Using Content To Attract Customers by GenooMarketing

Using Content To Attract Customers Watch the webinar video & see blog post Margaret Johnson: Good morning, everyone. Margaret Johnson, here with you from Genoo, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to, "Use Content To Attract Customers" It's my pleasure to introduce our presenter this morning, Kim Albee, our president here, at Genoo, as well as, our professional services agency, which is called, "ContentZAP." Kim was recently named one of the top 20 digital marketing strategists for 2015 by the online marketing institute. Here, at Genoo, we offer online marketing tools and marketing automation, to small and midsize businesses. We also work with business to supercharge their online marketing, and build and augment their marketing teams at ContentZAP.com Hope you'll check that out. Webinars replays of past sessions are also on the blog, at ContentZAP.com. With that, I am going to turn things over to Kim, and Kim, take it away. Kim Albee: Great. Thank you very much, Margaret. Welcome, everybody. Today, we have a lot of ideas put together for you, a lot of great information and some really good takeaways at the end that are really practical tips for you to work with and help you implement the things we're going to talk about today. Let's just go over a really quick agenda of what we're going to talk about. Basically, we're going to go over the basic flow of online attraction. We're going to talk about the lead generation formula, the kind of content that you're going to need. We're going to talk about how to eliminate the headaches of generating leads. We're going to talk about the importance of follow-‐up and how to do it, save time, and get better results. We're going to show you real-‐world examples so you can see what we're talking about. We bring it right down to the feet-‐on-‐the-‐street level. Let's get going.

The Basic Flow of Online Attraction Here's the basic flow of online attraction. You've got people coming in and finding you on search. You've got people finding you on your social networks and your media platforms.

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Why we split those out (i.e. social networks vs. media platforms) is because we just did three webinars in February. If you weren't on them, I invite you to go to our blog, and look at the posts and the video on them. There's a distinction between social networks and social media platforms. Where you can distribute your content, we'll talk about that some today, but as people find you out on social, that's the other place that your stuff gets found. Then, you might have directory listings, depending on the kind of business that you are. If you're a local business, you're going to have some listings out there. All of those things push traffic to a landing page, ideally, not to your home page but to a landing page. From there, they can go into your website. They can go further into your blog, but now, they're brought to you. When they're brought to you, what you most want them to do is have them find something they like and complete an opt-‐in form, complete a lead-‐capture form. Then they go into a lead database, not into an inbox somewhere. They go into a centralized lead database that allows you to track everything they do, to take actions, automatically, that can personalize based on what it is they're engaging with. That's basically the flow and some of the underpinnings of what you really want to be doing here to get the most bang for your buck on your presence, on your online presence and with your content. They could also call you. They could also call you. Hopefully, those phone calls don't just sit in a Post-‐It note or on a notepad on your desk, but that you take that information from the phone calls. You get that also into your centralized lead database, where you can then be in communication and things like that and track those engagements and interactions.

Lead Generation Is Easy. It follows a Formula. We're going talk about the lead generation formula, because lead generation is something that everybody needs to engage with. Everybody needs to look at how do I build my list, how do I use content to really attract people and get them engaged with me, and understanding what it is that we do that can make a difference for them. What I want you to know is lead generation is easy. It follows a formula. Let's take a look. There you go. Most of you are probably going, "What? Algebra was tough for me," or "Math isn't my thing. What are you doing with this formula?"

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We're going to take it step by step for you. Let's just break it down. One step at a time, L = A x P. Leads, (L), are a product of your target audience A) and the problems (P) that your products and services resolve. If you're perceived as resolving problems well and providing solutions that are helpful, you're going to get more leads, because people are going to want your content. How you get their attention is with an offer (O), something that they perceive as valuable enough to give you their email address. We call this an "attractor" or a "lead magnet" or a "call to action," or CTA. All of those speak to this thing called an "offer." How they evaluate your offer. This is how they evaluate it. We're going to keep talking about and turning the focus from you to your audience. This is how they evaluate your offer. Whatever content you put in front of your leads, they look at it like this. Does it interest them? Is it easy to access? What I mean by that is if you put a lead-‐capture form in front of people, does it ask for everything including the kitchen sink? Their first name, their last name, their address, their city, their state, their country, their website, their first-‐born child … Does it ask for everything, or do you make it easy for them to get at your content? If you ask for things too early and too much, they'll just lie, and now, you're in a worse situation, because you have bad data in your database. The third thing they look at is, are you credible? Do they trust you? Do you have authority in the subject? Having great content out there that people can find, and locate, and engage with and start to really utilize, builds your authority, builds your trust. Your content creates a body of work, and this is something that we also talked about in our February webinars with Nick Kellet, but that something that you want to look at. How do I build that credibility, that trust factor? Then, weigh all of those things against how much risk they perceive in accepting your offer. What's the risk to them, right? If you're asking for everything plus the kitchen sink, it might be perceived as too much risk, and people won’t take your offer. In fact, Marketing Sherpa has even shown that the more things you have in your capture forms for somebody to fill out, the more friction you create, and the less likely they're going to be to take that step. You want to think about that. It's like when you go to a party, and you meet people, you don't ask them everything about themselves when you first meet them. You learn their name, "Thank you. Hi, I'm Kim. How are you?" Right?

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But you don't say, "Where do you live, what's your address, how many kids do you have, where were you born, where did you go to school?" You don't ask all that stuff, so why on earth would we do that in the digital, online world? Think about it. Why you ask it, and I'll answer it really quickly, why you ask it is because you are self-‐focused. You're focused on what you want, not what they want. You've got to really start to flip that around and say, they're in the driver seat of the buying process. You're not, they are. What are you going to do to engage with them, and inspire them, and really get them moving in the direction where they actually love the stuff that you're doing? You've just got to think about that. Lead gen follows a formula, right? But you want to think about things, that's not all there is to it. To be effective, you've got to bring something more to the table. You can follow the formula, but to be effective, you've got to bring your experience. You've got to bring your experience of your market, your experience with marketing, your experience with life. You've got to bring your experience to the table. It takes creativity. It's not just by the numbers, and data, and all the analytics, and having a data head run your marketing. It's more around, how creative can you be about getting people's attention? About engaging with them on a level that they love, either cajole them, have some humor, go after fears. There's lots of it, we're going to explore all these things, and what's your creativity? Right on top of that, I want to add curiosity. Are you curious about your target market? Are you curious about what engages them, are you curious about what real problems do they have? Are you curious? As a marketer, I am infinitely curious about all kinds of things. I love to read, all kinds of stuff. I'm getting ready to go on a vacation, and I'm going to read non-‐fiction. I'm going to be reading a book on buyer personas while I am gone. I know you guys are probably rolling your eyes like, "What? I would never do that." Here's the thing, when you're curious about your industry, your marketplace, you learn things. You start thinking differently, you start bringing everything in. What are your competitors doing? What is the body of content out there, and does it work?

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Is it useful? What can you add to the conversation? Curiosity really allows you to look at that. Insights, do you have a way to understand data, to understand insights that you get? I'm going to share some insights with you about this webinar. One of the things that we know is that of all the people that came in for this webinar, 72 of you are from another webinar that we did with YP, for instance, Yellow Pages. You came in from one of those. 32 of you are new leads, based on this webinar, we've never seen you before, you've never seen us before. You came in and became a lead, just for this webinar, we know that. Also, there's other statistics that I am going to share with you, but do you have insights about that? We know how many people that are on this webinar right now, we know how many of you registered into other webinars, and which ones. It's fascinating, when you can see specific engagement, and where activities come together, and you can do so easily and pull that information, you get insights that help you develop new content, new campaigns, different sorts of things, OK? Now, it takes a mindset. I've pointed at mindset in many of these, curiosity, creativity, mindset. It's like, are you can do, or, "Oh my God, I've got to get this done." You want to look at, what is it that drives you? Is it, we've got to get this newsletter out the door now, so hurry up, we've got to get this stuff done, and you're just racing to beat the clock, or are you actually looking at it beyond the single campaign? What's going to be the body of work that you can add to your industry, and really start to garner that credibility, and garner the leads and the interest, and the engagement?

The Content You Need To Engage Leads Let's explore the content that you need. We've laid the groundwork for why content is so important, now, what kind of content do you need? You want content that will feed your traffic sources, right? You're going to want to re-‐purpose and reuse, and use content and generate content for distribution out to media platforms like YouTube and Scribd, and Issuu and SoundCloud. Those are media platforms. You're also going to want content that will go out to your Twitter feed, and your LinkedIn profile, and the social networks, your Facebook page. The social networks where your content revolves around you, around your brand, because people know the brand, they know you, you're going to see your content. Whereas on media platforms, people revolve around the concept. People are searching for things

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YouTube is the second most used search engine, second to Google, and Google owns both properties. You want to put your software people are searching, where they can find you, and we have a really interesting example of this near the end of the webinar that you're not going to want to miss. Now, if you're in the local business, you might also be on directory listings like Yelp or Google Local, things like that. You're going to have that. Now, the other content you need is on your website. You are going to have multi-‐page content, you're going to have blog content, you're going to have downloads and call to action content, things that people will give you their name and email address for, and that themselves to your list. You're going to have content there, right? Finally, you're going to want to have a capacity to capture leads, to put a lead capture form in front and be able to have those people go into a database. When they go into the database, automatically, they get taken to a thank you page, or they get a thank you email, and then, they get an email that says, "Here's that thing you asked for," and now, you have verified that the email address they gave you is good. You One all that to work together for you, and of course, once they are in your central lead database, you want to have tracking and all the things that let you know just how interested they are. It's a progression, and with the right set of tools like what Genoo offers, it can be automated. Which is really nice if you're a small and midsized business and you have a small marketing department, or you are the marketing department, you want to be as effective as you can be. Tools like Genoo. You can't do this without having automated tools. Having a bunch of different tools just makes it harder, because you have to go into each different tool, and then all your metrics are all over the place. You really want to have a centralized set of integrated set of tools that help you accomplish the stuff that we are going to outline here.

The Three Flavors of Content Let's look at what kind of content. There's three flavors of content. There's content that focuses on gain, pleasure or aspirations, right? You're in that Zen place, it's good stuff. What does your target audience most want and desire? Do they have aspirations that you can tap into, get that professional prestige or get these accomplishments and be at the top of your peer set? If life were good for your target audience, how would it look?

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That's what you're answering, how would it look? You're giving them things that would let them visualize that, and move into that world, and they want more of that. That's one flavor of content. Now, there's another kind of content that lays out the logical argument or perspective. You look at the pros and the cons. You show them return on investment of your solution over your competitor's solution. You provide a checklist that will have them see the benefits of your product and service in ways that make sense for them, right? You give them proof of success through customer case studies, reviews and testimonials, it's a logical argument that you're building there. It's very thoughtful, right? Now, the third kind of content is content that highlights fear or pain that your audience is or could be experiencing. You empathize with them about a specific pain they are experiencing, given their situation. You tell a story that they can relate to. You illustrate just how bad it can get if they don't take action soon, OK? Now, you're not a jerk about it, right? You're not a jerk, but you're appropriate to really spelling out the stuff, and you want to provide, you could provide success and failure sets of case studies of who succeeded, because they took action, and someone who failed, because they didn't, right? You can show that, because human beings, quite frankly when things are all good, and things are just going, we don't question anything. We just think, "All right, isn't this great? Life is grand, I love this. This is perfect, I've been waiting for this, it's great." It's not until we get hit in the head, slammed up against the wall, something's right in our face that we actually deal with some of our most pressing things. We ignore them up until then, but then, when they get our attention, we've really got to act. What this does is, this kind of content stirs the pot a little bit. What I also know is that people hate to produce this kind of content. A lot of marketers, a lot of business owners, you want to keep everything rosy and great. You don't want to really stir the stick much. If you eliminate this kind of content, you are eliminating a lot of potential for engagement. Let's just look at it this way. What do you think, which flavor is the most effective and inspiring action? Is it gain in pleasure aspiration content, is it logic and reason content, or is it fear and pain? What do you think? I'm going to give you a moment, write it down on your little sheet of paper what you think, your vote, for which one it is, and let's look.

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How many of you said gain pleasure and aspiration? Appealing to gain, pleasure or aspiration comes in at number two, that's the second thing that's going to be what will get people's attention the most. Now, here we go. Fear and pain causes the action the majority of the time, studies show. Studies show that fear and pain causes action the majority of the time, and then we quickly follow with the logic to support our choice. Think about buying a car. You find a car you really like, and as soon as you decide what you really like, you start getting attracted to a car, you see it everywhere on the road, don't you? You see how many of them there are. "Oh, there's that one. Oh, I like that color." All of that, you see it everywhere, right? And it's an emotional deal. Everybody makes decisions emotionally. It's just the way decisions are made. In fact, I saw a thing on CBS Sunday Morning, this is over a year ago, and they were looking at this guy who had to have brain surgery to get a tumor out. The brain surgery went very, very successfully. They removed the whole tumor, but this guy would sit for hours, looking at his closet, just trying to figure out what tie to wear. What happened in the surgery, and what they didn't know at the time was, something happened in the brain surgery that eliminated this guy's ability to feel emotion. With the absence of feeling emotion, he couldn't make a decision. That's how important emotions are to decision-‐making processes. That's why gain, aspiration, and pleasure, or fear and pain are the two that elicit action, where logic and reason is what...we're very logical. We don't make any emotional decisions. Yes, you all make emotional decisions, but then, you really quickly follow it up with all the logic. This car is the best one, because it has a very low rate of repairs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're going to come up with what exactly it is to make it look like you're making the best and most informed decision you can make. That's just the way human beings operate. All of these pieces of content are valuable. They all serve a really good purpose. You've got to consider how you use all of them in your content strategy if you want to maximize your results.

Content Done Well Content done well connects on an emotional level, is appropriate given where the lead is in their buying process. If they're at the very beginning of the buying process, you have questions that are very different than at the end. We're going to illustrate this in a second. You want to guide the lead in their buying journey. Here's the thing that most people forget. You do a blog. You just blog. People come in and read it. Great. You forget to ask © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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them to take action. If somebody's interested in your blog, what do you want them to do? What do they most want to do? You want them to contact you. They're not going to do it. That's like one percent of people at your site will do that, that they're actually ready to talk to people. Think about it. You walk into a store. What's the first thing the salesperson says to you? "May I help you?" What's the immediate reaction that you say back? That's right. You just said it in your head. "No, thank you. I'm just looking." What you want to do is you've got to ask them to take action along the way. Don't drop that piece out. That helps you build authority, relationship, and trust. It will result in more customers. You want to match content to their buying stage. You want to not just educate. You want to guide. Marry your goals with their needs, issues, challenges, or aspirations. It's not just about your goals. It's not just about getting them to click. It's not just about getting people to come to a webinar. It's about giving away the things that are really valuable, that are going to make a difference and are going to help you, help your audience. You want to design and assemble content pathways that give leads what they want and deliver on your end game. That's why when you post a blog post, it isn't just "Hey. Read this. Have fun." It's "Read this. Hey. We've got a checklist for you that totally allows you to implement that. You want to download it? Great. Give me your name and email." It's that kind of thinking. Here's how you match content. We're not going to go into this. We have things you can download [laughs] on our blog. Basically, you can go to bit.ly/content-‐pathways, with a hyphen in between, for a content pathway how-‐to guide. It goes through all of this. Basically, you can see that if you're early on in the buying process, you go through early investigation, opinion, and decision. We shorten the buying stages. Some people have it out into seven or eight stages. We've shortened it to four. The conversations. There are only four kinds of conversations that people have at any given stage. They have one about benefits, questions that they have. There are emotional sorts of conversations you can have, and then there are "stay in touch" conversations.

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You want to define. You want to cover your content across the board. I'm going to leave it at that. Go out there and get the content pathways guide. I'll have it at the end, as a link, as well. Creating your offer, that attractor, the thing that you're going to get people to come in through. You want to identify the target audience you want to attract. We could say understand by looking at your personas. Personas are a lot of work. Here's the thing. Most people don't do them right. They don't do them in a way that yields results that literally are like butter when you go to design your content. To that end, we have a blog post on personas, that I'm going to give you a link to. You can go get a little quick start guide that you can walk through. Secondly, we have arranged a webinar on March 26th with Adele Revella, who is the authority on personas and persona development. She has a new book out. We're going to have a special offer about how you can go through her process. She's got a process. It yields results. If you're interested at all in how to really understand your target audience, you're going to want to be on that webinar. That's out at contentzap.com site. Enough pitch about that. You want to identify the target audience that you want to attract. Write down their top three issues and challenges that your product and service or solution solves. You may very easily be able to get to that, or you may need to interview people to get to that. You want to really understand it. If you can understand it in their language, in the language that your audience uses, not what you shorthand it into, but what your audience uses, it will connect even better. What are the top three questions they really want the answers to? You should write these three things down. We'll give you the replay. You should write these three things down. This is something you could take action on immediately following this webinar. If you don't, then the webinar just lives like a good idea rather than something that really made a difference for you. Write these things down. You want to answer those things. If you have those, you can then create something. Ideas for your lead magnet, your attractor, your CTA content. You could do a cheat sheet. People love cheat sheets, by the way. You love them. Quick start guides, you love those too. Assessments, checklists, white paper, webinar, video, case study, e-‐books, all of those things. Ideally, it's got to be really good. You can't just give them surface-‐level stuff that's not really going to matter, and then, going to leave them with "Gosh. That was great, but it only got me an inch down into a 30-‐foot pile." © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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You want to give them something that's really good, some of your best content. The shorter and more to the point, the better. People should be able to consume it in 10 minutes or less. Think about that as just general guidelines of how you create this. You want to also build a corresponding call to action. You might have a great document, a great PDF. If you don't build a really good way to attract people to it, then it'll remain in your library. It will be very safe there, because nobody will see it. What you want is you want to build a headline that gets attention and action. There are some really great books on this. We've made some recommendations on that front. There are some really good books that help you understand the formula for a headline. It invokes curiosity, or it pokes at a pain with a hint of relief. It can provide hope. Again, those are the three conversations. It can motivate desire to achieve. Clicking through, this is where you want to leave them. No matter what, when they read that headline or that email subject line, clicking through is the path they want to take. Make no mistake. It will work if that is the action that you want and they take it.

The Last Element of the Lead Generation Formula: Frequency The last element of the lead generation formula. I know that you all knew that there was still this "F" on the lead generation formula from the very first slide that I gave you. You were wondering, "What ever happened with that F?" I'm kidding, because I know that you guys just went into overwhelm as soon as you saw the whole thing. We've covered all of it but the F. What the F is is frequency. If you touch someone only once, they'll not remember you. This is what we have to say about A/B testing, by the way. You work so hard. If you're an SMB marketer, small and midsize business marketer, you work so hard to create one email. Why would you create two, and then, only send them out to a very, very, very small subset? Whichever one performs better, which is still within the margin of error for, probably, your size of list, you then eliminate one and send everybody the other one. Why would you do that? Why wouldn't you use both of them and touch people two times? Just give a couple days in between. Oftentimes, what we've seen is people get more results off the second email, no matter what the second email is. Why? Because this whole frequency thing is at play, the number of times your lead sees the offer before they take action. We sent out a number of emails about this webinar. We sent one this morning. We sent one this morning and we got 24 new registrations for the webinar this morning. Y'all © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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who did that this morning, I love it, but you saw the webinar invite a number of times before you took action. Just look at your own response to the emails that you receive. You want to also be smart and pull people out of emails when they've already registered so they no longer get those invites, because you know they registered. You don't want to be a pain in the butt for people. You want to be appropriate. Again, you want to have tools that let you do that seamlessly. Where do you use your calls to action? You use them everywhere. You use them on your blog posts. You use them in your directory profiles. You'll use them on your website. You'll use them in links from your media platform content. For instance, after this webinar and after the ones we did in February, we get a transcript of the webinar. We put our branding around it. We put a link to the blog post that contains the webinar replay in our stuff about the blog post. That's right at the top. We create a PDF. We upload it to Scribd. We upload it to our channel on Issuu. Right there, people who find it can link directly through and come right into our blog. On our blog, we have a call to action. You can download a CTA quick start guide, or you can download your content chaos to pathways guide and things like that. We have different things that you can do. You want to also use your calls to action on Facebook or with your Google ads. You want to think through what do you maximize in that space, and then, you can also use it on retargeting. Retargeting is a subject unto itself. Anyone who comes out to your site, and then leaves your site, you can follow them around the web to any site they go to. They can see your ads that you build, that link them right back to your really great call-‐to-‐action offer. I recommend that you start with one offer or one call to action, and then, add a new one every month or every quarter. Don't get bogged down, because you don't have one. Just get one. Do what it takes to get one. Maximize the one, and then, go on to another one. Pretty soon, you'll look back. You'll have all these calls to action that you can leverage. You can leverage them over time. Here's an example of one on a blog post. This is a customer of Genoo's. You can see they have a blog post, but you can also see the call to action, right there, over on the right. This call to action actually, when you go over with your mouse, it has a whole other state.

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You could call this an "infographic call to action." I don't know. It's fun. What you see is that. When people click on it, then they go to the download form page. We also put a CTA at the bottom of the blog. All the way at the bottom of the main content, you also want to see one there. As people read the whole blog, they make it all the way down there. It's like, "Hey. Here's what you do next. Here's the action to take." Again, that has a rollover state, as well. It's fun to see. That automatically engages. We have had a lot more engagement and button clicks and all of that from creating buttons that aren't your traditional buttons. We've been exploring that. That takes them all to a landing page. The landing page has a call to action. With our WordPress plugin, you can create call to actions that actually pop a lead capture form right there. You have your choice. Do I want to take them to a landing page, or do I want to pop a little form that's responsive ready? If they open on a smartphone, it opens in a new tab for them so that they don't get lost trying to figure out where the form is. That's with our WordPress plugin. We make this super-‐easy for you. That's what you want, as a marketer. You want to be able to create the calls to action, get your content when you need to, and then you want to have them download. Once they download, you then want to send them an email. You don't want to take them right to the asset itself, you want to get the email. You want to give them an email. Why? Because now you are validating and verifying that their email addresses good, and now they're in your list. Because you're giving them something of value in exchange for their information, make sure their information is good. Now, they can download this, but you can also use it to give them another call to action. Don't just use your download emails just as, "download this." If you have other things that they might also be interested in, give them a couple different ways to go. Why limit it? That's another option. You can keep them very singular, "Here it is, go get this thing," and then, follow-‐up with different things, emails and sequences and we'll talk about that. But you want to maximize your thank you page if you've got one. Now, if they pop a form and you submit the form, you can just have a message that tells them to check their inbox.

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You don't need a thank you page then. It's just a matter of what's the flow that you are going to design, then, the email is automatically sent. You have the thank you page, and then you have the email. The second thing you can do is you can use Facebook for traffic. We have Facebook, we used Facebook three times for the last three webinars, and you'll see, those of you that came in through our Facebook ad, you'll see this silly little cartoon that we did. You can see we've tried a variety of formats and different things for our ads, but I will tell you that since February 16th, which is when we first started doing ads for this one, turning lurkers into leads, we have generated 123 new leads from Facebook advertising. That's at the cost of $5.85 a lead, on average. Given that it's $5.85 a lead on average, it's one of the best places. You can really customize your audience, you can tailor it right into your particular audience of people that would be interested in the kind of content and the kind of solutions that you provide, and that's what we did. Those are our ads, just images. They're really easy to create, these ads, just the graphic part using Canva. Because that's what we've been exploring, we like to explore tools that don't require, necessarily a graphic designer. Now, you may look at our ads and wish we had used a graphic designer, basically, they are working, and they work really, really well. We use Canva to create them, because we wanted to explore, "Do I always need to have Photoshop and all of that?" No, our SMB audience, we need to show you guys how you can do things, and do them easily without having all the software and all the expertise and a PhD in graphic design, right? Now, this is all measurable traffic coming from Facebook, and I can see conversion effectiveness, too. It's very, very good. You can think about using your content there, and play with your content. The first time I chose a really silly cartoon for using content to attract customers, I laughed when I saw this. Now, I don't know. It didn't poll quite, as well as her other two. Here, we've got this lemur eating, it's about info snacking, and here turning lurkers into leads. But you've just got to play with this. You can do multiple graphics in an ad set with Facebook, and they'll rotate them and determine which one is most effective, play with that, too, it's pretty fun. Margaret: Kim? Kim: Yep.

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Margaret: Kim, excuse me. I just wanted to clarify something. We've gotten a couple of questions about Canva, and Canva does have a very nice free version. The ads that you saw on the prior page were all created using the free version of Canva. You can also pay Canva a nominal fee and get many more templates, and they have a boatload of templates that are all pre-‐loaded. We uploaded these graphics and used their own graphics, but you can also use their graphics. I hope that's helpful, and I'm going back on mute now. Kim: Thanks, Margaret, and thanks for the questions, you guys. Participate and ask questions, because that's what we know what is valuable. We want you guys to get the most value possible out of this webinar. Margaret: I am sitting here answering questions as they come in, feel free to keep firing them away here.

Guiding Traffic That Lands On Your Homepage Kim: Excellent. The next thing you want to look at is, are you guiding the traffic that lands on your website home page? Are you guiding them, or is it just a free-‐for-‐all? You've got to ask yourself what you want people to do. The website that I'm showing you here, this is exactly what we did do here. We said, "OK, what is it we want people to do?" Visitors coming to the site, new to HSD will click on, what, so what, or now what. Those are the three things we want them to do, one, two and three. That's core of the philosophy of their book called "Adaptive Action," are those three questions, believe it or not. And so, we want people to take those actions because that's the heart of their philosophy, I already said that. Then there's a fourth call to action on the home page, at the time, this was back in the fall, "live it," a call to action about their upcoming conference that happened in October. They had that, too. Out of those three, we have a webinar that we did, and it's a recording. We'll send it to you guys, I can't remember what it was called. Anyway, it goes through all the statistics of what really happened here, and digital marketing for marketing automation success is the name of the webinar. We did this, and we showed you these examples with the statistics of what leads got generated and how that worked, and the fact that actually, people do click exactly where we want them to click.

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It's quite amazing when you look at the metrics and you can see that, that you can design this, you can look at it, and then you can understand, is my conversion as effective as it should be, or should I modify that? That's the webinar replay you should go watch if you want all the goods on it. Then you've got the “what” page, and the tabs continue, what, so what, now what. They have a primary CTA which is questions, download your first tool. We're writing this. Who's our audience? It's the person that's just now learning about adaptive action. They might be an organizational developer, designer, OD consultant, whatever, but they're the people that are coming in here, wanting to understand the concepts. Now, there are people that have gone through advanced training with HSD, and those are not who we wrote this for. Those people come in, they go right to the blog, they go right to some of the new tools that are being written every weekend every month by these guys, but they don't necessarily go through this. This was written specifically for people that were new to the concept, so we're introducing it to them. Then we have a second one called, "the Goldilocks equation." Those are downloads and calls to action that are right on the page of their website. We showed it to you on a blog, we showed you actually on your website, but getting a lead is just the beginning. You've got to follow up with them, or they will die on the vine. Consider this. 70 percent of leads are never followed up with, and I know that some of you on this call are in that camp. You get them, but then, you don't know what to do with them. You have good intentions, but months go by and you don't touch them at all. Now, two percent of sales close on the first contact, three percent on the second, four percent on the third, 10 percent on the fourth, but 81 percent of sales that close do so on or after the fifth contact. Here is the shame of the whole matter, is that only 10 percent of businesses actually follow through to the fifth contact point and beyond, leaving 81 percent of their potential sales to their competitors. That is a shame. Now, it's a very understandable shame, because if you don't have the tools to let you continuously stay in touch, and you're developing the content and building that body of work that really engages, you don't have any way to follow up well. You do a little bit, you do fits and starts, all of that. All you need to do is develop a pattern, and just keep adding to it, and over time you will have a body of work that's amazing. © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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How to Follow Up With Leads How to follow up? You just get started. Do you call everybody that's a lead? Well, that's pretty expensive. What we recommend is that you actually put together nurturing sequences, sequences of emails they can go out automatically based on what leads have been downloaded, that are appropriate to what that download is. Let's explore this a little bit. You have an offer. People come in and they raise their hand, "Yes, I want that offer," and they give you your information on the landing page. They complete the lead capture form and are added to your lead database, and automatically an email goes out with the download, and they are triggered into a nurturing sequence. What does that sequence look like? If they downloaded an e-‐book, let's say, and you covered five things in that e-‐book, then, you have basically your first email is welcome, and benefits, and how to read this e-‐book, how to engage with it, right? Thank you for your interest, all that. It might have a link to a blog post that they could look at, as well, and the emails two, three, four, five and six, because you have five points, recast the points from the content piece. Look, most people download your e-‐books and they go into a folder, and people really mean to read them. They might even print them off and put them on their desk, but the majority of those e-‐books do not get read, if you want to make sure the content is consumed, then, put it together into bite-‐size chunks. Remember, info snacking. If you have questions about that, you should go watch our webinar that we did last week, but basically, think about it and chunk it out. Re-‐cast, re-‐purpose some of those points and go deeper with blog posts. Create some videos about them, all kinds of things. But each one of these could go deeper, and include a link to something else that they could engage with. Finally, you can make another offer, into something else that is related or tangential to what it is they downloaded. If they take that, boom, they start into a whole other one. Then, you can also ask them for a free consultation, or to get in touch, or to set up a meeting or whatever. You can gauge where they are, because if there at that place, then, you want them to be able to jump right to that place, not to wonder about how to get there. That's a nurturing sequence, one idea for how you can do nurturing sequences. I'm going to give you one more. © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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This is what we do at Genoo. All new leads get a welcome series of emails. It's three emails. The first email, look at this one. That's only part of it, and it's long, and it's text, but all the emails, this one basically says, "Hey, welcome to Genoo, make sure you white list us. We've got some really great content, blah blah blah." It's that kind of stuff, and it gives them a link to some really good content. One good content piece, and it makes them a promise about what else they're going to receive. The second email, and there is a picture. Yes, that is me in my waders, after we took the dock out. We have a cabin up in northern Wisconsin that is heaven for me. I love it, I can't wait to open it up again. It closes every year, because it's not available in the winter. Anyway, there I am. What this does is it says, "Hey, here I am. This is me, this is why I love my cabin in Wisconsin, and what it provides for me." Now, you get me a little bit on a human level, right? Then, it goes into actually giving them the links to the content that we promised them. This isn't just crappy content, this is some of our best content, we're giving away to them right away so that they can get to know who we are. The third one continues to deliver that. It's a three sequence set of emails, and it goes out in three consecutive days to all new leads. Now, some of you are new. In fact, 32 of you on this webinar are brand new, and you are receiving these. The statistics are interesting. I know that this is going to be a hard slide to read, but here's the results of the three emails over time. We're getting 45, 47 and 31 percent open rates. We get a better open rate on that middle one with me and my waders, believe it or not. But look at the click through rates, we've got a seven percent click through rate, a 10 percent click through rate, and a six percent click through rate. You guys are consuming the content, that's good. We want you to, we're giving away our best stuff. This is good stuff. If you're a marketer and you want to understand how to reach your audience, we are giving you some of the best stuff we've got. And then on top of that, of even more interest, look at the single page views and the multiple page views that we're getting from people who clicked through and came to our site. They're actually spending some time on our site. That's fun. We recommend everybody do a welcome series. In fact, when you're getting started with Genoo, emails that you get and success tips actually walk you through how to create you're welcome series. Maximize your content.

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Maximize Your Content Using Social Media Platforms Now, I want to talk to you about going beyond just your website or your blog, talking about reusing content and social media platforms. Now, here's what I want to highlight. I want to give you an example. Five years ago, five, I created an iTunes podcast channel for Genoo, now what will be a little hard to see, I'm going to highlight it, is you'll see that October 7th, 2010, up until this February, in fact, February 19th, I think. February 18th, is that it? No, 16th. Right here, February 16th, I didn't post anything. We didn't post anything to this podcast channel, we just left it for dead, right? Now, here's the thing that amazes me, and why we're now posting to it again. This is why you want to maximize your content on social media platforms, this is why, check this out. Here are our podcast statistics, we use liberated syndication, to hold all of our audio for podcasts on iTunes. Look at the January number there, 112. 112 downloads of our content happened in January 2015, on content that was five-‐years-‐old. Holy buckets, really? 112 downloads? I don't know who these people are, but you could have found us. Anybody in this webinar could have found us, originally, and then come in. Media platforms help you extend your content life. You do not know the reach that you get with those, and it lasts for years. On social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, your content lasts for minutes. You post something out there, people see it, it might be minutes or days at the most, and then, it's gone and it's out of everybody's had. But out on social media platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud and Scribd, this content is there forever, for people to find and engage with. Now, look at our numbers in February, once we started adding our new things. That was all of our webinars for February, all of the audio is out on the iTunes channel, check that out. 246, boom, jump just like that. We've got an audience that people are listening, that's amazing to me. Moving on, because we're almost done.

Distribute Content Beyond Your Blog What you want us to distribute content beyond your blog. Now, where do you start? That's where most people are left with, "What? I don't understand how to do this." I

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know when we started, I'm going to out Margaret now, because Margaret was like, "I don't get it, I don't understand." I did a checklist, because I thought, "I'll do a checklist, people so love that." Margaret looked at it and was like, "Kim, what is this? No one is going to get this." I was mad, because I had this checklist, and I was going to use it as a call to action guide. Then, I stepped back and I said, "Huh, OK. Let's explain it all." It became a step by step guide that basically tells you, "OK, here's some to get started with, here's what they do, here's what they are, and here's how to use them." We posted it on our blog, that went with the webinars that we did in February, it's posted right there. You can access it through your blog, how the info snack habit leaves your brand forgotten. You can get right to that blog post by going to bit.ly/use-‐content, and go ahead and pull it. You can look at it, it is a quick start guide for content distribution. For those of you who want to get going with it, I say, look at that, five years, it was still working for us. We didn't even know. It's that kind of thing that you want to start to leverage. Expand your footprint, maximize your content. These are key takeaways, or resources is what I was going to change the slide title two. But if you want to know your audience persona, we'll just go down through them, go to our persona bit.ly/persona-‐blog, you can go to our personas and download a worksheet. Sign up to attend our, "Beware of buyer personas, the cow is on the ice." Meaning, buyer personas are so popular right now, and there is so much content about them, because everybody is jumping on that bandwagon, that a lot of them get developed, and then, they are never used, and they are up on the shelf, and you spend all this time and energy to develop them. There's all these questions about whether or not they are even useful. I can tell you they are, and we've set up a webinar for you guys with Adele Rivela, who is the number one persona authority out there. She has a process that you can use, and yeah, if there's somewhere you've got to roll up your sleeves and get to work, this is the place to do it, because if you do it well, it makes all the difference in the content that you then produce. You want to make the job easy for yourself? You'll be on this webinar, and you'll start that process. Now, the third one. Use your persona work to develop your offer, your contents.

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If you want to understand content pathways and how to think about them to design your content, there is a link for you. They're going to walk you right through how to do that. Experiment with the flavors of content, and test for what works best with your audience. Now, calls to action. CTAs are missing from most marketing, right? Make them mandatory. Become an authority by guiding your leads. If you give them too many options, it's like holy buckets, drinking from a fire hose. Let's guide you. Let's let you implement a thing at a time. Let's help you through that, let's answer your questions. That's what makes a difference, right? Go out, you can go to ContentZAP. We do have downloads for CTA quickstart guide, a lot of you have already downloaded it. Now, automate your marketing technology and make sure, make it easy. We've built it for SNB, marketing automation, that's Genoo. Check out Genoo.com; ask us for a 30 day free trial. We'll design a 30 day initiative with you, and you will see it work for yourself. Do it, and complete the online digital marketing certification curriculum. We have a seven part curriculum for digital marketing that's actually a certification course offered by the online marketing institute. Go and sign up and take it. You can buy it from them, we just developed it, we work with them a lot. We love what they're up to in their education charter, you also can do that. With that, I want to take any questions and we have some time for some questions. Margaret, I'm going to turn it over to you, and you can just give me some questions that have come in, and we can go from there.

Questions & Answers Margaret: I have been actively answering questions as they come in, and the first thing I want to say is yes, this webinar has been recorded. It will be posted on our ContentZAP blog, ContentZap.com/blog or choose blog from the top navigation. Our February the webinars are already there, and this one will be out there by Monday. One question I didn't get to answer was, back a few slides, you said something and I was answering a question and missed it. Does the 81 percent differ by industries, and to be clear, is this percentage for B-‐2-‐B?

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Kim: The percentages for B-‐2-‐B. I don't have the information about the industry, I think it was industry agnostic. I think it's a broad brush look at that, OK? That's the best I've got on that, but it was for B-‐2-‐B situations. Margaret: Another great question came in, and I answered it privately, but I really think it's worth talking about, because I imagine a lot of people on the call are thinking, "OK, my industry is highly competitive, or it is very price-‐sensitive. We run ads for 20 percent off, or come in and get a free side table with purchase of a couch or that kind of thing. How are we really going to stand apart in that kind of industry?" I want to share with everyone the response that I provided, which is "Think about things that will engage folks." This particular person that asked the question is in the furniture business. Think about if you can do something a little more fun, like the top 10 weirdest things found in the sofa cushions, or something that's a little more off the beaten path, like the best fabrics for reducing the appearance of cat hair, which is very important in my household. When we were looking for a new couch, we were like, "No. Microfiber, won't the cat hair cling to that versus this other kind of fabric?" Et cetera. My message to all of you is "Think about how you can engage in a way isn't the same as what everybody else is doing, and really, let your imagination and your creativity take hold here, and come up with ways that you can engage with folks that will make you stand out." And then, continue to nurture those folks through a series of emails delivered over time until they are ready to buy. Kim, anything you want to add to that? Kim: No, I love it. Here's what I want to say. Margaret is doing a webinar the third week in March, and it's all about the great content mismatch, the great website mismatch, what did we name it? Margaret: How to cure the great marketing mismatch. Kim: The great marketing mismatch, and it's going to be how to cure, because a lot of times, you look at your website, we'll talk to people and there's this huge mismatch around what your business does and how your website portrays you. Margaret's going to really tackle that, she's brilliant. You can just hear it already and the ideas that she has given you, we love her, and we have a lot of fun with this, she and I, and the staff. I would also encourage those of you who have those sorts of questions to go and join that webinar, because that's going to be a brilliant webinar. It's only going to be for 30 © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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minutes, it's going to be a quick hit, but I encourage you to take advantage of Margaret's expertise, too. I love your answer, Margaret. Margaret: Great. Another question that came in was a question about, "is subscribe to our newsletter a good CTA?" Kim: No. Margaret: That's what I said, too. That's a very low converting CTA, folks, it's so passive. It's so not valuable. Kim: Yeah, let me give you an example. That's great, let me give you an example. We have the ContentZAP blog. Since February 16th, we've generated over 130 new leads that come in through that blog. You know how many ContentZAP blog subscribers we have? 13. It might be 15 now, but we have 130 leads that joined our webinars, or downloaded our quick start guides, because those things add value and solve problems. When you subscribe to our blog, you don't know how many emails you are going to get, or what that really means. It's nebulous, right? Is it going to be valuable? You want to think about it. Provide the value. Give them the value, don't shortcut that. Margaret: Of those 133 new leads that have come in, importantly, only one of them came in through our, "Contact us" page. That's another really important note, contact us is not a call to action, folks. Go ahead, Kim. Kim: That's exactly right. Those are statistics, you would see those statistics for yourself. They're easy to grab from Genoo's tools and things like that, but you want to be able to have your hands around the data, right? Because it really helps you. It helps to be creative and all of that. Any other questions? Because I know we're coming up on, we can maybe do one more question. Margaret: I think I'm getting lots of the question boxes being answered for thank you, thank you. I think we should wrap up by saying you're welcome, you're welcome, you're welcome. We have a lot of great content out there, we invite you to go consume it. We invite you to go download things. Really, whether you end up doing business with us at Genoo, or ContentZAP or not, the thing that we most care about is that you're getting lots of value out of your marketing efforts. That's why we're doing these webinars, we want you to be wildly successful.

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We hope some of you will choose to do business with us, but even if you don't, keep using our content, because we've been doing this for a long time, and there's a lot of noise out there. We're here to help you plow through that noise, and figure out what makes sense for you. Kim: Margaret, thank you so much, and I just want to thank you all for your listening, and your attentiveness and for all of your great questions. If you have anything you need, don't hesitate to reach out. Connect with me on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter, all that kind of stuff, and please, let us know if we can be of help in any way, because we love doing that. I look forward to seeing you on a content webinar coming up soon, and engaging with you, and anyways. If you have questions specifically that you would love to see addressed with a webinar, send them to us, because we will find the experts, and we will bring them to you. We'll solve your biggest marketing problems, we love to hear about them.

About ContentZAP ContentZAP! Is a professional services digital marketing agency. We understand marketing technology and how to leverage it to help grow your business. We work with companies of all sizes to develop and implement content strategies, plan nurturing and follow-‐up sequences, or to augment content development. We sponsor events and webinars that provide practical, very useful ideas and strategies that will help marketers be more effective quickly. Sometimes reverent. Sometimes irreverent. Always relevant. contentzap.com

About Genoo Genoo is one of the most full-‐featured marketing automation solutions available, and targeted to the small and midsized business space. We love helping companies succeed with their marketing, and we are committed to building the best and most useful integrated digital marketing tools available! Inquire about a 30-‐Day initiative. www.genoo.com

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Notes: