Nathan Yerian is a co-founder of Adhere Creative, a marketing agency started at a kitchen table by Nathan and 2 other founders. Adhere Creative is now a 7 figure a year and agency with a nice roster of clients that pay monthly retainers.
If you want to learn how to build an agency like Nathan’s, this podcast is for you. In particular, we talk in detail about three of Nathan’s strategy for attracting leads.
One strategy is content marketing and we discuss specific questions as to how Nathan makes certain he gets the right content promoted in the right way so the right people read it.
We also talk about how Adhere syndicates their content and the types of conversation they have when a lead becomes sales qualified. They get them on retainer from Day One!
Listen now and you’ll hear Nathan and I talk about:
(04:00) Introduction
(05:20) Why did you pick Adhere for the name?
(06:00) How much revenue did you do in year one?
(09:30) What is your background in business?
(13:00) Where did you attract your first few clients?
(14:00) How has the type of client you work with changed?
(16:40) Please describe how you managed your retainer relationship
(20:00) What size of company do you target?
(23:00) How do you generate leads?
(34:00) How are you using twitter to promote your content?
(36:40) How does content syndication play a role in your content promotion?
(39:00) How do you handle the very first call with a prospect?
(44:00) Please describe what you mean by a marketing platform
(46:00) When does your relationship transition from free advice to paid work?
(48:40) Do your clients sign on for a retainer from day 1?
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Director of Strategy at inbound marketing agency, Adhere Creative, Nathan is responsible for the strategic direction of client campaigns. Nathan challenges his team and his clients to step far outside of traditional practices to breathe a creative life into a brand. The best clients for Nathan and Adhere Creative are those who are most willing to listen. While away from the office, Nathan enjoys traveling like a Roman, experiencing unique foods, craft beers and an engaging conversation with a stranger, soon turned friend.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/nathan.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-07-07 06:00:142020-09-16 05:00:01Advanced Tactics for Content Marketing and Lead Generation with Nathan Yerian
The very first step in your content marketing plan should be to pick your target audience. You’d think this would be common sense; however, skipping this step is actually an extremely common mistake.
The reason it’s such a common mistake is that marketers fear that by really focusing their message on just one audience, they will “lose out” on the hundreds/thousands/millions of other potential customers that aren’t a part of that audience.
The truth is that the benefits of targeting one niche actually outweigh the negatives.
In today’s post, I’m going to walk you through the process that you should follow to select a niche, as well as give you some examples of success.
How Knowing Your Target Audience Affects Content Strategy
Why Should You Pick a Target Market?
The reason that picking a target audience is so important comes down to this: the benefits of doing so far outweigh any downside that you can ever think of.
The Hedgehog Strategy
In the book, Good to Great, by Jim Collins, Jim conducted an extensive study on what makes great companies – as opposed to just good ones – and in the book he talks about something he calls the Hedgehog Strategy.
The point of the strategy is this: you need to find a market that you can totally dominate.
Do you think you could be the #1 marketing agency/consultant/SEO firm for everybody in the entire world? Not likely! There is simply too much competition for you to have any hope of achieving that.
Instead, as Jim points out in his book, great companies are extremely selective about who they are targeting, thereby significantly increasing the odds that they can achieve the #1 position in the mind of their audience.
I agree with Jim Collins and I think that a really killer inbound marketing strategy has to start with picking a very specific audience to create content for. If you have a different opinion, please share it down below in the comments.
Defining your audience is not as hard as you might think. In the next few paragraphs I’m going to walk you through some ideas and strategies that you can use.
First, let’s use Apple as an example, and look at how they are using the Hedgehog strategy.
Do you think that the people who work at Apple are deeply passionate about creating amazing products?
Definitely.
So, with that in mind, do you think it would make sense that a suitable audience for Apple would be a group of people who believe what Apple believes? Again, I think the answer is yes.
For example, I’m a loyal Apple customer. I own an iMac, a Macbook Pro, an Apple TV, an iPhone, and an iPod mini.
Why?
Because I believe that ease of use and a killer design is more important than a bunch of technical details that I don’t care about – and I’m willing to pay more for it.
Alienware Hardware Display Page, Notably Different Than The Clean Apple Look
If you go to Apple’s website, you will see that all their messaging is for people just like me. The technical details are there, but they aren’t front and center like they would be with a company like Alienware.
Unlike Apple, Alienware makes PCs for gamers, and these folks are deeply concerned with technical specs and performance. While I’m sure Alienware’s customers enjoy a pretty looking computer, I’m equally sure that aesthetics have very little to do with their buying decision. Theirs is all about performance.
Do you think Alienware cares one bit about regular PC users that don’t play video games? Nope.
Do you think Apple cares one bit about highly price conscious buyers? Nope.
Both of these companies are successful because they know exactly who their customer is and they direct their entire marketing effort to reaching more of them.
Now that we covered why having your target market clearly defined, let’s talk about how to learn more about them, as well as to establish two way communication.
Researching and Connecting With Your Target Market
When it comes to researching and connecting with your target audience, there are several strategies that I suggest you use. They include:
Talk to them
Conduct research on:
Twitter
Discussion Forums
LinkedIn Groups
Surveys
Magazines
Facebook
For Twitter, forums, and social networks, make sure that when you first start out that you spend the bulk of your time answering questions for other people. When you do this, the other people in the community are going to become interested in who you are, and when they do that, they will naturally think, “Hey, Dave is a cool guy. I wonder what else Dave has done?” Once you have established yourself as a knowledgeable person, the participants in these communities are going to come and check out your site.
So, with that said, lets have a look at some ways to use each resource.
If your organization already has a large customer base and you are looking to gain insights into how to attract more of your best customers, there is a very specific, unscripted process that will work well.
The goal here is to understand their psychographics (why they buy) more than their demographics (who they are).
This is a process that I first learned when I interviewed Adele Revella of Buyer Persona Institute. Adele has been doing this type of work for over 25 years and really knows her stuff.
During our interview, she gave me a high level overview of the process that she uses.
First, the person asking the questions cannot be involved in the company’s normal sales process. If they are, the customers aren’t likely to be as candid as they might otherwise be, and if that is the case, you aren’t going to gain the insights needed.
Step 1: Make a list of the customers & prospects who evaluated your firm, as well as your competition
You will want to interview people that chose your firm, as well as those that didn’t.
Step 2: Have a member of your team reach out to each one of them to have a conversation
The key, says Adele, is to not tell your customers that you are doing market research. Instead, you simply want to talk to them about the story of their decision to buy.
To do this, start off with the following question: Dave, take me back to the day when you first decided to look for a new [type of product] and tell me what happened?
According to Adele, it is absolutely critical that you start the ‘meat’ of the conversation with this question. You aren’t looking for random facts (like can be collected with a survey). Instead, you are looking for the story of their decision to make a purchase.
As you listen to them, you want to get them to expand on the story by asking all sorts of follow on questions.
For example, you might ask:
How did you come up with a list of potential suppliers?
Once you have this list, how did you narrow the list down?
Were there things on their websites that affected your decision?
If so, what types of things?
How else did you research and evaluate each company?
Did other people’s opinions factor in?
Who were these people?
What types of questions did you ask them?
Who else in your own company did you collaborate with?
What kind of input did they have?
Why was it helpful?
As you might guess, there are a LOT of questions that you are going to ask and this is only just a sample. They key is to always focus on the story…as well as asking why they made each mini-decision along the way to the major decision.
If you’d like to dive deeper into how to develop your buyer personas, check out Adele’s blog.
Primary Research: Talk to Your Prospects
If you don’t yet have a large customer base, without a doubt, talking to the people who are in your target market will give you the most insight, when compared to the other strategies below.
In my case, I regularly reach out to people with an invitation to talk to be about being a guest on my podcast. If you don’t have a podcast, tell them you want to talk to them about some research you are doing for an article or ebook that you are writing.
By being a reporter, as opposed to a salesperson, you will find that it is much easier to get your calls and emails returned.
When my prospect accepts my invitation to connect, I start off the conversation by asking them about their business and they results they have achieved. I do this because I am genuinely interested in finding out if they would be a good person to have as a guest on the podcast.
As you might expect, the longer we talk, they more rapport that is built, and when that happens, I can now very easily finished up my pre-interview by asking them some of the following questions:
Who would you really like to hear interviewed? (tells me who their influencers are)
What blog(s) do you regularly read?
Who do you follow on Twitter?
What social networks do you spend time on?
What magazines do you read?
What conferences do you attend?
These are just a few of the questions that I suggest you use. I’m sure you can think of many more.
In addition to these questions, you should also invite your contacts to invest 5 minutes to complete a more detailed survey. The goal of the survey should be to gain additional insights into:
Budget levels and/or spending patterns
Consumption trends
Preferred suppliers
Problems they are looking to solve
Which conferences/blogs/podcasts/magazines they rely on most
To host the survey, I suggest you use Survey Monkey.
The goal of my conversations is to gain an understanding of:
What are the top issues/problems they are looking to solve?
What language do they use to describe these problems?
Who influenced any decisions they made about choosing a solution provider(s)?
What to Do With This Data
Secondary Research
Once you have completed this primary research, I suggest you take some time to visit the websites that were commonly mentioned as being popular with your target market.
When looking at these sites, you are looking for data on:
What are the top posts?
What kinds of language is used?
What kinds of offers are made?
Who is commenting on their content?
Find the Most Popular Posts
To find the top posts, just look for the ones that are shared the most on social media. Posts with a lot of comments are also a strong indication of what is popular.
To help you analyze a site’s posts, I suggest you use Quicksprout’s free tool because it will save you heaps of time.
When you run the report, make sure to click the ‘social media analysis’ tab so you can see which pages were the most popular.
Twitter
When I first learned of Twitter, I thought it was a huge waste of time. Now that I’m starting to figure out how to use it, I have actually become a pretty big fan.
When it comes to finding your target audience, as well as connecting with them, Twitter is pretty amazing.
The Top Twitter Page For PC Gamers
For example, let’s suppose that you wanted to find and connect with hardcore gamers. How could you use Twitter to do that?
Well, you could first begin by looking for “best gaming PC” on Google. When I performed that search, that is how I found out about Alienware.
Next, I pulled up Alienware’s profile on Twitter and noticed that they had 62,672 followers while following only 130 people.
This tells me that Alienware is an influential brand in this space, and, because they don’t follow very many others, I also know that their 62,000 followers are legit. (whenever you see a Twitter profile that has a lot of followers, it can often be the result of their following a lot of others, just to get them to follow back)
The next thing I will want to know about Alienware is how much social authority they have.
Social Authority is ultimately a measure of influential activity. As such, it highlights content that is successful on Twitter. When you find users with high Social Authority, you’re finding great marketing strategies to analyze and mimic. And we think that this will help you be more successful with Twitter. – @peterbray
To discover how much social authority someone has, I’ve been using SEOmoz’s tool, FollowerWonk. This is a powerful tool that makes discovering influential Twitter accounts extremely easy.
As you can see below, Alienware is the most influential Twitter account for the phrase “pc gaming”. When I sorted by the Social Authority column, Alienware’s score of 61 put them on top.
Social Authority, in its simplest definition, is based upon re-tweets. If your tweets get lots of retweets, you have a high social authority. If you want more details on the science behind this, just read the entire post.
Followerwonk for PC gaming tweets
So now that we know Alienware has a high social authority and plenty of followers, the next move is to start connecting with the people that follow Alienware so that you can learn more about them.
To do that, I used FollowerWonk to find people that are interested in Alienware and then I sorted them by social authority. As you can see below, there are two users who actually have more social authority than Alienware. These are definitely people that you want to connect with because they can help you to really understand your audience (by speaking with them), as well as to help you to connect with your audience (by retweeting your tweets).
As you can see below, when I mouse over Anthony Wheeler, his total engagement is 56%. This is a good person to know if you want to learn more about hard core PC gamers, as well as to have the potential to get your content in front of many of them.
Another Example of Followerwonk Capabilities
Even if you don’t have FollowerWonk, Twitter is a total goldmine because it gives you the ability to search the Twitter stream. You can search by topic, by hash tag (#PCGamer) or by user. As soon as you do, you are going to find endless ways to better understand what your target audience is interested in.
Discussion Forums
For virtually every topic you can think of, there is at least one discussion forum. Finding them is easy. Just go to Google and do a search.
Discussion Forums Give You An Idea of Customer Engagement
When you participate in a discussion forum, you are going to see first hand what your target audience is interested in, what keeps them awake at night, and what they believe.
LinkedIn Groups
If your company sells to other businesses, I would strongly encourage that you check out LinkedIn Groups as they are very popular among the B2B crowd.
As you can see below, for the phrase, “marketing automation” there are 209 groups; the first of which is called Marketing Automation Experts. This group has 4,218 members, 142 discussions this month, and is considered to be very active.
Do you think that if you were to join this group that you could learn more about people who are interested in this topic? Do you think you could connect with a few of them? Do you think you could position yourself as an expert (assuming you are) within this community? Do you think that if you did, some of them would want to know more about you?
Surveys
Each time I’ve started a new blog, I’m quick to incorporate surveys into my auto-responder sequence. I do this because I want to quickly find out who is reading my blog and what they are interested in. The more I learn about my audience, the better chance I will have of creating content that they will enthusiastically share with their respective followers.
For example, because I ask every new subscriber to complete a welcome survey, I have know that 15.9% of my audience are marketing agency owners, 41% are small business owners and 34% are solo-preneurs.
Surveys Give You An Analysis of Your Customers, It Might Be Different Than You Imagined
I also know that lead generation is the #1 challenge faced by my audience, hence why I do so many interviews to address that topic.
Once you have access to this type of information about your audience, you are now in a position to either create more content for the audience you have, so you can expand that audience, or, if the majority of your readers aren’t the exact audience you intended to have, you can now publish more content that will be of interest to your intended audience, as well as to share that content on the social networks where your audience hangs out (which we discovered by using Twitter to ask them directly).
If you don’t yet know that much about the demographics of your targeted audience, and you don’t yet have a following, don’t despair. There is another way to very easily get the demographic profile for virtually any marketing that you could possibly be interested in.
There isn’t a magazine around that isn’t staffed by a crack team of researchers, all of whom have invested countless hours in market research. You can bet they know exactly who their customer is and exactly what that customer wants to buy.
They know this because they need this information to pass along to their prospective advertisers.
Don’t have the funds for a research team that big? No problem. Just piggy back on the magazines.
For example, when I googled “Field and Stream Media Kit” I was taken right to this page. Once there, all I did was click on the demographics link to learn more about this audience. With just a few clicks of the mouse, I now know the median age, percentage that are college grads, percentage that are employed, percentage that served in the military, etc…
Even Magazines Have Online Options
Facebook
Let’s suppose that I wanted to know how many people in my local area and into hunting and fishing. How could I find that out? With Facebook, this is actually pretty easy to do. It won’t be 100% perfect, but it will be close enough to help you assess if your size of a certain targeted market is large enough.
To do this, just pretend as though you are going to create a paid ad on Facebook. You don’t have to actually publish the ad, but you do want access to the data that going through the ad creation process will give you.
As you can see below, when I did a search for people that lived in San Diego, aged 37 to 57 (I chose this because of the median age from the Field and Stream media kit), who are interested in hunting and fishing, I see that there are 11,120 people. If that number is too small, or too big, you can easily just make changes to your search criteria, and from those changes, you are likely to make some valuable distinctions.
For example, if I change the gender from men only to men and women, the 11,120 increases to 16,840. So, for this topic, I now know that the ratio of men to women is roughly 3:2. For this particular example, the answer was rather obvious beforehand, but that probably won’t be the case in many other niches you could be looking at.
Facebook Analytics Usually Offers Interests and Engagement With Brands
I’m sure there are more tools than this, and if you have some good ones to suggest, please be sure and share your thoughts down in the comments below.
Common Mistakes
For companies with an established customer base, the most common mistake is assuming that you understand the psychographics of your best customers. Having a very strong understanding of your company and it’s products is by no means a guarantee that you really understand why your best customers bought.
If you are a younger company, by far the most common and most expensive mistake is trying to be everything to everyone. If you are going to get traction with your target market, you need that market, at least initially, to be as focused as possible so that the content you produce is highly relevant.
If you try to be everything to everyone, you will end up being nothing to no one.
Another common mistake is not taking the time to listen to your audience to really find out what they want (not the same as ‘why’ they buy). Surveys are a terrific way to do this, and if you do, be sure to ask questions that are both multiple choice as well as open-ended, because, while harder to analyze in aggregate, it’s those open-ended questions that can provide you with some really valuable insights.
No point in creating content that doesn’t draw your target audience’s attention. –Natalie Sisson
It’s also worth mentioning that one of the goals of your initial marketing campaign to your newly defined audience should be to further test and validate your chosen niche.
Let’s Recap
A marketing plan that doesn’t begin with a thorough understanding of the needs, wants, and desires of a very specifically designed target market isn’t really a marketing plan at all. Instead, it’s more of a hope and a prayer, and when it comes to business, hope is not a strategy.
Getting clear on who your target audience is has never been easier. Start by investing time in one-to-one conversations. After you have done that, use Twitter, discussion forums, LinkedIn Groups, Surveys, Magazine media kits, and Facebook to gain additional insights.
Not making use of these free resources will significantly reduce the effectiveness of anything that you try, and, even worse, could spell the end of your company before you ever have a chance to really get going.
Put the time into identifying your targeted audience and you will have taken a step that so many small business owners don’t put nearly enough focus on, and you will be in far better shape as a result.
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https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/targeted-audience.jpg349620Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-25 12:02:542018-08-01 18:42:47How (and why) to Define a Targeted Audience for Your Marketing Campaign
Listen in on this podcast as I interview serial entrepreneur extraordinaire Bill Faeth about how he grew traffic to his blog to 25,000 visitors/mo in the first year and 40,000 visitors/mo within two years. Bill shares his unique content syndication strategies, including how he discovers the exact places his buyer persona hangs out online.
He also shares the exact tools he uses to make the most from Twitter, and how he uses Twitter and LinkedIn to research his buyer.
This interview is a gold mine of information – I took two full pages of notes!
Listen now and you’ll hear Bill and I talk about:
(04:55) Introduction
(07:55) How much of your first year’s revenue came from personal relationships?
(14:25) How do you determine which are the most important KPIs are?
(20:55) How do you grow your blog to 35,000 visitors/mo within 2 years?
(23:55) How are you using Twitter to help promote your content?
(31:55) Please explain your content syndication strategy
(34:55) How do you get your content syndicated?
(40:55) How do you craft an email to get your content syndication?
(43:55) How do you build a list of places to syndicate?
(47:55) How did you use Twitter to research where your Buyer personas frequent?
(52:55) How are you creating this volume of content?
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
A former golf professional, career entrepreneur, and CEO of Inbound Marketing Agents, Bill discovered inbound marketing in 2008 via HubSpot. He quickly became a convert to techniques that allowed him to grow his business faster than ever, while reducing his marketing spend and tracking ROI. Bill is a nationally-recognized expert on small business growth, entrepreneurship, and digital marketing.
Over the last 22 years Bill has successfully launched 21 startups in industries that include eCommerce, transportation, and even a nationwide glow-in-the-dark mini golf business.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bill.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-05-22 06:00:562020-09-16 03:38:41How Bill Faeth Used Content Syndication to Grow His Blog Traffic to 40,000 Visitors a Month
This is Part 5, the finale of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.
Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.
Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:
How To Get Influencer to Promote Your Brand
Tactics to Get Influencers Attention
Importance of Using Influencers
I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.
This is the final post in this series that gives you easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. You can check out the other episodes in the additional resources section. You can also Subscribe now so you won’t miss out on my upcoming shows featuring more strategies and industry experts.
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Welcome back to episode number 113 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business, and I have yet to meet an entrepreneur that doesn’t want to do that. So if you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions and profits, well my friends, I’m happy to say that you are in the right place.
In today’s episode we are going to dive into part 5 of my 5-part series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotion. So, why is that such a big deal? Why is twitter promotion such a big deal?
Well as I mentioned in previous episodes, the one thing that is so wonderful about twitter is that it is a very frictionless social media platform. It’s dead easy to use. If you are following the strategies that I have been explaining in the prior episodes, you have learned how to create pre populated tweets and you’ve learned how to create widgets that show real time social proof.
All of this stuff works because if you do this right people, we don’t have to type anything, we don’t have to think. All I have to do is click the mouse once or twice. So that’s pretty frictionless.
So, when there is a lot of people just taking an action that is almost effortless for them to take, get enough of them doing it and as you might imagine the aggregate value of that can be quite significant to increase the buzz for your product or your event or whatever it is that you are trying to draw attention to. If you’re in business, which we all are more than likely, that is going to increase your profits.
In this episode, we are going to talk about how to do a pre crafted tweet so that you can get influencers to help you to spread the word and there’s a process that you need to follow. To do this right, you don’t want to just call him up and ask him because that’s probably not going to work.
Before we get into that I got 2 announcements. If this is your very first episode of the BrightIdeas podcast, welcome!
If your listening to this on a mobile device right now, text the word podcast to the number 96000 and you’re going to see some real cool marketing automation trickery which I talk a lot about here on my blog, plus gives you an easy way to opt-in and make sure that you never miss a future episode.
If you are listening to this on iTunes, some other place, wherever it might be. If you’ve never been to the blog before go to brightideas.co and you can become a subscriber, you can let people all about it and get a lot of free stuff there and ton of free content and ton of interviews, and I absolutely know that if you’re an entrepreneur you are going to love it.
Announcement number 2. If you are in B2B sales, something that I have spent all my prior life for a 15 years’ worth of B2B sales sold millions of millions and millions of dollars’ worth of stuff. The key, or one of the keys, is being able to get your foot on the door. That’s a huge problem for a lot of people. Once they are in the door they can ask right questions and get the business done but get in the door, man that can be such huge challenge. If that is a challenge for you, I have a course that will help you to improve significantly the results that you are getting back by 15 years of my experience. It’s called the best buyer formula, you can learn all about it at brightideas.co/bbf.
Okay with that said, let’s get in to it. I want to talk about pre crafted tweets–as I mention before the objective of this is to get important people to share your content for you.
You want to provide them with everything that they need to make it dead easy for them to do. Ideally, you want make it so they can do this and maybe 30 seconds or less. So, the way you want to do this is–I’m going tell you what you need to do but after I tell you how you are going to be able to make this work.
What you needed to do is write the tweets for them, send them off an email, and say, “hey here’s 5 tweets, if you wanted to pick one just cut and paste it” Boom! Send it out!
Great! Right? Well, it is very simple but there are some important things to understand about this simple concept and that’s in the how you do this.
DO NOT email somebody for the first time saying, “hey man I love your stuff can you send another tweet for me?” No, that’s not going to work.
What you need to do first is you need to find out who were the influencers that have the audience that I want and start following them and reading their stuff, share then sign up in their newsletter list to put in your RSS reader. Pay attention to their work; share their content with your tribe for a while first. Make lots of comments on their blog, make sure you do lots of tweets and make sure that their @username is in those tweets where you’re basically say, “man, your stuff really rocks and I’m telling my crowd about it”. They are going to like that. Not only that, they are going to start to know who you are.
I speak from experience because I have a pretty big tribe of people and got a lot of emails but there are certain people whose names… “Owen” …who I’ve come to know over a long period of time simply because they’ve reached out and they become active participant in my community.
Now, the next thing that you can do if you happen to have a podcast and if you don’t–man I encourage you to start one immediately–is reach out and ask to interview.
My first professional network is better than it has ever been in my entire life and it’s not from going to conferences or going to launches or swapping business cards.
It is because of my podcast. It is hands down the most powerful personal networking tool I have ever discovered. Here’s why: when I send a tweet or an email to a stranger that says something to the effect of, “how would like to be on my show” or “I’d like to have you as a featured guest on my show?” The ego — and I have one too, I’m not calling out other people I’m calling out all of us — it simply prevents us from ignoring an email like that in most cases.
Now if I, reaching out to Richard Branson, he’s probably going to ignore me because he is a whale and I’m a fish, but I find reaching out to someone who’s a slightly bigger fish than me more than likely I’m going get a reply.
So once you’ve interviewed them, start to build the relationship. No tricks. Just bee real. I’ve tend to friend people on Facebook and I like to see what’s going on in their life and they like to look what’s going on with my life and we have opportunities to comment. One of the things for people who know me is that I’m going to be a Dad in about another 2 months. Depending on when this episode airs, so at the end of April. So if there are new Dads in the audience, I need some advice man. So feel free to reach out and tell me what I’m in for cause I’ve never been a Dad before.
The point is, you want to be real. You want to connect to these people and then once you’ve done all of that, then you can send them an email with your 4 or 5 pre crafted tweets and because you have a relationship with them and you have goodwill with them. They are going to cooperate with you and the impact that an influencer can have on your stuff can be quite significant. So, it’s very, very, very worthwhile to put the time and effort into doing this.
Another idea by the way on how to make an influence looks good is when you’re blogging and you’re writing about a topic–and this is actually in our checklist of things to do when we write a blog post, and yes we have a checklist for almost everything that we do–is that you find a way to mention other people and make them look good and then of course once that post has gone live you can tweet out to them and say I’ve mentioned you in this post and more than likely they are going to read it and when they do, if they like what they read they’re more than likely they’re probably going tweet out that content if it was a good post. If it is a crap post and you mention them you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting their time but of course you making yourself like an idiot so don’t do that.
There are definitely specifics on how to write a post as matter of fact, I have written a post on how to write a post so if you come to brightideas.co and search around you’ll find it and if you can’t find it, send me an email trent@brightideas.co and I will send you a link or a member of my team–say if I can I’m too busy to — have a member of my team reply to you and send you a link directly to that post.
Alright, if you do all this stuff, you’re going to be one step closer to having influential people promote you. To get the show notes for this episode, all you are going to do is go to brightideas.co/113. If you’ve missed the previous four parts of this 5-part series, there’s going to be a link in the show notes or links I should say, to all of the previous episodes. I really encourage you to check this stuff out.
Twitter is my number one social referral source and I still have plenty to learn about twitter and that’s why I’m doing these episodes cause I’m learning new stuff and I’m implementing it on my blog and I’m sharing it with you while I’m doing it so make sure that you go and check those all out.
If you been enjoyed this episode I would love it if you go to brightideas.co/love where you’ll find a pre crafted tweet that you can automatically just click on and send out and I would thank you very much for that. There’s also a way to leave the feedback for the show in the iTunes store. If you feel like doing that I’m going to be one of your biggest fans.
So that’s it for this episode. Thank you so very much for tuning in. I love doing this podcast and I love all the questions and feedback that I get so you as an audience member are someone that I appreciate immensely.
That’s it! I’m going to keep on trucking and will see you in another episode soon.
This is Part 4 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.
Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.
Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:
How to Create a Shout Out Tweet
Benefits of Using a Shout Out
What They Look Like and What They Do
I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.
The next and final post in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Welcome back to episode number 112 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth in their business. I know we all want some of that.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions, and ultimately increase your profits, I am very happy to say that you are in the right place.
In this episode, we are going to dive into part 4 of my 5-part series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotions.
Now, if you’ve missed those other episodes, you can get to them starting at brightideas.co/109 and just keep on increasing that number one way up and you will get to all of the other episodes that proceed this one.
Okay, so we are going to talk about how to create a shoutout tweet and I want give a shoutout to Mike Stelzner from the Social Media Examiner—If you haven’t check it out you probably should–because I learned this little trick from him and I’m sure he learned it from somebody else.
The way that Mike uses it, is that when someone registers for social media marketing world, they can see this list of presenters and then next to the list of all the presenters names is a pre-crafted tweet like we talked about how to do in the previous episode–the episode number 111, the transactional tweet–but he does something that is pretty cool and I’m going to walk you through it.
Basically, the purpose of this tweet is it gives someone the ability to click a link and say–Hey Chris P we’re really looking forward to meeting you in person at social media marketing world.
So, what’s the big deal about that? Well, there are two things that are kind of a big deal.
Before we get into the big deal, I’m going to explain how I’m going to use it. As you know, I interview countless entrepreneurs here on my podcast. Now that I’ve discovered this little shout out tweet idea and every one of the posts that I do to host those episodes, those interviews, I’m going to create a shout out tweet.
So, why would I do that? There are two reasons.
Number 1 is that I want a person who is my guest to feel the love for being my guest. So the people listening will click that shout out tweet with their name and I mean there’s a specific detail–I’m going to give it to you in just a second.
They are going to give a notification and gives my guest the opportunity to interact with the listener and of course, they are going to love that, so that helps them. So what helps me?
What helps me is I’m going to put a hashtag in there–you remember I talked about the importance of putting hashtags in. And that’s the very first episode, in episode number 109 or 110, or the both short episodes and you should listen to them both.
Anyway, so what’s the big deal about the hashtag? Well, if I have that hashtag I can then populate a twitter widget with all this wonderful stuff that the listeners are saying about all these episodes that I do. So the hashtag was #thebrightideaspodcast and each time they are tweeting this shout out, I’m going to have this never ending stream of peoples on twitter saying how much they love the so and so episode of the podcast.
So, there’s really good reason to do this, its super easy to do. You use Click to Tweet just as I described in the previous episode–that’s episode number 111–and if you go to that post you see the screenshot and everything of how to do that so I’m not going to cover it again.
But here’s the one detail that is super important. When you start to tweet to someone, let’s say you’re going to tweet to me. If you just write @TrentDyrsmid-“Hey men I really like your show” or whatever. I’m the only one who can see that tweet. That is not really doing a lot and that is not as effective as if you put the word hey or whatever before the @trentdyrsmid. If you say, “hey @trentdyrsmid, I’m really digging the BrightIdeas podcast”– which I hope you do by the way and if you do please go and tweet that.
That way it goes into the public twitter streams. Obviously, you want it in the public twitter streams so more people see it cause that’s the whole idea right? We are talking about ways to increase twitter promotions so we don’t want to keep this stuff all over ourselves, we want the whole world to know.
So make sure that you do that and then of course, if you’re going to put the URL in there–which you might want to do– that’s a way to get people back.
So, in my podcast I’m probably going to put a URL back to the homepage of my blog because that’s where people come when they learn about the podcast if they are not familiar with it. They can become the subscriber and so forth.
So then you just again, like I did in the previous episode, you take this little bit of code or hyperlink rather. Put it in the blog post. You guys see this actually when you’re listening to this very episode.
Actually, there won’t be this one because there’s no one to shout out to so maybe I make a shout out to me–yeah that’s we all do!
Anyway, so that how you do. We got one more episode to get on this five part series.
So please make sure that if you haven’t already become a subscriber that you do so that you don’t miss any episode, you can subscribe on itunes or if you want to get an email notification just head to brightideas.co and become a subscriber.
If you’d like the show notes, a link to the screenshot, and the links and everything to this and other episodes go to brightideas.co/112.
That’s it for this episode, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so very much for tuning in.
This is Part 3 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.
Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.
Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:
How to Create Transactional Tweets For People Who Purchase on Your Site
Getting People To Populate Your Tweets
I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.
The next 2 posts in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Welcome back to yet another episode, episode 3, number 111 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. This is the podcast for we help on entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their businesses. Who doesn’t want some of that?
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, to increase conversion and ultimately increase profits, well, I’m very happy to say that you are in the right place.
In today’s episode we are going to talk about part 3 of my 5-parts series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotions.
Now if you want to get episode 1 and number 2 its brightideas.co/109 and /110 and will take you to two other episodes.
So in this episode we are going to talk about how to create a transactional tweet. Before we dive into that, I want to cover in case you miss the other two episodes.
Why is it so important to use twitter to get people to help you bring awareness to your brand?
Number one reason is that, it is really really easy to do. For the people who are going to do the clicking for you, you don’t even have to really type anything, they don’t really have to do anything, if you do it the way I instruct these 5 part series. People literally only have to click a mouse button and they are going to send a pre populated tweets and all sorts of other wonderful things for you making it very easy for people to do – that collective power of all those people doing that very simple little thing can translate into very big boost in the buzz for your product or for your event, and obviously that can help you to drive profits.
A couple of quick announcements before we get in to this. If this is your first time listening to the BrightIdeas podcast, and you are on mobile device, go ahead right now and text the word podcast to the number 96000. You’ll see some of my marketing automation trickery in action and ultimately you’ll be able to get a notifications of every episode that we produce from here on in and plus some other special surprises in the store for you. You’re in front of your computer and you’re listening to this on iTunes, just go to brightideas.co and enter your details and you can have the very same thing happen.
And the next thing that I want to tell you about; in the last two things that told you about my digital marketing handbook, this one I want to talk about something a little different.
If you’re a solo entrepreneur and you’re feeling a bit stuck or alone – not an uncommon feeling – I strongly encourage you to check out the BrightIdeas mastermind for you will be able to start spending time around other very motivated entrepreneurs, all dedicated to helping each other succeed and sounds like a very wonderful thing to be a part of that, I can assure you that it is. You can learn more about it at brightideas.co/mastermind.
So with that said lets kind of dive right into this and give you yet another golden nugget.
So a transactional tweet: what’s it for, why did you do it? The purpose is you want to be able to give people a very easy way to share their excitement about a transaction that they have just completed. The reason for that when the people buy something they typically pretty excited they want to tell other people.
Let me give me example. If someone signs up for my mastermind group – which I just mentioned – or they buy my digital marketing handbook or they buy the best buyer formula or they do any other things or buy any other things or register for an event, right on the thank you page, I’m going put a transactional tweet and typically it all say that something like “please click to tweet” and it will be the words that would show up in twitter and they just click it and that’s it! It’s done! They don’t have to type anything, they don’t have to do anything, and they don’t have to put hash tag in. Nothing and it’s all done for them!
The benefit of that is, remember back on episode number 2, I was talking about those widget boxes that you can use to accumulate real time social proof. If you write this tweet and you include hash tags every time someone buys your stuff, you’re going to be sending out these tweets, you’re going to have this constant stream of people saying all these wonderful things and that going to show up in that twitter widget, that you could put that on your page, on the side bar, wherever you want to put it.
So let’s get in how to do this and man, it is so incredibly easy, easy, easy, easy!
Alright, go to clicktotweet.com it’s free, you can pay more if you want to like extra stats and stuff like that. But I find free version is just fine. So here’s the thing, you are going to do number 1. You are going to write your tweet – you want to craft it in a way that it would be something that they would say. So, think about you’re the user that just bought the book or sign up for the course or attended the event or whatever it was.
What would they say? What would they say after that?
So, in my case of the digital marketing handbook – I just bought a digital marketing handbook and recommend you check it out – or something to that effect. So then you’re going to include in that tweet, very important, you going to include a link to the sales page for whatever it was that they just bought because if you forget that pieces really doesn’t do you any good at all. Then the next thing that you really want to put in there if you have enough room and you don’t have too much volume to drown you, you may want to put @your-username, so that you can get a notifications on your mobile device or whatever it is that you used to monitor twitter. Then you are going to reach out to this people say hey thanks. And that’s something I really recommend that you do because it does help you to build relationship with your new customers. And then, the hashtag! Don’t forget the hashtag because if you forget the hashtag then you can’t create the widget later on that’s going to show these wonderful tweets from all these people that have bought this stuff and registered for your events. So, make sure that you get the hashtag, that you hit the create tweet button and it’s going to give you a little URL.
So, now all you do is go over to your wordpress site on your thank you page. You type out – what I typically do – is in bold italics. I go “please click to tweet” and then I put colon and then take off the bold, take off the italics and write out whatever the tweet was.
I don’t need to include the URL. I don’t need to include the @TrentDyrsmid and I don’t need to include the hashtag – hashtag in the words that are shown on the screen – and then I highlight it then I turn it into a hyperlink with the URL that I got from ClickToTweet.
So now, when you’re done, all someone has to do is click that and it will populate up a tweet with a hashtag in the URL. Everything, all in it, cause you crafted it that way and they hit the tweet button and whamo! And that’s it! The tweet is sent and you my friends now are taking advantage of all that excitement that your new customers, or your new subscribers, or whatever it is that they just did whatever transactions they just completed, you give them a way a frictionless way to easily share their excitement with their tribe.
Alright so that is for this episode. If you would like to get to these show notes and I’ll include some links to all this stuff and some screenshots and so forth, just go to brightideas.co/111.
So that’s it and I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so very much for tuning in. If you enjoy this episode, I would love it if you would go to brightideas.co/love where you will see a transactional tweet where you can tweet out and say – “yeah brightideas podcast is pretty bad ass and you should check it out too”! I don’t think that’s exactly what it says but it’s something similar to that.
Okay, thank you so much and I want you to comeback for another episode soon. Take care
This is Part 2 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.
Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.
Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:
How to use Hashtags in Pre-Populated Tweets
Including a Customized Tweet Button on Every Page
Twitter Widget For Your WordPress Blog
I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.
The next 3 posts in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Welcome back to another episode of the BrightIdeas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their businesses, and we all want that don’t we?
If you are an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions and ultimately increase traffic for your profits, well my friends you are in the right place.
In today’s episode we are going to dive into part two of my five part series. The first episode can be found at brightideas.co/109 and its series titled five ways to increase your twitter promotions, in other words, to get other people to help you spread the word on twitter. So, why is it such a big deal? Why should you care about this one of the great things about twitter?
It’s really easy. It’s frictionless. People can pre-populate a tweet or do the things that are talk about in these five part series. So, when you make it really easy for a bunch of people to do stuff, that’s a great way of creating more buzz which is obviously another tool in your toolbox for increasing your opt-in, increasing sales of your products, and so forth.
So, before we get into the how to do this, I have just two quick announcements.
Number one, if this is your very first episode and you would like to make sure that you never miss another one, and you’re listening on your mobile device, please text the word podcast to the number 96000 and just pay attention and see what magic marketing automation happens. If you sit there in the front of your computer and you have already found us, if you found us on ITunes, just go to brightideas.co and you could become a subscriber there.
The second announcement is, if you are looking for a digital marketing/content marketing blueprint to follow to build your business. Well, I’ve written a book and it is called The Digital Marketing handbook that is how I build my business into the success that it is in. You can get the free chapter, if you head over to brightideas.co/book.
Alright that’s it! Let’s dive into the gold nugget for you and this episode so we’re going to talk about how to embed a twitter widget on every page that you used to promote your product or your event or whatever it is that you wanting to draw attention to.
So, to see is in action, if you visit the brightideas.co/blog and looking the right side bar, you’re going to see a widget there that I used to create social proof and awareness for my digital marketing handbook. So, I want to explain to you how you do that, but first lets dive into just a couple more quick little details that are important.
So when you do this, you want to make sure that all the tweets that are shown up in this widget are about the topic that you’re trying to draw attention to. In the episode number 109, I talked about the importance of the use of a hash tag and that hash tag is now going to can become critical in making sure that every tweet that shows up in this widget. I’m about to explain to had a do, is on the topic that you want it to be on so people who come there, they’re going to be able to see everything that people are saying and it’s going to help you to increase social proof for your product to your event of whatever it is you are trying to draw attention to and it’s going to do it in real time, so this is really cool.
So for to create a widget, all you need to do is go to twitter.com/settings/widgets/new/search and you are going to need to be logged in to your twitter account to do that. So once you do that, you are going to see a pretty intuitive interface. The very first thing is, you’re going to see is the box called search query and that’s where you’re going to put in your hash tags. So from my digital marketing handbook with hash tag #DMhandbook – so that means the only tweets that are going to show up in this widgets is tweets that going to contain that hash tag. So, how does that hash tag get applied? Well, on the free chapter download page there is a pre populated tweet that includes that hash tag. So hopefully many or most of the people who download the free chapter – because I ask them to write at the top of the page – will be kind enough to collect that tweet out for me and that’s going to populate this widget. So make sure you’ve got the search type then there’s a check box called “only show top tweets”. Make sure that you click that one. Specify a height that you want. I find that 300 pixels is a very nice height but if you have got a really long sidebar and you feel like filling it up with a bunch of tweets, make it as tall as you want to. Choose a theme, light or dark, and then click the create widget button – and there is also an opt-out tool – I wouldn’t check that but you can read a little there’s a question mark you can click and make your own decision. So click the create widget, it’s going to give a little snippet of code and all you need to do is go into your word press blog (which I’m assuming that most of you are using) and you’re going to look in your sidebar, drag over a text widget and then just paste the code into it, and that’s it! Voila!
The widgets that we have created will show up in your side bar on in every single page of your blog and you will be going a long way to increase, to bring awareness, and increasing the social proof in real time for whatever it is that you are trying to draw attention to. Pretty cool ha!
Alright, so that’s it for this episode. If you want to get to this show notes, I include the screen shot of how to do all of this go to brightideas.co/110. If you enjoy this episode I’d love if you’d take a moment to go to brightideas.co/love where there is a pre populated tweet all you got to do is click on it and I would love it if you do that, so thank you so much in advance.
So that’s it for this episode, I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid, can’t wait to have a tune back in for part three which will be coming out tomorrow.
This is Part 1 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.
Honestly, I used to hate Twitter, partly because I never understood how to use the thing. Now, my website’s number 1 source of social traffic is Twitter. It is an integral part of my digital marketing strategy.
I want to touch on a few key points on how to leverage Twitter for your business. Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:
Benefits of Using Twitter
Including a Customized Tweet Button on Every Page
How to Add the Share Button to Your Page
What to Tweet
I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.
The next 4 posts in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Welcome back to another episode of the BrightIdeas podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions and ultimately increase your profits. Well, my friends, you are in the right place. In this episode we are going to tie–this is actually part one of a five parts series of new episode that I’m doing. These are episodes in bite sized chunks, so we have only 5 minutes but you wanted a pick up a golden nugget these new short episodes are going to help you to do just that. This is part one of five part series on five ways to increase your twitter promotion.
So, why am I talking about this? Well, twitter for me is actually my number one source of social traffic. I use to hate twitter cause I don’t understand how the heck to use the darn thing. That was the long time ago and since then I’ve learned a great deal and I continue to learn a great deal. So, in this episode I’m going to give you a tip, the first of five, on how you can do that.
Now before we get to that, just really one very quick announcement– two announcements I should say, excuse me.
This is your first time listening to the show and your listening on a mobile device and you like to get notifications of future episodes, please make sure and text the word podcast to the number 96000 and something very cool happen on your phone and if you want to know how to do that, I have got just send me an email on what you know and probably will have a post at some point it’ll explain how I do it. Second of all, if you are looking for a blueprint to use digital marketing, it’s a combination of content marketing and marketing automation to improve your business.
I have written a book, and it’s called a digital marketing handbook and you can get a free chapter by going to brightideas.co/book.
Alright so let’s jump in to today’s episode with tip number one: which is to include a customized tweet button on every single page of your products. So, why do you want to do that? First of all, one of the great thing about twitter is, it is super frictionless. I mean by frictionless, is it makes a very, very easy for people to do. So the propensity to do it, of course, goes up and when that happens when you get a whole bunch of people doing something that is really, really easy to do, the aggregate effect of that you can significantly increase the buzz for your product, or your event, or particular posters, whatever it is whatever page you would like to draw more attention to. So, it’s actually very, very easy to do. The very first thing you need to do is create a custom twitter share button and the way that you do that is you go to about.twitter.com/resources/buttons and when you do, you will see that there are 4 types of buttons there. One shares a link, one is follow, one is hash tag and one is mentioned. So in this case you would want to use the share a link button.
So, pick that one and then there’s some button options that you need to configure and I’ll include the screen shot in this episode so when you get there you are going to see there is a share URL. So if you going to spread this button all over your site it will give the page title and the page URL of whatever page that twitter button is on. But in this case we don’t want to do that, we want to promote one particular page. So you need to specify the URL of the particular page that you want to use. Then, the next thing is the tweet text and you can either write something in there or you can choose to use the title of the page – that is entirely up to you.
If you want to have a “@” notification come to you put your username in, and then most importantly you also want to include a hash tag.
Now, in case you don’t know a hash tag is (because I didn’t when I first got on twitter), it’s a way that people search for information. So, one of the topics that I talked about is Infusionsoft.
For example, if I was talking; doing a tweet, composing a tweet about Infusionsoft, I would instead of just writing the word infusionsoft; I would write #Infusionsoft and what that allows people to do is often times more advanced twitter users will be searching for a hash tag. So somebody wants to know about infusionsoft for example, they would see that hash tag. They could search for any tweets that have that hashtags and they would see list of them. Now in this case you want to create your own custom hash tag and there’s a very, very specific reason for that which I’m going to get into in part two of the series.
So that’s it for now like I said it’s just about to tell you how to get to the show notes in the screen shots so will finish up here.
Alright, to get to the show notes for this episode go to brightideas.co/109. If you really enjoy this episode please do me a small favor head over to brightideas.co/love where there is a pre-populated tweet that you can automatically send-out.
That’s it for this episode I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid.
Be sure and tune in to the very next episode and if you want to receive to get part two of this series its five part series and mention at the beginning and if you want to make sure you get email modification at that just go to brightideas.co and go ahead and become a subscriber and you will definitely get notifications of this and future episodes so thank you so much for tuning in its been my pleasure. I’ll see you again soon. Take care.
Weddings are expensive. Most couples accept that and budget for it, or try to keep the cost down by limiting the guest list etc.
Not Dave Kerpen. He wanted a big wedding, and at 500 guests he definitely got that. But, he didn’t pay through the nose.
Instead, Dave and his wife used their marketing smarts to raise $100,000 in corporate sponsorship. Now that’s impressive!
But it doesn’t stop there – the wedding was held in a baseball stadium, and ended up getting a ton of media coverage. The couple estimated they received the equivalent of $20 million in earned media coverage, and they used the momentum from this success to launch their successful marketing agency!
Dave’s also had an Inc 500 fastest growing company for 2 years, and when we spoke he held the title as the #1 LinkedIn Influencer in pageviews. You can imagine that he has some great ideas to share.
Listen now and you’ll hear Dave and I talk about:
(03:05) Introductions
(05:20) What problem does your software solve?
(10:45) How did you go about attracting customers?
(15:45) How did you get started in business?
(18:45) How did you get corporate sponsorship for your wedding?
(21:45) How did sponsorship translate into customer attraction?
(26:15) How did you launch your agency?
(28:45) What would do differently today if you were starting over?
(31:45) What advice would you give the solo-preneur on growing beyond just one?
(32:45) What is your pricing strategy?
(36:15) How did you target your customers?
(39:45) How did you continually increase the size of your customers?
(42:45) What advice would you give to entrepreneurs to succeed with content marketing?
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Dave Kerpen is the Founder and CEO of Likeable Local, and the Co-Founder and Chairman of Likeable Media. Dave is the NY Times Bestselling author of 3 books and the #1 LinkedIn Influencer of all time in page views, ahead of Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Mark Cuban and President Obama.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/dave.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-03-10 06:00:122020-09-11 06:45:51Dave Kerpen on Reality TV, Building a Successful Marketing Agency, and Launching a SaaS Company
If you are one of the kind of people who think Twitter is just for kids to tell each other they had macaroni for dinner (that used to be me), I think you should really take the time to listen to how effective Twitter can be as a marketing tool. Sarah’s team at Hubspot is focused on Lead Generation, and with her different tools and social media platforms, Hubspot finds about 50,000 new leads a month. Wow.
In this podcast we go over the ways Twitter can be effectively utilized, how important content is for a Twitter campaign, and other winning lead generation strategies. I learned a lot in this interview and I think you will too.
Listen now and you’ll hear Sarah and I talk about:
(02:00) Introduction
(05:00) Why use Twitter for lead generation?
(07:20) How to determine a Twitter-Friendly content strategy
(10:20) Has removing the opt-in form ever proved beneficial?
(13:20) How do you get started with paid ads?
(20:20) How to optimize your campaigns
(22:20) What other tips do you have for Twitter campaigns?
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Trent: Hey there, Bright Idea hunters. Welcome to the “Bright Ideas”
podcast. I am your host,
Trent Dyrsmid. This is the podcast where we feature interviews with
the entrepreneurs behind some of today’s fastest growing companies.If you’re looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you start
a new business or grow an existing one, you are in the right place.The way that we do this is we interview proven experts on the show and
today is no different. My guest today is Sarah Goliger, she is the
head of paid marketing at HubSpot, one of the fastest-growing
marketing software companies on the planet.In this interview, we are going to dive deep into how to use Twitter
and paid traffic on Twitter. Not just paid, but paid and organic, to
generate more leads for your brand.And this was a really enjoyable interview, I learned a whole bunch.
So, in the roughly half hour it takes to listen to it, I guarantee
you, you are going to learn some actionable ideas that you are going
to be able to use in your business.Before we get to that, a quick announcement. If you are looking for
ways to take advantage of digital marketing to attract more interest
to your business, then you’re going to want to check out my recently
published digital marketing handbook. And you get to it and
brightideas.co/book.In the book, I explain everything that I have done to build my
business up in the very first year to a tribe of 10,000-plus
followers. We’ve had a whole lot of success. Also, I have invited a
number of my past guests to contribute to the book. You’ll get their
ideas in there as well.Again, get that at brightideas.co/book. And you can get even get a
free chapter. So, with that said, please join me in welcoming Sarah to
show. Hey, Sarah, welcome to the show.Sarah: Hi, Trent. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be
here.Trent: I am equally excited to have you here. So, thanks for making
the time. There’s obviously
lots of folks in my audience who don’t yet know who you are.Before we get into the meat of our interview on how to leverage
Twitter as a lead generation machine, let’s have you just take a
moment and please introduce yourself on who you are and what you do.Sarah: Sure. I work at HubSpot and we sell marketing software. I
manage our paid
marketing channel, which basically means that I’m responsible for all
of our PPC efforts and also working with some of our partners in the
marketing industry to coordinate opportunities to work together and to
promote our content to their audiences.The focus of all these efforts is lead generation. So, I work closely
with the other folks on our lead gen team who run our organic
channels; social media, e-mail marketing, landing page optimization.
And together, we generate over 50,000 new leads for our sales team
every month.It’s a pretty incredible place to be. We move really fast here and
we’re always trying to stay a step ahead in our marketing, so that we
can not only do marketing well ourselves and keep innovating, but
also, so that we can teach marketing to our readers and ultimately be
able to sell our software.I’ve been with HubSpot for two and a half years now. And I’ve actually
worked on a lot of different parts of our marketing team. So, right
now, I’m focused on PPC and paid marketing. But I’ve also done some
SEO, some blogging. For a while, I was focused on e-mail marketing and
lead nurturing. I did a bit of sales training.It’s been really helpful for sort of getting that full experience
across the board with marketing. But I would say that PPC has
definitely been one of the most interesting channels.It’s so different from the others and I love that there’s so much
flexibility with it. Really, just a ton of opportunity to do it well
and make it work for your marketing, to sort of play around and
experiment and figure out what works.It’s kind of like a big puzzle in a way. So, I’m definitely excited to
get into some detail here and chat about this stuff with you.Trent: I’m equally excited to get into detail. So, before we jump into
this, I’ve always wanted to
ask this one question to a HubSpotter. What do you guys call
yourselves, anyway? A HubSpotter or…Sarah: Yes. A “HubSpotter.” That’s the correct terminology.Trent: Your company is a content-producing machine. How many staff
writers do you guys have?Sarah: We only have a handful on the content team. I have to say,
they’re all incredibly talented
writers. We have probably four or five on our blogging team and then
another three or four who produce our eBooks. It’s a fairly small
team, but they crank out a ton of content every single month.Trent: Do they ever, all right. That was a total side-distraction from
the interview, but I
wanted to find out anyways. Now, we’re going to talk about Twitter
marketing. First off, the first question is why? Why use Twitter to
generate leads?
Sarah: I think that a lot of people still think about Twitter in the
way that individuals use it for
social purposes. They think “No one needs to know what I’m doing right
now. And I don’t really care about what other people are doing. I
didn’t really need to know that you ate macaroni for dinner. Thanks a
lot.”
These are kind of the status update kinds of posts that many people
think of when they think of Twitter. But these people are actually
missing out, because Twitter is hugely valuable for businesses.
And much like the other popular social networks–Facebook, LinkedIn–
you can use Twitter to gain a following, to share messages, to connect
and communicate with your fans and your customers.
The beauty of Twitter compared to the other social networks is that
Tweets are, of course, limited to 140 characters each, meaning that
you have to keep your message concise. But you can also share more
updates, more often because this is the nature of the platform.
So, in a given day, you could easily tweet 20 or 30 times without your
followers so much as batting an eyelash. But if you try that on
Facebook, you’re pretty much bound to watch your fan count tick
downward, right?
Trent: Yeah. That would be an understatement.
Sarah: Yeah. The other thing is that Twitter is such a vibrant space.
It’s a real community.
People go to Twitter to learn more about their fields of interest.
They go to Twitter to learn about brands and find out what their
friends think about those brands and have to say about them.
Really, as a marketer, who wouldn’t want to be on Twitter? Who
wouldn’t want to be active in that space? So, I think it’s really an
absolute must for businesses these days to be there, to be on Twitter.
Trent: I want to echo that statement. I used to really think Twitter
was the dumbest invention
ever before I got it, before the light bulb went on. Because, again, I
didn’t want to know when you were eating your macaroni or what movie
you were watching.
I’m happy to say now that Twitter is my number one social referral
source. So, folks, if you’re listening to this and you haven’t yet
embraced Twitter and you think like I used to think, I encourage you
to keep on listening.
I think, by the end of this, my hope is that the light bulb will come
on for you and you’re going to start to use it.
If you’re going to make Twitter work, you also need to have a strong
content strategy. Because you can’t just be Tweeting nothing, you’ve
got to have something that you’re sharing. Can you talk about how
Twitter and the content strategy go together?
Sarah: Absolutely. Yeah, before you really dive into Twitter
advertising or, for that matter,
any sort of promotional campaign, you really need to figure out what
it is you’re going to promote. You have to have some sort of content
to feed your campaign. Like you said, you can’t just tweet nothing.
And so, as obvious as that may sound, a lot of marketers will really
skip right over this step and just sort of say “Oh, I need to be on
Facebook and I want to set up Twitter campaigns. And I should really
start writing those marketing e-mails.”
But they won’t sit down beforehand and map out the content that
they’re going to use in those campaigns. And that’s when things get
really difficult. Because when you get ahead of yourself like that,
your content really is the backbone of nearly every kind of marketing
campaign that you could possibly run.
And so, it’s so important that you sit down and really make that
effort in advance to figure out what it is you’re going to promote.
And also, the content that you choose to promote on a given platform
is likely going to determine your positioning, your copy, your
targeting, your audience. So, you need to have this part figured out
before you can even begin setting up your campaigns.
I won’t get into too much detail about what types of content you
should be using. Because that’s a whole other topic for another time.
But, basically, you want to figure out what the goal of your campaign
is and then choose content that supports that goal.
If your goal is to generate leads for your business like my goal is,
you’ll want to promote lead generation content. That is, content
that’s behind lead capture form. Whether that’s “Hey, we’ve got this
free eBook for you to download. In order to read it, we just ask that
you give us these few pieces of information about yourself.”
Or it may be “Fill out this form to sign up to join us on this webinar
that we’re hosting. Whatever it may be, you want to be capturing
information. You want to be capturing those leads through that
content.
But, conversely, if your objective is more branding and awareness-
focused, you’ll want to promote content about your business. Content
that conveys your brand message.
Or maybe your goal is actually to turn more of your followers into
customers. In which case, you’ll want to promote more content about
your product or your service. Maybe offer a free trial or demo.
Once you’ve identified your goal, you really want to focus in on
creating high-quality content pieces that you can use to help you
achieve that goal, help you get there.
Trent: Have you guys ever tested, done a split test with a piece of
lead gen content that is
behind an opt-in form? Versus just being freely available? I’ve read
some stuff and I’ve never tested this myself. And so, I’m very curious
if you have.
Some people, they land, they click the tweet, they get through to the
landing page and they’re like “Eh. I don’t want to fill in
information.” So, they don’t interact with that piece of content, they
never see it, they never see how good it is.
Whereas if the content was simply available, granted, you don’t get
their information, per se. But so, potentially, so many more people
could see the content because a person who sees that first tweet gets
the content. They interact with it, they think it’s great, they share
it and so on. Have you guys ever done any testing on that?
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, we definitely find that the longer your forms
are, the more friction there
is, right? People don’t want to spend the time to sit there and fill
out all of their information to give to you and people are also
skeptical of giving companies their information.
As little privacy as we all have these days, it’s still something that
makes people inherently uncomfortable.
We have found that the fewer form fields you use or even just taking
out the form entirely will tend to result in more submissions or more
downloads. But the trade-off is that, what you could do, conversely,
is create content that’s really, truly valuable to your readers.
That’s what we focus on here. Every single piece of content that we
put out, every blog post we write, we audit it for quality before it
goes out.
We make sure that this is something that people would be willing to
sit down and fill out a form in order to read. Our blog posts aren’t
gated but our eBooks, we really make sure that they’re enticing enough
and the content is legitimate and it’s valid, and it’s substantial
enough that people would take that time to go through the form process
in order to get it.
Then, of course, that helps our business because we need to be able to
feed our sales team at the same time.
Trent: You guys don’t happen to have an eBook that explains the
process that you go through
to reveal your eBooks before they get published, do you?
Sarah: You know, we actually have an eBook on how to create eBooks,
believe it or not.
Trent: Could you make sure you send me a link to that so I can include
it in the show notes of
this episode?
Sarah: Sure thing.
Trent: Thank you. All right, so, should you be running paid ads on top
of your organic efforts
on Twitter and if you are going to do that, how do you which one to
focus on?
Sarah: You always want to focus on organic promotion first. For no
other reason than the
obvious that that’s the free one. So, you want to make sure, first,
that you have a solid, organic Twitter strategy in place. That you
have a strong number of followers and that you’re regularly tweeting
valuable content to them.
You should already be working toward your goal, whether it’s lead gen
branding, what have you. You should already be working toward it from
an organic perspective before you consider starting with paid ads.
Then, once you have things running smoothly with your organic
strategy, if you have some budget to work with, paid advertising is
actually a really excellent way to supplement your efforts.
And note, that I chose my words very carefully there. You always want
to use paid advertising to supplement your organic efforts, not
replace them. And this is, of course, true across the board. Not just
with Twitter.
Trent: Okay. How do you go about getting started with paid ads? How do
you set up a
campaign?
Sarah: There are a couple things you need to figure out before you
dive in. So, like I
mentioned earlier, you want to start by deciding what your goal is.
Whether it’s lead gen, brand awareness, lead to customer conversion.
And then, once you have your goal nailed down, the second step is to
decide what type of campaign you want to run. If you’re looking to
increase brand awareness and gain more followers, you can run what’s
called a “promoted account” campaign. Which displays your account in
the “Who to follow” sidebar.
It also allows you to craft messaging about why people should follow
your brand, which is then displayed next to a “follow” button. You
might say something like “Looking to stay updated on the latest
marketing tips and trends? Follow HubSpot to stay in the loop.”
And then, that will appear right next to a “Follow” button so you can
follow the HubSpot account right from there.
Trent: And what did you call that again?
Sarah: That’s promoted accounts. So, that’s better for branding. But
if your goal is lead
generation or really, anything other than brand awareness, you’ll want
to run promoted tweet campaigns.
These put your tweets right in the feeds of the users that you’re
targeting. And if this is the option that you choose, then the next
thing you’re going to want to do is select the content that you’re
going to promote in those tweets. Make sure that the content aligns
with your goals, like we discussed before.
And then, the next step is to choose your targeting. So, this is where
things start to get a little bit complicated, but bear with me. So,
Twitter is actually really good as far as targeting goes. You have a
few different options.
One, is you can target based on keywords, which lets you target users
who search for or tweet about those keywords or engage with them in
some way.
This type of targeting is really great if you’re running an event, if
you’re doing event promotion or if you are running product-specific
campaigns because then you can really zone in on those keywords that
are relevant to that product that you’re promoting.
It’s also really good for going after folks with purchase intent. So,
if you’re looking to sort of narrow in and focus on those people who
are most likely to purchase from you, this is a great option for that
as well.
This option, going based on keywords, will usually give you a
narrower, but more focused and higher-quality audience.
Then, you can also choose to target by interests and followers. And
this option lets you search for interest categories to target. For
example, I can target anyone who’s interested in marketing or home
repair or French cuisine or whatever it is that is most relevant to
you. That’s the interest side of the equation.
And then, it also lets you input any Twitter usernames. And it’ll then
target users who look like those people’s followers. So, for example,
when I run campaigns with this type of targeting, I’ll put in a bunch
of usernames of people who are really well-known in the marketing
industry and have a lot of followers. It’ll find other Twitter users
like those people’s followers.
This option is much better for a less qualified, but much broader
audience. And then, on top of this, you can also target by location,
you can target by gender, you can target by device.
If you only want to reach people who are on desktop or only on mobile,
you can do that, too. To really have a ton of flexibility here to
build an audience based on the criteria that you care the most about.
Then, they also, just last month, actually, released a brand-new
targeting option called “Tailored Audiences,” which lets you directly
target your site visitors. And this option is really great for re-
targeting.
We did the beta testing when they first rolled this out to the beta
users. So, we’ve been in this for a few months now and we’ve been
collecting some data.
We found in our own efforts that our re-targeting campaigns have had
45 percent higher engagement than our regular promoted tweet
campaigns. So, if you’re looking to convert more of your existing
database into customers and sort of focus more on them, then Tailored
Audiences is a really great option to use here.
Trent: Let’s dive into that one a little deeper for a minute. So, I’ll
just use myself as the guinea
pig. I’ve got my 4,000 or so Twitter followers. When you talk about
the Tailored Audiences, am I tweeting more to the people that already
follow me? I’m not sure that I fully get it yet.
Sarah: You’re basically tweeting to the people who are in your
database or who have visited
your site. You could set it up to say “Anyone who has come to my
website, I want to capture them in this audience.” And then I want
them to be in this group of people to whom we’re displaying these
tweets.
Trent: When they come to my site, they’re going to get cookied. And
that cookie is then going
to trigger a re-targeting within their Twitter stream.
Sarah: Yes. So, it’ll build the audience for you. It’ll grab everybody
who has visited your site
and then, that will be the audience that you select for the targeting
purposes.
Trent: Okay, cool. I like that. All right.
Sarah: Just to wrap up here, to finish the building out your campaign,
really, the last thing
that you need to decide on is your budget. And I think this is where a
lot of marketers get stumped or concerned or nervous.
Everyone sort of asks “What’s the right amount to spend on paid
advertising” and “What’s the right amount to start off my campaign”?
The unfortunate fact of the matter is there really is no right amount.
It’s different for everyone, it’s different for every marketer, for
every budget, for every campaign. And if you’re really planning to
spend a lot, I don’t know exactly what the minimum is, but they’ll set
you up with a dedicated account rep who is going to help you on the
best ways to spend that money.
But otherwise, you’ll pretty much have to figure it out on your own.
But I promise, it’s really not as hard as it sounds. So, you want to
just decide how much you’re willing to spend on Twitter ads in a
month. And then break that down, you can divide it out by business
days if you want.
Try spending that much in a day and if it’s too little, if it’s not
working, you’re not seeing any results, you can condense that spend
into maybe a week or two. It’s much better to spend more at once and
see actual results than to drag out your spend in tiny increments.
So as you go, you’ll sort of start to get a feel for how much you need
to spend in order to make your campaigns effective. And that’ll help
you plan your spending going forward. Then, once you have all of this
mapped out, you just set your bids for the campaign. When you choose
your targeting criteria, it’ll give you a recommended bidding range.
I would say go for at least the average of that, if not higher. If you
have more to spend and you can be a little bit more free with your
money, then go ahead and set it maybe even a little bit above the
bidding range.
Once you choose your bid, I think you’ve pretty much filled out the
whole setup process. You just write those tweets and you can go ahead
and launch your campaigns.
Trent: If you had one landing page that was your number one lead
generator that you were
promoting, you could have any number of different tweets that would
all be linking back to that one landing page?
Sarah: Oh, absolutely, yeah. And I would actually recommend that. When
you’re building a
campaign, you want to have more than one tweet running in that
campaign. Because the interface that you’re looking at within the
Twitter ads platform will show you the number of impressions and the
click-through rates by each tweet individually.
You want to be testing more than one so you can figure out what kind
of language resonates the best with your followers and keep optimizing
from there.
Trent: Okay. All right, so far, it’s making sense. So, now, we’ve got
our ads. They’re up and
running. Obviously, they’re not as good yet as they could be. Do we
have to go through some kind of optimization? So, I’m sure you’ve got
some ideas you can share with us on that.
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of like what I was just saying. You
want to be trying different
things, have those different tweets, be looking at the metrics and see
what’s working. But sort of from a more macro perspective, you want to
keep an eye on these campaigns.
You don’t want to just set them up and let them run and leave them
unattended. You should really be constantly optimizing for your
overall metrics.
So, when you’re choosing what metrics to sell for, you want to align
those with your goals. So, if your goal is lead generation, you want
to be maximizing the number of leads that you generate and also,
minimizing your CPL or cost per lead. And so, these are the two main
metrics that I look at for our campaigns.
It’s also important to look at these metrics across all of your
campaigns, but also, on the individual campaign level. So that that
way, you can see which campaigns are performing well and which ones
are bringing down your averages.
What I do is I use a different tracking token in the links for each of
the campaigns I run, so I can see on a campaign level, which content
pieces are generating how many leads.
Since I’m also able to see how much I’m spending on each campaign
through Twitter, I’m able to very easily calculate the cost per lead
of each individual campaign. And then, if it’s too high and the
campaign is either not generating enough leads or costing too much,
then I’ll pause it and shift its budget over to a higher-performing
campaign.
You want to always be doing this and always be sort of optimizing for
the top performers of the bunch.
Trent: You mentioned the term “tracking token.” Is that using the
Google URL builder, or is
that something that is within the Twitter interface that allows you to
create that?
Sarah: It’s not within the Twitter interface. You can build your own
URL tracking token. I type
ours in myself. It’s fairly simple. You can usually just do little
question mark source equals and type it in. It depends on what sort of
analytics software you’re using to track it.
We use HubSpot. So, I know that I’m able to go into our reporting
tools and very easily see how everything breaks down. And we also run
Salesforce reports, so I’m able to sort of do the campaign by campaign
breakdown there, too.
Trent: Okay. Now, do you guys have any blog posts that you could link
me to that would
provide more information on the tracking tokens and campaign
optimization?
Sarah: Absolutely, sure.
Trent: Make sure that you get me those links, too, please.
Sarah: Okay, will do.
Trent: All right, what’s next on my list? What other tips do you have
for running an effective
Twitter campaign?
Sarah: In terms of the copy, I would say the biggest tip that I have
is don’t be too sales-y.
Your copy should always focused on providing value to your readers. As
is true, of course, in all marketing contacts, not just on Twitter.
But if your tweets come off as pushy and super product-focused, then
chances are, they’re really not going to get much engagement. You want
to really let your brand personality show through. And talk to your
followers as if they’re real human beings and not just leads in your
database.
Trent: So, have you got some phraseology examples that you could give
us? Is it a lot of how-
to-type [inaudible at 00:23:42]?
Sarah: Yeah. People like “How to,” people like “101 examples of
companies that are rocking
social media.” Any way that you can phrase it that very clearly
conveys the value to the readers. Whether it’s because it’s
interesting or because it is a how to or because it’s just very
relevant to them and their industry. You want to make sure that it’s
enticing content.
Trent: Okay. All right, where do I want to go here?
Sarah: So, other tips.
Trent: Yeah, let’s keep going with tips.
Sarah: Another tip would be to spice it up a bit. I think that text
can be great. But it can also get
kind of boring and can blend in with all the other tweets in your
users’ feeds. And we found that images work really well.
We’ve actually found that using images in tweets increases lead gen by
57 percent, which is huge. So, try some images, try some Vine videos.
It never hurts to give your brand some personality. People love that
stuff.
So, go for it. Try crazy things. Be enticing, be engaging. Be fun.
Trent: A Vine video. Can’t say I’m familiar with a Vine video. I’m
probably embarrassed to
say that, but what’s a Vine video?
Sarah: It’s quite all right. Vine is a six-second video platform. It’s
tied into Twitter, so you
can record a six-second video. And it also lets you break it up. I
think you can only do it on your iPhone. I’m also not 100 percent on
top of Vine, so we’re in the same boat there.
You can sort of hold your finger down and then let it go, so you can
break up the six seconds. It doesn’t have to be continuous. But
anyway, you can do very fun things and short videos and include those
in your tweets very easily. It’s sort of a quick way to entice people
to watch something.
Trent: Is Vine a platform that’s owned by Twitter?
Sarah: Yes, yes.
Trent: It is? Okay. All right, so when you’re up and running,
obviously you don’t want to just
keep doing the same thing over and over, because that always gets old.
What are some things that you guys have done which you didn’t
necessarily think you were surprised by the results? Surprised to the
upside. I’m looking for the examples of the best and most successful.
Sarah: Sure. So, like I said, the images were probably our most
surprising test. I had no idea
that they would increase lead gen by 57 percent. I mean, when that
stat came out, we had team meetings about it because it was just so
incredible. So, that was really exciting.
We also started doing promoted accounts recently. So, my main focus
has always been lead generation. So, we’ve pretty much strayed away
from the promoted accounts because that’s obviously focused on growing
your follower base.
I decided to give it a test recently and it’s actually been working
very well. We’ve been able to cut the amount that we have to spend to
gain a follower basically in half from what it used to be.
That’s been really effective as well and I would say that if you have
the budget for it, it’s definitely worth a test.
Trent: Hang on, I want to make sure I understood what you just said.
You decreased your cost
of adding followers by using promoted tweets instead of promoted
accounts?
Sarah: The other way around. So, promoted tweets are what we typically
use for our normal
campaigns. Those are sort of our lead gen tweets, if you will. It’s
where we share our content and we say “Oh, if you want to learn more
about how to use Facebook for marketing, you should download this
eBook.” With better copy, of course, but that’s the general idea.
Whereas promoted accounts, the idea there is that you are just trying
to get more people to follow your account. That’s what I was saying
before about “If you want to stay updated with the latest tips in the
industry, follow Hubspot and we’ll keep you posted on that stuff.”
More of that kind of thing.
So, what you’re paying for is essentially more follower acquisition.
Trent: What did you do that drastically cut the cost of follower
acquisition?
Sarah: Just starting to do that. I’m not actually sure what types of
efforts we were running
before. We may have done promoted accounts in the past before I was
managing this channel. But when I came back to my manager and I said
“Hey, this is the amount we’re paying to acquire a new follower,” he
said “Oh, wow. That’s half of what we used to do.”
So, I’m not sure exactly what we’re comparing apples to apples here.
But it’s been very effective. Not even comparing it, but even just
looking at the numbers as they stand by themselves. It’s been very
good.
Trent: Now, earlier in the interview, you talked about targeting with
keywords. Is there a
keyword research tool within the Twitter campaign builder at all so
that you can figure out search volumes for keywords?
Sarah: Yeah. So, if you enter in a keyword or a few keywords, there’s
a button that allows you
to find similar and related keywords. So, that’s really great for just
sort of thinking of those things that you haven’t thought of.
The other thing is, if you used AdWords, they have a really great
keyword recommendation tool. So, you can always look there. I’m sure
there are other sites that also will find similar keywords. But, yes.
They do have it built in right into Twitter.
Trent: Okay. All right, so let’s wrap up with my lightning round.
These are just a couple of
really quick questions. What’s the most recent business book that
you’ve read?
Sarah: Most recent business book that I read? Well, just this morning,
actually, I was
discussing “Blue Ocean Strategy”. And that is definitely a classic, I
would say, business book. I would definitely recommend that one.
Trent: What’s your favorite blog and you can’t say HubSpot.
Sarah: I can’t say HubSpot. What’s my favorite blog? You know, I
really like Seth Godin. He’s
one of our unsung heroes around here. Or maybe for you, I guess he’s a
sung hero. We definitely love Seth Godin around here and he writes
very short snippets, but they’re great. Very entertaining.
Trent: All right. And if people want to interact with you at all, how
do they do that?
Sarah: I’m on Twitter. @SarahBethGo and you can find me there. Or you
can find me on
my website, sarahgoliger.com.
Trent: All right. Sarah, thank you so much for making some time to
come on to the “Bright
Ideas” podcast and share some insight and tips on how we can all use
Twitter to generate more leads for our businesses. Much appreciated.
Sarah: Absolutely. It was my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Trent: To get to the show notes for this episode, go to
brightideas.co/98. If you enjoyed the
episode, please also take a moment and go to brightideas.com/love
where you’ll find a link and a video to show you how to leave feedback
for this show in the iTunes store.
And if you take a moment to do that, you have my eternal thanks
because every time someone does, we get a little bit more exposure in
the iTunes store. That draws more listeners and then more listeners
get to benefit from hearing all of the bright ideas that are shared by
my guests here on the show.
That’s it for this episode. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so
much for tuning in. And I look forward to producing another episode
for you in the very near future. Take care.
About Sarah Goliger
Sarah Goliger is the Head of Paid Marketing at HubSpot. She is responsible for coordinating marketing campaigns with external vendors and running display and retargeting campaigns through both search and social networks with an ultimate goal of lead generation.
Previously, Sarah managed email marketing and lead nurturing for HubSpot’s mid-sized business segment. Sarah also offers individual email marketing consulting. You can learn more about Sarah on her website and connect with her on Twitter at @sarahbethgo.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Sarah-Goliger.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-03-07 06:00:332020-09-18 05:59:31How to Leverage Twitter for Lead Generation with Sarah Goliger
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The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
Director of Strategy at inbound marketing agency, Adhere Creative, Nathan is responsible for the strategic direction of client campaigns. Nathan challenges his team and his clients to step far outside of traditional practices to breathe a creative life into a brand. The best clients for Nathan and Adhere Creative are those who are most willing to listen. While away from the office, Nathan enjoys traveling like a Roman, experiencing unique foods, craft beers and an engaging conversation with a stranger, soon turned friend.
