Category Archives: Content Marketing

The Power of Infographics and Visual Content – Donna Moritz

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Donna-Moritz-PinterestDo you put shareable images on every page of your website? Do you know how to create a compelling infographic or image and what tools you need to make them? Do you know how to tell a story with an image?

If not, then you’re not alone. A lot of small businesses don’t realize the importance of “snackable” visual content or how to incorporate it into social media. By connecting with your audience in a visual way, you give them instantly recongnizable content that can propel them to share it with others.

This week, we talk it up with visual social media strategist Donna Moritz, to learn more about how to make interesting infographics and visuals for your most popular platforms and how do it effectively.

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Big Ideas:

How did you become a visual social media strategist?

  • I was at the Pro Blogger event a couple of years ago, and Darren Rowse was talking about looking for the sparks in your business and how they can lead you in a direction that can really change things completely.
  • I realized that when I was blogging I was really interested in topics to do with word-of-mouth marketing and content marketing but I was writing more and more about visual social media that was starting to become a thing. We were using images more on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram.
  • I noticed that my readers were really responding to those articles and I was really enjoying writing them. So I started to do more and then Amy Porterfield asked me to do a blog post which was the first guest post on her site actually.
  • Me being excited to do a guest post for Amy I thought, “alright, why don’t we do an infographic,” because infographics were quite big at the time. I’d never done one so I had a designer work with me and we did one on Pinterest and it’s been shared tens of thousands of times, reblogged everywhere.
  • I think we’re about to do a 2.0 because it needs updating.
  • It showed me the power of good embedded visual content in a great extended blog post. So I became really interested in that.
  • I started to do some more. Entrepreneur.com started to post them regularly and they were asking me to do more. From there I started to do some for clients.
  • We do them mainly for top bloggers just to get a really good pace of content going. I really love that whole storyboarding and design back and forth and the creation of a visual story.
  • I actually a wannabe graphic designer. I never did graphic design but I am really interested in design. I’m quite creative so it’s the perfect fit for me.

So, you’re coming up with the ideas, but you’re having somebody else execute this for you?

  • Yeah, and it’s actually good because now a lot of what I do is that I teach people they don’t have to have design skills, they don’t have to have a lot of time, they don’t have to have a design team.
  • It’s actually the best time ever to be creating visual content because we have such amazing tools. We never had the tools we have now, two years ago, Canvo, we didn’t have great apps on our phones that allow you to make instant visual content.
  • Even though we create high-end infographics, I have a designer who’s also an illustrator because we really want to make them unique. But, I do a lot of my own visual content for my business and also when I have managed clients I have been able to create a lot of visual content using really easy to learn tools.
  • We’re now sort of moving into doing visual strategies for businesses and helping them to actually create their own content or doing small projects which might be for a launch or something like that were they need a lot of snackable, easily shared content to promote something.
  • Generally, my big passion is helping people to understand that word-of-mouth-marketing is really enhanced by great shareable visuals. Any one can do it.
  • When you think about the different types of visuals you can create, they’re not all high-end infographics. Sometimes it’s a very easily produced piece of content that they can do.
  • It’s a really good time for people to start playing with it.

What was the information you were trying to get across in this infographic for Amy Porterfield?

  • Amy wanted a how-to post about Pinterest because Pinterest had just started to become quite popular. It was also pushing the boundaries of it because when I wrote it it was almost like it could’ve been converted into an ebook.
  • It was called the 10 Commandments of Using Pinterest for Business. Pretty much if you go to Amy’s website (amyporterfield.com) it will be one of the most popular posts on the right hand side unless there’s been a change (it’s usually there).
  • It was a very simple infographic and it also paved the way for me to think about infographics differently because at the time they were very data driven. They were basically pie charts made to look pretty.
  • I thought, “this doesn’t have to be this way. It can tell a story.” So with this one we really just summarized the key points in the article which were the ten commandments. It was nothing special really, it was just some fun birds doing different things to do with the ten commandments and we had dot points under each one.
  • It was more of a how-to infographic. Since then we’ve really started to do a lot more that tells a story visually rather than just being data. A lot of them have a lot of how-to tips on them and just trying to make them really useful to people so they’ll want to keep them on their Pinterest boards or on their desktop or however they bookmark information.
  • I’ve found that they’re starting to shift from really being just statistics driven to being more useful for people. But, we always include references and things like that at the bottom if we can.
  • That first one was just bright, fun, it was engaging, and it was useful so people shared it.

That’s great. So you can be using more than one type of infographic and you can use it to tell a story.

  • Yeah, I always include data if I can.
  • A good example is one we did for Ian Cleary recently. Ian’s a really smart, savvy blogger and he was amazing to work with because I knew that he would get it promoted quite well (he’s from razorsocial.com and a past guest on this show! view our interview with him HERE http://www.themarketingagents.com/ian-cleary)
  • He wanted to do an infographic about different tools, so a “day in the life of a social media marketer.” That one didn’t actually have any statistics on it at all. It was purely different tools and when you would use them.
  • The poor girl was working pretty hard during the day. As you moved down the infographic it had lots of different tools you would use on the way to work on the train, mid-morning, lunch, afternoon. I convinced Ian to let the poor lady have a glass of wine in the evening while watching television.
  • We had that all designed up and it actually has no stats. It’s just for what tools you wanted to work with it’s great and useful and they’re being used by your industry as a social media marketer you could look at that.
  • Now, if you used them all you’d go crazy, but you can pick and choose which ones. It didn’t have any stats at all. I think we referenced a couple of things but it was mainly reference to Ian. It was his content and we just turned it into a story so it wasn’t just a boring list of tools.

Why do you think we’re so drawn to visuals in social media? Why are they so important?

  • I was talking about this at Social Media Marketing World. It’s a shift to visual social media.
  • We started to communicate more and more in visuals coming from blogs to Facebook with images then to almost completely through marketer blogging and multimedia marketer blogging with Tumblr, and other sites like YouTube and then completely to a point where we’re basically speaking in pictures only on Pinterest and Instagram.
  • I used to talk about it being a shift, but it’s actually kind of a return because really we’ve been communicating in new ways, there’s a great quote by Apu Gupta, the CEO of Curalate – “Our ancestors used to communicate what mattered most by drawing on caves and now we pin, we reblog, and we Instagram the things that matter and we’ve kind of come full circle.”
  • It’s true. We’re back to communicating with images. I think party it’s because we’re hardwired to communicate visually from the moment we’re born. We react to faces and images.
  • Partly, in a way it’s helping us to cut out the noise. There’s so much information coming through that it’s quite obvious when you’re looking at newsfeeds – we do gravitate towards something that catches our attention.
  • Text is very hard to catch people’s attention with. An image will catch attention and then it kind of depends on how you structure that image as to what happens afterwards.
  • I think there’s a lot of emphasis on reach when that’s great. You can get eyeballs on your content but unless it catches their attention, people aren’t going to do anything with it.
  • In general, we’ve come a long way but we’ve kind of almost returned to where we were originally which is back to communicating visually.
  • A recent study said that it takes 13 milliseconds to process an image. I love blogging and I love podcasts and video rocks, but we can’t get that same instant emotional connection that images give so it helps people to make a quick decision when they’re seeing content and they’re trying to filter out the stuff that they don’t want from the stuff that they do want.

How do I use an infographic to use it as part of my marketing, my lead generation program?

  • The trick is to always think in terms of your homebase and where you want people to be.
  • This has kind of changed a little bit and I just want to talk about one thing that you might find interesting, and I’m sure you realize this is happening, historically we’ve always talked about driving traffic to our website which is important, but there’s three types of traffic I think of.
  • One is the traffic to your website which is still very much high priority. That’s because you own that space and you own that website. It’s not rented land like on social media sites.
  • Then there’s the traffic on your website which is where you want to keep people on your website going from possibly one article to another or however you keep them interested and then hopefully signing up to your newsletter list.
  • And then there’s the interesting one which is the traffic away from your website. People might say, “why do you want people to go away from your website?” But to be honest, with sites like Pinterest now there’s a lot of potential for people to share your content back to Pinterest.
  • In fact, you can be asleep and have more content shared that has nothing to do with your marketing. You’re not putting content out there. You’re just putting good images or visuals on your website and people will pin it across Pinterest.
  • I think the one thing you can do to start with – and anyone can do this – this is just to make sure that every page on your website, infographic or no infographic, has a good piece of visual content on it. Because that way people have an option to actually share that visually. It also makes it more engaging if you’re sharing out to Facebook or Twitter or wherever you want to share it.
  • The other thing is when you are choosing to embed something that you are taking the time to do – like an infographic – to make sure that it is in a detailed piece of content that is really helpful to your audience and you know your audience and what they need. Make it really useful.
  • For every infographic, and let’s say the one we did for Ian, I said to him part way along as we were designing, “right, mate. It’s your turn. You need to go and write an awesome blog post.” Which for Ian is not really that hard – he’s a very good writer. He went and wrote a great blog post that worked in with the infographic. It wasn’t exactly the same but it referred to the infographic and complemented it.
  • Then, when he put that infographic on his site he then shared it out on social media sites but he also offered it up to other bloggers and did blogger outreach for them to share the infographic. All traffic led back to his site.
  • So he had two pieces of content. In fact, if that graphic got separated from his website – which it would on Pinterest – it stood alone and it was his own piece of standalone content as well.
  • There’s a lot of different things you can do and even just take away smaller pieces of information and turn them into smaller graphics that then lead back into that infographic.
  • We call them snackable pieces of content. I hope that makes sense!

If we’re sharing an infographic with people, do we want to share that embed code as well?

  • Yeah, I think generally we do that as a rule of thumb now with an embed code.
  • There’s a lot of simple plugins that you can use and I can definitely give you some links.
  • It is a good idea and it just makes it easier for people because they can just grab the embed code. There’s a lot of people that just share infographics willy nilly and for the most part they’re good or bad at them and they reference them back to the site with a link, but the other way is course is to take the graphic off and upload it to your site.
  • Generally that’s considered okay but I think if you’re gonna stick to good copyright and that sort of thing, use an embed code.
  • The other thing about embed codes like you said, it makes it easier for the other person as well.
  • That’s definitely a good thing to do. I think too, if you’re reaching out to other bloggers just use good common sense. I get spammed a lot with people just sending infographics to me that aren’t really relevant to my readers.
  • I know Ian and myself too, we’ve often offered a small guest post to somebody if you’re offering to give them an infographic that you could offer to give them a twist on it and do an introduction on it but sometimes I only need a short paragraph or intro.
  • That’s what we do for entrepreneur.com. I’ll publish them on my site and then a day later they’ll post it with an intro paragraph, so there’s a few different ways you can do it.
  • Definitely, embed codes are a good way to go.

Many people would say, “we’re a one-man shop, or a small business. We don’t have a lot of money to spend on this. Visuals and infographics are outside of what we can do.” What would you say to that?

  • Absolutely not. In fact I have done a couple myself and did some smaller versions as well and I’ll give you a link to an article that’s actually on how to create infographics and it’s got an infographic about how to create infographics embedded in it so it’s kind of a bit “meta.”
  • It’s called the “7 Superpowers of a Knockout Infographic.” That’s got a few links to some really great tools you can use that actually are very templates but you can get quite creative with them and add your own branding.
  • There’s a tool called Pickto Chart and you can get a free subscription to that and test it out and it’s not a lot per month. There’s one called Easelly and Infogr.am. Those three have their advantages and you can find out which one suits you best but they’re really great tools for creating infographics.
  • My other favorite one is Canva because Canva allows you to create graphics of any size so you can do a custom template. You can do a 735px x 4000px high image infographic or you can do shorter, snackable size kind of graphics. On Pinterest, portrait size at least. Something that’s longer than it is wide gets shared better.
  • Canva is great because you can just use it to create a simple infographic and they have lots of grids. You can even just put in a simple photo series. I really love the simplicity of a simple photo series showing how to do something in your industry and then like a header and a footer and this is what the infographic is and then the footer with your contact details and just using text overlays.
  • Anyone can create a simple graphic or infographic. It’s not that hard. These templates are really really cool. You’d be surprised at how great they can look.

Any specific advice if we have an image should we be repurposing it for different places? Or should we not worry about that?

  • Yeah, for sure. I definitely think that repurposing images is a really clever way to go.
  • You just have to be a little careful you’re not just putting the one image on every platform. There’s kind of clusters you can look at.
  • Firstly if you’re mainly on Instagram and Facebook then obviously square images are the best way to go and you might post it first on Instagram and then repurpose it for Facebook. They post quite well on both.
  • With portrait size images, which is sort of a 2:3 aspect ratio like 400 x 600, they do very well on Pinterest. In fact, Curalate did some research and showed that that is the most shared size even more than infographic size, you know, the longer ones. That is a good size to go with.
  • I’ve done some testing and it looks okay on Google+ and it looks okay on Facebook so it is good to have some portrait-sized images in your blogpost or just creating them and sharing them right to Pinterest.
  • The other size that I’ve been playing around with lately is the size that Facebook recommends for pulling in for your linked images in articles which is like 1200 x 627 and I’ve even reduced that to half to make it fit across the blog post.
  • I find you can either use some SEO plugins where Open Graph will pull that image in to make sure it appears nicely on Facebook. Or, I just have that size image on my blog post and that pulls in nicely on Facebook, but it’s also a great size. It’s almost the ideal size for a Twitter image.
  • I recommend just occasionally uploading images directly to Twitter. They do get shared better directly into Twitter or second best, through a third-party app. Images on Twitter get twice the number of retweets.
  • It pays to think about doing some images, especially for your content that you’re spending a lot of time creating and you can then upload to Twitter as well.
  • There are the three sizes – landscape, portrait, and square. Those are the three I tend to go with the most and they would cover most of your platforms in one way or another.
  • That’s the tricky part, but it’s not completely cookie cutter. You have to work out what your top platforms are and it comes back to traffic. Where’s the traffic coming from with these images? If it is Facebook and Instagram then focus on that. If it’s Facebook and Pinterest, then do that.
  • If you’ve got the time, then do that extra image. Once you’ve got the program open and you’re creating an image, whether it’s getting your designer to do it or you’re doing it, it’s much easier to do them in one go than to try to do it later. Then it doesn’t cost much more in time or money.
  • That’s why I say to people, “when you’re creating images, think about a series of images that you could create,” and this is talking about some other tools you can use, like Canva, or another tool like PicMonkey. If you’re creating images you might do a series of two images or quotes or something like that. Don’t just create one, just do five or ten, then you’ve got images for the whole next couple of weeks.
  • You kind of inadvertently brought up the topic of batching. People who batch their videos, podcasts, or blog posts, think of images in the same way and do them in a batch so you’re not constantly going, “oh god, we’ve got to do an image for tomorrow.”

What tips and tactics do you have for something like this, whether it’s a brand in general or maybe an event, that we can really get people to share our brand through visual means?

  • I mean, if you can get sword swallowers that’s the way to go…or fire breathing, walking on coal, all that stuff is instant shareable images.
  • I think there’s a couple elements to it. One is to really give people a slippery slope and make it really easy for them to do it. That part’s kind of covered for us because people are using mobile devices so they often have them in their hand.
  • The second is to make them in the moment. So, obviously when you’ve got a sword swallower in front of you that’s a great way to encourage people to share content. But, for a lot of different businesses they think very much about online but just to go offline for a little bit. Sometimes their business might be offline as well.
  • For instance, there’s a company called ProDive and they run diving tours. They go out for three days and it’s completely catered for and they dive and they hang out on those beautiful boats. They actually have wi-fi on their boat to encourage people to share images about what they’re experiencing.
  • Now, in a conference you obviously have wi-fi and everyone’s there with their phones, cameras, and etcetera. Sometimes it’s as simple as just asking them you know – “I would love you to share images of what’s happening behind the scenes of the conference.”
  • It’s always as simple as giving them a hashtag to add to it because it kind of adds the fun. If you need to you can add an enticement of some competition or something like that.
  • I had one for my session at Social Media Marketing World where people had 300 pairs of 3-D glasses at the end of the session and had a couple of slides in 3-D just for something fun. But then I got them to do an art imitates like where I’ve been talking to about how to get people to share images, I said, “I want to see the best image using a pair of 3-D glasses by the end of the day,” and people were off taking all sorts of weird and wonderful photos and sharing them with a hashtag.
  • In often cases it’s about looking at what sparks your audience. For instance there’s a lady here in Australia who’s a stylist and she often puts up photos of outfits and things like that. She’s a very popular blogger. One of her clients said, “can you post up what you wear every day when you’re going to school pick up and down to the shops or whatever.” So, she posted it up and a simple hashtag #everydaystyle. She didn’t tell them to do anything and people just started to want to post up their own photos of what they were wearing.
  • Before long her Facebook community had doubled. She already had a great community. She was posting summaries of hundreds of photos on all of her platforms where people were just sharing these photos with the hashtag #everydaystyle but it was connected to her brand.
  • Same thing goes for Tourism Australia. They’re encouraging people to share content about what they experience about our country under hashtags. So hashtags can be very popular and in the moment if you’ve got something happening – an activity or event or an on-location thing – then that can really help.
  • If it’s online, then sometimes it’s just about creating great content yourself and encouraging people to add to it. So there’s a number of different ways.
  • I’ve seen that done a lot. It always comes back to your audience. It is all about them but they want to participate in what you’re doing. If they’re interested at all in your business they will love to be involved in that behind the scenes activity and being able to contribute in some way.
  • So, involving them and asking them what they’re doing while they’re listening to your podcast, Rich, is a brilliant idea. And there’s the beauty because it was your audience’s idea.
  • I remember talking to Nicky Parkinson, she’s the stylist at stylingyou.com.au and I said, “how did this start? Did you say to them ‘here’s the hashtag, start sharing photos?’ and she said ‘no, I had someone ask me to do it and I don’t like to tell my audience how to jump through hoops but, then wow, there’s a spark and I’ll follow it.’”
  • It’s awesome that your audience thought of that and that they’re running with it. I’ll have to do one from Australia now!

Juicy Links:

Bonus Info:
…not mentioned in the podcast:
A Bonus Tool for Creating Images: “This is a great app for creating instantly shareable, design-quality tips, quotes and how-to images on the go. It is an iphone app and allows you to create an image in seconds while you have a few spare minutes”.  Warning > it’s addictive!
Here is an article by Curalate that you may find interesting about users pinning more content to Pinterest to websites (85% of content is actually pinned by users and not brands!… from websites!).  It is also a handy article to show your website clients as they often don’t realise that by changing their web content in the wrong way, or not adding valuable visual content, they may be leaving valuable clicks on the table!

Rich Brooks

Graphic About Info

How a Business Blog REALLY Generates Leads – Marcus Sheridan

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Marcus-Sheridan-PinterestDo you have meaningful conversations with your clients or prospects? Do you answer the questions you get from them? Do you know how to incorporate teaching and communication into your sales process to build trust?

If not, then you’re not alone. A lot of small businesses don’t realize that by answering the questions most important to their customer they are augmenting their content marketing. By being open and honest with your audience, you invite them to trust your judgement and ultimately choose your business over your competitors.

This week, we chat it up with web marketing guru Marcus Sheridan, to chat about making your prospects stay on your website to learn and engage for longer than you’d ever think possible.

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Big Ideas:

How did blogging and content marketing save your business?

  • Not that you asked the wrong question, but I want to change to “how did incredible teaching and communication change your business,” because that’s the way I want the listeners to think about this.
  • We started our company in 2001. It was super small and we just kind of grew as companies do.
  • We were installing in-ground pools throughout Virginia and Maryland, but when the market collapsed in 2008, it was an epic disaster for us.
  • We lost a quarter of a million dollars of business immediately after the stock market crashed and by January 2009 we went through three straight weeks where we were overdrawn in our bank account.
  • I talked to lots of consultants at the time and everybody said essentially the same thing which was, “you need to go ahead and file bankruptcy.”
  • But, if I did that, I was going to lose my home, and my partners were gonna lose their homes, and it just wasn’t a good situation – a very stressful time
  • It was during this time that I realized, “hey, we gotta generate more leads than we ever have, and we don’t have any money to do it. So, what do we do?”
  • I was also looking at the trend that was the internet and how consumers were clearly changing. It was obvious to me, the way I used it – to research and to learn. I knew our customers and prospects were doing the same thing.
  • So, the more I read about inbound marketing and content marketing, and all this stuff, what resonated in my mind was that, “if I teach better than anybody else and I’m really not afraid to address all these questions people have – and I put it on my website and I take the time to be thoughtful – that I’m going to get the reward.”
  • That’s exactly what I did. Our philosophy became four simple words that have changed my life and since then has been the same philosophy we use with every single client which is – THEY ASK, YOU ANSWER.
  • That is, any question we’d ever been asked we were willing to address it on our website. I firmly believe that if a business is not willing to do that, that it’s almost like somebody walking into your store or your office and they ask you a question and you tell them, “yeah, I appreciate that, but I can’t give you the answer. Go ahead and go down the street. They’ll give you the answer and once they’ve given your the answer, go ahead and come on back and we’ll work you up a deal.”
  • It doesn’t quite work like that any more. We did that, and to make a long story really short, like you said, it saved the business. It’s the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world.
  • It’s amazing what’s happened and now we’re moving into the manufacturing space as well. That’s been a great ride and I’m very grateful to be a part of it and I’m grateful that I can now apply those same principles to other companies.
  • It doesn’t change. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling pools or water for pools. Essentially we’re dealing with people and communication and great teaching.

How did answering these questions change the sales process for you? How did you all of a sudden rescue your business by answering people’s questions?

  • There were a few things. It’s a very important question. Let me describe the scene.
  • I was working, at the time, 65-70 hours a week. I would go on a sales appointments during the day and most of them were a couple hours away. Most of those sales appointments themselves would last a couple hours, so I would get home at 11pm-12am at night .
  • I would have heard a question during the sales appointment and it got to the point where I would literally say to myself, “how do I address that on my website?”
  • As I did that, from an SEO perspective, it did very well.
  • To give you an example of what I’m talking about, 5 years ago no swimming pool company had addressed how much a fiberglass pool costs on their website – which is quite stupid if you think about it because this is the first question that everyone wants to know.
  • If they call the company, and this applies to any industry regardless of what you sell, people want to know how much your stuff costs.
  • Nobody’s ever bought anything without looking at the bottom line number. It just doesn’t happen.
  • We answered questions like that. We answered questions like: What are the biggest problems with fiberglass pools?” Are fiberglass pools cheap? Are fiberglass pools ugly? Are fiberglass pools too skinny?  We compared different manufacturers.
  • We just did things that nobody ever did because ultimately when you address the stuff that consumers really care about they force you to have an opinion on things. It forces you to sit there and say to yourself, “I’ve gotta let go of all these traditions that we’ve always had in business and solely focus on what the consumer wants from me right now.”
  • Because we did that, the visitors we got in search was tremendous. Just to give you a feel for this, when we started this our site was about 20 pages. Today the site has about 800 pages and most of those are just answers to questions in a blog format – we’d answer them one at a time
  • Last year we sold about 90 fiberglass pools and we know the average number of pages that these 90 people viewed on our website simply because of the advanced analytics. In this case we used HubSpot, but there are a lot of tools that allow you to know these things.
  • The average customer last year read about 105 pages of the website. That’s insane. It’s stupid! That’s like, impossible. If you had come and told me 5 years ago, “hey, Marcus, check this out. I’m telling you. People that are willing to buy a pool. They’re willing to read 105 pages of your website before they buy.”
  • I would’ve looked at you and called you bad names and I would’ve told you to leave because you don’t understand my industry or my business.
  • That’s the way most businesses feel until they realize that most of us grossly underestimate people’s willingness to become comfortable with a buying decision. The only thing that gets us comfortable with a buying decision is learning more about it.
  • That’s why some people just bought the $250 cell phone but they spent 4 days learning about it – 6 hours a day. That’s just what they’ll do.
  • So 105 pages sounds crazy, but it’s real.

What would you say to someone with concerns like, “I don’t want to discuss prices right away, so I don’t want to put it up on my website?”

  • Let me put it like this that that’s a very nearsighted way of seeing it.
  • Number one, there’s this great traditional belief that’s been around for a few thousand years that says “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
  • When we go online and we can’t find what we’re looking for we get pissed and then we leave. That’s just how it works, right? If I ask a room of 1,000 people, “have you ever researched the cost of something online?” then 1,000 people raise their hands. If I say, “how do you feel when you own a website and they talk nothing about costs and price?” 100% of the room says, “frustrated.”
  • It’s the first word I’ve called “the F-word of the internet.”
  • Frustration leads to a loss of trust. When I say, “frustrated,” you don’t look, you don’t say, “maybe it’s in here somewhere.” You don’t do that because you’ve been taught that if you’ll keep looking you’ll find the reward, you’ll find the answer.
  • You also don’t pick up the phone to call anymore. You used to say, “well, they don’t have it here.” You also don’t say stupid things like, “oh, it’s okay that they’re not talking about this because they’re just basing their pricing on value and because they care so much about value they just need to talk to me first. That’s okay. That’s alright.”
  • They don’t have those conversations with themselves. So, we all want it one way when we’re on one end and then when we get on the other end we say, “well, we’re different.” The reality is we are NOT different. That’s the first answer.
  • The second answer to your question is, when people only see this as “I’ve got to give an exact number,” they’re completely missing the mark.
  • The answer for “how much does your stuff, your service cost? – b2b b2c, it doesn’t matter – The answer is that it depends. Unless you’re selling 25 cent gum balls, right – it depends.
  • The key isn’t that you necessarily give me a number the key is that you’re willing to address the subject on your website and give as much detail as to what would drive the cost up and down as possible.
  • I want to feel like, as the consumer, I’ve been fed. The number one reason – and I love asking this question – “what defines the phrase ‘great website’?” It’s a powerful question.
  • Essentially everybody says the same thing (and it’s a two part answer) – “I want to find what I’m looking for and I want to find it quickly.” That is what defines a great website in 2014 and beyond.
  • If you hold on to that philosophy then it’s going to guide you and you’re not going to have stupid debates like – should we hide our secret sauce when in reality it’s not a secret whatsoever. It’s just thousand island dressing.
  • The moment any company really embraces that they’re so much better off at actually inducing trust versus trying to control the conversation.
  • Let me add one thing to this. The number one complain I hear from marketers and marketing departments is, “we can’t get enough content from the staff.” Most companies, the ratio of sales to marketing is like 10 to 1.
  • I love asking companies how many sales people they have. Ten people will raise their hands. Then I’ll ask, “how many emails do you send out a day that answer questions that prospects or customers are asking you?” The answer is always the same – “dozens, hundreds, or thousands.”
  • What would happen if all those sales people in your organization answered a question with any meat, to a prospect or customer, if they bcc’ed somebody in marketing? What would happen? I don’t think anyone in marketing would ever say, “ I don’t know what to write about. I’m not in touch with my customer anymore. I don’t have enough content.”
  • All that would be eliminated by one simple click of the mouse. Nobody’s doing it. It’s unfortunate.

How much does SEO play in the creation of your posts for Sales Lion?

  • It’s huge. Let me tell you how extensive it is.
  • I’ve got a company called Health Catalyst (healthcatalyst.com) and if you want to watch somebody that is crushing it with content marketing just go to their learning center and you’re going to be blow-freaking-away with all the videos, the webinars, the e-books, the white papers.
  • We have done so much incredible stuff. When we write an article with that company, and we’ve got four people that do this together, four of us look at the article – and it’s not a slow process. We still make it fast – we will spend literally as much time talking about the title of the post and what keyword phrase or set we’re targeting as we did about the post itself.
  • That’s how important it is to us.
  • We analyze every single page title. We analyze the URL every time and we analyze the meta description every single time. We take all three of those things very seriously.
  • Then whenever we produce the post we focus very much on where the subheader (h2, h3 tags) opportunities are and what are some secondary keyword goals we can manage from this. By the way, I say to go look at the articles. You’re never gonna think for one second, “wow, they’re writing for search engine.”
  • It shouldn’t feel like, to the reader, that you’re writing for search engines, but it should feel like “someone is talking to me.”

Are there SEO plugins you’re using with HubSpot?

  • First of all, the Sales Lion IS built on WordPress but it uses HubSpot on the back end so that allows me to have all those advanced analytics.
  • The problem with just Google Analytics, as you well know, is that you can’t analyze names of people. You can analyze patterns and you can analyze traffic, but not names.
  • You can’t say “Rich Brooks came to my site today. He read 35 pages. These are the 35 pages he read and this was how much time he was on the site.” I don’t know Rich Brooks came, but somebody came. Right?
  • People need advanced analytics. I do find though that a lot of our clients that don’t use HubSpot they are using something like SEO Moz, or anything that allows them to track keywords.
  • Every time you write an article it should be very clear, for most businesses that are average and don’t have this monster following online, if you are not paying attention to SEO you are going to have a difficult time, in most cases, gaining the traction you could have gotten.
  • Whenever you produce an article it should be very clear that these are the keyword sets or phrases you’re targeting with this post. Everybody that is in marketing should know it. Then, you should have a tool that’s tracking those sets. That way, after a week or a month you can look back and say, “okay, here were our hits, here were our misses from a search perspective and now that we see that this article isn’t going to fly, do we need to redo the article? Do we need to go after a different light? Do we need to edit it?”
  • This is the type of stuff that we do and we do it all the time. It’s worth it. I’m so glad you’re bringing it up because I swear nobody brings SEO to me anymore. Thank goodness for Rich Brooks.
  • Just because something has a low number of searches per month doesn’t mean we don’t go after it.
  • Something might be searched only 15 times a month all over the world, but the 15 people that searched that  – they were freaking ready to buy that thing right now.
  • If your product or service is a $100,000 account or sale, don’t ever allow the fact that something is a low monthly search number, to skew you from targeting what you know to be a very important and relevant prospect or customer question.

So now we’ve got our post. You hit publish. What do you do next to make sure it reaches the widest variety of people?

  • This is one of the areas I would say that once again, it does depend on the business.
  • I find that for the majority of our customers, especially in the b2b space, LinkedIn does very well for sharing things either to groups or to just on your own individual LinkedIn pages or your employees’ LinkedIn pages.
  • Twitter, Facebook are fine, but to me that’s literally what they are. I find for that most businesses Twitter and Facebook are much better as retention tools than they are for “find” tools unless you’re doing targeted ads or things like that. Which to me is a completely different conversation.
  • Most of our clients will share on those platforms and we’re doing a little bit more with Google+. I don’t know if it’s going to be here tomorrow or not, I have no idea.
  • Here’s the one thing about Google+ is other than us kind of like, fringe people, the majority of the world – especially teenagers – they just don’t think it’s cool.
  • When it comes to River Pools, we don’t play with social media. We have a Facebook page but it’s just there. If spent much time at all with Facebook and Twitter it wouldn’t be as nearly as beneficial as producing straight content through text or video.
  • YouTube and the blog is where we put 90% marketing attention and dollars with River Pools. If you shift gears and you go to The Sales Lion, which is my marketing site, it’s very different because I guess probably 25-30% of the traffic is socially driven. It’s just a different place whereas with River Pools it’s 80% organic and 15% is direct search and then 5% is social.
  • I think a lot of people try to be a jack-of-all-social-media-trades and they end up being a master of none.
  • You can’t just come out of the gate and say, “we’re gonna be great in all these areas.” It’s just not realistic. Beside that, the majority of your customers aren’t on 6 different platforms. It’s just not how it works. You don’t find people going to Twitter and saying, “hey all, I just bought a $50,000 pool.” You just don’t see that.
  • You don’t see a lot of people on Twitter saying, “where should I get a fiberglass pool?” You don’t see that either. It’s just the way that it is. It’s the way that the platform is right now. You gotta say, “where are the people at?”
  • LinkedIn is the same way. LinkedIn doesn’t work for swimming pools. I’ve tried. Because, I was just trying to figure these things out. I was experimenting. It doesn’t work. That’s why we put all of our attention towards video and text.
  • One thing doesn’t change though, whatever platform you’re on you’d better understand the problems that your prospects have. You’d better be willing to address those problems and you’d better do it in a way in that they understand what you’re saying.

Are you using either blog to build up an email list?

  • Both of them.
  • How do I do this? Well, with pools I use my list twice a year and I’m going to use it a lot more now that we’re going to be in the manufacturing space as well.
  • What we do at the beginning of each season, like around February when things are slow and people aren’t quite thinking about it, anyone that has filled out a form on our site that’s a legit lead, they are going to get some type of notification of spring specials “get on the calendar now.”
  • From that it’s nothing to generate a few thousand dollars of business from those emails. It’s pretty important. We do that twice a year during slow times.
  • With the Sales Lion I have a list derived from the people that have downloaded the ebook. The ebook has been downloaded about 20,000 times now.
  • I have one conference that I put on a year which is very important, called “The Remarkable Growth Experience.” I also have digital marketing services for businesses that are $5,000,000 and above. So those are the two target markets that I’m going after with my list.
  • For the pools you don’t have many people, but you might have them right when there in the process of shopping. You do see that. You do have some outliers that are weird mavens and are totally into like vendors.
  • No matter what, it ain’t a long term relationship. Maybe 1% is going to continue to come back for whatever reason, but 99% it’s going to be a relationship that’s 6 weeks, maybe 6 months, whatever it takes them to make the decision (once they’ve learned about pools).
  • One thing that we do better than anybody in the world – ha, that sounded really arrogant when I said it, but it’s true – in the swimming pool industry we used to get calls that went like, “hey, I’ve been looking at your site. Could you come out to my house and give me a quote for a pool,” and I used to say, “yeah, sure Rich, I’d love to.” Basically, I didn’t know how informed you were. I didn’t know how educated you were.
  • I found out I kept going out on sales appointments and answering the same questions and I was wasting a lot of time and it was really dumb.
  • So we implemented this thing that I have named “assignment selling.” Assignment selling changed our lives and changed our business and it’s changed a lot of other businesses that have used it in their own way.
  • We found in 2012, when I was comparing two different stats for groups of people on our website, the first group of people on the River Pools site had filled out a form and was interested in a quote but they did not buy. The second group of people filled out a form, asked for a quote, and did buy. So, both filled out forms one didn’t buy and one bought.
  • As I was looking at these two groups one number just jumped out at me and that was the number 30. That number 30 fell under the group that had bought and that number represented the total number of pages that they had viewed.
  • What we found was that if somebody had read 30 or more pages of our website before we went on the initial sales appointment they would buy 80% of the time. The average in the industry is about a 15% closing ratio per appointment. So, if we got them to 30 pages or more, we were golden.
  • This is when we changed the entire way that we sold and we called it assignment selling.
  • So, you’d call me and say, “hey, Marcus could you come out to my house Friday?” and I would say,”Rich, I’d love to come out to your house, but here’s the thing. You’re getting ready to spend a lot of money and because you are you don’t want to make any mistakes – this is a one shot deal – and I don’t want you to make any mistakes. So to make sure you don’t make mistakes, I’m going to make sure you’re educated. To educate you, this is what I’m going to do. As we’re talking on the phone I’m going to send you an email that includes two main things – it’s going to have a link to a video that shows you the whole process of how a pool is installed in your backyard. You’re not going to have to ask me about it because you’re going to see the whole process for yourself. The second thing I’m going to include here is an ebook guide that will answer all your questions like, ‘should I get a cover for my pool? What type of cover is the best? Should I get a heater? Should I get a gas or electric heater?’ It’s going to answer all those types of questions. It’s about 30 pages long, but I promise it’ll be worth your time. Would you do those things before I come out to your house?”
  • 90% of the time the person on the other end says, “yes, I’d love to,” and at which point you say, “great, now Friday morning before I come out I’ll call and confirm that you took the time to do those things.” That is assignment selling and that changed our entire business.
  • Today we have a closing ratio of about 85% which is mind boggling for anyone in the swimming pool industry. We now only have to go on 120 appointments a year to sell about 90 pools whereas before we used to have to go on about 250 appointments a year to sell about 75. Do the math on that!

So these blog posts have really paid for themselves a million times over.

  • Yeah, and people say all the time, “well, if you’re industry is so competitive and SEO is really hard then all this ‘they ask you answer’ is not really gonna work, you know, Marcus?” I’m like, “that is the dumbest statement I’ve ever heard,” because until the end of the internet, people are gonna come to your website and they’re gonna expected to be fed. They’re going to have high expectations.
  • Those ones that communicate and teach the best are gonna earn the most trust. You’re still gonna have people come to your website to vet you. So, once they’re there, what is that experience like?
  • This is such a big deal in terms of insuring if they actually do take a moment – like if they’re a referral – and they come to you or they look in the phonebook and find your URL and come to you or however they come to you that’s non-SEO, social, they come to you.
  • Are they gonna fall in love you when they’re at your site? Or are they going to say, “this person is just like everyone else. They’re just schlepping their stuff. They don’t care about my problems and solving them.”
  • That’s why this content is so very very important. I’m glad you point that out because I just can’t stand it when people say, “this strategy doesn’t work long term.” Really?
  • If someone says, “do you think blogging will work in 10 years?” What I want them to say is, “do you think communication and great teaching will be important for businesses in 10 years?”

Juicy Links:

Rich Brooks
Swimming in Pools of Leads

How Retargeting Generates Leads and Sales with Nick Unsworth

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Nick-Unsworth-PinterestHave you been using online advertising to generate leads? Do you know what retargeting marketing is and what pixels can do for your small business conversions? Do you know how to double your leads by combining traditional display ads with pixel campaigns?

If not, then you’re not alone. A lot of small businesses don’t know what pixels are let alone what they mean for your online marketing success. By setting up pixels on your website you can continue to advertise to your customers even after they leave your site.

This week, we target social media coach and retargeting marketing master, Nick Unsworth, to chat about pixels and the importance of zooming in on focused, relevant ads that follow your prospective customers across the internet so they don’t forget your product or services.

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Big Ideas:

So bring us up to speed. How did you become “Life on Fire?”

  • Basically my whole life I’ve been an entrepreneur and I’ve always just been about living the dream and yet I had so many darn challenges along the way – a real brutal and tough journey as an entrepreneur.
  • I was always chasing and chasing opportunities in real estate until the market crashed. I did network marketing in college and long story short, I ended up with this dream and vision to sell a business by 30.
  • I tattooed that goal on my own chest on a cross and so I obsessed about it. That was my mission and I sacrificed a lot of my twenties to make happen and sell my business by 30.
  • What ended up happening was it wasn’t what I expected. I got stuck on as the CEO of a 2-year earn out and it the business was no longer mine. I had corporate partners and everything changed and what I realized is that I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t the money that makes anyone happy.
  • It was at that moment where I walked away from the rest of the equity I had left and walked away from a ton of money. I said, “all I care about is that I want to do what I love every single day. I want to live MY life on fire,” and that’s exactly what I did.
  • Once I walked away I had that “a-ha” moment, hired a business coach, and just figured I’d build a business I love and enjoy every single day.
  • That’s how Life on Fire was born and it’s our mission to help you and help other people love what they do for work and usually the money follows. Everything else follows.
  • That’s in part how we do digital marketing. You gotta love what you do but you’ve got to be able to get customers too.

Can you define retargeting for us and maybe give us an example?

  • One of the best ways to think about it is just picture that you’ve gone to the Macy’s website or Zappos or a big box brand and you look for clothes or you’re shopping for anything. You could be at Home Depot.
  • On Home Depot’s website I was looking for this palm tree looking plant and I clicked on it. I didn’t buy, but I clicked all the way through and just wanted to see if the darn thing was available at my local Home Depot.
  • Ever since then, I have this plant that follows me around on the internet – it’s starting to become a little bit annoying – but the plant shows up on Facebook on my feed. The plant shows up in my newsfeed on Facebook. The plant shows up on random sites all throughout the internet.
  • What ends up happening is that retargeting or remarketing means that if you land on a site you get “pixeled.” A pixel is the same thing as a cookie.
  • If you go to a website and in your browser you get pixeled or cookied and that leaves a footprint and that means if you land on a site the advertiser knows that and they can then serve you ads in other places indefinitely.
  • What ends up happening is that if you were to take your website and you were to put a retargeting pixel on the home page of your site so anyone that touches that home page with their browser – even if they just head there for a second – instantly that pixel fires and they get “cookied” if you will, and then you now know that and that’s a virtual asset.
  • Then, you can use a platform like AdRoll.com or Retargeter.com and then you can literally choose to serve that pixeled user display ads throughout all of the internet. You’re talking everywhere. Imagine if they’re on msn.com, your ad might pop up or on Pandora – your ad might pop up. They’re on Facebook – your ad pops up. They’re on Yahoo – your ad pops up.
  • What’s crazy is that you can serve someone ads all throughout the internet because there’s literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of websites that have space that’s on their ads that’s used for Google and Yahoo and Bing and these big advertising networks.
  • So, what’s cool is that just by simply putting this tracking pixel on your website you can essentially pixel the people that come to it. Then you can simply choose to turn it on and serve them ads wherever they may be.
  • These ads are following them around and the whole purpose of all of this is that it’s a newer form of online marketing. It’s all about frequency and being “seen” everywhere.
  • There’s a brand impact. When I advertise on Facebook people perceive that you’re an expert. Whether you’re a local business – you could be a local realtor or you could be a guy like me as a business coach and I might teach on Facebook advertising – and in that market when you’re advertising on Facebook people start to think, “wow, this guy’s an expert.”
  • When you start to throw in retargeting, in addition to just advertising on Facebook, they’re seeing my face, your face on Yahoo too, on nbc.com, and all these other big, huge corporate sites. They start to think, “wow, this person has authority.” Plus, you’re just in front of them over and over which tends to increase conversions.
  • This is all about being seen everywhere and building your brand positioning and most importantly, this is what’s responsible to help people get back to your site to purchase whatever it is that you have to offer through just being all around them.
  • It’s such a great way to build that brand positioning and most importantly build up the conversions. There’s a lot of different types of examples but one that I think is really timely is – you know for a guy like me or like you, Rich, someone that uses live webinars to sell products and services or coaching – that it’s so interesting because people are always looking for where you optimize that process.
  • So, a live webinar might use Facebook advertising to drive and get leads to come into an opt-in page. They’re opting to get a live webinar, you then teach some really good free information and then you sell at the end. Well, in that entire process you can optimize your ads or you can optimize the landing page where they’re landing and the copy on there.
  • Just imagine if instead of 20% that the people that register show up live, what if 50% of people that register show up live because they’re being reminded through these retargeting ads all throughout the internet.
  • You can increase the amount of people coming into the offer, but with the example of the webinar, that’s an example of one that’s really impactful because if you can double the percentage of people that show up live in a webinar, you’re literally doubling your sales.
  • So that’s one particular area I’m seeing the most success with retargeting.

How can a small business with a limited budget get started with retargeting? Where do we start?

  • Yeah, so there are two options.
  • I would say that if you’re pretty savvy with running your own ads and you’re decent with putting your own copy out there and things like that I would recommend using AdRoll.com.
  • The great thing about AdRoll is that there’s no minimum budget. It’s very cost effective. They use a CPM model which means you’re paying per 1,000 impressions that your display ad will get. You might be paying anywhere from $.50 to $1.50.
  • So, you have to have a lot of people pixeled to have a substantial amount of money. The good thing is that this is actually pretty affordable. If you’re a small business, you might have a retargeting budget of $50/month which is really cool.
  • If you’re a small business in a local market like a realtor, insurance agent, or chiropractor, even if you own a restaurant, people in your town, no joke, go to your next chamber of commerce meeting or B & I meeting – people are like, “oh my god, Nick. I see you everywhere!”
  • When I was in real estate and if I did this you would blow up in your town because you literally are just all over the place.
  • If you are someone that doesn’t have a big email list or you don’t get thousands and thousands of visitors to your site per day then AdRoll is great because there is no minimum budget. You can spend $50 a month and they simply give you that code and that pixel is nothing more than just a set of code that you put on your blog or website and they’ll tell you exactly where to attach it.
  • You can put it in your footer of your website. It’s invisible – no one knows it’s there. What happens is that you literally just put it on the pages that you want to retarget to people. If you want to get more advanced and you want a picture – yeah, you want to retarget people that end up on your home page – you might want to serve them ads to get them back to your home page or to your offer.
  • However, just imagine that someone that lands on your checkout page for a product or service – I would serve them different ads about that individual product or service. Just imagine, so Home Depot didn’t send me back to Home Depot. Home Depot sent me back to the exact same palm tree thing that I was looking at because they were smart enough to know that’s where I was and that’s what they’re going to show me until I buy it. Once I buy it they’re system is smart enough to know to turn that thing off. That’s why that plant keeps following me because I haven’t bought it yet.
  • AdRoll is great because it’s very easy to set up. You do have to create your ads and there’s about a dozen different shapes and sizes because, just figure, your ads are going to be displayed on a wide range of websites. You don’t really have the choice as to which ones they’re going to go on. It could be on the Google content network, you’ve got the Yahoo content network, or you can choose Facebook or Twitter, but typically the Google content network is great but there’s lots of varieties in shapes and sizes.
  • So, you get an idea of what your ads are going to say and then you get the dimensions for those ads and then just have a web developer or graphic designer make those specific ads. You can plug and upload all that artwork and you can turn the puppy on and let it track from there.

So that’s AdRoll, with no minimum budget. It sounded like there was another option as well?

  • Yes. The other option is Retargeter.com and I’ve used both, but what I like about ReTargeter is that there’s an advertising campaign manager that runs and optimizes your ads for you.
  • If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re doing too many things and you don’t have time to tinker with this stuff, then ReTargeter’s great because they’ll optimize not only these ads, but they’ll actually even run Google AdWords as well if that’s something you want to do.
  • Part of the strategy is putting these pixels on your website and that’s great because you’re going to capitalize on people coming to your site and you can follow up with them.
  • Where the strategy becomes really really powerful is when you combine retargeting with very targeted ads. If you’re marketing on Google for very specific keywords that’s so targeted (e.g., buying a home in pacific beach san diego) – that’s a buying keyword and I could use AdWords for it then retarget anyone that clicks on that landing page or website page.
  • Facebook – one of our main strategies is we’ll drill down with our clients and we’ll market so narrow, so if it’s health and fitness – (e.g., women that are engaged that live in a particular geographic area near that gym). The ads might say something like “Congratulations on being engaged. We want to help you look your best on your big day. Here’s 7 ways to drop 10 pounds and glow on your wedding day.” That’s so targeted that when you’re using Google AdWords or Facebook to get to those people then when they land on your landing page and opt-in to the offer you’re sending to them then use retargeting on that traffic.
  • That’s one of the things that makes it special. You zoom in and you target really well. You generate new leads and you follow up with those new leads using retargeting.

So, to be clear, when you’re using Google AdWords at the same time are you serving up the ads based on the retargeting, or are you targeting similar phrases?

  • Whether there’s Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, that’s one way to go out and do your own lead generation. Whether you’re targeting the keywords or advertising to Pages on Facebook, that’s just a way to create good lead generation and then retargeting is always the after effect.
  • It’s only once they click on that offer then they’re going to get retargeted using AdRoll and they’re going to be seen all throughout Google and random websites online.

But, our retargeting ads aren’t going to be a part of those Google AdWords like the “sponsored” ads on the side are they?

  • No. Those are totally different.
  • These are more display ads on different websites. When I say things like the Google content network, basically there’s millions of websites that sell space on their websites. So, instead of managing their own advertisers, let’s just say I’ve got a box on my website that I want someone to advertise there it could be a huge pain in the neck to try and get sponsors and all that stuff.
  • Basically, they can sell that space to Google and Google will fill it up just by using things like remarketing and retargeting. It happens automatically.

So, when I set up my retargeting am I going to target people who maybe the last thing they saw was my SEO services, or could I set up three different campaigns based on the three different pixels that are in there?

  • It can get pretty robust. It can literally be as in-depth and creative as you want to go.
  • Think of it as having rules. You could set it up to be really intelligent about it and have different pixels on different pages so that you know exactly what’s happening. You can choose to segment.
  • Think of it this way. In the same way you segment an email list that you have and you know that these 3,500 people purchased a product, and these 1,000 people opted in for an offer. The same way you tag people in your email list or in your CRM, the same thing is true with these pixels.
  • The more detail you have in there the more creative and flexible you can be with how you want to serve ads to people. The cool thing is if you have different products I would put different pixels on each product and then it’s your choice when you want to serve those ads to those people – do you want to automatically have it be the last product they viewed? You can set it up that way. You can have it that when someone purchases that particular product think of it as having another pixel on the checkout page that essentially negates the one before it.
  • Now, it doesn’t negate the pixel and just wipe it out, but it would be smart enough to know that it won’t continue to serve them ads because they just purchased. That’s cool because it’s intelligent enough to turn off after they’ve bought it so you’re not nagging someone that already bought it.
  • I think overall, one of the most exciting aspects of this is that we all think about an email list as an asset for a business. Everyone’s always talking about the foundation for an entrepreneur or even small businesses is having an email list. That’s your follow up tool and that’s how you build rapport and relationships and that is what allows you to earn income and all that good stuff.
  • The thing that’s interesting is that as you build up this virtual, invisible asset for your business, if you have 100,000 people pixeled imagine that I could take that virtual asset and decided to run ads for your event, Rich?
  • That becomes something that I know they’re targeted entrepreneurs. I know that I’ve paid to get them pixeled. I’ve either ran Facebook ads to get them pixeled on that page or they landed on my website. They’re very targeted.
  • The cool thing is, when I used to run my Facebook advertising agency I would do this and I would only choose clients that were in the space that I was in because I was building up this virtual asset of all these pixeled people that I could also serve ads.
  • For example, if I had five clients that were all in the entrepreneur category, I could leverage this virtual asset that I owned as the advertising agency. I could leverage that asset for all of it.
  • So, if it’s costing you a dollar to get someone to click from a Facebook ad to a very targeted landing page that’s a dollar. But, once they land on the page I already know that they’re a very targeted lead. Now it’s only going to cost me a penny to take that person and show them an ad again on retargeters.
  • It’s a pretty good high quality asset I can use over and over which is great.

So, if I understand you, I don’t need to only drive people back to the website where they were first pixeled, I can really drive them anywhere?

  • Absolutely, that’s what so cool, I mean if there’s awareness and they know you and your brand it’s more congruent and synergistic to send them things that are relatable to them and what they’re interested in. If they know you, and your face is on there for your company, then if your face is on those ads for your event, that’s very congruent and that’s going to convert and work well.
  • However, if there was an affiliate product and thought your audience would also like that, you could be an affiliate and just serve those ads to a completely different offer. So wherever you choose to send them with those ads is totally your call.
  • The cool thing is that no one knows who’s serving them the ads so you’re not going to tarnish a relationship with someone by sending them ads for an offer because they have no idea how they’re seeing them on that site.
  • About four years ago I was getting into the industry and this and that. My goal was to build relationships with the “gurus,” the guys on the stages selling courses.
  • What I did was I wanted to be an affiliate for them because that’s the fastest way to become friends with someone – you make them a whole bunch of money and all of a sudden they love you.
  • So I became an affiliate and was selling their products and services and I didn’t have an email list. Even if I did have one, I wouldn’t want to hit up the email list over and over to make them buy people’s stuff and burn relationships. However, I decided to run ads on Facebook for their products and services and I just chose to give away an iPad to someone who purchased their product through me.
  • If it was a $2,000 product and I got $1,000 in commission I’m up $500 (the paid is $500). So, I use that model of running ads as an affiliate and giving away a bonus and using retargeting and I crushed it. I literally had six figure gross promotions as an affiliate. It was unbelievable. It was like the easiest money I’ve ever made. I built tons of relationships.
  • It got a little more competitive because I taught it at a couple seminars. Here I am sort of the guy with the big heart like, “oh my god, this is working so well you guys have to do it,” and then everyone started doing it.
  • Building up this virtual asset and sending these people back to your offers – it’s all about being seen everywhere, builds up brand, and helps increase conversions.
  • If you run ads on Facebook you’ll notice that if you’re running ads to 50,000 they won’t serve ads to 50,000 people your ad once, a second time, or a third time. If your budget is smaller, they will take 10,000 out of the 50,000 and they’ll show your ad 10-15 times before they’ll start showing the next 10,000 the next ad 10-15 times. They understand you can’t see the ad once. It has to be in their faces over and over and over.
  • That’s exactly why AdRoll and retargeting work so well because it’s the frequency and it’s being seen everywhere.

I’ve heard there’s a minimum of site traffic I need for retargeting to really work. Can you speak to that?

  • You’re basically paying on a CPM model, and it could be anywhere from $.50 to $1.50 per 1,000 people, so you want to have thousands of people pixeled.
  • Your budget might be $.50 a month and that’s okay, but your goal is to have thousands of people and to build up this asset.
  • You want to take your website traffic and ramp it up. If you don’t have a lot of people you can take this pixel and you can put it HTML email newsletter. You’re pixeling the people who open your email. You’re pixeling the people on your website. You might run Facebook ads and send that ad traffic on Facebook to a free offer that you then pixel there.
  • The good thing about AdRoll is there is no minimum and you can get started even if it’s small. I would say start putting these pixels on your website right now and just build it up.
  • As far as running ads to it, you’re not gonna get a whole lot of action if you only have 300 people in there. It can still be beneficial, but it’s just not a lot of people.
  • We found that you really want to have over 10,000 people pixeled to get enough impressions and enough action in there.

Let’s say I don’t have 10,000 people pixeled. What are some of your tactics to get up that number?

  • The number one thing is getting new traffic.
  • Using Facebook advertising and running a campaign, getting very specific in who your target market is, so that when you run an ad on Facebook and you’re targeting that perfect customer, that ideal prospect, that’s so targeted. Even if someone comes to your website, people come and then bounce off if that’s not even as targeted.
  • If you run a Facebook ad you can zoom all the way in. I could target my sweet spot, like men that are 28-33 that are interested in becoming an entrepreneur that like Gary Vaynerchuk, that like Entrepreneur on Fire, it’s like “boom,” if they have those qualities, they’re perfect for me.
  • Then, I run an ad on Facebook and I might send them to a free webinar, or free video, or send them something of value. I’m sending them a gift because I want to then get their email address, but really all I want them to do in that Facebook ad is to click it. When they land on that website page the great thing is that even if they opt-in or they don’t opt-in to the goal (which is their email), I can still pixel them right then and there using Facebook ads and retargeting.
  • Any business owner can use highly targeted Facebook ads, drive leads to your business, get those leads to cash flow and then pixel where they land so that you’re growing your base of pixeled browsers that you can then remarket to as well.
  • That is the most efficient way because then you can track that campaign. Our goal is when we run a webinar where we sell we’ll track our Facebook ads. We’ll know how much it costs for someone to opt in. We’ll know how much it costs per thousand impressions we’re sending out on AdRoll.
  • Then, we’re looking at things like what percentage of people showed up live to the webinar. What percentage of people converted that night. How much is our cost per sale.If we’re spending $300-$400 to get someone to purchase our $1000 product, that’s cool. If it costs us $450 for someone to buy but we’re selling at $1000 we will take that all day long and just increase the spend.
  • The opportunity is that as long as you know your numbers and you can create conversions and even if you were to break even, I would rave that up all day long. The beautiful thing is that as soon as we have an offer that converts and we can make a positive return on our advertising expense, then it’s literally as simple as you just turn up and dial up the ad spend.
  • So, if we earn two times our money on our Facebook advertising – for an example, we did a webinar, brought in customers for a little over $400, but we’re earning $997 and it’s all margin because it’s literally just my time to coach and we ran that and did about $20,000 in sales in about a week – so when we do this the next time we’re gonna ramp that up and quadruple our advertising budget and we’re going to do it again and again and again.
  • That’s the beauty of paid media. Once you have an offer that converts you literally just increase and increase and increase. That’s how I’ve taken a client like Andrea B. who’s in aromatherapy. This woman did a webinar. The most she’s ever made in a month is $50,000. I taught her how to do webinars and she earned an extra $10,000. Her gross was $60,000 and she broke her own record. Since then, all we’ve done is increased her lead flow using Facebook ads. We’ve increased the number of people that’ve attended her webinars which she started because of us. We retargeted all those people and she went from $50k-60k, $60k-80k, from $80k-$125k, from $125k to up over $330,000 a month!
  • All that is literally as simple as getting your offer to convert and then you’re just increasing your ad spend.
  • Then you want to just find where that ceiling is. Her ceiling? Who knows? Maybe it’s $500,000 a month, maybe it’s a million a month. The great thing is that any business can scale and ramp up fast with paid advertising.

Is there a way to include that pixel on something like GoToWebinar or how might you hack that system to be sure I’m getting all that information?

  • Basically when they provide you with that piece of code that goes on your website you are setting up those different pixels for those different scenarios.
  • What happens is when that person lands on the site, the browsers contain all that data. There is definitely a turnover when someone clears out all their cookies or something like that. That will wipe out that browser data. Typically there’s not that much turnover from clearing cookies a whole lot. Us internet marketers might be more aware of it than the average consumer.
  • You have the flexibility to create these on your own and how you would like and then when you’re serving your ads you want to make sure that you’re just using trackable links.
  • I recommend using affiliate links for your own stuff so you can always track and know what’s converting from where. We just set it up using an affiliate program.

Juicy Links:

Rich Brooks
Retargeting Pixels Like a Boss

How to Create Blog Posts Influencers Will Share – Michael Stelzner

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Mike StelznerA lot of small businesses don’t even know what linkbait is let alone how to go about implementing it. Do you know how to curate and share relevant content from outside sources?

Do you know how to properly notify your audience and contributors once your post goes live?

If you don’t, you’re not alone. Many small businesses don’t know how to use linkbait techniques and tools to curate relevant content. That’s why we asked Mike Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner and author of Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition, in this week’s episode of The Marketing Agents Podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Big Ideas:

  • In one of your recent videos you talk about Linkbait. What do you mean and how do you do it?
    • The idea is to create content that will draw people (with a bigger platform than you) to your site in hopes they’ll share it.
    • One example, at My Kids Adventures – my new blog – has an article “5 Daddy Date and Mommy Date Ideas for Quality Time With Each of Your Kids” that talks about parenting tips and we asked for tips and provided a link back to their blog with a mention of their name – it’s aggregated content in a post that is designed to be popular and shared.
    • When these bigger platforms give feedback, they might feel compelled to share with their larger audience.
  • How did you go about that? How do you get these bigger platforms to contribute?
    • We all like to see our name in lights.
    • You promote, tweet, and share this content so it’s reciprocal.
    • The secret sauce is most people don’t get enough recognition and people love getting that opportunity.
    • Even if you’re unknown in your niche, if you reach out to these targets and say “hey, I’m putting an article together on ‘x’, and I’d love to get a few sentences from you – and these other people are contributing to it as well.” Once they see that other respected peers are involved, that helps.
    • It helps that you have a nice blog and they find cool stuff they may want to contribute just on that fact.
    • You can also created Linkbait pieces without people at all. You can find bigger blog content and curate relevant content into a new post.
    • People love someone that does the hard work for them.
    • On Social Media Examiner our recent “top 10 social media blogs” post had a contest and it was a Linkbait campaign on steroids. People submitted their choices, there was judging, nominations, and we offered a graphic called the “badge of distinction.” It’s very prestigious and the winners put this badge on their site.
    • You can do it the easy way by finding and sharing, have contests, there are so many angles to it.
    • Businesses don’t do enough to find curated content. People like to read posts from someone they trust.
    • You can create something new out of the best curated content that is of value to your audience.
  • Can you walk us through what you do about notifying your audience once a post goes live?
    • One of my interviewees told me to do a video podcast, and that I should use my looks to help.
    • Remind people that the post is live and twitter is the easiest way to do this.
    • You can schedule slightly different tweets based on the user’s name and it’ll get their attention plus the likelihood they’ll retweet is good.
    • I’ll email the person and thank them for their contribution and let them know the article went live with the article name, and a link, but don’t ask for a share.
    • It gives them the opportunity to click through and share it

      Do not ask for the share. It converts that communication into a pitch and it’s a turn off.

    • When you go out of your way to not ask for it, the likelihood they will share it is higher, because it looks more like a favor when you remind them of their contributed post.
    • Distinguish yourself by not asking.
  • Are there other post archetypes that you find successful for a small business blog?
    • There’s bazillions!
    • I think the “how to’s” are the best.
    • As small biz owners we don’t have a lot of time. Any time you can put “how to” in your post, it has search benefits.
    • 80% of our posts are “how to” posts.
    • Why do we turn to the web? We want to know how to do things.
    • It’s a universal thing for any type of blog.
    • The art of writing the headline is so important to your blog post.
    • I do have another tip. Use “numbers” (i.e., 18 Ways To Improve Your Facebook News Feed Performance, 5 Dangerous Projects You Should Probably Let Your Children Do, etc).
    • We all like numbers. There’s something magical about a numbered list.
    • This formula for both my blogs is nearly all “how to” or “# tips/ways.”
  • In your blog, your page title and SEO title can be different. Do you mix that up or do you write one title for everything?
    • We use Yoast for WordPress because it does an analysis.
    • I rarely ever change the titles. Whether they find it via search, or Twitter, I just try to find the best headline for human consumption that is slightly search optimized.
    • I design one title for both, but we haven’t tested that. I’m not sure if that’s better or not in the long run.
    • If one title is stronger, then probably use it for both versions.
  • You get an insane number of comments. What are you doing to get people to engage with your content and leave comments?
    • An important caveat, Social Media Examiner has millions of readers, and we don’t get as many comments as you’d expect. We do get a lot of sharing on social channels. Sharing is a one-click way to say they appreciate your content.
    • Even big sites like Mashable don’t have a lot of comments.
    • We get comments by saying “what do you think?” at the end of every on of our articles.
    • On My Kids Adventures, we also say that and ask for a comment or input as well.
    • By adding that you greatly increase the chance your readers will comment.
    • The other thing that’s absolutely essential is that we ask our authors to engage with comments on their posts.
    • If someone makes a comment, they’re investing time in your post. If you don’t answer that comment it’s rude.
    • Try to reply within the first day to every relevant comment.
    • The end result of that is that people are becoming more affiliated with your brand and it starts real engagement and evangelism of your content down the road.
  • What social share tips do you have? What tools or techniques do you use?
    • Decide which social platform for your website is most appropriate and put those share buttons at the top of the article and you can see how many people shared it.
    • Just google Twitter widget or Facebook widget.
    • We also use a persistent share bar on both our sites. We’ve got Digg Digg and it remains in view on the article throughout.
    • If you have a mobile plugin, like WP Touch Pro, you may have to disable the Digg Digg plugin if it interferes. You can put share buttons at the bottom of your post for your mobile users. Facebook for WordPress is a good plugin too.
    • On My Kids Adventures we use jQuery Pinit Button for Images that puts a PinIt share option over any image on your post for people to easily pin things.
  • What can we expect from Social Media Marketing World if we’re new to it or a repeat visitor?
    • What makes this different from other conferences is the networking. We have a pre-conference networking event. This year’s will be on an aircraft carrier! It immediately helps you to meet people.
    • We also have dedicated network ambassadors and they try to help to make connections for you.
    • We have a big space called the “networking plaza” to get to meet people and know people.
    • We have the who’s who in social media coming to speak. We have over 80 sessions.
    • It’s bigger and better than last year. It’s an incredible opportunity to get to meet people and to learn.
    • We have 9 simultaneous sessions under four different tracks – social tactics, social strategy, community management, and content marketing.
    • It’s in March in San Diego so it’s nice and warm there!
  • Any last things you want us to know?
    • Check out #SMMW14 on Twitter and look at how many people are already crazed about this conference.
    • I’ve never seen this kind of excitement.

  • Juicy Links:

    Rich Brooks
    Another Link Baiter Fishing for Content

Hubspot’s Laura Fitton Shows How Inbound Marketing Can Help Your Small Business

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Laura-Fitton-PinterestA lot of small businesses haven’t used social media as a tool for inbound marketing. Do you know the steps and tools to use to deliver specific relevant content to your customers?

Do you know how to best use Twitter to help your business grow?

If you don’t, you’re not alone. Many small businesses don’t know how to hone their social media platforms to focus on what matters to their business. That’s why we asked Laura Fitton, inbound marketing evangelist at HubSpot to show us how, in this week’s episode of The Marketing Agents Podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Big Ideas:

  • How does one become a “marketing evangelist?”
    • It involves a lot of public speaking and tons of communication.
    • Make sure that you’re listening to marketing influencers and giving their work attention and telling them work we’ve done (when appropriate).
    • I’m paid to be nice to people I already like!
  • How did you end up at HubSpot and how did social media play a part?
    • I used to be a speaker coach and was blogging about it.
    • It led me to Twitter and to create Pistachio Consulting and then the idea for One Forty came along.
    • It made sense for my company to look for a bigger entity to support us.
    • I reached out to Brian and next thing we know it was a beautiful marriage.
  • Do you think it was a good or bad move for Twitter to limit its tool and app ecosystem?
    • I think it was a bad move because there’s great potential for revenue from the Twitter data stream.
    • They are getting 15% of their revenue from the few licensed third-party companies.
    • An app store would help market incentives and monetize that data stream.
    • A platform is a tough business strategy to execute because you have to try to keep everyone happy and protected .
  • What are some of the biggest reasons people are telling you why they’re not embracing social media?
    • The resistance to inbound marketing is usually – “I haven’t heard about it yet, I don’t quite understand it, I wonder if it’s like content marketing, what is it?”
    • Social media offers the chance for a company to throw a lot of material out there for a prospective audience.
    • How do I attract the right group of people that are likely to convert?
    • Building community is key – attracting the right people to take action.
    • The inbound marketing philosophy is to earn your audience by generally being of value.
    • The company that’s using inbound (marketing, recruiting, training, or whatever) – the inboundy way is to say –  “what can I do that is of use, of service, that is helpful to the people I want to attract.”
    • These people can be your buyers or the people close to them.
    • All our marketing is focused on “what can we do to be useful to the marketer?” and how to add value by using blogs, emails, lists, etc.
    • What can you offer without being pushy. Make it about your reader or buyer.

    If you want to earn your right to be in someone’s inbox, you’d better be delivering something valuable to them.

  • Do you have different definitions for inbound marketing, content marketing and social media marketing?
    • Inbound marketing is the car and the content is the fuel.
    • Inbound marketing is a set of practices and attitude that help your marketing. It can involve emails, landing pages, content in that offer or blog – without it it’s useless.
    • Inbound is all the steps and practices that you use to attract, convert, and delight once they become customers.
    • Social media marketing is an important tool for content marketing and inbound marketing.
  • Is Twitter still your favorite platform?
    • Oooh…no! I answer that question differently now though.
    • It’s my favorite platform for doing x, y, and z…
    • I love using Path for being brutally honest with a core group of friends.
    • Twitter is still my favorite platform for seeing if I have a contact, or for seeing someone I know who knows a prospect to get leads from.
    • I use LinkedIn and Facebook for a specific set of things.
    • When people say “I don’t get Twitter” then it may mean they just don’t get it, or don’t have a specific use for it yet.
  • Although businesses “get” Facebook, a lot don’t “get” Twitter. How do you explain it to them?
    • I try to ask them questions about their business and what their needs and we look at some examples of people in their industry.
    • Maybe we talk about the types of people they want to build relationships with them.
    • Maybe they’ve already been doing some inbound marketing and want somewhere where they can get their content found.
    • In August 2007, I had emailed my blog post to Guy Kawasaki about Twitter and he replied back. I told him he could do efficient rumor hunting on Twitter much quicker than RSS. He was blown away.
    • It’s stupid to be insulting to someone and say “you’re just dumb, and you don’t get Twitter.”
    • If you just jump onto Twitter without knowing who you need to find or what you need, then you won’t get it.
    • It’s like changing the channel on the radio. Keeping tuning until you find what you like.

    It’s important to interact with people on a low-key business basis way because it builds trust.

  • Using our social media software from HubSpot I was able to watch tweets from a talk and could tell who were leads, which were customers attending, I could selectively retweet customers that gives me a chance to see when leads are tweeting and helps us follow up with them.
  • Using those tools is pretty darn practical. We can see specific segments of new customers or revenue that come in from Twitter.
  • Is the future of social media for small businesses going to be the “pay-to-play” strategy using ad platforms?
    • Yes, definitely. People will tag other things and we aggregate those as well.
    • Yes, it can be a part of the mix, but the inbound philosophy is to offer high quality content to your niche of users.
    • Using a search strategy, or a social media strategy, it can be about liking, sharing, and interactive content.
    • You can do social media marketing in a really annoying outboundy way or a likable, shareable inboundy way.
    • It’s like a soap opera. I’m paying to put on this show to sell my product. But I need to make it a good show or I won’t sell my product.
    • There are certain brands that I love so much that I love sharing their product.
    • Brands can respond to your customer tweets or feedback quickly via Twitter or social media.

    A lot of times we forget that the client relationship is very important to ongoing and future business. When you can’t cement your bonds in real life, then what are you doing for your clients on social media?

    It’s much better to be that guy who tells you “you have spinach in your teeth.” You want your customers to be comfortable with coming to you. You really should be doing everything you can to delight your customers. The delighted customers are the long-term insurance for your business growth.

    Relationships do have ROI.

Juicy Links:

Rich Brooks
Pickle Back Evangelist