The Intranet -Today’s Primar y Inbound Marketing Media >> page 8
BUSINESSREVIEW
HOW EFFICIENT IS YOUR PRACTICE
Tracking Results >> page 10
>> page 6
DO YOU LIKE ME? >> page 3
INSIDE THE MIND OF A DATA SCIENTIST >> page 4
3 Secrets Stolen from
Direct Response Copywriters >> page 8
Loren Smith ELAUNCHERS
WELCOMES INFUSIONSOFT EXPERT
>> page 14
BUSINESSREVIEW
In This Issue:
Come Join Us For Breakfast Have breakfast with us to launch eLaunchers.com’s Insiders Circle, the new home of GKIC in Maryland eLaunchers
September
17
Invite you…
www.einsiderscircle.com
Do You Like Me? How Paying for Likes Can Actually Help Your Business (and other shocking insights) . . . . . . . . . 3 Inside the Mind of a Data Scientist Dreams Are Data . . . . . . . . . . 4 How Efficient is Your Professional Practice? . . . . . . . 6 3 Secrets Stolen by One-to-Many Masters from Direct Response Copywriters . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
September
17
Where: Germantown Innovation Center @ Montgomery College 20271 Goldenrod Lane, 2nd Floor Germantown, MD 20876
When: Wednesday September 17, 2014 Continental Breakfast Program 8:00 am to 10:30 am
What Interesting Items Has Parthiv Shah Bought Recently – and Why? . . . . . . . . 9 Tracking Results . . . . . . . . . . 10 Educate Your Customers . . . . . 11
PROGRAM Welcome
Dr. Hercules Pinkney Master of Ceremonies
eLaunchers’ Insiders Circle: Overview, Introduction & Free Trial
Parthiv Shah President, eLaunchers.com
Overview of Business Round Table & Mastermind Training:
Jeffrey Bochner eLaunchers Insiders Circle
Closing Remarks
Dr. Hercules Pinkney
Feature Presentation Mastermind Training 10:30 am – 3:00 pm Jeffrey Bochner TRUST Workshop for Business 4:00 – 6:00 pm Parthiv Shah, President, eLaunchers.com Please R.S.V.P. by September 09, 2014 to dshah@elaunchers.com or 301-760-3953
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Please Park in Rear Lot in GIC Reserved or Visitor spots
The Internet-An Introduction Today’s Primary Inbound Marketing Media . . . . . . . . . .12 eLaunchers Welcomes Infusionsoft Expert Loren Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Do You Like Me?
How Paying for Likes Can Actually Help Your Business (and other shocking insights) By Kim J. Walsh-Phillips
M
ost social media is a waste of money. The fluff passed around is enough to spread on peanut butter sandwiches all across Kindergarteners from East to West Coast. Many brands just go after fans as a popularity contest. I don’t care if you have one million fans…did you get any sales from it? But, going after fans can be a worthwhile endeavor.
Why Run a Likes Campaign Likes Campaigns can be very worthwhile if used correctly to attract qualified leads and grow your business. Why to Run One: 1. Create social proof that others believe in your product or service. When restaurants start seating guests for the night, they seat them at tables in the front of the window first because customers always help to attract new customers. The same is true of building social proof of your business. If you have 24 fans on your page and you profess to be popular and in demand, these messages are not congruent.
I am not an advocate for spending thousands of dollars on building ads, but I am a proponent for buying fans until you reach the 500-1,000 mark for a sense of legitimacy if your fan targets are matched well to your perfect prospects.
2. Develop an inexpensive list of leads that you can target on your next campaign.
In all of our Facebook Ads results for clients, we are seeing a trend that Facebook fans convert at a higher rate and lower cost per lead than other marketing channels. If you
invest wisely in your Likes campaigns, you can develop an inexpensive lead funnel, especially if you also collect their email addresses (see example). 3. Utilize all of Facebook’s Ad Features
Facebook now gives a lot of additional features to pages with 1,000+ fans like Audience Insights and creating Lookalike Audiences, both of which are killer for advertising with a high ROI.
a. Retargeting traffic from your website b. A lookalike list from your email list c. Friends of your fans Want a higher social media ROI? Visit www.SixSocialMediaSecrets.com to discover how to use direct response marketing for a higher ROI.
Here’s how to run a Likes Campaign effectively 1. Make the ad about your target market, not about your products and services. They want to know what’s in it for them. (1) 2. Test different pictures in your ad to see what performs the best. Never assume what will get your audience the highest ROI. (2) 3. Get email addresses at the same time. By using the Advanced Feature of a landing page view and setting up a tab with email address collection, you can capture email addresses at the same time you are getting a Like at the same price. (Sweet, no?) Definitely worth pursuing. (3) 4. Do not target other pages to build this, unless you don’t have your own lists to use. This is because it is unsure how many of their Likes are real and you wouldn’t want to waste money going after Fake Likes. Groups to target for your Likes campaigns:
Kim Walsh-Phillips, is the award-winning Speaker, Author, Strategist and CEO of IO Creative Group, a results-driven marketing and PR agency. She is a techie marketing geek with great shoes, a hatred of awareness campaigns and an obsession for marketing with a sharp focus on ROI. Kim has worked with brands such as Sandler Training, GKIC Insider’s Circle, Ron LeGrand, Dan Kennedy, Harley-Davidson, Chem-Dry, and Hilton Hotels to increase revenue through direct response marketing. Kim is the author of “Awareness Campaigns are Stupid and Other Secrets to Stop Being an Advertising Victim and Start Monetizing Your Marketing.” For a free report with more social media strategies, contact our offices at 301-760-3953 or send an email to pshah@elaunchers.com.
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Monthly Feature: An Interview with Parthiv Shah
Inside the Mind of a Data Scientist
Dreams Are Data TW:
(Tom Woolman) I understand your marketing technology background has recently compelled you to correlate dreams and data; can you expand on this a bit for us and perhaps tie it to the marketplace?
Get with Infusionsoft. We’ll get you automated. Automate Your Email Marketing You’re a small business with big plans. You need a marketing solution that lets you create professional, personalized emails that deploy automatically. That’s where Infusionsoft comes in. Infusionsoft is the only all-in-one sales and marketing automation software built for small business, combining email marketing with CRM, social media and e-commerce tools into one system. Design professional emails, create personalized nurture and upsell campaigns based on customer behaviours and easily track your data-and do it all automatically. Plus, our 99% deliverability ensures your messages make it to the inbox. See Infusionsoft in Action to learn how you can grow your business and your profits faster than ever before. Contact eLaunchers, and Infustionsoft Certified Partner, to find out how Infusionsoft can help you grow your business!
So, what exactly are dreams? I believe that ultimately all dreams can be reduced to data and data sets. Dreams are vivid, graphic images -- represented by pixels in our minds – drawn by data. I can listen to someone describe their dream, then anatomically build the foundation of the dream, and then construct a bridge to interface with the outer “real” world. Such a scenario is not that removed from more practical solutions that are imminent today. Imagine building a system connecting data between two points, for example between a crying baby and toddler, and their nanny and mom. Voice recognition could be programmed to wake up the mommy if the baby were crying, and the nanny if the older toddler were crying. So, to tie dreams and communications about youngsters together, I’d like to share the time I cultivated a dream – an idea – when I was watching my baby boy in a neo-natal care unit, inside an incubator. As the father, it fell upon me to help keep all the family members advised of the baby’s progress 24/7. We established an elaborate branch network of phone calls – since this was over 15 years ago and the internet was in its infancy. Frankly, there were far too many people requiring far too much detailed medical information in far too short a time span.
Parthiv Shah, eLaunchers.com
Therefore I envisioned, even back then, what today we would call a baby blog (or microsite). Twitter® could of course supplement the main baby news headlines and in depth updates. I realize today I could easily build an APP for this, too, and add an RSS connection as well.
301.760.3953
TW:
13236 Executive Park Terrace Germantown, MD 20874 pshah@elaunchers.com
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PS:
(Parthiv Shah) The funny thing about dreams is that, while not all dreams come true, all major discoveries --which we acknowledge as “real” phenomena -- were at one time only dreams. So, in that sense, if you want to discuss the reality of the future then you have to talk about the dreams of today – and some unrealized dreams of yesterday.
And, as you had mentioned to me before, your additional “secret ingredient” was the addition of some kind of a web-cam or “Baby-Pro” inside the incubator, right?!
“To chase your dreams, chase your data. Respect the data; data is the nucleus energy of every single thing that rules the universe” — Parthiv Shah
PS:
Yes, indeed, I had wanted to add a webcam inside the incubator to share real-time/streaming video images of my baby with my family. Of course, the nurses and doctors immediately saw the medical monitoring benefits this would allow. There were a few failed, subsequent efforts to bring the medical version of such a device to market; they essentially all died in regulatory red tape. Insurance companies would not cover the expense – and there were significant privacy concerns. The amazing thing is that I recently read in the Washington Post that today Holy Cross Hospital will have such cameras in their incubators – the first in the nation. Social media acceptance and technological advancement has changed the landscape to mitigate the privacy concerns, and Holy Cross found a unique way to subsidize the costs which I’ll tell you about later. Specifically, what changed? Standards changed. What is considered “normal” or acceptable today in terms of compromising privacy, would have been an outrage 15 years ago. Just like the NSA’s behavior will likely – lamentably – be seen as normal 15 years from now. So here we have an example of a dream being nurtured in the intellectual
“collective conscience”, manifesting itself a decade and a half later! Today I am further developing the consumer application potential of my incubator monitoring idea. I would wrap the entire thing around a website, replete with data about the baby – his weight and eating habits, e.g. The mother would be able to choose from several filters for various audiences. I would pull feeds from WebMD® for in-depth articles about topics family members and friends cared to learn more about. And of course I would ultimately create an iPad® application that I would sell to mothers.
TW: PS:
So the mothers would pay for the app?
Well, would Pampers® or FAO Swartz® pay for it? Probably not. But if the app were provided by the hospital and the hospital paid eLaunchers say, $50 per mom who wanted it, this could work. Consider there are about 8-18 incubator “pods” per hospital, and there is a 14-18 week average patient churn time, so there are hundreds of moms with babies in these pods per year – per hospital! And the lists of mothers would become ideal lead source hubs. Their dozens of friends and family members who
logged into the website would be invited to the baby’s “graduation” party. I would create a database of all the party’s attendees and then later find ways to solicit donations from them, by inviting them to a fundraiser gala for the hospital! So that is how, as a data scientist, I created the entire idea of an app that mothers would want – from the remnant pixels of my dream 15 years ago. To translate this whole conversation into a benefit for my audience, I have this advice:
Dream. Dream big and often. Share your dream with others in vivid, graphic detail. Someone some day may be able to translate your dream into data and make it real. While most dreams will not come to fruition, it only takes one idea to launch an invention, a career, maybe even a movement. If you would like to share your dream’s data with me, I can help bring it out into the daylight and develop it for the marketplace. Please contact me at 301-760-3953 or email me at PShah@ Elaunchers.com Tom Woolman is the Marketing Director at eLaunchers.com.
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How Efficient is Your Professional Practice? – by Dustin S. Burleson, DDS
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lthough I have a heavy reading load and tight schedule for completing articles for four monthly newsletters, I frequently go back and review my article bank before writing. It’s amazing what I sometimes see in an article or book on a second take. Something I didn’t see there before. Such is the case this month in preparing for this newsletter and its feature topic: efficiency. Webster’s dictionary defines efficiency as maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense. I define it by asking coaching clients, “how many useful results are you getting from every project you undertake and the amount of energy you put into those projects?” Most good days, I give myself a 40% on the efficiency scale. On bad days, it’s zero or 20% tops. If we’re honest, efficiency is an area of our lives where we can always find opportunity for improvement. It is no surprise, therefore, that an article in the 2013 Harvard Business Review sprang to life when I went digging through the archives. Brad Power eloquently discusses the topic of efficiency and how the habits in our organizations can either help or harm us when pursuing better results with minimum wasted effort and expense. He breaks things down into three simple concepts. Things we “must do” in our organizations. These are regulatory, safety checklists or things we do to handle emergencies so that people don’t get hurt. Second, he reviews “should do” practices like the routines
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or standards that have been established as the best way to get certain tasks done in your organization. These standards must also allow adaptability, flexibility and even innovation. Third, Power describes the process of letting your employees know where they have discretion in what they “may do.” This allows creativity, innovation and “flexibility to meet customer needs in real-time.” It also boosts employee satisfaction. One of my favorite books, The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gawande is a brilliant look at making your “must
do” activities more efficient. Simple checklists, like we recommend at the end of each day, week, month, quarter and year, help keep our teams on track and reduce waste. Pilots use them, surgeons use them, and so do the engineers at your local power plant in order to ensure you can read this newsletter after dark. So, why don’t most doctor’s offices have any checklists? Have you established the safest way to take an impression or an x-ray? We all have ideals in our heads on how certain procedures should take place. It’s time to write them down and make a checklist. Checklists will help with memory recall and help new employees by plainly stating the minimum necessary steps in any process inside your practice. When considering “should do” practices, Power brilliantly suggests we ask our teams “how could we do the work of this organization, execute its strategy and fulfill its mission, better?” My team has come to expect at the end (or beginning of team meetings, if they are too quiet) I will chime in like a broken record, at each and every meeting, “what can we do to make this organization better?” How can we serve our patients better? How can we improve employee satisfaction? How can we drive revenue and reduce waste? Where will this organization be in five years? How can we get there faster? Setting standards in your organization, like the standard of never settling for mediocre, helps push your team forward. It also mandates that you do a good job training your employees. If there are no standards to
learn, you can imagine what the process might be like to go through your practice as a patient. Likely, an inconsistent and unmemorable experience. At a recent meeting with Dan Kennedy, he shared some inside baseball he learned with the Disney Imagineers. After a new customer purchases a Disney timeshare, there is an eleven-hundred step process they go through over the next 60 months to solicit a referral from that customer. Do you think Disney has a few standards? How do ours compare to theirs? Most interesting in Power’s article, he breaches the topic of “may do” discretion. These are the things your organization does to encourage your employees’ overall engagement and motivation. Give your team the opportunity and responsibility to take initiative and turn on the creative juices. Dental and orthodontic offices must be able to respond to patient requests in realtime. Your employees should not require the permission of a supervisor, or even worse the doctor, to make a patient happy. Our employees have up to $1,500 on-the-spot, just like the employees of the Ritz Carlton, to make a client happy. Starbucks employees follow a similar approach that allows them to be flexible in how they interact with customers. I can hear from a mile away when an employee in any business says “but our policy says…” It’s a weak excuse why management hasn’t allowed these employees to truly shine and deliver exceptional service. And, if you think businesses that operate like this will still be around in 30 or 40 years, give me a call and let’s make a wager. Today’s economy and the consumer dollar demand that we all get serious about customer service and allowing our employees to adjust on the fly to patient demands.
How efficient can we be if three or four employees are forced to “admire the complexity of the problem” instead of just solving the darn problem? Efficient organizations have dismissed the notion that standards and core competencies mean the same thing as rigidity. To maximize your efficiency, find a way to stop thinking about your
employees as “workers” who must be constantly supervised and arm-twisted into performing the correct task in your organization. Embrace the opportunity to let your employees do their jobs better through a flexible view of standard operating procedures and allow them to solve problems in real time. Your results will soar and your efficiency will never be better.
What if? - EVERYTHING You’ve Ever Been Told About Growing Your Orthodontic Practice...is WRONG? What You Don’t Know about Growing Your Practice Could Come Back to Haunt You
Before you spend another penny marketing your practice or hiring self-proclaimed “gurus” to build your new patient base, please visit www.MyOrthoGuide.com for a special handbook, The Ultimate Ortho Handbook: Seven Essential Success Strategies They Didn’t Teach You in Dental School. It could help save you hundreds of thousands of dollars and untold personal and practice heartache. The vast majority of orthodontists are too busy running their practices to make any real money. And once you realize the easiest part of your day is straightening teeth, it can be a very difficult and potentially very costly investment of time and resources to relearn the real business of orthodontics from the ground up.
What You’ll Discover in This Free Handbook • • • • •
How to stop wasting your money on marketing that doesn’t work. Transform your patients and referring dentists into raving fans of your office. Discover the #1 mistake orthodontists make and how to avoid it. “Steal” the perfect formula for running your practice on auto-pilot. Five things to never put in your practice marketing. Get this right and your return on investment will sky rocket. Hint: your competitors are doing this all wrong. • The only metric you should be worried about in today’s economy and slow-to-no growth professions of dentistry and orthodontics. This is the ticket to extreme success and my secret recipe for taking my from-scratch practice with zero patients in 2006 to over 7,500 active patients today and over 1,774 orthodontic case starts per year.
Are You Stuck in Your Practice? Because orthodontists all over North America and beyond often regret their decision to hire a practice management or marketing consultant, Dustin Burleson Seminars has helped many doctors through massive turnaround and complete practice transformations. Dr. Burleson’s practice-growth strategies have generated over $300 million in orthodontic revenue for his clients. As a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Burleson brings evidence-based practice management and business development strategies to the top 1% of orthodontists (or those who wish to join this elite group).
If you own an orthodontic practice or know someone who does, I urge you to request your free handbook. Discover the seven essential success strategies they didn’t teach you in dental school. If your practice growth isn’t where it should be or you’re finally ready to make the type of income you deserve, my team can help you develop and implement the same ultimate success strategies that have been tested in 8 countries and over 67 different major markets around the globe. This free handbook could change your life and the life of your practice forever.
Dustin Burleson, DDS – – – –
Founder Burleson Orthodontics President and Senior Consultant, Burleson Seminars Director, Rheam Foundation for Cleft and Craniofacial Orthodontics Best-Selling Author of Stop Hiding Your Smile! and The Consumer’s Guide to Invisalign
Please hurry! This offer contains time-sensitive information.
Visit www.MyOrthoGuide.com today for your FREE handbook! © 2014 Dustin Burleson Seminars • 4135 N Mulberry Drive • Kansas City, Missouri 64116 • (800) 891-7520 • MyOrthoGuide.com
TPO-ad-orthotown.indd 1
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5/8/14 11:29 AM
3 Secrets Stolen by One-to-Many Masters from Direct Response Copywriters by Mike Connolly
“Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman, not the attitude of the prospect.” – W. Clement Stone
H
ave you ever noticed how the great platform pro’s like Dan Kennedy seem to walk right into the “living room of your mind” and start a great conversation with you?
How do they do that? Before I share with you three of the secrets they know and use, stolen from the world of direct response copy, I want you to now reverse roles and picture yourself up on stage, in front of the video camera or on the phone and your teleseminar has just gone live… What’s the most important thing that has to happen before you can make a sale to anybody attending?
You’ve got to connect with a room full of individuals Yes, you are speaking “One-to-Many”. However, each attendee to your presentation is listening to you as an individual. To grasp this, think of the last group presentation you heard or watched. Were you listening “Many-toOne”? Doesn’t make sense, does it? So when you present, yes you’re speaking to a group; however each person is processing what you say and do as if in a one-to-one conversation with you. And when you’re presenting, if you’re at all awake, your “spidey sense” tells you whether or not you’re connecting with somebody… anybody in your audience. It sucks when you don’t connect because when you don’t, there’s less money to count at the end of the day. Yet when you connect with a well-structured presentation, with relevant, useful content and an irresistible offer, that’s when the numbers soar.
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So, here are three “tricks” or techniques that a good direct response copywriter will use to connect with a reader. Put ‘em to work in your next One-to-Many Selling situation, and tell me if you don’t sell more next time you’re in front of an audience:
Copy Trick #1: “I to Thou” Wipe out any “podium-speak” from your talk. Limit phrases like “I know you are all…” Speak - and write your script - as if it’s just you and your favorite kind of prospect, sitting down at the bar and having an earnest conversation about a dilemma he wants a way out of. You clearly see his way out. You care. You know the solution. You’re a schmuck if you don’t move him to action. That kind of approach shines through in everything you say. Notice how you’re
affected by it with other speakers. Try it yourself and see what happens.
Trick #2: Be Informed About and Speak Directly to Her Concerns. Here’s where a little research comes in handy. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, but it’s what separates the pro’s from the wannabes. If it’s a live event, explore the town you’re in, the association you’re speaking for, the host and her background... But take it a level deeper. Find out what the issues of the day are. Has there been a plant closing? What are interest rates doing to the industry? How do they feel about what they’re doing or not doing in social media? Get very specific on at least one point so you can apply what you’re saying to that audience.
Trick #3: Speak in his “Dialect” Try replacing your way of talking about an issue with theirs. Check out forums, speak to somebody in the group by phone, read blogs to pick up the language they use.
It’s almost unconscious, but he’ll forget you’re an outsider and feel more comfortable listening to you when he doesn’t have to work so hard to understand what you’re saying because you’re already speaking his language. An advanced twist to this is to really play up how you’re an outsider, poke fun at yourself and at him through different lenses of the stereotypes you set up… I’m thinking here of Jean Robertson, the great humorist, NSA president and award-winning speaker who claims her success was due to speaking two languages - English and Southern. The best direct response copywriters use these tricks in one form or another and you can too. They work in any media or format, however can be especially effective when you speak live or by recording to a group.
Dial up Your Sales a Notch or Two The three techniques I’ve just shared with you are just a few out of a checklist of 31 or more items I go through before a serious piece of copy goes out the door. Would you like to see how your script measures up to the full 31-point checklist? Normally available at $497, if you attended Dan Kennedy’s One-toMany Selling Training and are one of the first five to submit your script by midnight EDT, July 15, you can have a full critique including up to 30 minutes by phone with me to go through it in detail, brainstorm solutions and answer any questions you may have. All at ABSOLUTELY NO COST or OBLIGATION to you. Call (301) 760 -3953 or email content@ elaunchers.com and be one of the first five to submit your script by September 15 to fine tune your presentation into a sleek selling machine, doing magic for you every time you sell One-to-Many. Mike Connolly helps small businesses get big through direct response copy that sells. He’s a Dan Kennedy Certified Copywriter for InfoMarketers and Infusionsoft Certified Partner with eLaunchers.
What Interesting Items Has Parthiv Shah Bought Recently – and Why? by Tom Woolman
A
s I sat in front of Parthiv’s desk at his new Germantown business digs to ask him about his most intriguing recent purchases, I couldn’t help noticing no fewer than six screens and four keyboards in front of him: one PC, one Mac, one large screen TV, an iPad®, a large Samsung cell phone, a screen on his desk phone and there were probably others nearby… A self-confessed gadget freak, Parthiv maintains that while he has “electronics galore”, they all meet one requirement: each is practical and accomplishes something unique no other device does on its own.
Parthiv was able to overlay the various sites and form a composite or amalgam of the ideas site with each participant’s favorite aspects. Needless to say, this very much “wowed” all the participants! Very cool stuff indeed!
Lately, Parthiv has been particularly focused on accoutrements for his office. A few cool “items” purchased: First, a special “white board/dry erase paint” that was applied along the entire interior north facing wall in five coats – an expensive paint that took several days to apply. Tastefully, the color matches the balance of the painted walls so that it can only be distinguished by its slightly glossy sheen.
Notwithstanding, ironically, somehow Parthiv seems to be the very most enthused by his recent purchase of two “little black book” type journals a la “old school”. One of the 5” x 7” books is actually brown. He unabashedly reveals he got the idea of carrying a black and brown book from Dr. Burleson. While Dr. Burleson of course has his own distinct uses for his books, Parthiv has developed his own unique uses for his two books. But first, it should be noted that Parthiv has all but banned loose paper and Post-it notes – anything that can get lost easily. Parthiv uses his black book primarily for a detailed to do list. He shares his brown book with his office manager – it never leaves the office. The office manager distills Parthiv’s emails and identifies all action items from all correspondence. The brown book is on Parthiv’s desk in the evening and goes back on the office manager’s desk first thing in the morning. Parthiv believes these two books have greatly improved operational efficiencies and all but eliminated totally “dropped balls”!
A high resolution, ceiling-suspended video/movie projector displays on a similar paint in the conference room. This projector is able to post multiple computer screens simultaneously via InFocus. Wirelessly, of course. And several windows – one from each participant’s PC – are displayed on the 8’ x 10’ wall in the conference room. Parthiv then can toggle and enlarge the appropriate image(s) – often from the web -- as the conversation progresses. Most impressive, Parthiv described a scenario where his client participants each liked different graphic elements from different website home pages.
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Tracking Results by Benjamin W. Glass
T
racking the results of your marketing efforts is important. Knowing where your cases are coming from helps you decide where to spend your next dollar or next hour of marketing. It is important to be as precise as you can but in today’s multimedia marketing world I will be the first to admit that I sometimes sacrifice precision for “getting more things done.” That being said, it is important to know when the marketing vulture comes around to sell you more ad space in their media whether or not what you spent last year in that media was productive. We determine our marketing “budget” not by some formula that is a percentage of income or net or gross but by understanding what the return on investment is.
As usual, I’m going to suggest a slightly different approach to gauging return on investment. Remember first of all that our marketing is twofold. We hope to attract today’s case, but we also hope to attract tomorrow’s case by obtaining, today, the names and addresses of people who find us interesting. They may not have any case today or they may not have a case that we want. Building that database of people who do find us interesting and with whom we will be “top of mind” later is vital. Remember, the database is your most important asset.
To Request a DEMO please call our offices at 301-760-3953, or email pshah@elaunchers.com
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Therefore, if we do some form of advertising and we can at least break even in terms of the cases we actually get from it today, but we add names to our database, all of whom have some value to us later on, then we are “net positive” on the marketing piece. Now the only question is whether there is a type of advertisement or media where we can get a better ROI. Let me also suggest here that “l” is a very dangerous number. We do not want to rely on “ l” of anything to market our practices. It would be very dangerous indeed to rely solely on referrals or solely on the Yellow Pages or solely on the Internet because any one of these could go away in the future. Any one of these advertising methods could be so drastically changed that they have
effectively gone away in the future. (Go back and re-read the last chapter- will people search for lawyers tomorrow the same way they are searching today?) Therefore what we are looking to achieve is a portfolio of marketing messages and media that allows us to produce great results overall. Here are some ways that you can use to track marketing results: 1. Special tracking telephone numbers. The Yellow Page reps sold these for years but today there are any number of firms from which you can obtain local or toll free numbers. There is a danger in only looking at the number of calls that come through a particular number, however. With so many people using cell phones and simply hitting “redial” that special number you bought and paid for may be used over and over by the same client or prospect. Therefore, if you are using tracking numbers it is vital that you go deeper. As you’ ll see in the next chapter, Richard Seppala (The ROI Guy) allows you to go much deeper than merely tracking the number of calls through a particular number.
2. Tracking URLs. l personally own over 300 URLs. (I buy them through GoDaddy.com, but there are many other sources.) This way, when we run any marketing piece we can create a specialized “landing page” that is affiliated with a specific easy to read and easy to spell URL. Simply put, we have the ability to know when a consumer fills out a webform exactly which ad they saw or heard before going on the web.
3. Tracking web forms. When you get a web contact through your website today, do you know which page they came through? (Of course you might if you only have one web form and that’s on the front page of your site). You should have web forms soliciting contact information or making an offer for your books or information packages throughout your website. Each web form can be specifically tracked so that you know exactly what page the visitor came through. This tracking can be totally automated with lnfusionSoft.
4. Ask the potential client. Of course this method is the least precise. We’ve had clients tell us they found us in the Yellow Pages even though we haven’t been there in years. The point is that when we are making a decision as to where to “go next” with our marketing we want to I) know what is and isn’t working and we want 2) diversity. For help with tracking you can always contact Parthiv Shah with eLaunchers. com at parthiv@elaunchers.com. Reprinted by permission of Benjamin W. Glass, from Great Legal Marketing.
Educate Your Customers by Karl Franklin Bryan
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ducate them about what, you may be thinking. Well, consider this, many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers. These are people you already know to be a good sales potential…they’ve already bought from you! Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position. Here are a couple of key elements to use to retain your current customers: 1. Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person-by pigeon if you have too! 2. Post-Purchase Assurance: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel like they are being supported for their purchase and with the item they purchased. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt completely abandoned? Something as simple as a Thank You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining a great customer. 3. Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business or even come up with a club specifically to reward loyal customers. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option. 4. Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of swindling and crap
out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they will trust you and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer. There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business: • Quality product/service • Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer • Offer subjects your customers find interesting Use this approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success. Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside! As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and diverts some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers. In every ways possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.” So, there it is! Remember, our FREE test drive can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that.
Start your test drive now at einsiderscircle.com
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The Internet-An Introduction
Today’s Primary Inbound Marketing Media by Benjamin W. Glass
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ote from Ben: This chapter is for those who outsource all of their Internet marketing. Even if you are paying someone else to run your entire Internet marketing operation you need to understand the best strategy and technology to use in order to communicate effectively with your webmaster. You can end up spending a ton of money on someone who makes a very pretty website but delivers no cases. Frankly, most webmasters are not marketing experts at all. They are good at designing websites, but have no clue what is really involved in generating attorney marketing that is effective. Thats like buying an expensive car and leaving it in the driveway.
Since 1995, my webmaster has been Tom Foster of Foster Web Marketing. You can find him and review his portfolio of clients at FosterWebMarketing.com.
hire an attorney/sign any forms] before I request the free information that [you, the lawyer] are offering.” (Do you see a principle emerging here?)
For many members of Great Legal Marketing, the Internet has become a marketing engine. Others struggle because they lack a comprehensive plan and they have not teamed with a technology partner to maximize the Internet as a marketing tool. Internet marketing is much more than a mere ego driven website. While page one positioning on Google is vital-it’s still not enough.
The Internet is just another form of media. Your message doesn ‘t change much just because the Internet is the media. While promoting yourself on your website as an authority is laudable and certainly should not be ignored, you will get beat every time by someone who is using the Internet as the front edge of a comprehensive marketing program. This is why the “be a thought leader and they will come” gurus are wrong. You need to get the consumer to raise their hand and to say to you “I’m interested in hearing more of what you have to say.”
Numerous legal marketing commentators suggest that websites and blogs are used to establish yourself as a ‘’thought leader” in the hope that a consumer will figure this fact out, search you out and initiate contact. Hope is not a good strategy. This belief is yet another example of the “work your way up the ladder of success” and “do good work and they will come” mentality that has pervaded lawyer marketing since advertising was first allowed. Let me be clear. The Internet has one purpose. Your websites, blogs and any other impression that you have on the cyberspace world should provoke the visitor to initiate contact with you. In fact, let me make it even easier than that. Anything you do on the Internet should be designed to have the client say “I’d be a fool to talk to [the adjuster/
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Dominate the search engine return page (SERP ) so that you are “everywhere.” Create interest with a compelling headline. This can be delivered by video. This is not your name, your logo or a picture of your city. Maintain interest long enough for the consumer to see your “irresistible offer” and get them to click on it or get the consumer to submit a question together with contact information to you. Automatically take the new contact
information and put it into your data base and kick off a multi step multimedia sequence of marketing events.
How Any Lawyer Can Dominate Google Obtaining and maintaining a commanding presence on Google requires both technology and a willingness to work. Make no mistake about how competitive and difficult it is to achieve a prominent position on the first page of Google. However, once you do it can be very difficult to knock you off and it is disheartening for your competitors. The best attorney internet marketers can usually achieve more than one position on the first page of Google (without buying expensive Adwords ). Here are the technology essentials: 1. A website content management tool. Gone are the days when you hire a webmaster and every time you want to change or add content to your website you call the webmaster, wait for weeks, and finally see the change. Whoever is designing and maintaining your website should have a “backdoor,” or content management system that you can access on the fly to create and upload: a. New pages b. New content on existing pages c. New frequently asked questions d. New practice areas e. New images and photographs f. Blog entries g. News that is appropriate to your practice area h. PDF documents including
court opinions, briefs and your mailed, monthly law firm newsletter i. Video (That is then itself automatically pushed to the various video distribution sites on the internet.) j. Contact forms and information request forms that automatically add contacts to your contact database. If you do not have a content management system that allows you to do these activities then your website will never keep up. While Google consistently changes the way it perceives and then ranks the utility of websites one thing remains clear-fresh new content remains king. Many lawyers are now employing writers and bloggers to constantly and consistently push good relevant content to the Internet. The top performing websites are “media machines” and the attorneys behind them consider themselves “publishers.”
Too much work? Life is a choice. You can keep buying those static template websites from the mega website designers, but you cannot continue to complain when the sites fail to produce cases for you. 2. You need software that tracks the actual search terms that people are using to come to your site. Google Analytics is a free tool that every website should have and if your web designer has not included this tool in your package and shows you how to use it you should pick up the phone and fire them. This is important because while lawyers are willing to spend a ton of money bidding for “vanity” keywords like
“Virginia personal injury attorney” yet over 70% of all searches do not use the vanity keywords. Most searches are in the form of a question or some sort of an extended statement. It is absolutely vital that you know what the 70% of non-vanity keywords are that are being used to find you in order that you can create more content optimized for those “long-tail keywords” to “feed” Google. Special Bonus: want to see a ‘tour’ of some really crappy attorney websites and wasted money on Google AdWords? I’ve got a cool video that will upset web development companies and lawyers alike at My AttorneyWebsiteSucks. com. Reprinted by permission of Benjamin W. Glass, from Great Legal Marketing.
ATTENTION SOLO AND SMALL FIRM ATTORNEYS WHO DESERVE BETTER Is it Really Possible for YOU to Make More Money, Get More Clients, And Still Get Home in Time for Dinner in THIS Environment?* Answer: YES. Thousands of attorneys across the United States have discovered my marketing and practice building secrets – secrets that put your marketing on auto-pilot and allow you to become a hero to your family and an icon in your community Today, I’m going to give you an opportunity to discover my proven system and give it a test drive for two months. When you accept my offer I’m going to send you my Power Tools Kit for Becoming a Hero to Your Family and an Icon in Your Community (value: $1,597.00) for just a small shipping and handling charge. Interested? Go to ParthivLovesGLM.com.
Ben Glass
GreatLegalMarketing.com BenGlassLaw.com Virginia Attorney Ben Glass
*Without becoming prey to and putting your law license at risk with so-called SEO Content Writing “Experts,” pay-per-click thieves, link-building fraudsters, phony “Best Local Attorney” directory advertising, Google® “keyword” experts, unethical shared TV ads, local advertising hucksters, fake law firm “centers” that offer to sell you the names and personal information of clients they hunt down with false advertising and cold calls, and all those non-lawyer marketing “gurus” claiming to be able to tell YOU how to talk to CLIENTS even though they’ve never run a law practice in their lives.
You get all this just for trying us out!
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BUSINESSREVIEW eLaunchers Welcomes Infusionsoft Expert
LOREN SMITH D
o you ever feel like you’re on a journey towards something greater than yourself? I’ve come to learn that it’s all about that journey. “Arriving” is a myth. There will always be more to contribute, more to see, more to experience and more love to give. That’s not a quote I found. That’s how I feel as I write this. It’s 10 P.M. on a Saturday night and I just turned down the opportunity to hang out with some buddies so I could share a piece of me with you. My intention is simple, but not easy. Connection. Because I know I can’t do it alone. But we can sure as hell do anything if we work together. My divorce was final on March 8th, 2010. It’s easy to remember because just 4 years earlier on March 9th, 2006 I got married. I didn’t see that coming. A week after my divorce was final, I found an incredible path. Something
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that changed my life for the better and I want to share it with you. Marriage isn’t easy and divorce is one of the hardest things I’ve gone through. I tried so hard to keep it together, but it takes two. Unsteady employment took a toll on my marriage. Not that I couldn’t keep a job. The job couldn’t keep me. I always knew there was more. I went to school to be a landscape designer. Not because I really wanted to, but my mom suggested it and it seemed like a good idea. After some years of hard work and dedication, I ended up getting a job at the largest landscape
construction company in Arizona. I made it. But I aimed too low. While I was hanging out with people that looooooved plants and trees, I wasn’t passionate about it. I didn’t get excited about plants, but I did enjoy turning a flat piece of dirt into something functional and beautiful. While I was landscaping, I started reading books like, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and “E-Myth”. I learned that I love entrepreneurship and business. I love the freedom that it affords. I love learning about marketing. Not just love. I crave it. My appetite for learning has never left and never will. 2009 was a tough year for me. I was running operations for the largest landscape maintenance company in the world. I enjoyed what I was doing, but was approached by my brother in law to help him systematize his startup. I jumped. And I helped him grow to the top of his market. That was fun.
The tough part was my marriage. It was rocky. We just had a beautiful baby girl in December of ’08 and new stresses made it hard for me to focus. I couldn’t work for my brother-in-law anymore either. I didn’t really want to be around the family. I didn’t know what to do. Luckily I found a position to run the marketing for a law office at the beginning of 2010. I didn’t know what I was doing really, but I was committed to do a great job. One of the things we needed at the firm was a good way to keep track of clients and make sure we were coming through with what we promised efficiently. I shopped for different software and finally decided to use Infusionsoft. I had no idea what I was getting myself into… We signed up at the beginning of March 2010 and we were invited to their big user conference two weeks later called InfusionCon. This was just a week after my divorce. I was never at such a low point in my life, but I still had hope for better things to come. InfusionCon blew my mind. I was so amazed that a group of 1,000 entrepreneurs would get together to support each other like that. Freely sharing ideas and specific tactics they were using that worked. This was my new family. Being social was not something I felt like doing for the whole next year, because of my divorce so I found myself signing up for everyone’s newsletter, buying every recommended business book, attending every webinar and going to every event that I could afford.
Before the year was over, I decided I needed more and I saw an opportunity to partner with a mentor of mine, Brad Martineau. Brad was the 6th employee at Infusionsoft and spent 6 years building the software and helping them grow. He had just left Infusionsoft and was working in the trenches with private clients. I proposed to him an idea of creating a membership program for Infusionsoft users. I noticed that most Infusionsoft users want to see what other users are doing, so we decided to interview the top users and share our interviews with our members and also show them some tips and tricks they could apply in their own businesses. We sold the idea at InfusionCon and signed up about 80 people. That was a start. After a couple years of interviews, training and coaching, we decided to add some more top talent to the mix and another partner, Dave Lee came on. With Dave’s entrance and some new trademark rules Infusionsoft was implementing, we changed the name of the business to Sixth Division. Within a year, we grew Sixth Division to be the top Infusionsoft implementation team and did 7 figures that year. Meanwhile, I was trying my hand at developing some new systems with law practices and dental practices. I had done marketing for law practices and I always kept an eye on the dental niche. For some reason, my 3 best friends in life are dentists, so watching dental marketing was intriguing to me.
As a result of my experience and expertise, I’ve been able to cultivate great relationships with many top marketers and “gurus”. I’m humbled to be a part of their success and continue to become better because of them. One of my most valuable and evolving relationships has been with Parthiv Shah of Elaunchers. We have known each other for many years and have helped each other throughout. I’ve watched Parthiv create some great relationships and a loyal client base. I was humbled when he approached me to be a part of his growing team and to help improve systems and be the head of his Infusionsoft implementation team. It is our collaborative effort that will bring many clients success as well as our own. And we can only grow by helping our clients grow. As we move forward, our focus will be on helping tribe leaders and dental practices grow by providing done for you marketing services. Our current clients will be happy to know that their level of service is rising and future clients can be assured that they are in the greatest hands. If you are a tribe leader or dental practice owner and you are considering implementing more effective marketing systems in your business, let us know. For more information on how to bring Infusionsoft into your marketing program, contact Loren Smith at 301760-3953 or email him at LSmith@ Elaunchers.com
I subsequently sold my stake in 6th Division and was hired to help a dental group grow and I was a catalyst in doubling the number of practices in the group in just 1 year.
I was going to be a master at marketing.
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Gifts That Grow I would like to give you four amazing free gifts. Gift number one, I will give you a copy of my Success Blueprint Bundle along with the companion CD and Business Kamasutra e-book. Inside the Success Blueprint Bundle you will learn • What business, sex, and big data have in common • How big data applies to small business • What is wrong with your sales funnel • How to take your business form chaos to clarity Gift number two is my Tribal Marketing Blueprint, which is my secret technology formula of building
a tribe of followers using technology, web, data, and marketing automation. My third gift is a copy of The Ultimate Success Secret, a book I co-authored with Dan Kennedy himself. My fourth gift is a copy of eLaunchers Marketing calendar – which is filled with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual marketing activities for your business (plus tracking spreadsheets)
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This work sheet and ideas for Marketing budget brea kdown are borrow ed with
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from Dr. Dustin Burle son.’s marketing plans. Dr. Burleson’s marketing director boot camp is an awes ome marketing resource for you.. Visit Dr. Burle son’s website for more valuable resources at burlesons eminars.com or call (800) 891-7520
To Give These Gifts...
elauncers.com\tellafriend Over Ten Years, Hundreds of Clients, Thousands of Campaigns and Billions of Pieces Mailed
Parthiv Shah, eLaunchers.com 13236 Executive Park Terrace Germantown, MD 20874
301.760.3953
pshah@elaunchers.com