00:05

Hey everybody, welcome to our webinar. I’m Kathleen from SharpSpring Ads’s marketing team and we’re super excited to be here today. We’re going through our webinar on how to build pages that convert, how to turn your website visitors into leads. So before we get started, I just want to remind everybody that we will do a Q and A at the end, and then afterwards if we have more questions than we can get to, we will do a follow-up video the following week. So if you have questions now or at any point through the webinar, go ahead and throw those in the box at the bottom of the screen and we’ll go ahead and get started.

00:40

So our speakers today, we’re super excited about. First up we have joining us Andy Crestodina. He is the CMO and co-founder of Orbit Media Studios in Chicago and he has spent 20 years in SEO and analytics. He’s done tons of presentations every year on SEO and he’s even been a host for SEMrush and he has a handbook on content marketing. So pretty much all around just an awesome guy. We’re excited for you to be here Andy.

1:10

Thanks Kathleen, I’m glad to be here myself. This will be fun.

1:14

Awesome. And then we have Todd Libo joining us as well. He’s the CEO of Ascend2. For those of you who don’t know Ascend2 is a research-based marketing company that works with marketing technology and data companies and conducts original research. But Todd has also worked with companies like Oracle, Dun and Bradstreet and Adobe. And so he will be also bringing tons of insights today. Welcome Todd.

1:36

I’m looking forward to it. Thank you guys for having me.

1:42

Yeah of course. And then of course we have Eric Stockton. He is our General Manager here at SharpSpring Ads, but he’s really known for his knack for growing businesses. He’s managed huge ad budgets and overseen a variety of sales organizations throughout the years, as well as speaking at Marketing Sherpa events, Email Summit, and Demand Gens Summit just to name a few of those. So welcome everybody. And I should’ve got the memo to wear mine. I know it’s, we’re working from home. This is what we do, for those of you who don’t know or who haven’t seen one of our previous webinars, Eric’s classic outfit is his hat, so we couldn’t be here without that. But so for today we’re going to be talking about how to build pages that convert. And we’re going to start out talking about, what if you could convert more of your website visitors and improve your ad performance without it causing a huge redesign of your website. So Eric, would you start us off a little bit with kind of your theory on our holistic marketing strategy and how that plays into what we’re talking about today?

2:53

Yeah sure. So we have had lots of conversations over the last several weeks about like how do you come up with a way to be able to, or an approach to be able to know that you’re putting your dollars to work right? If you put a dollar in, you’re getting two dollars out. And how do you really understand that and get your arms wrapped around it as a marketer. And I sort of, I don’t know, that I don’t, maybe you want to call it a rant, I’m not sure, but there’s just been this sort of epiphany for me over the last I don’t know, couple of weeks where there’s so many marketers that sort of optimize or work based on job title right? And so what you’ll see is the design person has their certain way that they’re measured and then you’ve got your Demand Gen person, and they’ve got the way that they’re measured. And they’ve got a certain set of KPIs. And then you know, you’ve got your certain KPIs for email marketing specialist and you can sort of just go down the list. And you know, the challenge for that is it’s really difficult to optimize in a vacuum right? You can’t do it. You have to look at things like it’s a holistic approach from beginning to end. And I think that comes in the form of both your thinking and in the way that you attack the problem in your team and how they organize around it.

4:32

And then also, in the tech stack or the marketing stack, that you use that sort of serves you and serves the goal. So you know, at the end of the day we really, as marketers, we really have to focus in on sort of a holistic view. And understand how all of the team works together to sort of lead up to the KPI, which is revenue right? And that’s the key right? That’s what really solves problems and what really grows businesses and drives revenue.

5:08

Awesome no, thanks Eric. And just kind of go from that and kick us into what specific things you can do to improve your landing pages as part of the marketing strategy. I am going to turn it over to Andy now and he’s going to take us through a quick exercise on some copywriting hacks that will be super relevant for your landing pages.

5:34

Sure. Anyone recognize that guy? Jacob Nielsen. Nielsen Normal Group, famous usability researcher. He did a study in 2004 where he gave a bunch of users a bunch of tasks and a bunch of websites to measure the success rate for websites in general. Kind of ambitious. Todd’s getting ideas how we could like see if the internet is good and then he did it again in 2016 to see if the internet had improved. And basically, not just concluded that yes, usability and conversion and you know, the web has gotten a bit better, but why things fail, why people don’t convert, why people can’t complete a given task. And the main answer was findability. It’s the number one reason why you and me and Kathleen and Eric and Todd and everyone else watching this has trouble performing a task on a website is that there’s missing information. It’s not that the design isn’t fancy enough. In fact, fancy design is one of the reasons why things fail according to Jacob Nielsen. So if you break down to Todd’s, Eric’s point just now about the ultimate KPI right, getting the person to act revenue, this little person, this visitor doesn’t get over here to the goal and convert unless the answers in this first arrow is bigger and stronger than uncertainty, which is like vector geometry right? You want to get that person to get over to that goal. So our job as marketers and to the first point about, this isn’t going to be an expensive effort. Probably this doesn’t require an invoice or a budget or a statement of work or a designer or a programmer. It’s just content. You can log into WordPress or whichever you’re using, whatever system you’re using and improve your site right now from the findability perspective without a big investment right?

7:24

It’s just a matter of knowing your audience and what their information needs are. So what we do when we build sites and, this is almost not even believable we launched three sites yesterday, we do 60 sites a year, we’ve done more than a thousand since the beginning. Our approach to building websites is to start with this big bit of qualitative research. Interviewing our clients. If you’ve ever been to any conversion conferences and they talk about what works and how to get better results sort of weirdly, like if you know a more junior marketer might expect to hear tips about button color or something like visual hierarchies, that’s all relevant, potentially relevant. But what really matters is the information needs. The audience find ability to solve for x. Solving for x answers people’s questions. So I’ve collected questions over many years that I’ve heard conversion optimizers bring up in these conferences. And I’m going to show a bunch to you now. Talk to a prospect before I jump in. Eric, your point about holistic marketing was perfect because rather than sales people judging themselves based on sales and marketers judging themselves on marketing, and what we have to jump over that silo. And if the marketer understands the audience if they’re like a market expert, not just marketing but an expert on the market and they know what this, what people, why people buy and don’t buy, to do that now you can make a great page to do that. You’ve got to ask questions like this.

8:49

Take me back to that moment when you first realized you needed help. This is me talking to my target audience, my current customers. What else did you try and what didn’t you love about it? What almost kept you from buying from us? Anyone out there? Does something, does an answer jump to mind? Why don’t people hire you? Very important information. What made you confident enough to give us a try right? This is messaging prioritization, right? I’m going to make a better page if I get these answers. What made this our company the best option for you? Messaging prioritization. I can go make a better page. What can you do now or better than you couldn’t do before? You’re going to hear that your value proposition in their words, not just so you can go right, but you can actually use their words. You let your audience write your copy for you. Can you give me an example of when this made a difference for you? You know, we do a, Todd does original research for people, talk to 50 clients, ask them how that helped them and then use that language on those pages. If you couldn’t work with us ever again, what would you miss the most? What’s the number one thing you would tell a friend if you wanted to convince them to hire us? You’re getting these slides of course. Go, rewind, watch this, you know, you get the recording, happy to share all of this.

10:02

You can also ask questions just to your top sales associates and get even more insights. For example, what questions are you just sick and tired of answering? In my experience, if you ask salespeople what question do people ask you a lot, they look kind of like hem and hog, they’re not sure. But if you ask them in a different way, what are you just tired of explaining to people? They’ll have a good answer. Yeah, people like to complain right? They tell you everything you want to know. Yep. If you trigger the rant, they’re going to go on and on instead of you having to pull it out of them. Bug difference. Some of these are redundant by design. What should people ask you but they don’t? That’s if you’ve read The Challenger Sale. Again, to Eric’s point, holistic marketing, good marketers read sales books. That’s an awesome book for a marketer to read. It’s basically about content marketing, but it doesn’t call it that. Calls it just like educational content or something. But, answering the unknown, solving for the unknown need, bringing up, you know, there’s, they talked to five people but you didn’t just answer the questions you raised. This other thing that they didn’t know, they needed to think about, what was the aha moment that prospects have during a sales call? What analogies do you use to explain what we do? If people can work with us, even if what my web page needs to do some objection handling, what objections need to be handled?

11:20

This question elicits that. So now I’m going to combine that with Joanna Webb, who is credited with kicking off the conversion copywriting industry. She’s from Copy Hackers, she does a presentation called Money Words where she breaks down the grammatical forms that tend to correlate with success. They write landing pages and emails because actually she left this offer list because everyone talks about it. Use the word because it’s going to force you to get the why. This is an example a technology buyer, we offer on-site installations because not everyone wants their data in the cloud. Should you have access to your data from anytime, from anywhere? Already, and still use this in your next sales page right? In your next email You’ve already upgraded your network, but you’re still having performance issues. It’s going to be awesome. Copy. This is going to work well. The fact is, the truth is, because everyone wants to feel like they’re a logical decision maker. The truth is that cloud-based applications still crash no matter what they promise, even if you can. This is the objection handling. You still have 100% access to anywhere even if your services are on site or whatever the case. I’m kind of making this up.

12:31

Now watch, I’m going to put it together guys, watch this, I’m going to take the question, use the answer, and build a web page. For example, I’m interviewing a client. I asked them when evaluating options, what was the most important thing? Oh, security was number one. Scalability was number two. Now I know how to make my page question/answer content. Give me an example of when this helped you. Oh you guys really saved my bacon that one time, testimonial quotes, you guys really saved my bacon, I can’t write copy that good right? Only the audience can write copy that good. Everything I write is automatically marketing. Everything they write is social proof. You see that. You can’t write copy as good as they can. What was the biggest challenge you were hoping to solve? I wanted better insights. Not just dashboards. Already, and still you already have dashboards but you’re still not getting insights. Wow the visitor is going to say wow this page is like reading. my mind. What can you do now that you couldn’t do before now? I don’t have to run that damn report every time. Stop running the same reports again and again. What analogies do you use to, I’m talking to the sales team now, what analogies do you use to explain what we do? On-site installation is like owning your own home. It’s like your house. You should own your own home. See how that’s gunna, we know that like a market-tested chunk of language that is used in sales meetings all the time. But the sales people don’t think holistic marketing gap to push sales messaging up into the marketing funnel. That’s what the marketer can do.

13:54

What questions are you tired of answering? Oh people keep asking me what if we want to cancel my contract? They can cancel their contract any time. It’s not even a contract, it’s month to month. Hey have we even said that in our marketing yet? Oops. We missed an important objection address, it cancels anytime. What questions should people ask you but they don’t? People never ask us about how well we test, how good we are at documentation. Now look, I’m going to use the fact is right, people want to feel like they’re logical decision makers. The fact is, 80% of software installations are never fully tested or documented. i got data if you don’t have data to support your assertions. Talk to Todd. Put these things together and you’ve got what I called the perfect B2B service page. Not just for B2B, this works for anybody. This, the psychology of a person with information needs is not so different, B2B, B2C, this is from an article. Sorry that’s hard to read. I actually pulled out these, this list. So you’ve got it here in this last slide, but fundamentally what is a web page? It needs to guide the visitors thinking by using a visual hierarchy to align with messaging priority. Taking them from answer to evidence, answer evidence, answer evidence, call to action. That’s the structure of a high converting page. Solve for x, satisfy people’s information needs. Don’t miss. Jacob Nielsen was warning us, findability is the big problem. So high converting pages are pages that answer the visitors questions and satisfy their information needs on the topic of the product or service. That’s what I got for you guys. I’m going to quit sharing and we’ll come back.

15:27

Thank you that was amazing. So many thing to digest there Andy. I mean, we definitely don’t ask enough questions do we? I mean, I think it’s marketers, I mean, it’s not, we don’t, I was just going to say like when can Andy do our web page? [laughter] I love that right? I mean, so here’s the thing. You know, if you sort of like put it all together you know, I love your approach Andy because what ends up happening is you pre-answer the questions that you know are top of mind for your perfect ICP, your perfect customer right? And so you know, now I think of course naturally, for with SharpSpring Ads, i think sort of funnel, I think okay, well now let’s go to the ads. Like how do you test messaging and what is it that your prospects are responsive, you know, are responding to in the ad right? So this can be very useful, just for the ad right? There’s the core question that’s burning on somebody’s mind. You are triggering that right there in the ad. It’s going to give you better click-through rates, gives you lots and here’s the thing too, is you just laid out, I don’t know how many questions, like six or eight, something like core questions that a prospect would have as sort of defined by your sales guy. But the, just working out funnel like everyone one of those could be a set of ad creatives you right? You could test every single one of them, figure out which one’s pulling more. You can sort of get real-time data on what it is, what your pain points are that your prospects are having. I love that.

17:26

This is great, yeah. From the visitors perspective I mean, if you, as someone once asked me, it’s like in one word what must our website do, my word was answer. Because that’s why the visitor, go look at your own browsing history. Why didn’t you go back to all those websites? It’s like you wanted to get information. Marcus Sheridan, the popular marketing speaker, talks about FAQ content that he just wrote a book, like they ask you answer. Yeah. But what you just said is interesting and works well with this framework because I’m an analytics guy from way back but the problem with analytics is, it only shows you what works out of the things that you’ve tried. If you start, if you go back and do some qualitative research and you talk to your audience, you’ll get new ideas for things to try. You can test different messages, you can create different ads, and get more data that I clicked away from this message. Cool. Let’s include that on the page or let’s build that into our content. Hey this page is you know, I’m getting this question a lot from this audience. Let’s put that message into the ad so you can see how that’d be a nice feedback loop as long as they’re not these groups aren’t too siloed within the org right?

18:35

Right right yeah. I think that’s right. I mean I think also, if maybe you’re an earlier stage company right? You’re a startup and you are the sales team right? As an individual and as you’re talking to people and you’re developing who your perfect customer is or perfect prospect is, many times you don’t know what it is, you know your final pitch. Value proposition really is, and so you know it’s been, it takes a lot of time and time equals money right? So if you could sort of accelerate that, which is what some people use our platform for. And this is by the way, is not a pitch or anything. It’s just we see people that are testing ads all the time and I never, it’s funny, when I first started with SharpSpring Ads I didn’t realize that’s what they were going. I was like man, why are they spinning up a bunch of campaigns and then pausing them and then spinning up a different set of campaigns or testing different types of campaigns against each other. And the reason why was because they were trying to hone in on their own value proposition, their own messaging right? And this is how they were doing, they were using, they knew who their audience was right? It wasn’t huge. They hadn’t gotten to scale yet but they had enough traffic to be able to sort of work against and they knew who they needed to be in front of. They just didn’t know exactly what their key pain points were and these ads, every one of them were geared towards different types of pain points. And they were able to get to the answer that your CMO or whoever really wants to know. Which is how do we get in front of the right customer and how do we scale?

20:31

Yeah I love that. There’s, oh Todd you were saying, well I’m just, you had mentioned Marcus Sheridan and when I was at Marketing Sherpa we had him speak, that’s probably about 10 or 12 years ago and literally it was right when he had made this transition and really did the exact, the blueprint you’re discussing where he went and just started asking questions of the sales people and converted his business from an outbound to an inbound process. And he used that information to create this incredible content that ranked highly because he listened to his audience. He listened to his sales people and he converted all those questions to content pieces that answered it. And he got to a point where he would not even go and have a meeting with somebody unless they read a certain amount of content that prepared them. So a lot of it’s that and the sequencing of how you sequence the process. Don’t ask somebody for a sale before they know enough information because they may say no before they’re ready to say no. They might have a yes inside them they just have not understood the product and the process enough to say yes.

21:53

Yes yeah, Marcus points out just how effective that content can be when used in the marketing funnel to create leads that are so warm that by the time the associates talk to them they’re just trying to, they just basically take the order. It’s like, he tells stories about how he’d go to meetings and these people who he knew from his automation system that had been to the site 11 times. And he’d start with this little spiel and they’d stop him and say no I already know all of this from your site. I’m ready to buy. So this is the trend in digital. This is the trend and this is the big picture. Like what the internet did is it made all of us so capable of doing so much research, going back to the previous eras like the 80s and before, you had to talk to an associate just to get information. Nobody wants to talk to an associate. We all expect to get all the information we need online. So that was one of the benefits. The other thought to your point, he now calls it assignment selling. I talked to Marcus recently, he won’t exactly, as you just said Todd, they won’t even take the next call until the prospect has clicked and read these articles. So marketers think about marketing and generating marketing qualified leads. But sales people turn marketing qualified leads into deals. Actually, that’s pretty inefficient right? And that’s what Eric said up front. If the marketers give bottom of funnel content sales enablement content to the sales team. They’re going to do a much better job of following up of helping people disqualify themselves.

23:26

Yes so those emails sound like this, it’s like thanks, a great meeting, ready to set up the next meeting anytime. Before we talk again please take a look at these two things here. I saw a presentation where they show those emails, I couldn’t even find it. Take a look at these two things because it’ll make it a better conversation. So all the people that they talk to, they know that they’ve given them an assignment and they know that that person is going to be a warmer lead because of it or they’re not a lead. If they’re not, if a lot of your prospects shouldn’t be in your funnel, you want them to get out, they don’t want to be an unqualified lead. So help them disqualify themselves, that’s another benefit. I don’t even know, that’s a great point. You’re just assigning them. Yeah no, all of those things are great. I’m just gunna try to get rid of the sun that’s flaring into my face. No problem. Yeah no worries. All of those were super relevant and great points and kind of our first step in what we wanted to talk about today is content and calls to action which Andy has already covered basically in that awesome little walk through that we went through at the beginning.

24:33

So we’re just gunna kind of move on and keep going. So our next, and this one as well, using questions to discover psychological triggers. I think that this is exactly what Andy was just talking about but can we talk a little bit more about maybe the, what is a psychological trigger for everybody watching. Like explain that a little bit more. Well there are reasons why we all do and don’t do things right? Why we take action, why we don’t. Why we hit the back button, why we close the browser tab, and the things that marketers do to discourage those actions and incentivize the more profitable actions for the brand are often called psychological triggers. Technically they may be leveraging a cognitive bias or they might not be lots of things that we do as marketers trigger are basically leveraging a cognitive bias. For example, a testimonial leverages the conformity bias, you know, the pattern interrupters and color and white space leveraged the Van Restorf effect. Like you can actually break down another day, we’ll do this, we’ll break, we’ll look at a page and break down like, how many, I once did this in a presentation like let’s pull up one Amazon page. I’m going to count the number of cognitive biases that they’re using on you. And there’s a lot, there’s a whole bunch of them so are they you know, are they triggers? Basically the page needs to align with the motivations of this visitor to help them make a good decision for themselves. They’re not, you don’t want a bad customer. You don’t want a returned product. You don’t want someone to buy if they don’t want to or become a lead if they’re not qualified. So what we want is to raise the information level of the visitor on their terms. Yes. Give them what we want them to have. Answer unknown questions, provide evidence to support answers. Nobody goes to websites to read testimonials but if you put testimonials next to the answers, quick tip, please don’t make a testimonials page. Your visitors don’t want to go to a testimonials page. I’ve never seen testimonial pages as popular pages. And analytics. It’s like serving someone a dish of like all parsley. It’s like that’s a garnish, that’s not a dish. That’s not the main thing. Nobody orders a glass of cherries as a cocktail. It’s like, it’s supportive and it belongs next to the answer it supports right? The answer, 100% on time service, every time evidence, thanks you guys rocked it, you were on right on the dot, like so yeah these are, that’s an example of a psychological trigger. But you don’t get that unless you reach out to the audience.

27:13

But, and in my experience another super quick tip, the best way to get testimonials is to simply build into your business process a mechanism for getting feedback. How’d that work for you? Did that help? Tell me what it was like to work with my team. What would you give and send if you have any PR, any net promoter score plans to get feedback from your audience. You are also going to get testimonials because you’re going to talk to some raving fans and all you got to do is take that one extra step to say, wow that was awesome. Would you mind please, if I could use, would it be okay if I use that as a testimonial on our site? It would mean the world to us. Almost always say yes. So gathering social proof and learning how to be a better company from feedback from your clients, same thing.

27:54

Yeah I like what you mentioned as far as also, it’s the sequencing of where you have it you know, so if you have a guarantee at the top of your page before somebody even doesn’t know if they want your product and all of a sudden you’re saying, well it’s guaranteed 100%. It’s zero effect as a matter of fact, it’s a negative psychological trigger. And so really thinking about that sequence of the user is extremely important.

28:25

Yeah I saw someone had me review an ad for them yesterday and it said like webinar free, Thursday December 15th, whatever like and then below that it had the content, like the topic. Like why does anyone care what format it is like what, you know, no one cares. People care about themselves a lot. people care about their problems a lot. People care about brands very little. People don’t care. Nobody wakes up and says I’m looking for a good webinar, any topic will do. Nobody ever says I’m looking for something to do on September 15th, no one ever does that. I think there’s, they also see the world in which they see the world right. So when they, when they view content or they view something on you know, an ad right, you have to yeah, just like you said Andy, yeah you got to talk to them in their language right? if you use their words back on them, that’s the thing about copywriting that cracks me up right? It’s not as complicated as we like to make it. It’s an art, no question. But there is like real fun. It’s all grounded in real fundamental sort of like logical things if you really sit down and think about it and you know if you talk to people in the words that they use, and you know use it in the cadence in which they use it, and you know it’s just, it’s the most powerful tool you have in your tool bag. You can’t write copy as good as they can. There’s no, you can’t come close.

30:06

Absolutely. It’s cool yeah. I love what you said earlier Andy about how everything that we write as marketers is marketing and what they write is social proof that was really cool. That was exactly true. There’s another quote that’s not mine. It’s Eugene Schwartz, the copywriting legend, he wrote scientific breakthrough advertising here. Let’s see there’s my bookshelf over there, it’s this black book right down there. He said great copy isn’t written, it’s assembled. That makes so much sense to me. He wrote that like 50 years ago. But it really is a matter of construction. It’s like, what are the elements, what are the supportive visuals you know, who are the, who are the strongest voices? What is best data point you know? If we recently relaunched our site, I don’t have it it’s over there, my process was to just take a bunch of questions that people ask me during sales. I still do tons of sales and then just write answers and then create page blocks and then I cut them all up and it became like a card sword exercise. The pages are assembled after I built each lego, it’s an effective way to build high converting pages is to start with that FAQ content. What’s the supportive evidence answer? Call to action.

31:21

Yep nope that’s exactly right. So then moving on a little bit, our next piece in the puzzle kind of just as you were saying, is to use analytics to look for leaks in the bucket and Eric, I know that we’ve been doing tons of I mean, most companies are looking at their analytics closely. Especially right now. But I wonder if you can speak to this a little bit. yeah I think you know, it’s funny Andy you just, you’d said you know, like nobody creates it or nobody should be creating a testimonial page you know. And your answer would be the opposite of that. If you saw it in the analytics and people were right for some reason searching that out and you saw that that was leading to a conversion, you know downstream, but it’s not right and that’s in this particular case and so I think that’s the case across the board right. So there’s you know, there so many markers have questions around like, especially if you’re redesigning a website or you’re building a site for the first time, you know, like what do I do with my pricing page you know. How do I build credibility you know, how do I sell them up front with a free trial or do I push them downstream to like a click to call a schedule a demo you know with a sales person. What you know, they’re having like fundamental business model questions right? That ultimately lead to you know, whatever the site ends up becoming. And so analytics, especially in a redesign, obviously for first time, you’re going to be testing and you’re going to be gathering data, but in a redesign that’s like the best thing ever right? You have like all the data. It’s telling you like, these people are telling you what they want to see right? And what they find most important and what they find secondly important, so analytics from a numbers perspective you know, also like tools you know, no particular ones in general. You know, but heat mapping tools, things like that are super helpful when it comes to your checkout pages or your lead capture pages that are really like your money pages you know? So I think those things are just you know, it’s like it’s sometimes it’s scary when you start with a white piece of paper right? And you’re like where do I start?

33:53

So Andy I like how you were just saying that it’s like you know, well that’s true. Do you start with a white piece of paper, but you’ve got some building blocks that you start working on that, fill in the gaps and by then the time you’re done filling those things out, you’ve got a page right? And I think that really sort of struck home with me. Well if you don’t spell it with a capital A, and you just say use any analytics or any data to find leaks in the bucket, your point earlier about using about testing messages in ads, this reminds me of not technically conversion optimization but some channels are high stakes and low information. Other channels are, lots of information but low sakes. so if you make, it’s like social media. You get all this data, you post something in social media. There’s like, there’s comments, there’s shares, there are impressions, there’s click-throughs and everything, and who cares. It’s your social media, your organic reach is like 2% anyway. Why not share that thing ten times and get as much data as you can or make a group of ads and see if it worked. You’ve got a low stakes high data channel. Use that to inform your high stakes low data like email marketing, email subject lines. That kills me. I never know how to write an email subject line. It’s murder. Like how do you come up with, like you only have one chance. You send it, you can’t unsend it. It’s like, was that, I wish I could have maybe tried testing it first, can test it, you can test it with an ad. You can test it in social media. You can, there’s you can next time you write an email subject line, if you’re really concerned about it, if it’s a high, if it’s a big content project that you’re got a lot riding on, maybe give it, give yourself a couple of days and share it five or eight times on social media and see which of those got the most engagement.

35:38

Yeah, or your point about ads. Yeah yeah, you’re home online you know, we find with our original research when we do surveys we ask, you know, it could be email marketing or content marketing and we ask marketers like, what’s your greatest barrier to success or your greatest challenge? And it’s just like, it’s amazing like what you get and how it tells so many different stories when you get that information. I mean, i think people, when. you’re looking at your analytics, you’re finding leaks. When you’re asking questions or doing research, I mean it’s incredible for just I think your overall knowledge. but also just, you learn so much. Yup. I used to have a lot of people, still have these, it was like a little carousel part way down a page where you could read a testimonial and then click next to read the next one, click next and read the next one, so it’s basically like a little slideshow of social proof.

36:46

Yeah I put HotJar on the page so I could see click heat maps. Oh wow only 5% of people click to see the next one. I switched to a scroll heat map to see how far down people are going. Wow 25% of people are scrolling past that depth. All I did was change them so they were stacked instead of being in a slider and I got five times the visibility on the second testimonial. I went from 5% to 25%. It was an obvious choice. Any way, it’s rare for insights to really jump out at you and hit you in the face like that. This one did. It’s, no one could deny it. Any meeting with any person you were in, would look at those two charts side by side and say, heck yeah, stack those babies, don’t you get rid of that slideshow. And for that reason, you know, we’ve kind of included, we almost never use carousels or shows at all anymore because the percentage of people who see the subsequent slides is pretty low. Data driven decision making, data driven empathy, yes. Eric I think you remember working on those Ann Holland landing page handbooks with the heat maps back in like, 15 years ago. Boy that was the rage. It was amazing when you actually finally started having that data to be able to visualize it.

38:02

I mean yeah, what cracks me up is you know, in general, like as a general rule, you know the makeup of a page is primarily the same over the last 10 years or whatever, what is sort of the optimal layout. And things is really hasn’t changed dramatically. You can do radical redesigns and different types of tests that do end up surprising you and that’s why you test. But in general, if you don’t have anywhere to start, there are plenty of places that show you, like here’s the structure that you want to lay out sort of like, what Andy was saying earlier, I think too, you know it shouldn’t matter, like I was just thinking about this, so copy is used in so many different places right? The question answer sort of approach that you’re saying Andy or have been teaching us over the last several minutes is has been, you know, it’s employable everywhere right? It’s employable in your sales, you know, presentations, and then in the deck. It’s funny, I did a linkedIn post about this a while back where I said something like, if I’m parachuting into a business for the first time, one of the things that I’ve always sort of looked at has been like, you know let’s figure, let’s spend a couple of days just answering support tickets like of customers right? Let’s come in and you know, talk to, spend a week with just your sales people and just listen in on those calls and just hear. That’s why I love tools like you Gong and different types of tools that look like, really allow you to be able to understand things. You know, Sharpspring has a sales dialer and there’s some transcription capabilities in that and there’s just all these different kinds of tools that are at your disposal that allow you to be able to see what your customers are saying. And then you can turn around and use that and slice and dice in so many different ways.

40:17

So landing pages, yes absolutely sales documentation and whatever the next slide deck is that marketing is preparing, absolutely you need it there too in your chat bot that you’re putting together. Right, yeah. I mean you know what the questions are already right? And you’re able to sort of insert that into the discussion as a prospect that you come to a well optimized site like that and its like oh my gosh. You know me right? You know exactly what I’m thinking. And there’s a subconscious sort of connection that even without talking to a person that you are building a relationship with. Yeah I in the same way that I don’t love testimonials pages because it’s like important evidence out of the flow, out of context, I don’t love FAQ pages because they’re like important answers out of context, but there’s some, there’s a couple things that are amazing about them for analytics. if you have an FAQ page that has expandable content areas where you click to expand, if you put a Hot Jar on that page, you’ll see exactly which ones get expanded and which ones never get expanded. So at a glance you can see what questions are truly frequently asked by your audience. Similarly, if you go to the, if you have an FAQ page and in analytics, you go to the navigation summary for that page you can see what pages people were on right before they went there. Pages that sent your visitors to your FAQ are almost always pages with information gaps. Why did the visitor leave this page and go to FAQ?

41:55

They didn’t want to have to click that. They didn’t want to have to aim and tap you know. They would rather have scrolled and found the answer right? Aiming and tapping is way too much work. So if you can I would look at the FAQ pages navigation summary in analytics and look closely at those pages and ask yourself, why would this visitor leave this page to go to FAQ. So there’s, i think the perfect website doesn’t need an FAQ page. But if. you have one, you’ve got some awesome opportunities to do some kick-ass analysis.

42:27

Yeah exactly, and I love that you guys are mentioning some tools like HotJar and ChatBot. Eric, you just talked about that because our last point for this webinar is you know, how can you use Legion tools to engage with your visitors once you get them there. So Chatbot is one example of that. And I know that we at SharpSpring Ads had some good experience with Exit Pops and some things like that, Eric do you want to talk a little bit more about some other tools that would be good for these, for our viewers?

42:56

Well so we yeah, we talked about Chat Bots you know, we’re talked about Exit Pops, I think that’s actually a really good point Kathleen. I didn’t really think about that until now, but you know, understanding why people are leaving is just as important as you know, is or the most important thing that you can sort of like spends your time on right, I mean there’s a saying that says, it’s basically make sure that before your climb the ladder you’re painting the right house. That was a Stephen Covey right, and I probably completely butchered that statement but you guys know what I mean. And I think yeah, make sure you’re painting the right house right? So there’s a strategy around it and then the tools and the marketing stack that you use is really just set up to be an enabler right? To be able to serve you, not the other way around. I think we get stuck in this. I need to have this big, like I sort of envision like every marketer I mean, if they’re like, if it’s like my credit card like every marketer has the same kind of tool set. I mean maybe different brand names or whatever that they’re subscribing to, but they’re all sort of using the same marketing stack right? They’ve got a Chat Bot, they’ve got email, they’ve got CMS’s and plugins and they’ve got I don’t know, what did I miss, pop-ups, you know whatever they’re advertising. Like everybody can look at their credit card statement right now and see all of those things, those line items on their credit card and the last thing, and then they sort of like take this, hey let me go. And like try to stitch all of that together with like Zapier right, or the integration whatever right. That doesn’t, that’s like it is such a hard thing to do when you do that right? Because what ends up happening is the data doesn’t like you know, different types of platforms, they don’t talk well with each other. They don’t play nicely in some cases. And Zapier sort of like a band-aid, you know, I mean nothing against them I think it’s great, we use it. Yeah yeah yeah. But my point is like, if the data isn’t in one place and those pieces aren’t talking to each other in a holistic way, and again I’m on the soapbox of the holistic marketing approach. But you know, like from that you want to know as a marketer from the ad click or ad impression all the way through to conversion even afterwards right? Because you want repeat sales and everything else you need to know through the entire life of the lead how these steps are affecting a conversion or a new lead or what have you. And if you don’t have that you’re missing out because you’ve got your budget and you know, there isn’t a marketer that I know you know that I just, I haven’t met a marketer yet that has a decent sized budget that doesn’t wake up sort of in the middle of the night and say oh my gosh, like how am I going to hit my number for next month or how am I gunna do these things and it’s not, I need to sign up for another thing right? What it is, I need to have an approach that says here’s where my dollars are being spent on the front end. I’m putting a dollar in and I’m getting two dollars out right? And it’s all like, it’s all shown and captured sort of in that life of the lead.

46:37

And what makes this sort of you know, makes your life easier as a marketer is you get to have a conversation in the CEO or the CFO’s language right at the end of the day, they don’t care. Really like yeah maybe there’s lead KPIs and you know, like you’ve got all your different KPIs or whatever at the end of the day, they don’t care right? What they care about it one thing, and that’s how much revenue are we driving from our idea customers. That’s what they want to know right? And if you can talk to them in their language in that way, it makes you a rock star. And so. you know, when you have that kind of approach I think that’s the thing that really sets you apart as sort of a marketer or an entrepreneur is you got to be able to take all of these different things and see it all in one sort of stream or the life of the lead. It’s such a challenge. It’s really overwhelming for so many people. It’s like where do I begin digital marketing. There’s so many actions you can take, like which of these would have the best impact? There’s so many tools you can use, so many topics, so many formats, so many channels, so many influencers, so many, and I think marketing technology people tend to over buy you know? They buy a giant tool that does millions of things and they’re never going to use them all.

48:00

So yeah, it’s what the world needs and there’s a shortage of this skill I think in the market. It’s just the legit strategist who can look at a set of, at an audience, look at the messaging, look at the pages, look at the traffic drivers and then prioritize what should be done. Yeah I love where this all started because we said what can you do without spending money. Like what are content changes you could make so everything that you do has a high or low R and a high or low I right? So ROI, so the things that have the lower I, I’m very biased toward things that are at the bottom of the marketing or sales funnel. I’m very biased towards things that can be done quickly you know. It’s a sport and you got to love it. It’s like my job today is to find low-hanging fruit that will make a difference for this brand. Something I can see in analytics if it doesn’t affect traffic or conversions, what am I doing? So yeah, it doesn’t, if it doesn’t connect to revenue and that can be even in the form of content right, I mean if you can’t tie content to ROI then you know you’re just asking for trouble right? You’ve gotta, in your budget you have to be able to do that and I think there is a huge opportunity for marketers who sort of understand that. And can like bring all of their data and their different tools and everything, you know under sort of you know a single roof that sort of answers those questions. Those questions where those things are talking to each other, I’m a firm believer that marketing tools, you know platforms things like that. If they’re used properly I mean, that’s the, it’s like a game changer for you as a marketer, the problem I have is when you try to like solve a problem with a thing instead of actually understanding what the core issue is right? And then finding the right platform you know that solves that problem. And I think that’s honestly, this is by the way I’m not pitching or anything or whatever, but that’s what I’m excited about with SharpSpring Ads and with Sharpspring, is because that’s our goal right? Is to make sure that you as an agency or you as a marketer. You’re like trying to drive revenue, you’re trying to generate leads, you’re looking at ways to be able to bring in more dollars into the organization through your marketing efforts. And you need to know how to measure those. And you need to know how to drive revenue and you need platforms they they sort of enable you to do that. But those are tools that I have a bias toward also. Because remmarketing creates more value from every visitor you have. Yeah. And a tool like Sharpspring connects that final dot. You need to know really the bottom of the funnel. You need data and insights into where this person came from. How many times they visited. Is it, you can basically see like this is a warm or cold lead? Is it at the core of everyone’s martech stack should be a database. It’s all the people, so those things, you can’t do marketing without them. You brought up a great point too Andy, on just that aspect of strategy and just how important that is. And we see that repeatedly in our research that lack of an effective strategy, whether it be tactical content marketing or lead generation or you know, a data topic, or a technology topic, lack of an effective strategy and I think, just like how everything fits together is definitely a pain point for marketers.

51:59

You know, we’ve never had marketers say that a paint point is, they’re not doing enough. That there’s not enough tactics to keep the day busy. But you know kind of how everything fits together and maybe a good illustration is like, when we work with companies on a research project, a lot of times it’s challenging sometimes because we have to kind of go back and reinforce, like did you use your research to do this, then this, like did you squeeze enough juice out of it? There’s probably a lot of other things you could use it for and many times marketers go on to the next tactic. And you know so we’re also kind of encouraging. I think it goes back to that low-hanging fruit or are there things you can do. That there are free or low cost, well a lot of times you have it there. It’s just a matter of, can you use it in different formats? Can you take that really good blog post you wrote and create a vide out of it? Can you create an infographic from the research you have or whatever the case may be? But I think there’s a lot there. And that pain point of strategy and how it all fits together is definitely a real issue.

53:18

Yeah I think people make stuff and then plan to promote it. But the plan to promote it should be done before you start making it. Everyone’s like oh content promotion is more important than content creation or you should spend if you you hear this at conferences you should spend 80% of your time promoting content and only 20% creating it. It’s like people come up with numbers like this. I think it’s impossible. Have you ever tried tracking your time and number of minutes you spent like, I can’t ever tell keyword research is that creating content or promoting content. I’m confused. Anyway, build content that’s easy to promote or plan the promotion prior to making the thing. I can’t imagine someone actually doing a research project without knowing how they’re going to get the word out there. That would be, that it’s crazy I know that people do understand the importance of content promotion, but it’s that thinking should be built into the content. Content should be built to rank or to be shared or with in collaboration with an influencer or with the visuals in mind you know, or with the idea of repurposing planned out in advance right? So we are definitely getting close to our time here. So I do want to take a couple questions since we’ve covered up so many things in this webinar. And lots of insights, a little bit like drinking from a fire hose for some people who are viewing. So we’re just gunna cover, grab two of these questions and cover these before we end today.

54:50

So one question, our first question is, how would you suggest going about getting the answers for the questions that you shared? So if it’s your sales person, obviously that might be easy enough. And you shared some good strategies for that, but outside of that, when it’s your prospects, how do you go about getting that data? Maybe Todd, this is a great question for you.

55:12

I mean, talking to your sales people, observing, and it said information on your website doing original research, obviously we like to do that. But I would say, as marketers just get in the habit of listening. Sometimes we just talk way too much and we need to listen. Awesome. Cool. Well then our second question is, can building a bunch of separate landing pages hurt my site’s CEO? That’s fine, I’ll take that real quick. I’m not sure how other people define it, but in my mind a landing page is a page designed for one specific source of traffic with one very specific goal. So a landing page might be the page that you arrive at after clicking on an email or clicking on an ad. And that page has really just one purpose. That page is trying to get you to convert. Maybe right on the page like a classic unbounce style landing page. So in that case, it’s SEOs are relevant. Don’t worry about, at all about SEO. You have a different plan to get traffic. We just said create content with a plan for promotion. And as one of those, a PPC or email landing page has nothing at all to do with SEO. It’s not, you could make it no index and keep it out of Google if you want. If you could make 10 million of them, if you make an extraordinary number, you might want to index them or set your, put them in a folder where your robots.txt file excludes them from the crawl because you don’t want to waste Google’s time. If the landing page is just like the analytics site content landing pages report, in other words it’s just the first page that the person visits, is there a disadvantage to having a larger site? Not that I know of. No I don’t think so. I’ve, there are weird things that happen at very large scale websites where you need to create multiple sitemap.xml files or very carefully manage Google’s crawl budget. But there are sites with tens of thousands of pages not relevant to almost anyone that I talk to day to day.

57:29

Awesome. Well those are great answers. Thank you. And if there’s follow-up questions to that, like I said earlier, go ahead and throw your questions in the box at the bottom of this page and we will absolutely get to those when we do a follow-up video. But I just wanna put a little plug in here for our next upcoming webinar. If you liked what you saw today and you wanna come back and learn about the evolution of performance marketing, you can go to perfectaudience.com/event and go ahead and register for that. That’ll be on December 3rd. But other than that, we have had a great webinar today, and like Andy said at the beginning, you will get a follow-up recording and all of the slides you’ve seen today coming in an email after this. So thank you everyone for joining. Andy, Todd and Eric, this has been wonderful. Thank you Kathleen. And I had one real quick question, and so how do we learn a little bit more about you and your services and what you’re doing over at orbit, Andy? Orbit is actually just a web design company, but there’s a lot of part of this was about web design. So orbitmedia.com you can see our recent redesign, which incorporates everything we just discussed. I write an article on our blog every two weeks. So orbitmedia.com/blog and everyone is welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Those are my two best networks. I never use the other one, the face world one with the blue F, that’s the other thing that’s b2c or something I don’t know what that it. Sure it’s awesome, cool, great, well thank you all. Yeah so. Go ahead and connect with Andy on LinkedIn. The same for Todd and Eric. And we will see you next time, thank you it was a lot of fun everyone.

0:00

Hi, everybody, we’re super glad that you guys are here today. I’m Kathleen Davis on the marketing team here at SharpSpring Ads. And today we’re going to be doing a little training on how you can build your audience on LinkedIn, which, in turn grows your business, and then your overall following as well. Before we get started, I just want to remind everybody of our question box at the bottom right of the screen. Just drop any questions or comment that you have in there throughout the webinar and we’re do a Q and A at the end, and we’ll get to as many of those as we can.

0:35

So with that, we’re just going to go ahead and get started today.

0:40

I’m going to introduce you to our lovely speakers. Our guest speaker today is Mandy McEwen. She’s the founder of an award winning agency called Mod Girl Marketing and she’s based in California and we’re having her on today as kind of our LinkedIn expert. She does the thing day in and day out, and we’re super excited to learn the strategies that she uses.

1:02

Then, we have a returning guest, Todd. He’s the CEO of Ascend 2, which is a marketing research company. He’s developed, or helped develop their marketing research methodology over at Ascend2, and we worked with him quite a few times in the past. So welcome back, Todd.

1:21

And then, we have Eric, our General Manager here at SharpSpring Ads. He’s know for his knack of growing many businesses and sales organizations over the years. And he’s also spoken at Marketing Sherpa events, e-mail Summit, and a couple other events. Just like that, just to name a few.

1:37

So thanks everybody, for joining us here today. And we’re gunna go ahead and just jump in, because we’re super excited about the content that we have today. Todd is our research expert, so I’m going to hand this over to him and let him get us started.

1:53

Sure, thank you. And it’s a pleasure to be here today. And I was really excited about this topic because, I know, personally, I use LinkedIn a lot, use it for our company, and we’ve done a lot of research, kind of around tactics that not only encompass your LinkedIn, but just how do we engage audiences and grow audiences. So, when I was looking a little bit more at some of the data, and actually pulled some from LinkedIn, a perfect source, on how large is this opportunity, you can see the trends are, are pretty tremendous. This here is just looking at the US and how many, not just how many users are on LinkedIn, but how many are active each month. So, you can see 62 million, I think they have 170 million actually on the LinkedIn platform in the US. 62 are active on a monthly basis. And I think that’s a real, I mean obviously, we all wanted to tap into that. But I think it’s a unique audience. It’s a very great opportunity to engage. I’m looking forward to these practical tips today and we’ll have some more research sprinkled throughout the session.

3:04

Yeah. Thanks, Todd. Moving on, we just kind of have a graph here that’s kinda just giving an overview of just how many people use LinkedIn, not only in the US, but also world wide, because they’ve seen record levels of engagement in recent months, and in recent years.

3:20

And then, this is kind of just a general representation of who’s on LinkedIn. And Mandy will get into some of these specifics, but these are just the type of people that you probably are trying to get in front of, and this is how LinkedIn is gunna help you do that.

3:38

So, how are LinkedIn users engaging? And I think that mostly is through content. But since Mandy, this is her area of expertise, I’m going to hand this off to Mandy.

3:48

Yeah, so the majority of LinkedIn users, honestly, they go to LinkedIn to browse and consume content. And what’s crazy is, only 1% of LinkedIn users actually create content consistently. So, on a consistent basis. Yet, there’s 91% of executives that are using LinkedIn as their main content source. So there’s a massive opportunity for you guys to establish yourselves as thought leaders and post content on a consistent basis, because people are going to LinkedIn to absorb and consume that content. But we don’t need just more noise, right, and we’ll talk about this in the five steps we get going on. Like, we don’t need that. There’s plenty of noise out there. We need value, and we need people who are passionate, and really want to help provide that value to people. So, there’s never been a better time to leverage LinkedIn.

4:36

And Kathleen mentioned this earlier and they, they’ve seen a skyrocket in use because of code and more people being at home, right? Right. But what’s crazy is that the people posting hasn’t skyrocketed. Right? So, yeah, probably some more people have been posting. Because, you know, we’re, we’ve all been at home this entire year, pretty much. But there’s still such a great opportunity for you guys to really provide valuable content on a consistent basis. And that instantly is going to make you stand out, because again, only 1% of LinkedIn users are doing that. So that’s what we’re going to talk a little bit about today.

5:15

Alright, so we’re just gunna jump right in and get started. Before we get into the first five steps, or the first of the five steps. Mandy, do you want to talk a little bit about the difference between company page and personal page?

5:27

Yes, definitely. So I have a couple of tips I’ll get to in a minute about company page. But here’s the deal with company pages. It’s pretty difficult to get exposure on a company page when you don’t have an advertising budget behind that. And LinkedIn ads can get pricey, right? So for small businesses, LinkedIn ads aren’t even a viable solution, it’s just not a great idea. For bigger companies, yeah, it’s great. So, with a personal page, you can connect with individuals personally. You can build relationships, you can post valuable content. You’re kind of limited with what you can do on a company page, but I’m going to give you some tips here in a bit to leverage both your company profile and your personal profile. Everyone should have a company page. If you have a company you 100% need a company page. One, it looks weird if you say you work for yourself or a company and then there’s that grey box that you guys see and it looks like it’s a nonexistent company, right? So it’s super simple. That’s one reason why everyone needs to have a company page in the first place. So we’re going to walk through why I feel like leveraging a personal profile is more advantageous for you than focusing on a LinkedIn company page. But I am not telling you to neglect the company page. So we’ll get to that here in a second, because it’s going to allow you to open up many doors for opportunity from leveraging that personal profile.

6:48

Awesome, thank you Mandy. So we’re just gunna go right into our step number one.

6:50

Here we go. Step one with building an audience on LinkedIn, before anything else you guys have got to have an optimized profile. And what I mean by optimized is it can’t say that you’re a business owner and that’s your headline, right? Owner at or whatever the company is. So I see so many people just making the mistake of, you know, they kind of treat it as a resume, your profile. And it needs to speak to your target audience and it shouldn’t be all about you. So yeah, it should be about how great you are and how you can help people, but it should speak more to your end target user. Um, so for example, you know, who do you want to be connecting with, think about them. What are their pain points? How can you help them use data. I just posted a video last week I think, on my LinkedIn profile, you guys are more than welcome to connect with me there and look at my content, but I talk about using data. Todd loves this, right? So use data in your LinkedIn profile. Talk about what you’ve done for people and the results that you’ve achieved for them. And paint that picture of what that could look like with people when people work with you, right? You also need to work on your headlines. So use keywords. We like using LinkedIn to do a little bit of keyword research. If you guys go to LinkedIn, you start typing in keywords and you scroll to the bottom of it, it’ll tell you what other keywords people type in. You can also use tools like Uber Suggest which is a free keyword tool owned by Neil Patel that I love, and that’s just going to tell you what types of keywords that people are actually typing in a searching for. And then you can use those throughout your profile.

8:17

Um, one tip – headlines. Um, a lot of people are using, “I help, you know, blank to blank by blank”. Like, that’s the, I help, you know, people do this by this and everyone and their dog is using that right now and it’s completely overused. And so I don’t want you guys to do that for a couple of reasons. One, you’re gunna look like everyone else. Two, the first three words of your headline are the most important because that’s like the prime real estate that people see. Because if you’re commenting and you’re posting on LinkedIn, um, only LinkedIn’s gunna show those first three letters of your headline. Everything else is gunna get cut off. So if you’re not very strategic about your headline and what you do and using those keywords and attracting, uh, your tribe of people you can help, then people are just going to pass. you up and you’re going to look like everyone else. So, just a couple of tips there. Also, of course you sprinkle those keywords, start your profile, make sure you’re optimizing everything, take advantage of all the summary, um, that the character spaces and the summary and everything. If you guys want help there is a LinkedIn checklist, um, that SharpSpring Ads has on the bottom here and then the link that you guys can click on and get my free checklist to help you out with your profile. It just makes things easier for you so you make sure. you don’t miss anything.

9:30

Hey Mandy, I have a question for you. Go for it. How often do you suggest people go back and update and revise their profile?

9:38

That’s a really really good question. I personally like to do it a handful of times a year, right? So quarterly. I say quarterly, right, that’s what I like. And it’s not like you have to necessarily change everything. Just make sure you’re reading through it on a quarterly basis at minimum and make sure that it’s relevant for you now, because as entrepreneurs, especially business owners, we’re constantly evolving our businesses right? And things are changing and whatnot, so you want to make sure that it is highly relevant. Not to mention you might have learned something like this webinar you’re on right now. Where like, oh I actually missed that. So I would say on a quarterly basis is a really good idea. And I test out new headlines all the time so don’t be afraid to change your headline even like once a month and just see how it goes. Test new things out, see how it looks. And so, I’m a big fan of switching it up, but I would say quarterly is pretty good. Minimum, twice a year, I would say, yeah.

10:30

And also, I would also recommend maybe anytime you do any branding changes, things like that, a lot of times people forget about their LinkedIn page. Yes, 100%. Not only your company page, but your personal one.

10:48

Allrighty, unless you guys have any more questions we’re just gunna move on to step two.

10:52

Perfect. And that kind of leads me in a bit – the latter part of step one was having a plan, right? And so, like, connecting with people would be part of that too. So there’s kind of a, you know, two-fold approach here, and we’ll get into more of there here in a second with the content piece and the connecting piece and they really go hand in hand. So, I recommend that you guys block off time in your week to add new connections whether that’s a Tuesday and Thursday for an hour, or it’s a Monday, Wednesday, Friday or heck, it could be every day for 20 minutes. Whatever works best for. you. But if you don’t put it in your calendar, then it’s probably not going to get done, right? Or you don’t put it in your to-do list, whatever you guys use to stay organized. So, I highly recommend, um, leveraging the search feature that LinkedIn gives you. So when you’re on the free version of LinkedIn, you’re a little bit limited on what you can do. Of course they want you to pay just like every social media network does. So if you have LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator, you can do a little bit more with the searches and finding your ideal target audience and then sending connection requests. Um, we like sending at least 25 a day. Typically for ourselves and our clients, and it works better if you can personalize it. So let’s say you have a list of people that you want to connect with and maybe it’s a target list of prospective customers or prospective clients. You always want to personalize that so if I’m connected with Eric, “Hey Eric, you know, I just talked to your colleague Kathleen, she mentioned that would be great for us to connect, you know, what do you say”, right? So something like that where it’s like, do. you have any sort of, or let’s say they just posted an article and you saw on LinkedIn, okay, great article. I love what you said on x, y, and z, so anything to make it stand out is better. Um, if you don’t have anything you could always do “Hi, first name, open to connecting” that’s, you know, it’s better than nothing. There’s just so many people that are using LinkedIn the wrong way, that uh, for us, that are using it the right way. You need to put forth a little bit of effort so you stand out, right? So go ahead.

12:45

Uh, that is actually something that’s fascinating to me, so I get, I don’t know, 20 or 30 of these things, you know, all like, I get a ton of them right, and so, uh the question I guess I would have is what are the things that people are doing wrong, to avoid?

13:01

Good question, yeah. Um, selling on LinkedIn Message is wrong, period. But especially the people that are sitting there connect to request messages like, “Hi Mandy, I came across Module Marketing LLC”, which means that they just, the bot in there right. “Um, we do x, y, and z, and we offer this, this, and this, and this, and this, and we think you’d be a great fit.” But yeah, no, don’t do that. Don’t sell. So, what do you see, Eric and Todd, on yours, that you’re getting?

13:30

I think that’s right. I mean, it just, it destroys the, the power I think of LinkedIn, when you know, all you have is, you know, people that are trying to, you know, push something at you before they start generating a conversation, right? So, there’s, there’s got it, you gotta, you gotta, sort of invest in somebody before you start withdrawing from somebody, right. And, and , so you know, having that, you know, having that engagement deliver some value. Have a conversation rather than just, you know, hitting them to the point. And I totally get it, right, and you’ve got SDR’s and VDR’s and sales people and they’re, they’re using this great tool that is LinkedIn. This great platform and, and they don’t, you know, they’re, they’re not investing the amount of time the same way they would if it was you and me sitting, you know, at a coffee shop. And we were talking, right, we would know if we were going to, you know, have a professional conversation, and we wanted to talk about a business opportunity. You don’t immediately just start pitching right, right? Right. There has to be, there has to be more to it than just that to develop a relationship. To develop a little bit of trust, a little bit of rapport before you just jump right in. So, and that’s, that’s, honestly, I decline 99% you know, of that kind of stuff, or ignore it all together. Because – but, but, I think I would change that tune and, and, actually maybe the 1% that comes through are the people that are saying, you know, that are delivering value, or they are commenting or having, you know, wanting to have a conversation that’s not just a big, you know, sales pitch, so you declined because you’re, you’re tend to be a mean spirited person, but I am, yeah. That’s a lot of it. That is, okay. That’s my default, yeah, okay.

15:22

You know, one thing too that I, that I’ve missing and trying to get better at, is you know, like somebody will set up a meeting with me, or at a company and then I realize, oh, I didn’t go, and uh, you know, connect with them on LinkedIn, and so I try to make sure I keep a note of like people who’ve connected with me in other formats and make sure that, you know, that you know, if I’ve been talking to them via email or something, that I connect with them on LinkedIn, because, you know, a people move, and then you still have that connection, uh, and just it’s just a much more natural process. So, I find that there’s a lot of ways outside of just, you know, um, even outside of LinkedIn, sometimes that you can find that connection. But make sure you make it on LinkedIn as well.

16:12

Yeah that’s a really good point. Just being like consciously aware of that right Todd? It’s like some things we don’t think about because we’re so busy and we talk to so many people throughout the day. It’s like, just having that conscious awareness of, I should probably go connect with them on LinkedIn, right? It’s just, Hey Todd, we just chatted, you know, give minutes ago, would love to have you on LinkedIn. I mean, it’s just a simple way to build your connections, especially if you’re posting content because you want people to see that and you wanted to get in front of people and there’s no better way of doing that. Especially with people that are warm, right? Like, warm prospects that you’ve actually talked to, which is rare in the LinkedIn world that you actually talk to you know, your connection. So it’s kind of like, that low hanging fruit, like why wouldn’t you add them? But that’s a really good point because it’s so easy to just miss that and not think about.

16:56

Especially senior level people, because you know, we see some of the research that senior level people are on LinkedIn, so they might be a participant in a meeting, but you know, you may only be able to talk to them once every like two or three months because of their busy schedule. But if you connect with them on LinkedIn, you have another opportunity to at least keep your company and your name in front of them in a strategic way.

17:18

Exactly, which is going to begin to show the power of posting on LinkedIn too, right?

17:26

Yeah, thank you guys for all of that. So I kind of think that after connecting the next, that leads into our next step, which is engaging.

17:33

Yes, the best. So can I tell you a story that I just heard yesterday when I was talking to an individual. W were talking about working together, so she was telling me that she left a comment recently on a post of an influencer and he has like, 200,000 followers and she left a pretty well thought out comment. And she got 400 followers like, instantly, within an hour from that one comment. Okay, so if that’s not like, proof that engagement is powerful, I don’t know what is. And this literally, I just had this conversation yesterday. And this has happened to me last week too. I posted on an influencer’s post and I got lots of people connecting with me saying they saw my comment. So first things first, it’s very advantageous for you guys to follow certain hashtags in your industry. So whatever industry you’re in, or whoever you’re targeting, follow those hashtags every single day. If you, if you can do it every day, that’s better. If not, again, this is something you need to block out time on your calendar for, even if it’s like 8am every day, every morning, I do this. This is what I do, I go and I look at hashtags for 10 minutes. And I go and look at the influences for another 10 minutes. Whatever it is, put it on your calendar and make it happen. Otherwise, it might not, but follow these hashtags and look at what’s happening and, and try to post comments on recent posts, right? So ones that aren’t 48 hours old, trying to do the most recent ones possible and look what’s popular, and try to leave a well thought out comment. That’s one great way to get followers and awareness and then also follow industry influencers. It could even be micro-influencers – other people in the industry who are posting content consistently and have a decent sized connection base or a following – engage with them and post their content and share, you know, you can share their content too. So any way that you guys can engage with popular posts and people doing good things on LinkedIn, the better it is for you. Um, and there’s so many, there’s so many benefits of that. One, you’re getting your name out there more to all of their followers. Two, your connections are seeing that you’re posting valuable comments on, on great posts. And three, the influencers themselves are going to see it, and they might even connect with you and they could introduce you to their network, right? So there’s just so many benefits of engaging and I feel like selfishness is running rampant on LinkedIn, really in our world, let’s get real. But really on LinkedIn, and people are just so selfish and they’re just all about me, all about me, all about me. But when you take the extra effort to actually leave comments on people’s posts or share something that you like or you know, just engage with people like, be a human being. It goes a really long way, and I think a lot of people just overlook that because they’re so self-centered and they’re just like “I need sales, I need sales” and they forget why LinkedIn and social media is there in the first place. It’s for us to connect as human to human and to engage with one another. So, What do you guys think?

20:22

I, I think, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, there’s you know, you see so many people again that, that, that ones that have the most, uh, sort of dynamic conversations, uh, where they have lots of lively, uh comments, and feedback, you know. It’s, it’s where there’s genuine conversation happening, genuine, you know, contribution to the, whatever the conversation topic is. Uh, you, and then you can look at the next page over, or the next individual over, you know, LinkedIn profile over, and it’s just completely dead, right? You know, it’s got one comment, or zero right? There’s every time you post, it has zero reach, because there’s, uh, you know, we’re talking about an algorithm here, right? We’re talking about an algorithm that pushes out, uh and just like with Facebook and just like with Twitter, and every other social media platform, there’s an algorithm around that that says the more people that are engaging on these particular posts. I’m going to rank them better and I’m going to give them more reach because they are going to be more, uh, valuable, you know. They’re going to deliver more valuable content, you know, to the platform. Um, so I’m just fascinated by this.

21:39

I had a question, and this is sort of like a nitpicky one. But the, on the free version of LinkedIn, how many hashtags can you follow? Do you know? Do they limit you? They, I think they do, yeah. I didn’t know that because we follow so many. But ourselves, if we don’t use the free version of LinkedIn, so that’s a really good question.

22:03

I want to say that you do, like, as a page owner, there’s a certain limit that you have. And, I could be wrong, maybe, maybe I’m wrong, but I want to say it’s like three that you can follow, you know, so for, you know, for a SharpSpring Ads, for example, I could, I could follow, something like digital marketing or digital advertising or whatever, and then I capped. Um, but there may be a paid version that unlocks that a little bit more. I’m not sure, yeah. That’s a good question. I do not know, and I Googled it real quick. There’s a video we can very, we can definitely find that out and bring that up, yeah yeah yeah. Kathleen’s gunna have that by the end of the session and then, yeah absolutely. For sure, yeah.

22:43

I mean, I would just say, you know, about the engagement – Mandy, I totally agree, you know. It’s that being selfless, you know, as compared to selfish, and making sure that you’re like truly adding value and you know, when you can, you know, it’s influencers and people like that, but just even people, you know, in industry and really providing that thoughtful content back to them via sharing. I mean, that goes a long way, and people you know, people remember that, and you know and they engage with you, um you know, you’re playing the long play. There’s no, there’s no quick fix I think in any of this. And you know, if you, if you’re going to get a, you know, quick hit, um, it’s probably, not going to happen.

23:28

Exactly. Reciprocation, right, like you said. And yeah, I’m glad you mentioned it. It’s not just influencers I want you guys to comment on. it’s your connections, right? Even if something has less connections than you do, if they have a great post that shows up on your feed, leave them a comment. They’re going to really appreciate that, right? Just like Todd mentioned. And it goes a long way. They see that you, you’re engaging with their content. Guess what? They’re going to engage with your content too. And guess what happens with, Eric mentioned the algorithms. The way the LinkedIn algorithm works, the more you engage with someone, the more it’s going to show your post to that person and vice versa. So if I’m commenting on Eric’s posts, Eric’s going to see my posts more, right? And then Eric’s more likely to comment on my post if I’m chatting with Eric on LinkedIn Messenger too, LinkedIn’s going to show my post more to Eric because they know that we’re interacting with each other. So there’s so many benefits of that. But yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point there too, Todd. It should just be anyone who has great content you’re connected with. Take the time to leave them a thoughtful message. It goes a long way. Or a complicated, especially if you know, especially if they’re uh, you know, like, during these times if people are looking for jobs or you know, things like that, I mean, you can just really help somebody by, you know, putting a comment into something they posted or something like, that I mean, you know, there is a lot of value you can give to people, uh with not expecting anything back.

24:41

Exactly, I read, I actually just read something an influencer, she said someone on her network had you know, I’m looking for a job and din’t have a single like or a single comment and she liked and commented and that alone was enough before she has quite a few followers to get people to comment and then someone saw it and then someone shared it, you know. And so just one little trickle effect is, can make all the difference in the world. And this, this individual is delighted because like you said, there’s so many people right now looking for jobs, looking for opportunities, and you can make a big difference just by leaving a comment. I mean, it’s so simple, yet it can go so far.

25:15

That’s true, and in the, uh, kind of the same vein of, not expecting anything in return, um, our step four is give, yes, my favorite give without expecting anything in return. We need more people doing this in our world, which is why we’re talking about it. So you guys can start doing this so you guys should always come from a place of value. Everything we’ve been talking about up until this point is coming from a place of value. Give, give comment to people, give likes to people, give content right, share your, your value, your expertise. I mean, all of. us have unique experiences and unique skill sets that we could share and help people all day long. It’s just a matter of doing it right. And there’s so many people who are just afraid of putting themselves out there. But uh, you, you can make a big difference and in a lot of people’s lives and work and livelihood just by sharing simple tips and giving people those aha moments that they’re like “oh wow, that seems quite simple, but I didn’t think of that”, right? So just always come from a place of value, even um when you’re connecting with people. I wanna, I’ll do this all the time Eric, you actually got a message from my team on this. Asking how I can help, right, so every connection. After I connect with someone, I send them a message and ask how I can help. Are there any projects you’re working on? Is there anything I can do to help you? So yeah, of course it’s gunna help me, obviously. if they want to hire me, but that’s not it. Like, sometimes people are just like, yeah you could share this, or can you like my company page or can you introduce me to this person? It doesn’t have to be, it’s not all about you know, reselling them in a helpful way. It’s just literally asking how I can help, and it’s just as simple as like, is there anything you do to help you, I mean it’s so simple. But so many people aren’t doing that, you know. How many times people are like “Oh, I haven’t been asked that in a really long time” Yeah, actually you can do this, right. I’ll get back to you on that. So, just give.

27:07

And the big thing here that we’re getting ready to talk about next is give with your content, right? So publish valuable content and give in that form, which we’ll talk about here in a second. But I just feel like you guys can chime in here too, I feel like there’s not enough people giving without the expectation of return on, on LinkedIn, and there needs to be more of that, because it comes back to you tenfold. When you give and you’re not expecting anything, I mean, karma for one, you talk about that all day long. But it’s just okay, this individual obviously always gives, coming from a place of value. That is going to come back from tenfold because you’re going to stand out because guess what, 99% of people on LinkedIn aren’t doing that. So, it’s helping the, the people that you’re giving to, and it’s helping you really brand yourself as this trusted expert that genuinely cares.

27:54

Yeah, they’re, they’re going there, there are going to be sales people listening to this call or you know, listening to this webinar right now. Uh, BDR, SDR folks, uh, entrepreneurs trying to do a partnership, and this is going to just fundamentally just tweak them in the wrong way, right, and what I mean by that is you know, they’re just either, you’re going to just certainly just like, see them like crumple up into a little ball, because they immediately want to jump into the conversation. They don’t want to take the time, right? And and they don’t want to, they don’t want to invest the time, but here’s a number, you know, that, that is super helpful. If this doesn’t sore of like, break you through that kind of mindset, and in the give first. Uh, is that, there’s a stat and I don’t know where it’s at, I’ll have to pull it up, but there’s a stat that’s basically that says, if you do this first, if you give first, if you contribute first, if you were real in your conversations first, uh, the the likelihood or the increase in let’s call it, uh, the engagement is around 320% more likely that somebody’s going to engage back with you than they would if you just jumped right into the conversation so, and that goes back to that point that I was saying earlier. It’s like, I, I mean, I’m just using, I’m using myself as an example, uh, but I will ignore 99%, I mean, I think that’s probably an accurate number, uh, of the people that request and, and immediately just ask for something, right? Because that’s because you know, what you know, what you’re going to get on the other end of that, you know, you’re going to just, you’re going to get pitched on something and everybody’s busy and it’s not like it’s a personal thing. I mean, I love people you know, contrary to what Todd was saying right, but my thing is I’m just fundamentally like, I’m focused, I’m trying to be cognizant, and be, you know, my time is valuable, and I’m trying to you know, I’m trying to uh, keep, keep, um things moving and do my job well, and , and so what you end up with is a natural bias towards ignoring or not wanting to engage with those kinds of people. But if you do give, if you do contribute to a conversation if there is a give first mentality, I’m much, much likelier, you know, to engage with you. It’s worth a test right, I mean, if you’re skeptical, you can, you know, just try some with a different approach. And see, you know, see what happens and especially if you’re really targeting specific industries or people. Um, you know, you can, you know, do a little research, and you know, go to their website maybe, see a blow, you know, blog, that that company wrote, uh, put a little you know, put something up there and mention you know, mention them. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways but it takes a little bit of extra time. But it’s worth it.

30:54

Well, the tendency Todd, right, is to just blast it out there. Right, just blast it out there and and, you know, it’s quantity over quality, and and you know, there’s, it’s it’s really like a false positive that you’re getting like more numbers, because those people you know, are you know, less likely to, to, actually do anything, you know. And, and, I don’t know, I kind of, you know, in some cases too, on the, on the flip side, you know, anybody who’s just blankety, or blankety, that’s not even a word, but you know what I mean, right? No matter what, right, they are just going to accept your requests, right? You know, they just sort of go through, maybe they’re trying to build a network and maybe it’s like this vanity metric or something I don’t know, but but you know, it’s a little bit of a pride thing, you know. I want you to know I want to hit my 5,000 cap or whatever it is right. And so, but my thing is about, that is, you know, the the the, you you sort of, you know, my dad always said, you know, you get what you pay for, right? You. know, so, you know, when you’re engaging with somebody you want to make sure that that conversation is valuable, and if you think about it, you know, I would much rather have 10 really good conversations than I would 100, you know, surface level conversations that are never going to go anywhere and and it will rub people the wrong way, but like Todd said, just test it on you know, your next, you know, for the next two weeks, just test it and see what happens. I guarantee you, it will, it will, outperform anything else you’ve been doing. Agree that quality over quantity is kind of the same principle that we have here under step five, which is published. Everything has a trend that you guys have noticed right. Quality and give a human being it really goes a long way, and it’s you know, funny we’re talking about being human, but we laugh back. Right now in our world, unfortunately, but we need it now more than ever due to the craziness that’s been happening. So it’s not about, I know obviously I could sit here and tell you guys all day long that you need to be posting and I did when we first originally started this, because only 1% of people are posting content, but I don’t want you just to post for the sake of posting. That’s dumb. And we don’t need more people posting fluff and noise. That’s not what we need in this world.

33:15

We need quality value content that’s actually going to help people and engages them and entertains them right. And one way to do that is just to be human, be vulnerable. Um, I feel like so many companies and individuals and companies, they feel like their posts have to be about the company. You guys don’t know how many times we work with clients on a consulting basis, we spell out everything. These are topic ideas you can talk about, um, what what are your customers paint points tell a story, tell a customer story. Tell about a time in your life where, you know, you went through hardship and what you learned out of it. Talk about your favorite inspirational quote, what that means, whatever, and all they do is post content that leads back to their company page, and it’s just all about the company. Like, that’s not what I’m telling you to do. You guys, you should have the majority approach, shouldn’t even mention your company to be honest. You can talk about certain topics that your company does, but it should not even mention your company anywhere in it. It’s value, it’s providing value to people. It’s helping them and then getting people to think, so thought provoking content too. And getting people to engage because like Eric mentioned, earlier the algorithms, it’s all about getting people to comment and engage on your posts, so instead of just talking all about you and your company which no one cares about, not to be rude, but they don’t ask people questions. So start a conversation with people and ask people what they think. Ask people to leave an example of whatever you’re talking about. I mean, there’s so many different ways to do that. And people love stories. Tell a story about a certain situation. Tell a customer story. Showcase why it is you do what you do and tie that into your content. I mean, there’s so many different ideas. We could talk for hours about constant ideas. But it really is quality over quantity and being a real human being honestly, being a real human being, you know, that is like, it boils down to that, right?

34:48

I mean, it’s so funny. I was, I was, um, I was, I don’t know, I can’t remember who it was, I think it was Dave Gerhart had posted something a few weeks ago or something and he’s like, he’s like, you want to k now what the most, uh, out of all the posts and in the, in the posts like, you know, three, four, or five times a day or something you know, and and um, he’s like you want to know what the most, uh engaged post I’ve ever had was. I’ll share it with you, and it was him, I’m pretty sure this is, I’m pretty sure I’m quoting this right. It was him and it was like his daughter, like off in the background, like he was working from home and everything started happening with Covid and everything and it was probably March or something, and it was, I think it was his daughter or something off in the background, and she was, he was on like it was a vide of him, you know, and he was on like a professional call like trying to be all professional, and his daughter’s over and off to the side, and just completely interrupts and starts talking about like her poop or something and just that video of just like that little snippet of him just posting because it just because it was, you know, it was real, and you know, because I mean you, that’s look, by the way, I am not suggesting that people, you know, that’s that, that is not the platform. This is a professional platform, but what did I mean that was, you know, one post, out of the last you know, 400 or whatever that he’d done that, you know, was, was good deliverable, you know, good delivering content you know, very, you know, uh, sort of uh, talks a lot about things like, copyrighting and things about, you know, uh, you know, marketers needs, and and what works and what doesn’t work on things like LinkedIn, you know. Or some other platform, and and so you know, when you see that, what you see is somebody who realizes, you know, that you know, people do need connect, especially right now, right?

36:47

People do need connection, people need to see that you are a real human being and that you are not just you know, something, and you know, just my own personal little story. I you know, uh, so when we started working from home, uh my kids went off and like their first day of school, you know, in the, in the spring, and and um, it was, it was probably, I don’t know, January or something, February and I started working from home and they, they made me for school, they made me this big posted that said SharpSpring Ads you know, on it, then it was all handwritten and everything, and I swear, I cannot tell you if, if it was a new person that I’d, you know, I was on a video conference with, or some, you know, some sort of um, zoom or something. Never failed, somebody was gunna mention that, you know, and I would tell the story, you know about how the kids did it and everything, and and that was like a great you know, just that something simple, you know, like, that where, uh, was a great icebreaker. And, and, um, but people, people are craving that right now. its just that real interaction they are, and sharing just like you mentioned, personal posts too, like I know this isn’t Facebook, but you can still sprinkle in some personal posts – a picture of you and your family if you’re even if you’re out camping or whatever. Like people love that, and it shows the human element and the human side of you, so it doesn’t have to be all about business, business, business all the time. I mean, I sprinkle in random. So my sister visited in July and I have a selfie that I took of her and my wife and my sister, and it blew up. I think that was like the second most popular post. It was just, you know, I think there’s a little bit of value in it, but people love, like, oh, this is a real human being, things like I do, and that’s how we relate to each other, I think.

38:35

I think in terms of numbers I think, that’s right like sprinkle, I think is the right word for it, right? You know when you, you’re talking, it can be every time, it’s got to be you know, just, just in, in the right, you know the right, small you know, amount. And I think we’re gunna see some, some of the research, but some content that people really appreciate and is inspiration, so however you get to that inspiration and encouragement, uh that you know, sometimes is, you know, what’s missed in the whole B2B world, you know, yeah, I agree. I try to post on Monday’s. I try to make that like, my inspiration, and if you go and look at my stats, I guarantee you like over 60% of my most popular posts have been the inspirational ones. Really because people are craving people, like, uh, someone I usually only share inspirational stuff on like Instagram, that’s all I do. And I rarely post on there. Someone messaged me I’m going there, like I thought you were a psychologist because of all the inspirational posts that you post. I’m like, I majored in psychology but thanks, I’ll take that as a complement right? Because that’s important to me. Like, I want to motivate and I want to inspire people, right? I mean, that’s a big part of what I do as a professional and as a human being. And so I’m glad you brought that up, Todd. I mean, that’s huge.

39:48

And people just like, I mean, they’re craving the human element and they’re craving inspiration right now too. And if you can give them that, I mean, the sky is the limit.

39:55

Yeah, I was also going to make one more comment on the whole quality versus quantity and Eric, you know this because Eric and I used to work together at Marketing Sherpa, and those research studies that we did even back then you know, it was always whether it be, um , regarding like, lead generation or any kind of marketing tactic. This is whole like quality versus quantity. And even though people typically say quality over quantity, their actions don’t always represent that, so their true belief system you know, when push comes to shove, is quantity, quantity, quantity, and they, they, they speak to quality, but they do quantity, and so I would just, you know, maybe an inspiration or encouragement would be, you know, it has to be a belief system. I mean, obviously, you you need to have data behind everything you do in marketing. We’re judged by results, but I feel like you have to have a conviction to quality and make sure that you stick by that principle and what you’re doing.

41:07

Yeah, I agree. And speaking of that, I mean, the belief system mindset too is huge in this too. I feel like so many people, um are afraid to be vulnerable and they’re afraid to post personal stuff, they’re afraid to post inspirational content. They’re, you know, especially people who aren’t used to who are. you to just pumping out, you know, for lack of a better term, crap content. Like you’re talking about quantity over quality. They overthink it, and they’re like well, if I do this, are they, people aren’t gunna like it or if I do this video, I don’t know what, am I, I’m not gunna look good or people aren’t gunna like the way it sounds or whatever. Or what if, you know, I share this story and people don’t resonate with it. Like, there’s, there’s so much fear around it and mindset is huge like you can’t worry about what people think of you period. I mean, not everyone’s gunna love you. That’s just the nature of the beast, but you have to get over that, you know. And so it’s a belief system too that you need to pay attention and make sure you’re doing quality over quantity. But it’s putting forth that extra effort and getting real that people are kind of afraid of. Like, it’s easier for them to just post this, you k now, tip and the link back to the website than it is to like sit down and, okay how can we tie this to a personal experience or a customer experience to where it’s showing that human element. And I feel like a lot of it is people are just afraid of what people are going to think or it might not go well and it doesn’t matter, you can’t care about people. Not to mention, not everything is going to be a hut. Like, that’s the whole point with posting quality over quantity, is you will be able to judge which posts are great and which ones weren’t so great. That’s normal. Not all of them are going to be a hit. But when you’re just posting quantity, you can’t even go back and look at like, what posts perform better because they’re all kind of like meh, you know? So there’s a lot of beliefs, uh belief systems and mindsets that that is a big play here. I, I think if you, when we talk about publish, if you think like a publisher, um, well, Eric must not like that last statement, he’ll be there. He’ll be back, but you know when you think about you know, publish, and if you think like a publisher in my background, I started out truly in publishing companies, you know, what it was all about and you mentioned this earlier, Mandy, about having a calendar and a schedule and a process, you know. So, sometimes you can get quantity I think. But, and quality just purely by planning for it and having that consistency, that that will you know, people underestimate it, if you, you know, if you have a methodology like a publisher, um, you know, you can, I think you can accomplish a little bit of both.

43:40

Yeah, no, I do too. And it’s all about just having that structure right, and so um, one thing I do, here’s a tip for everyone, is, I keep a Google doc in my bookmarks on my chrome browser and it just says content ideas. And literally throughout the day, even if I’m not in front of my computer and I’m like out on a walk or something, and I think of an idea or I see something and it sparks inspiration, I’ll go and I will drop that down right. So throughout the day as I am browsing LinkedIn, as I’m just working and things come up, if if it you know, if I’m consciously aware of, okay Mandy, you have to create content every Sunday, like Sunday’s when I create my content for myself. On Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So every Sunday I go and write content and I keep this document going of all these ideas and that way I never run out of ideas because we’re bombarded with information all the time and conversations we’re having. And there’s so many great things that we can talk about and things that like you know, oh that’s a good idea right? This aha, oo I could write about that and if we’re just writing them down it makes creating content so much easier, so much easier. And then you guys can use that save feature on LinkedIn, so if you’re browsing uh, LinkedIn and you see posts that you like, that maybe you could reference and use as inspiration to create your own posts, you just click that three dots in the right hand corner and there’s a drop down and you can save it and then you can go back and you can look at all your saved posts on LinkedIn from other people. And then, voila, that’ll give you content ideas too.

45:00

So it’s just being aware of everything that you’re, you know, absorbing in your brain and what you’re seeing on a daily basis and being aware of hey, I can use that as a reference or I could use that to help me write content. And that goes a long way too, so you, so you’re not just like, oh gosh, whatever day you choose it, oh it’s Sunday night, I have nothing to write about like what am I gunna go and you freak out and you spend hours upon hours like, overthinking it. Whereas, if you could just reference this document, even mine is messy, it doesn’t have to be super organized. But the process of writing is organized, but my thoughts are not, you know, and so it’s just having a process that works for. you guys. But I think something like that where you can kind of like brain dump if you will, when you have ideas or when you see things, it really does help because then you have endless content and just like Todd said, you can create lots of quality content if you have a system and a process. But if you don’t have the time yet, just start with one a week even, right? Just one quality, you know, piece of content a week and then you can ramp up from there once you get more comfortable with the process.

45:59

Yeah, and I just got a text from Eric, he said how’s that for real, he just felt you know, the money fell off, this fell off the webinar so that’s a webinar. We’ll hopefully have him back soon but um, we are coming close to the end and I definitely want to get to some of our questions since we have some really great questions in the chat box.

46:20

Really quick, um, Mandy, would you just kind of give us a, uh, I mean, we had a little overview of the personal profile versus company page earlier, but give us some more tips on this.

46:29

Yeah, so, real quick guys, uh, LinkedIn gives you 100 invites a month. I don’t know if you new this. So if you go to your LinkedIn company page and you click admin tools, there’s a little drop down and then you can click “invite people”. So there’s like an option under admin tools to invite people to your company page to like your company page, and you can do that 100 times a month. As in, you can invite 100 people a month to do that and you can just go through and select or you can type who you want to invite so. I highly recommend doing that. It’s a great way to build your company page – followers. Speaking of – it’s pointless to have followers if you don’t post content. So two ways on how you can leverage content that you’re already posting for your personal page. One is to just share it. So, instantly when you write the content for yourself on your personal page, you can share it on your company page or the second thing is you can repost it another date and maybe slightly tweak it. So take the same content you posted on Monday, let’s say, on Tuesday or even Thursday, you posted on your company page, and just maybe change a few words to match the company voice etc. right? So those are two ways and then I already talked about why every business needs a company page. Just because it looks uh, amateur, if it shows up with a little grey box on your profile, when in reality, you have a legit company and if you just haven’t created a company page, it goes a long way. Because then, it’s going to show your logo on your profile.

47:45

Yes, definitely. I just want to pop in and say that at SharpSpring Ads we’ve done that trick – the inviting people – 100 invites a month. We do that, um, that definitely works, so that is an awesome tip Mandy.

47:57

So, Todd. Here’s we’re gunna have some more um, research from Todd basically about LinkedIn engagement.

48:06

Yeah, I mean, this just kind of shows you know, why people engage what type of content. So it’s pretty self-explanatory, but I mean, that aspect of educational relevance, you know, staying on top of the trend inspiration. And I would say, you know, I guess my takeaway from this would be one of the things is, you know, you have to know your audience, right. So you have to know what’s of interest to them to engage them. So you have to know you can’t have, you can have educational material. But if it’s not educational material, is of interest to them, you know, it’s not going to help you with the engagement of those people. but you know, again, this is like really taking the time to know your audience. And then. you can transfer that into content that engages them.

48:56

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. That the skill development is such a lower percentage of the amount of engagement than the educational or relevancy because it, and when I started on LinkedIn just out of college, skill development and professional development was everything and that was all that I cared about. But kind of as it evolved, it’s kind of grown into something more than that, I think.

49:18

No, it is interesting. My guess is though, that this is just a hypothesis, I don’t know if a whole lot of people and companies do a whole lot of content around skill development. That might be, you know, that’s an opportunity for you to actually focus on that.

49:41

I know. That’s very very true. That’s a very good point Todd. And then we have the topics because that’s the other side of this right? What topics drive engagement and you know, I think about this all the time from the standpoint of you know, what can we put out there that’s what I mean. We’re a research firm, so we have that advantage of always putting out like new research you know, and things like that. So industry news, tips, that’s why, you know Mandy, after you do a great job, just from that aspect of putting out quality tips for people, you know, if they see it and they use it they’re going to follow you, right? So jobs and skills leadership and he says I think, all these things are, you know, just industry events. I think also when you can tie other things into industry events, not just like posting that this even is going on, but maybe posting that event, and you know, if you have something special going on during that event you know, sharing that and just being helpful. So yeah, all of this stuff, you could just think about. Like, to me, these are like research. Like this is just you know, a thinking tool. So think about, like okay, what I see here and what applies to me, what applies to my business, and it just kind of tests, I mean like, Mandy said you know, put something out and you see how many people engaged and you kind of learn and adapt as you go along.

51:08

And you can blend these right? So I blend like, trend slash news with tips right? So I’m like hey, LinkedIn just rolled out this new x, y, and z, here’s how to take advantage of it. So for example, I didn’t talk about this and we could talk all day long about LinkedIn tups by the way. But you all can connect with me on LinkedIn if you want more. So there’s a feature that they rolled out a few months ago where you can pronounce your name, right, you can go on the mobile version and it’ll let you print – it’s for pronunciation, but we, us marketers use it for an introduction right, and it’s so genius because a human element again, and you go and you’re like hey, this is Mandy McEwen, thanks for browsing my profile, if there’s anything here to help you, let me know, thanks. Like that’s what mine is right. It can be so simple. Other people do something more specific, like if you want help with your LinkedIn, let me know. But it’s just one simple way that you can add that human approach. And so I know you shared this on one of my LinkedIn Lives, and shared it again and again, and so I like blending a few of these. I mean, what Todd has here on the screen, you guys can get creative and blend several of these together and then like, just said just test and see what happens right?

52:09

Yeah, we do that for example. Like on research, you know, we show the research, maybe we ask a question you know, does this connect with what you’re seeing, you know, to find you, to find out, you know, um, you know if what they see in the research connects with what they experience in their company. Or you can also say, okay here’s some challenges that marketers are having, and here are some tips on how to overcome those challenges. So like, there’s like you said, blending it and kind of combining in getting you know, it kind of goes back to like maximizing the value of like a high quality content piece. So you know, you spend a lot of time, maybe to do you know, like for us like a research report or a case study or something like that. Well then, you want to really find like how many different ways can I use it, and it’s not like a one and done.

52:57

Oh you know, I shared that case study, now let’s go on to the next thing. No there’s probably 40, 50 things you can do around that if you just sit down and kind of become more strategic about it.

53:08

Totally, yeah. And it’s just taking that extra time that people just, they’re so busy they’re not willing to do. But when you take that little bit of extra time to do that, and to spin off different ways of sharing that research report like you mentioned. It’s going to pay off ten fold. If you want to do it so that little bit of time, that 15 minutes or 20 minutes that you took coming up with those ideas, it’s going to pay off. Like you can’t compare it to where if you were just well, you spent all this money on this routine, you shared it once, now what?

53:36

Moving on. Well that’s kind of a waste of your resources right? Where you can spend a little bit more time to get creative and then you can be posting about it for months with all sorts of different content that people are engaging with. So that’s a good point. Well that’s very very true. Those are all great tips. We’re just going to give a little shout out to Mandy’s checklist here. This is Mod Girl marketing’s ultimate LinkedIn profile checklist. So if this is something you guys are interested i, the link is in the chat on the bottom right and you can go check out her website. So if you have questions, continue to send them in. If anything that we just said has sparked your interest, leave us a comment, but we do have some questions already. So Todd and Mandy, I’m going to read off a couple of these. One of them is so some of these we have gotten before the webinar, and one is specifically about how to build and maintain strong relationships with your network when you do have a busy schedule that doesn’t allow for constant LinkedIn engagements.

54:32

I think that’s definitely probably an issue that a lot of people are running into, is just the time crunch. So what kind of what time-saving tips would you have for them? So we all have 24 hours in a day, right? We’re all super busy. It’s where we spend out time and prioritizing and Todd and I both mentioned this. It’s the putting stuff on your calendar and making you do it right so if you’re structured and you know, let’s say you only have an hour a week to do this on LinkedIn, well then when is that going to work for you on your calendar. Is, you know, Monday Tuesday Wednesday mornings for 30 minutes, is that good? Well then put it on. your to do list on your calendar. Like, you have to be structured at doing this and it’s all about prioritizing right? And so, if you have a plan, if you have a structure, it’s going to go so much faster. So, if you don’t have a plan right now, step one is to go and write down what you need to be doing. So I need to be following these hashtags. Go follow the hashtags. I need to make sure I’m following the right industry influencers, right? Go do that, right, and then come up with a plan of action, then try to execute that plan of action. But if you’re just like, I don’t have enough time to do then nothing’s really going to get done and you’re still going to be spinning your wheels. You have to make yourself do these things and the easiest way for me to make myself do something if I have it on my to-do list and on my calendar right? Time blocking or whatever works for you, everyone’s different. But just write it down, you know, whatever you got to do to make yourself do that. That’s my tip Todd. What about you?

55:51

Yeah I mean, I think you kind of mentioned this before, but like I always like to have some sort of way to keep little, jot little notes down so that when I do go and spend that time, like I have you know, ideas, and you know, thoughts already kind of you, wherever they came, and we’re inspired by, I have them here and I’m starting not from a black, uh, blank, you know sheet of paper so to speak. But you know, I have some things already baked in, and uh kind of go from there and I think, and many people reply should connect with you because I think there’s also just some general tools you can use to help kind of, like you said, you can do your writing and then have it go out over the course of the week and things of that nature exactly. And I talk a lot about those types of things on my weekly LinkedIn livestream every Thursday so you can connect with me, and I can help you out with whatever you need on LinkedIn. But yeah, make just, and again, going back to the question keeping in touch with people so let’s say once a month, spend an hour and go and just ask how people are doing so people that. you connected with and maybe not everyone but maybe someone you had a conversation with it could have even been a prospective lead or a prosperous program, spend a little bit of time even if just once a month, put it on your calendar and go and just check in with people. Hey, first name, you know, I haven’t talked to you in a couple, we just want to see how are things going, how’s business going, I mean. Something as simple as that can go a long way so you have to make an effort to block out, you know, times to do all those things – not just posting content, not just engaging – it’s also keeping in touch with people via LinkedIn. Because that alone goes a long way, because a lot of people are just connecting, connecting, connecting, accepting, and then they never talk to them again. You know, which is kind of pointless. So you want to make sure that. you’re keeping in touch with those relevant connections as well. And just a simple, Hey Todd, how are things going since we last chatted, that’s all it takes. It’s so simple yet it takes a little bit of time that people are just not willing to do. And so for the people that are willing to do that, it goes a long way right and you know, one I guess final thing too. I mean, LinkedIn does make it kind of easy because you know you have your notifications, and you can see, for example, when people you. know got a new job, and I never just say congrats, you know. I mean, it’s worth you know, actually sending them a message and you know having a few words for them. But you know, you have all those notifications and that’s like, I’ll try to go through that and just look and see. So they kind of prep some things for you, you can get a lot of ideas there, and but just don’t take the easy way out I would say right?

58:21

No, those are both great tips. I know that we’re almost out of time. I do want to take one more question. This is a good one from Terry who’s listening still. So he has been posting content, but does not seem to reach his target audience. So, we’ve kind of talked about how to build your audience, how to gain engagement, but what if the people that you’re reaching are not your target audience. What, in that case, would you suggest?

58:48

So I would focus on growing your target audience, right? So focus on adding connections that are in your target audience for one. So a lot of people will come to me at the same thing and they’re like, I’m posting all this content and posting this content and not getting the results I want. I’m like well, how often are you building relationships and adding new connections? And they’re like, oh probably not as much as I should be. Well are you going to answer the question. They’re not. So they don’t answer the question, right? The answer is, they’re not building connections. So if you are awesome, continue doing that. But keep building connections with people in your target audience. And then the second thing is, this is popular right now too, is you get people together – we do this at Mod Girl with people that like-minded people that are posting content and you guys can help each other out. And it’s kind of like engagement groups, right? So if Todd and I are posting on a consistent basis, we might get together with, you know, five or ten other people that are posting content and consistent basis. And we help each other out and we have messages and threats or whatever we use to communicate and we share each other’s content. You know, with Okay I just posted this awesome thing, and you like and you comment and it’s so, it’s kind of like the, you know, you have my, if you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours type of thing. And that’s a way to get engagements. And even though it might not be people on your target audience, it’s going to help with the algorithms right. And so, it’s just a way for you to get your posts to show higher up in the feed by having people that you know and you like that are also posting content. Like and comment on your stuff and then you do the same for them right? But the only way to get targeted people in your industry to your content is to add more of them to your audience. And then also, engage with more people in that target audience, right? So make it a point like we talked about every single week to go and engage on people’s posts that are in that target audience. And you’re naturally going to get people requesting to connect with you because they’re going to see your comments on those industry posts.

60:33

Yep, as I said, be laser focuses and if you find the right people that are in your audience and they have influence and you can just spend the time. once you get engagement with them, then you get their audience and that’s how you build it. So I mean, we do that. For example, it’s a little bit, not in LinkedIn, but like for media coverage of research, we know if we get one or two of the big players to cover our research, a lot of other people will cover it right? So we spend a lot more time trying to engage those one or two large media companies knowing that once we get them, all the other players will see it right? So you have to be very strategic in what you do.

61:19

Yeah I would, if you’re not spending time right now on the engagement, adding new connection piece, I would cut back on your content and take a chunk of that time that you’re spending on your content if you don’t have more time to spend, and put those efforts toward engagement and connecting with those targeted people that Todd’s talking about. Because that honestly goes so far, and I feel like for people that don’t have big audiences already, that is almost more important than posting content to be honest. I mean, They’re pretty close, but I mean, you want people to see it right. Like you guys want people to see. your content and you want targeted people to see it. So if you’re not building those relationships, you’re not engaging with people in that community, in that industry. The same people are going to see your content over and over again, which is kind of, you know, not the greatest for you right? And then the spirit of quality of our quantity if it’s not the right kind of content, then it’s the wrong quality, right? And that’s a whole other topic right? We’re just assuming that your content’s quality.

62:11

Well so we do have quite a few questions, but we are unfortunately out of time for today and everyone’s time is valuable like we’ve talked about. So we’re gunna close here, but we will send out our follow-up email with the recording. So we will either do a follow-up video or we will send out some answers to these questions in that email. So just be looking for that tomorrow in the morning. And I just want to thank you Mandy, thank you Todd for jumping on behalf of Eric, thank you for everybody who’s listening and who attended today. Eric had some internet issues, but he is awesome. He’s glad that you guys joined and if he had been here I’m sure he would have some more answers for these questions as well. So just look out for that follow-up email and thank you guys. I had a great time. Alright, thank you, appreciate it!

00:04

Hi everybody, welcome and thanks for joining us today for our Seven Targeting Best Practices That You Can Implement Today. I’m Kathleen from the marketing team here at SharpSpring Ads and we’re just seeing some people signing on still, so we’re gunna give it a second and then we’ll go ahead and get started. Alrighty well, welcome again to everybody who’s just joining us. I’m Kathleen from the SharpSpring Ads team and thanks for joining us today. Before we begin I’m going to introduce our speakers for today. So first we have Eric Stockton. He’s our general manager here at SharpSpring Ads and Eric’s done quite a bit of other work in other businesses building their sales teams and a lot of experience in publishing and online media. And next up we have Jalali Hartman, he is our AI lab director here at SharpSpring Ads, but he’s also the founder of Roboto. So he is very experienced in the field of innovation and new technology. And he is a great asset to us here at SharpSpring Ads. So we’re excited to have him on today. And then last but not least, we have Todd Lebo, who’s the CEO of Ascend2, and he’s worked with Ascend2 for a couple different research projects so John is a great asset to our team as well. And he is super experienced in marketing technology firms and agencies drive demand to their products and services. So thank you all for being here with us. And without further ado we’re going to get started.

2:05

So our premise for today is the seven best things you can do for targeting, and I’m gunna hand this over to Eric to get us started on why retargeting is a must for all advertisers.

2:16

Thanks Kathleen. Yeah so we were sitting just to give you some premise behind this, we were sitting in a meeting working remotely like I’m sure everybody is, this is probably about two weeks ago, and we were looking through some of the questions from the previous webinar that we had done, and we were getting a lot of questions around topics that we felt like would form a good set of, these are your core principles that you want to apply for a successful advertising campaign. So we put seven, we selected seven of them. There are more, and if you actually, at the end of this webinar when you get the recording, and you also can have the slides, we’ll circulate those at the very end, we put together some bonus material for you with some extra tips and things that we couldn’t fir into the core content. So, but we’re going to start with a seven and then we can talk through some of those.

3:18

So we all sort of know that retargeting is the low-hanging fruit of advertising. It’s the most quality traffic. It is the highest performing in terms of click-through rate and allows you to be able to show your ads to visitors that have already experienced your brand, had come in contact and had a good experience with your products or services and more likely than not is going to be one of your most cost effective ways to drive conversions and leads. So what we really wanted to do is sort of start off with that and kind of walk people through what that looks like. And make sure you know, if I was probably, what we would have had here on the slide was a funnel graphic right, and in that funnel graphic if you think about retargeting and where it fits in the funnel, it fits at the very bottom of the funnel right? It is right there where your most qualified traffic is as they are coming to your site, and you know experiencing experience in your brand. So super targeted. And allows you to be able to drive higher ROIs than you typically would with other advertising methods. So that’s sort of point number one and then going into point number two, which is going to be, oh I think we’re having some technical difficulties here hang on just a second. I think we may have lost Kathleen. We did. But I’m sure we can check, you can keep going on. I’ll work on moving the slides for you. Yeah I appreciate that.

5:08

So I have a hard time throwing two things at one time so I’m just going to help you out. I really do, exactly right. So if I’m looking at number two, which we’ll get the slides to catch up with us, but it’s all around prospecting. There’s a sale if you’re in sales, there’s always that classic sales terminology, you’re saying it’s like always be closing. If you sort of translate that into advertising, it’s really always be prospecting. So what’s happening, especially in an environment like we’re in right now with Covid and you know, budgets have been rolled back in certain areas, what you have is a, and what we are seeing over you know, the last couple of months especially is people had pulled back their ad budgets back in March when things were very uncertain like most people did. And now what they’re seeing is the drying up of their funnel right? And where they pulled back and they’d stop bringing new blood into the pipeline. So really you know, even all, really especially in this kind of environment, not letting the funnel dry up, so always adding new prospects. Always bringing more people in at the top of the funnel. And we, I sort of just picked three methods, there are more than this, but just for the purposes of this discussion, I really just kind of looked at three of them, native ads which are within a particular publisher’s content. That is that floating ad that’s in the middle on the text side, what we call smart audience, which is augmented audience, that allows you to be able to find based on your site content, your domain. Allowing you to be able to focus on, or select an audience that matches both of those. And that is different than a lookalike audience. A lookalike audience applies machine learning and AI, you know Google, Facebook, SharpSpring Ads, we all have our own sort of flavors of that, where you know we will match based on, in some cases, tens of thousands, thousands of data points to be able to come up with your perfect prospect based on who has been converting historically.

7:44

And you know, we’ll talk a little bit more about this in some of the other slides but essentially giving you more, sort of the more data the better right? That’s how algorithms tend to work. If you feed them more, the better they get on the other end and maybe we’ll let Jalali talk a little bit about some of that. And then the third item, and by the way these are not actually necessarily in sequential order, we are picking these because they all sort of rise to the top. I would probably start with number one, but then subsequent to that, you can, based on your case, you’d find that there are certain tactics that are gunna work better than others. The third one that we are talking about is really, it’s more of a tactic or a strategy around sort of expectations, what, and the reason why we threw this in here to build this as one of our seven, is we know from experience working with you know, tens of thousands of these types of campaigns that performance advertising and retargeting is a subset of that, is really, it’s an iterative process right? You’re testing, you’re iterating and also the algorithms themselves, again Google’s, Facebook’s, ours, really need a lot of data in order to be able to learn quote-unquote, you know, based on click behavior, purchase behavior, purchase activity in order to optimize to the fullest extent. And typically what we advise is somewhere in the neighborhood of six to eight weeks of time where, and by the way this is completely a function of your traffic and clicks and conversions. So if you have a higher volume of clicks and conversions you know, the more you have the faster the algorithm can learn. And maybe you don’t need a full eight weeks and there, you know, but there are a vast majority of campaigns that are really sort of in that, a smaller subset of traffic. Especially things like startups, you know groups like that there are websites like that that don’t have tremendous amounts of traffic. So it takes a little bit longer to be able to gather that data, that click behavior and purchase behavior to be able to get the algorithm to learn. So it’s not a short-term thing. it can give you good results along the way. It’s not like you start at zero and you have to wait eight weeks and hope right? So there’s, you know, what you’ll see and if. you think about it in terms of like a graph, you know, what you’ll see is a chart that sort of works its way up and to the right. If you think about performance being the top right of the corner of the graph and that is sort of an expectation point, where I see mistakes in campaigns is really where we have an advertiser who is coming in and they’re saying hey, I really want to dial this in. I’m really excited you know, I’ve got this new product I’m ready to launch, you know, how fast can I turn this thing around and you can sort of pre-train the algorithm in some cases by getting the tag installed and having the algorithm learn and build your audience.

11:45

That’s one, you know, it’s one sort of piece of it, but when subsequent to that, it’s really the rest of it. So. you know, having that kind of, I think you can see my screen here is that right? Yes, we can. Yes you can great. So really you know, allowing people to be able to, I’m trying to talk and share screens and sorry I’m not very talented I guess in that front. But you know, allowing me, you can sort of pre-train it and get yourself in a position where up front the algorithm learns and then you can again, subsequent to that and allow you to be able to grab those clicks and purchase conversions in order to finish out. But it’s typically the 6-8 week mark and then you can see my next slide right, this is white lists, odds are we just see your desktop or it might still be Kathleen’s desktop. Yeah those of you just joining us, Kathleen’s in Gainsville, Florida. If you’ve ever been there in the summer, she was getting hit with a thunderstorm. She is, oh she’ll be back in a second. Yeah, so I’ll keep going and then again, what we can do is we can, well see Eric as you were saying, something that you were saying, something that really struck a cord with me as you’re getting the slides up you know, I just, you’re talking about kind of like testing up to those improved performances and I think there’s this element and actually Eric and I had worked together at a testing lab for many years in Jalali too, that’s how we first met each other. I think there’s this element of kind of having a DNA of testing that becomes part of what you do to you know, best practices kind of give you the starting point of you know, where do I start, where do I start at you know, what should I be, what are things that other marketers are doing successfully because that’s a great place to start. But then you’re just constantly having that DNA of testing to kind of get up to the point where you’re being successful. And I think as we talked about this topic, my background research and I was going through some of the research that we’ve conducted and seen on, you know, like why retargeting and I was just, if I could share a couple of those, you know, one is that we have found that 41% of marketers, 41% of the budget paid, ad budget that marketers have is going toward retargeting. So they’re kind of allocating and moving some of that you know, 41% of that budget to retargeting. And one of the reasons is because, and we’ll see some other stats of how successful it is, but I also think it, by getting a higher rate of return on your retargeting, it kind of helps your overall ROI of the program.

15:01

So yeah. It allows them to get a overall higher or ROI of the program invest more into keeping that top of the funnel working. So you know, that’s one of the stats that I looked at and you know, also the retargeting really addresses that 98% of people who come to your site but never make a purchase that first time. So they’re coming, you’re investing into making them come to your site whether it be paid media or SEO. Even like building content and having a magnet to draw people to your site. So you have all these people but 80-98% go somewhere else. And so this retargeting is kind of acknowledgement of, they have interest for some reason in you. They’ve come to you once but how can you keep re-engaging with them and so that’s really like some of the initial data that we had, that really kind of like reinforced kind of this best practices conversation today.

16:04

Yeah I think that 98% is such a big number and you know, it’s been passed around across the web in different research reports and I think it’s easy to overlook how powerful that number really is. We look at 98% and we see a it a lot, and it’s easy to miss that there’s a real frustration factor. I mean, I’ve, everybody on this call in some form or fashion has probably been running businesses or, you know, has been the person pulling, running the budget and the thing that as a business owner myself and in my past life, was always frustrating to me was, I would pour lots of money in the top of the funnel through PPC and other areas and then what would happen would be, I would get in a position where I would spend, I’m making this number up, but let’s say it’s a hundred thousand dollars a month, and PPC, and what you know, on the other end I’m getting maybe you know 2,000 conversions out of that or something. And that’s just always this constant like iterative process of ROI in the campaigns. And you know, if I had, if I flipped it a little bit and I said okay, well 2% of my people are conversion, 98% of them are leaving. Two percent of them are converting. if I got that to 3% it doesn’t seem like it’s a big number, but 3% goes from 2,000 sales to 3,000. That’s a huge number right? That’s the difference between me maybe breaking even on an ad campaign and making real money. And especially if I’m a small business owner right? So there’s lots of that kind of thing that you have in this kind of process where you want to see more of these little tweaks that you can make in order to get big gains and drive real revenue. So the fourth topic is really, your tactic, it’s really a white list, excuse me white lists, we like a lot because it allows you to be able to dial in your particular target focus right?

18:31

So where you’re in a particular campaign you’re running, that campaign you’re retargeting. But maybe you know, you only want to show up on certain publishers websites. There are certain platforms that allow you to do this. SharpSpring Ads one of them where you can basically dial in a certain audience that you want to target. You can also target certain, and pinpoint certain advertise, or publishers that you wanna show up on. I’m gunna use the New York Times as an example and maybe your type of product, your type of service, your, the ads that you are running would do, would succeed better click-through rates, conversion rates on different types of publishers, inventory, and not to get politically leaning one way or the other, but you know I kind of think about certain types of products are going to appeal to a particular audience and those audiences are all important.

19:43

So being able to take, let’s say it’s a conservative type of conservative learning type of product, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but you know, let’s say it is then maybe you know, that particular one is going to do better in more conservative type publishers that deal, that attract more conservative viewers and audiences. So those kinds of things I think are super important to be able to look at. And again, by the way it’s you know, you can target and white list audiences. So you know, there’s another scenario here that would be a good example. You know, people who visited your checkout page, and those are people that are higher qualified than people who just visited your homepage. And you know, people that make it all the way through out of product, or you know, or are looking at a particular service, getting all the way to the checkout page is an indicator of how qualified that individual is and how important or how valuable that person is to you. So having those kinds of little tweaks that you can make really does give you that campaign performance. And maybe does get you from 2% to 3% right? So those kinds of things are super important. Another one is that I’ll just kind of keep going real quick, is the use of creatives. And we’ve actually done a pretty extensive webinar on this I want to say about a month ago now, talking about how, and we had a campaign that we were running that we used as an example or for our case study and basically we had, we were able to, using multiple ad sizes, allowed us to be able to get better CPMs or better costs for certain types of ads. Maybe smaller ads were less expensive and that when you sort of looked at it in terms of your campaign, you look back at all, across all of the ad creatives that you were running the more expensive ones which would be like your leaderboard ads or you know, your less expensive ones that would be you know, smaller ones.

22:15

When you sort of average them all out, what you got was a 27, well let’s see what it was, I’m doing this from memory, I have to, want to go back and look at the number but the case study was, we were able to get an increase of around 30% more inventory or more reach more people you know that we can get in front of at a 27% or so cost decrease which is sort of counter-intuitive right? I mean you’re thinking about it. You’re saying okay, well I’m sending my ads out more to a larger audience, you would think that you know, it would cost. you more and really what was happening is the lower cost ads were actually driving down my overall spend so those kinds of again, little tweaks really are the difference between a successful campaign and maybe an unsuccessful campaign. Number six on our list is how you can target your prospect list with what we call dynamic email and basically what that is is if you have a CRM, let’s say you’re using something like Sharp Spring or you know, Clavio or Marketo or something like that, the CRM that holds all of your email data, you can actually integrate where SharpSpring Ads specifically will take that data and then match it up against the sort of the whole graph of cookie users that allows us to be able to create an audience around and serve ads against that particular group.

24:00

So a good example of this would be, let’s say it’s somebody who’s coming in and they are building an email list of people who have opted in for a particular newsletter. I’m making that up. So you have a list, and you know, maybe that list is around ten thousand people. We will actually take that list and actually in addition to your newsletters, your campaigns that you’re sending out through your service provider, you know, email to the inbox, we are able to come alongside that will ads across the web. So we actually were able to give you two or three, give your prospect or your customer, two difference views of the same type of content. So, you know, and maybe, and a good example of this would be, and maybe this is how you signed up for this webinar, we run our own ads for SharpSpring Ads, for our webinars. So you know, if you signed up for a webinar and you saw our ad that was across the web, and maybe you were on CNN.com and you were looking at the news and you saw our ad and clicked through on it, that might very well coincide with the exact same email that you got in your inbox from us earlier that day that says hey, we’ve got this webinar that’s on the seven best practices. And the power of being able to see it in multiple locations like that, it really reinforces your brand, reinforces the, you know, the offer that you were trying to get in front of your prospect. So super powerful option there as well.

25:50

And then number seven is really sort of a general principle that I think is super important. And this is where I think a lot of advertisers get frustrated, where you’ll see people on the back end of a campaign, say that are you k now, they are interested in a particular product or getting their product. Maybe they’re launching a new product line. Let’s just use that as an example. They launch a new product line and in that product line the, maybe you know it’s an audience size of around 2,000 people or something that, what happens is you know, if you only have an audience size of 2,000 people, you are very limited in the amount of ads or reach that you can get in front of these prospects, so. you can get in front of that particular prospect group and that’s super important. But then there’s also the power of being able to sort of expand that into a larger audience and if we think about that in terms of a Venn Diagram for example, the Venn Diagram you know, you got sort of picture two big circles and then there’s a sort of a circle within the circle. It’s sort of your sweet spot right. So super hyper focused targeting pinpointed targeting combined with the reach and the scale is what really gives you the balance of a successful campaign.

27:45

And that sort of also ties back to number, point number two that we were talking about when we were talking a little bit about prospecting and bringing people into the top of the funnel. So what’s happening is you know, that larger audience you know, may not have had an experience with. your brand yet, but combined with your higher performance or retargeting ads gives you sort of a blended rate of better ad performance and better overall campaign performance. So super valuable to be able to know how to dial both of those in. And if you think about them sort of like in terms of dials right on a dashboard or something you know, you’re tweaking one a little bit over here and you’re tweaking the other one over here. What you end up with is the proper balance of a successful campaign. So that was number, that was sort of the number seven. And I feel like I have been doing this immense amount of talking and there’s a ton of people on this webinar that have come in and are probably not seeing my slides. Again, please forgive us. What we’ll do is, we’ll actually give you the slides after the fact. Make sure that you have those in your hands as soon as we get done with this webinar, but because there are so many people on here, I really was interested in seeing if we could get some questions from people. And. you know, if I just looked here real quick, one of the questions that we got, and I’m gunna maybe defer to the panel a little bit on this. I’ll sort of play moderator and you know defer to some others.

29:42

So jalali and Todd, here’s a great question from Todd. He’s saying is there a minimum number of visitors per month on the website before retargeting really makes sense? And Todd looks like he works for a B2B small business market company. He’s got a little bit less then 6,000 or so visitors. Jalali you want to take that one?

30:15

Yes that’s a good question. So when we’re talking about targeting versus retargeting, just to define it, so the retargeting is we’re trying to identify who that person was and give them a message back. And I think we’re all familiar, a lot of you probably grew up doing email marketing right? So it’s kind of a similar thing, except in this case we know who they are because they’ve come to the website and we put a cookie on them right? That’s kind of how this platform works. So the question is, is there a minimum amount that makes sense? And the answer is absolutely not. In fact, I’ve, I did a campaign. The first day I launched it the person got a tag to a visitor remarketed to that visitor got a lead right? So it doesn’t have to be a large volume of people, it was just that that gentleman that the user thad seen the company before they came over they saw it again and again. And in fact, in the lead they commented, hey I just saw this on some website, like that’s amazing you guys were able to kind of do that. So you don’t need a large volume. However when you kind of zoom out and look at the math of what’s going on, you’re trying to serve ads to people that have already seen your site. So if you’re out there trying to serve ads and. you’ve only had 50 people see the site, there’s just a limited amount of times you can show them those 50 people that ad. So it makes a lot of sense to grow that audience either via your email list that you can then target to, or just let a lot of people see your site right? So put the pixel on your website, that’ll start day one kind of tracking, but no it’s just an incredibly effective way.

34:46

in fact, there’s this weird effect that we see where someone comes in, you could have a very small business, someone comes in but what happens is that users start seeing you on their favorite news sites right above like the featured news on like a Fox or a CNN or you know, it’s like they’re then, they go over to their Facebook, they see you there. Right. Wow, who is this company is just everywhere right? It’s amazing how they do that. And I think there’s something to be said to that. Especially when you’re small right? It’s like you want to be hitting those people through you’ve probably spent a ton to get that visitor initially right? So to be able to follow them around and again, this is not like tooting the SharpSpring Ads horn, it’s just in this day and age especially, it’s really important to just capitalize on those people that have already visited. You forget what you looked at, you’re like that happens to be a lot. It’s like you’re trying to remember this company and then you see the ad, so that’s a great question.

32:44

And if I could add a little bit more to that one. Of course I love stats and one stat here I have is B2B retargeting outperforms B2C retargeting by over 400% in conversions per impression. Which is pretty impressive right? So i think that kind of aligns. Generally what you’re talking about from the standpoint even if you have a smaller universe of potential, those people are probably also much more targeted right? So they you know, it’s a manufacturing company you know. And that person who came to your site is looking for a specific implementation, you know. They’re also very targeted. So once they go and leave, there’s a benefit of keeping engaged with them. And a much higher percentage of conversion opportunity, I would say the second point that I see from the research that we’ve done at Ascend2 is like, there’s this overall umbrella of strategy that you have to consider. So for example today, we’re talking about retargeting and paid media, but that also plays into SEO strategy and your content strategy. So you’re using your SEO and content strategy to attract people to your site. So you’re investing in that, but you’re also wanting to take some of that budget and invest in paid media.

34:14

I was just recently talking with a marketer and he was saying like, I’m trying to invest in SEO and my SEO and my content, the leadership team just says we’ll just do paid media. And I’m like, I need both but he’s trying to explain to them like I need both of them to maximize my program. So I think when you start thinking about your overall strategy and how retargeting fits in, it’s not just an isolated tactic. I think it’s kind of, is part of your overall plan. Yeah I think the balance that you achieve you know, by the right mix is super important right? I mean there isn’t, there’s sort of this, you know my mom always used to tell me everything in moderation right? And it’s sort of the same thing here right? There’s a moderate approach that gives your the right balance on the light, the right blend. So let’s see, let’s go through one more here. This is from Armin. He says, we work for a digital marketing agency. Serving customers is amongst others like banking insurance, medical, et cetra. And the question really is, you know, can a solution, I mean he specifically mentions SharpSpring Ads, you know in general, will retargeting work for things like programmatic display on behalf of your clients right? So you know, can you use something like PA for, to be able to serve ads to your clients.

36:12

And I guess I can take that one. But so yeah, I mean we do, we have lots of agencies that fit that exact same model and really, you know some of our more successful advertisers are agencies that are managing their clients budgets and so we will typically, I mean I can’t speak for other platforms or anything, but for PA we have the ability to be able to create sub-accounts. Each client gets their own account and also, their own login if you wanted to give that to your client so they can see their reporting, they can see their dashboard. We see a lot of people actually a lot of agencies really like that capability because they’re able to, like there’s this complete transparency right? When the client, and you as the agency you know, or the account manager are looking at the data together under the same, you know, the same roof and you’re seeing, and you’re sort of building a strategy around that there are other advantages as well. But you know, that’s one that comes to mind. You guys want to add anything to that?

37:34

Yeah so just, see you’ve been going through a lot of stuff here and some people have been coming on. Yeah this slide, so this is about targeting and specifically retargeting. And I think that the common thing that I keep seeing, especially any kind of size advertiser you’re trying to talk to, there’s so many different things you can be doing now. Like when I, for example, my granddad had a small insurance company. I remember him sitting and looking at his business cards and his rolodex and literally like handwriting little notes and sending desktop calendars at the end of the year. Like that was his retargeting. And that was pretty effective right? It’s like that person he met at a meet-up one morning. And he now sends him a little note and then we got into okay, well let’s get into this about our emails right here. I’ll build these email lists and get them. Then we got good at segmenting the email list and sending emails and now we’re in this age where literally you have to have data and machines and computers running and trying to figure out who came to your site. Who was this customer? What did they do? What was their interest level? You know, I don’t know about you, some of the people on the call, but deal with just massive amounts of customers and so trying to remember who did what and so you need this platform. You need a platform to kind of run it and I think it’s easy to get lost in. I need to have this Facebook thing, this Instagram thing, and all these difference things running. What you really need to do is drill down, okay, who are your segments?

39:01

They’re either not a customer yet or they are a customer. Or maybe they’re a certain type of customer. Then you need to break it down into okay, this person needs to see this message. This person needs to see that message. And really kind of start there before you go into channels and all the different tools that you need. Like what does that map look like? Who are these people? And I think Eric’s even doing a thing like down to the persona. Like who are they really? What do they, what are their needs you know? Like us, our small business customers need something much different than say, an agency. Some of you guys are probably agencies right? So you don’t always want to have the same message going everybody. But if you can get that kind of nailed and start to use automation and really dig into your analytics about who you’re looking at, who you’re talking to. I mean the difference is just tremendous. You know, I imagine like if my granddad had that kind of software back then he would have been growing a lot bigger. So it’s, it can be very overwhelming. It’s definitely not something you can do manually anymore you know. You have to have some kind of automation that does this, that sorts these people. But it can make a huge difference. Like it just, it really can. And it’s worth taking the time to drill down on who your segments are and what messages they need. Start with that and then kind of deploy the campaign.

40:22

Yeah, there’s a, and you say this a lot Jalali right? It’s not computers and algorithms and AI and machine learning you know off on its own and it’s just doing its thing. And it’s also not, you know, experts and gurus and specialties. We really as users of, and advertisers today have so much more power than we ever did in the past. Because you know, we can come in and we can manage our own campaigns right? And if we’re an agency we can manage campaigns for our clients in it like much more effectively and allows us to be able to grown our businesses, drive more leads, get more sales, than you know, we were able to do in the past. It’s just, it’s you know, it’s what’s the old adage. It’s you know, sort of like one plus one equals three you know? That example and it really is right? I mean you do have to have algorithms and machine learning and those kinds of things you can’t survive you know sort of in this day and age without that. But you also have to know which dials to turn and which things to be able to focus on and we spend lots and lots of hours with advertisers all the time you know, talking about you know, what their strategy is. How to make campaigns more effective, how do they improve those? And then we share a lot of that, a lot of those learnings actually on these webinars and in these little roundtable sessions that we do, you know, once every week or two. So you know, I think just pulling all of that together, it makes for a pretty exciting time right now.

42:30

I have another question actually from Christy. Maybe this will be the last question we do. There’s a ton of questions in here so what we may, what we might do is actually do another follow-up like FAQ session or something on Monday and you know, handle some of the other ones. But just for the sake of time right now, the last one is from Christy. She said how do you incorporate retargeting, specifically as a tactic into your overall campaign strategy. So that’s a good question. I have a couple of thoughts on that, but you know, toss it out to you guys. I mean, the absolute easiest way to do that is to install our pixel or a retargeting pixel from a competitor and just let the software start doing it. So all that means is basically you’re putting a little snippet of code on your website that allows another platform to track who that person is and serve them the appropriate ad. And so that’s as easy as it is to kind of get up and just copy and paste some code into your bottom here if you were trying to segment and do that yourself. You never could, but that’s really and I kind of feel like you should be doing that before you’re doing the other campaigns, just so that you start to build an audience right? Like even if you’re not actively spending a ton in retargeting, you should still be tracking and segmenting and organizing those visitors the same way you would an email list.

44:07

Honestly yes, people that came to certain sections of your site, they made, that’s incredibly valuable data to have and the ability to go back and then say, okay, and we do a lot of that. Like, let’s build up and build up a bunch of people then let’s hit them back with a certain ad of a certain type. Launch some product that maybe would be interesting to them. So yeah, it’s, it sounds overwhelming. It’s actually not hard to do at all. So I think if you already have a campaign and this you know Christy, I would say you have a, let’s say you’re running a PPC campaign and an email campaign, and you’ve got some other things going, PR or something, that’s driving a reasonable amount of traffic to your website, this is one of those things where it’s not an either or proposition. And I think you posed the question right. You said, how do you incorporate it right? So how do you feather that in? How do you bring it alongside of your existing campaign strategy? All retargeting does is makes it every other form of your advertising better. That’s really what it boils down to. So if you, on a very practical level, you take an audience that you were building up, that you’re able to come in and you’re able to target, you’re bringing lots of people in the top of the funnel let’s say with your PPC or your email campaigns, what we are able to do in a platform like SharpSpring Ads for example, would you be able to bring those people back at a much lower cost?

45:55

So right now, if you’re paying three dollars a click, I’m making that number up, but let’s say you’re paying three dollars a click for your particular ad campaign, you’re paying a fraction of that in retargeting and if you think about it, it’s even more qualified than the original. Well it’s as qualified as the original click, you’re just paying a fraction of the original click price. So that user cost you, or that visitor cost you three dollars the first time, and it costs you, again pennies compared to that to bring them back. So that’s sort of the power of it. So when you’re talking about, how do you incorporate it on a practical level, it’s super simple just to install the tag and start building that audience. And then layering in that more effective advertising that makes the rest of your overall campaigns just work better. So, and it doesn’t have to be a large budget. I think that’s an important component too. Like you can start small and build as you get results.

47:10

Yeah I mean, actually that’s what we recommend is you know, we all come from testing and experiment backgrounds right? So one of the things that you want to do is come in and look at these campaigns holistically and sort of walk before you run right? You set up your campaign, you get, especially if you don’t have experience with it, or you know, it’s a brand new campaign you know. You start small, your budget doesn’t have to be massive and what you do is as you get data and as you get success you start building that up and ratcheting things up and it’s sort of a function of the amount of traffic that you run through to your website on how fast you can scale up. So but yeah, good points. And again I think maybe what we’ll do is a follow up series you know, 10-15 minutes where we answer some of the rest of these questions because there’s a bunch of them here. But I think we’ll kind of move on. This is is more Jalali’s area so I’ll let him talk real quick about kind of what we’re doing. Jalali do you want to talk about this?

48:26

Yeah so this is actually a lot simpler than it sounds. So I’ve been working on a, I guess a program that within SharpSpring Ads where we can apply actually very advanced technology, put very high level experts kind of on advertising data to do one thing and that’s just drive more conversions. So I don’t want you guys, but I do try a lot of marketing stuff. I try a lot of programs, I spend a lot of advertising dollars through this lab in different places. And at the end of the day all I want is really a sale or a lead. Like I’m interested in the tactic behind it, whether it was retargeting prospecting social media SEO, but the other day I just want to see, I spent some money and on the other end I got results and that’s what this, the AI lab is at SharpSpring Ads. So not something we charge for, it is unless something that is invite only in terms of you have to have certain things in place, conversations happening, an understanding of your basic funnel. So you understand kind of what’s going on now and then the ability to drive some conversions. So there’s no budget limit or anything like that. But we do need to kind of have data coming out of it and what we do is just work alongside you to just optimize. So you set up the campaigns normally, but then we kind of come alongside and say okay, well how can we get more gains out of this.

49:47

If you have a ten dollar per lead goal, what do you really care when it comes from and kind of how it works and that’s kind of the goal. So we’re going to take our platform that we understand intimately, we’re going to take a whole bunch of data from other campaigns and other kind of sources and just help you to do more with it. So it’s a good opportunity, especially going into the e-commerce season here if some of you guys are e-commerce folks. Eric share an amazing thing and I was trying to find it but it was the amount that e-commerce has grown during the pandemic. It was ten years worth of growth in one year or something like that. It’s incredible. Three months. So yeah, so there’s a lot of bad and there’s a lot of scary stuff and somebody, the other one thing that is clear, online is not going away. In fact, it’s even more important so as you guys are getting ready kind of closing out the summer here, definitely if you have clients or you have yourself, like maybe a funnel that is working or could scale or where you just need to maybe get a little bit more fruit out of it. That’s kind of where we can help and so how do they actually fund out more of that about that Eric on this?

51:01

We’ll be sending a follow-up email. We also have the address AI@perfectaudience.com if you want more from, but yeah just a great program Eric’s extending, giving us some ad budget to work with, to get people up and going, team of experts that will just take your campaigns and really try to get them tuned here going into the fourth quarter. Yeah, and that’s actually interesting like that’s, it’s good for brands and agencies alike right? Yeah. In fact it doesn’t matter if you’re directly around the campaign that’s great. If you’re an agency even better. We can take some of your top customers and apply some of this stuff and really get going. And I can tell you it’s the future. You need this type of engine kind of running against your campaigns. So take advantage of it.

51:57

Yup. And on the other, just sort of a bit of like shameless promo here. Frankly we, one of the reasons why we do this is because we find that a lot of people just you know, they’re excited about getting started and where they fall short is like, just creating their first set of ads and so you know, they’ll come in and you know, they’ll sign up for an account and then they’ll sort of get stuck in how do I get the right ad? How do I get the right branding in my ad and my color schemes and it’s you know, if you don’t have a designer on staff it can be kind of a hassle. And it just sort of takes the wind out of your sails. And everybody that we talk to is super excited about being able to do something after they hear like, oh wow, that’s exactly what I need and I need to you know, so you need to sort of dive into that. And then I talked to him like a week later and it’s like yeah, I really want to do it but I’m using Fiverr to get my ad guy to help me get my creatives built and they’re having all sorts of trouble around that or they just don’t come back right or whatever. So what we’re doing is just a free ad set offer. This is for the first 20 advertisers that launch a campaign with SharpSpring Ads this month.

53:23

And so what we’ll do is we’ll build a whole set of creatives around that and you know, allows you to be able to work with our experts who know how to optimize for things like click-through rate and make ads really pop and work and allows us to be able to build those for you and so the way you can do that is you can just go to perfectaudience.com/match and that allows you to be able to apply to do that. Or you can email in at ads@sharpspring.com. We can actually help you there too. But the first 20 advertisers that launch a campaign, kind of sort of limit it because we don’t have infinite amounts of design help and frankly, I might, i sort of like, we dropped this in last minute, we might freak out a couple of our internal designers. Let’s see we’re doing this. But we’ve got some really talented people on staff and we can help you out with that. Design sets, we offered this I think two weeks ago. Yeah just some of the banner sets that come out of it, it’s great. Like that’s a really good resource.

54:35

That’s awesome yeah. Makes the difference yeah. And then so follow-up, we as I was saying earlier, we do these once every week or two, there’s certainly no shortage of topics and things that we can cover, that we can go through. But the next one is some, I don’t know when we were talking about this, maybe a week or so ago, we were talking about like what’s the next sort of topic that people are writing in about, having questions about. And typically and some of the questions that jus came in you know during this particular webinar are actually, for it can be answered by this one that we’re doing in two weeks on August 20th. We titled it How to Stop Killing You Campaign. So a lot of times what will happen is we’ll find people that are just super excited and they try to do too much at once. And they’ll just try to turn all the dials and knobs and flip all the switches and what ends up happening is the data gets really muddy and the algorithm doesn’t learn as quickly as it should. And maybe they’re trying to, like a good example this is, you’ve got three call to actions on the same landing page or you’re trying to sell too much in an ad and it just sort of diffuses or waters down your message and you get a really bad click-through rate. Things like that. So we’re going to talk a lot about those kinds of things.

56:14

Super exciting topic that we have a lot of fun with because we’re going to show you screenshots and examples and different types of websites that are in campaigns that are actually running and live where you can see what other people are doing and we can learn together with those things. So yeah August 20th, we do it at the same time every Thursday. Feel free to sign up for that. You can actually do that now so you don’t forget if you’re like me. I’m super busy, I’m going to hangup and I’m going to go and run off to 16 other things and I’ll forget. So you can do that by just going to perfectaudience.com/event and you’ll be able to register for the upcoming event. I think with that we’re going to close. Yep. Oh yeah, so these are the bonus things I was telling you about at the end. We’ll include these in the slide deck as we circulate it around. But there’s lots of different types of things, tips and tricks and things like that that we refer to that we couldn’t cover in in this particular hour that we were spending. But yeah, with that we’ll let everybody go. Thanks for joining us. Super appreciate spending the time. I know it’s valuable and we’ll see you next time.

00:04

Hi everybody and thank you for joining us today. I’m Kathleen Davis from the marketing team here at SharpSpring Ads and today we’re going to be discussing metrics that matter most in 2020. But before we get started I just want to remind everybody that we do a Q and A at the end of each webinar, so if you have questions now or throughout the presentation you can go ahead and type them in the chat box at the bottom right of the screen. And we’ll get to as many of those as we can at the end. But today I’m going to introduce our speakers. So first up we have Jalali Hartman from Roboto and he also serves as the AI lab director for us here at SharpSpring Ads. And next we have Eric Stockton, who’s our General Manager here at SharpSpring Ads. He’s known for growing businesses and sales organizations over the years and he’s also spoken at many events, marketing sherpa events, email summit, B2B Dimension Summit and others just like that. And then our guest for today who we are super excited to have joining us is Kathryn Hawkins from Eucalypt Media. We’ve been working with Eucalypt for a little bit now so thanks Kathryn for joining us today for having me. Awesome. So today before we get into talking about the metrics that matter, we wanted to start out with this question: what are your goals? Because before you decide what metrics you want to focus on, and this is the question you have to ask yourself, and your most valuable metrics are going to vary depending on what those goals might be. So Eric I’m going to let you jump into this a little bit but we wanted to just emphasize that you have to understand the why behind your goals before you’re able to before you’re able to create any kind of plan that’s going to work for your metrics.

02:05

Yeah I think that’s right. So the reason why we put this webinar together, and the topic I think is so important because we’ve had so many advertisers over the last several months ask us what should I be optimizing for, and then that question really can’t be answered. And I spin in like a vacuum. And in my experience over the years of just optimizing and working on my own campaigns or running teams that you have to take a step back and ask what’s the goal, what’s the strategy behind the tactics that you’re employing. So I’ve seen a good example would be, I’ve seen a lot of marketing managers step into a new role and they’ve inherited a series of channels that they are not charged with managing. And they get into it several months, and they’re managing KPIs that were handed down to them. But things go south or things aren’t working the way they should or they’re not hitting the numbers that they should be hitting. And what ends up happening is you realize that they’ve been taking these same numbers and the same approach and don’t have the underlying strategy that feeds into those channels because maybe those channels are changing or maybe they’ve shifted or maybe the goal isn’t the goal anymore. And so understanding the why behind the goal is really the whole crux of this webinar.

03:44

Yeah and just like Eric was just talking about, sometimes those goals shift as you go, as time changes, as your business evolves. So as you can see there’s the business life cycle graphic we have here and it kind of just shows how your focus will shift over time and why your metrics shift at the same time. Yeah and so yeah, so the metric that you’re optimizing for at the beginning, if you are just launching a new product, the KPI that you are focusing in on is going to be completely different than if you’re a more mature model. You have built out channels and you understand what the underlying drivers are for the business prior to handing them off to a sales team. if you’re in the B2B space or if you’re in e-commerce you know your metrics are going to be different because those individual channels have brought in more data and allowed you to be able to see what’s driving the revenue. And I think I would probably stress the communication between departments is key here if you’re in a management position. And especially if you’re something like in B2B, let’s say you’re in a management position, maybe you’re a director level or something, and you know half your job is really communicating from the finance side of things, what the CFO is looking for in those numbers, the cost drivers, communicating that correctly and then also on through to the sales team to make sure that the leads that you’re handing off are going full funnel and actually closing. So having the right expectations and setting that expectation across the whole life cycle is super important.

05:50

Right right. So with that we’re gunna jump into some of the research we’ve recently done on metrics and how people are using them today. And not that long ago in May we did some research and partnership with Ascend2 and during this research we sent out a survey and asked a group of marketers which metrics ere the most important for their businesses. So here on the slide you can see the result from that survey with ROI being the most popular, and then ROAs being second. But as you can see there’s also click through conversion, cost-per-click, etc. that marketers are using. This was interesting when I first saw this data come back. So there’s a couple things that stand out to me on it. One is the view through conversion. If you’re not familiar with that, is it means somebody saw the ad at some point in the cookie window over the last 90 days or whatever, and then purchased, actually came back as the lowest most meaningful to everybody. What’s interesting about that is when you look at advertising as a whole, that’s actually what you’re trying to do is drive as many touches that ultimately drive conversions. And so we kind of work backwards up from that right, it’s like how many people have seen this? How many people ultimately at some point end up buying. And as your spend gets bigger and bigger that becomes more and more important right? It’s like the big big advertisers, that’s really all they’re looking at is branding at that point. So I thought this was interesting also.

07:26

We were talking about the return on investment versus return on ad spend, I think you’re going to touch on that. The difference between those two is that the next one Kathleen, yes that’s right, so that’s like I think it’s a commonly confused kind of metric, but we’re going to drill into that. But yeah these are interesting and I think one thing, just from a data perspective that I see a lot is, we’re all, we and everybody on this call in the presenter panel anyways, we’re always trying to understand the metrics. Are they accurate? Are they what we’d expect? Can we present them properly because it can make a huge difference between something barely working, something making tons of profit, something losing you money, and so you have to get it right? And it’s very hard. Sometimes we don’t always have the info that we need. There’s a lot of different things you can be tracking, like in this chart like if you’re just looking at the click-through percentage that might not actually be resulting in conversions, which is what your end goal is. So you have to be kind of careful and make sure you’re not looking at false positives and so on. So there’s a lot to it, and in fact, that’s why we’re here. We deal with this all the time. We know our advertisers do as well, and we’re actually here to help you with that. So both on this webinar and actually just contacting us, so sorry go ahead. That was my little, no that’t great thanks Jalali.

08:48

Before we get into the difference between ROI and ROAs, we have some quotes from marketers from this survey and this one specifically is from Lauren Patrick, the VP of marketing at Cirricula. So this is kind of like her stance on why ROI is so important. So she says it’s definitely the most important metric for marketing leaders, especially at an early stage for technology startups in their growth stage. And this is kind of going back to what we mentioned at the beginning about how your metric focus might shift depending on where you’re at in the business model and so obviously for group people in the early stages, ROI is definitely super important. But yeah, establishing what that is and what that means because that is going, you know ROI is going to obviously for different types of companies going to be different things. So you know, establishing truly what the number is and what the metric is and why it’s important has to be at or near the top of the list when you’re first doing lots of things like market testing and channel testing, new channel testing, things like that. So yeah, in this marketer, I spoke with that Lauren and she also mentioned the cost of customer acquisition was, it was another important key point, just talking about how much did you invest initially to bring on a customer and what channel did they come through, just so you can really track what’s profitable, what’s getting a return for you, and understanding how you can optimize and make those shifts as needed.

10:24

So that was, I think an interesting point just to talk about in those early stages, yeah your focus is bringing people on and hopefully getting them to be long-term customers an interesting thing that we get when we’re talking to customers a lot is they’ll say, my budget is ten thousand dollars a month, let’s say, and so that’s fine. Like I totally understand. We all have budgets, but what it also tells us is that they’re not thinking about the full funnel, right? They don’t have an established acquisition cost like Kathryn was talking about. And their lifetime value, the customer, and they’re not comparing those two and what is the ROI. So you got into a mode of like, I spent $10,000 a month, and it’s really just because I don’t know if that $10,000 is working or not right? And that’s as far as I’m willing to go. And here I can test this. There’s people that spend half a million dollars in a day right? Because they figured out that it works and they figured out that they know if they spend this in 2.1 months, they’re going to get their money back and then they start making money or whatever that formula is. So that’s the goal I think as as advertising, we’re trying to get down to this formula of I know if I spend a dollar, I make two. And once you do that it’s really just a matter of scaling, like how can I find more volume and how can I optimize this. But it’s if you get that wrong from the beginning you get very confused about what your budget is, and what your capacity for growth is I think.

11:47

I think that’s right. Yeah and it can get away from you real quick. So I think that brings up the next slide. Right. That’s the difference between ROI and ROAS. Yeah so ROAS is sort of that leading indicator right, that helps you figure out on a bi-channel basis what’s happening with your individual campaigns. And those ROAS numbers drive the ROI, like the overall ROI of the marketing department or your marketing campaign if you’re an individual business owner or something running your own campaigns. So yeah, the ROIAS really is what kind of brings that front and center to you and establishing that by channel is super important because you might have really high quality leads in a particular channel and less quality leads but twice as many in another channel. But at the end it’s cheaper or less expensive right? And ROAS is better, but as you look at the sort of as all of the numbers roll up, what’s the overall ROI on the campaign? Because that’s all that really matters right at the end of the day, are these campaigns in aggregate really driving the business forward.

13:09

I saw a goos example of, sorry no you go ahead, I saw a good example that clarified this point for me, it was like, what the advertiser was an e-commerce advertiser, they were selling a pair of shorts and a pair of pants, so the roads on this campaign was positive, meaning they were making back in revenue what they were spending plus, but what the actually the pants had a higher cost, so it was not ROI right? So that would have given you kind of a false positive. I think the campaign’s working but then you run your numbers at the end of the month, you should have shifted that budget to the pants or to the shorts when you’re making more money. So I think when you get into e-commerce and grant where you’re very granular on each product has a certain profit margin, that becomes important when you’re trying to test a new channel. just say like, okay can I drive traffic profitably roughly, I think the ROAS is great because I think we have a quote about that where it just gives you a real high level indicator, does it work? We do which is right here. This is our next slide. So Kathryn, I don’t know if you want to give some background on this quote, this is from the CMO of Better Performance.

14:16

Yeah now, so this was one of the people I talked to, basically saying that if you are looking at the ROAS that sometimes you are being able to track like if an ad is doing what you need to do, it’s just a way to tell you that you’re not getting the results that you want, you need to touch your gears immediately and so that’s something that I think I feel like between ROI and realized it’s the ROI is very important but also less easy to access. I mean it’s something that sometimes there’s more comprehensive measurements that need to go into it. I mean so things like if you have, for instance hired an agency to develop an e-book or something for you, you might be paying like for or five thousand dollars for that and that’s something that you kind of need to calculate that into your bottom line. But that’s harder to kind of analyze on a day-to-day basis verses the of knowing okay this is how much you’re spending to get these results from this particular ad. So i mean I think it’s the sort of thing where the ROAS makes it, it’s I think it’s very important just because you are able to make those shifts immediately and understand like on a day-to-day level okay, this is where I can be shifting my budget accordingly.

15:40

That’s a great point. It’s from an automation standpoint, I can testify that some of these channels including ours to a degree from an advertiser, just like they’re using the ROAS because that’s the only number they have right? They don’t know what the profit on your product is, so the algorithms are going to optimize for what you’re saying the value of that sale is to you and so that’s one area where you have to be kind of cognizant of the two where you can make some big mistakes in terms of setting your targets and so on.

16:13

So we’re gunna go ahead and move on to the next one unless you wanted to talk about ROAS Eric. No I think absolutely. So kind of the next step in the process of figuring out how to look at your metrics is now that you set your goals, how do you reach them and I mean, that’s a pretty big question. It’s probably almost as big as the first question of what are your goals? So to help us answer that, we’ve got our next quote from Gabrieles from Charlotte AI, and he kind of is basically saying that once you’ve got that metric that you’re watching it’s going to tell you what to do with your ads, which ones to stop running, which ones to keep going and which ones to give another shot.

17:00

Yeah so we had Gaba on, I want to say like two weeks ago and he did a great job in the last webinar that we did, and he basically talked about different types of ad sizes and different types of campaigns and like on a tactical level, but really the whole message of the webinar was more about we, you want to test and you want to iterate and you want to do it very quickly so that you can learn what’s working, what’s not working, and dial in as fast and as efficiently as you can. So testing multiple combinations and have a lot of experience with that as marketers when we’re doing things, like AV split tests for landing pages right, and we do the same sorts of things with ads when you’re running an ad campaign. So there’s a lot of iterative process and a lot of multiple combinations that you’re testing to find that right one that’s the winner right. And so there are a number of metrics that we go through to be able to determine that, and you know maybe Jalali wants to talk real quick about that.

18:08

Yeah so I’m kind of geeky, I love looking at stuff like this because I’m looking for where the opportunity is, and I can attest Jalali is indeed I mean, it’s kind of fun, it is boring, and like you’ll scare people away at parties but I mean, most of my career has bested in dealing with numbers and looking at these numbers and trying to find money in the numbers right. And that’s, there is whether it’s, you’re building a product or a highway or an ad campaign, like you have to understand what’s going on. So when I look at this okay, what is it first? it’s like okay, I see they’ve made 4.3 times their money, that’s great. The conversions are great. I don’t know, I have no contacts right. It’s like is this good or bad. I don’t really know, I wouldn’t know what to do and how to optimize. i do know however that I’m paying for CPM right? So I’m paying for the impression whether I get a click or not. And so the first place that I start is, I want to get more clicks out of those impressions, I’m already paying for, if I’ve been paying for clicks I don’t care about the impressions, but let them run as many impressions as they want. I want clicks and kind of go down the funnel that way right? And then so once I get the clicks I say okay, and I can tell from that .109 that that’s low. Just because I have access to all the data about all the advertisers I know that’s low. So that’s an area where okay maybe I need to make a better ad, do better targeting. Like I’ve got to get more people responding to this and then I go down to the conversions. Okay well, conversions, I don’t see the conversion rate there. But that’s the next time I would look at you know. We know that we should be getting x percentage of the people buying if they’re not, then maybe we need to look at that landing page and look at that funnel before we go back and drive more impressions. So that’s kind of the system. And as you can see it gets very complicated fast.

19:48

And where the industry is going is just, no person could do this by themselves. That’s where the things like SharpSpring Ads platform comes in or automation right. So you need to be able to, these things, it’s live and there’s no way that you can manage it. You can however get really good at just setting your goal. Like we need to meet this one. We know that that [inaudible] needs to be above four. We know what the CPA needs to be, so this one is 1396. I know it needs to be at 10 or below right. So we have work to do. And those are just things that we’ve set based on the initial analysis. So we don’t have to keep coming back every time and say is this working or not. It can just quickly, it’s at 13, needs to be ten. Right right. So I think there’s something to just sort of, from a different perspective, is also how the machine learning works and how the AI piece of platforms work. So whether it’s SharpSpring Ads or Facebook or Google or what have you, the more data that you are able to put into the system and allowing to be able to learn the more effective it’s going to be, the better it’s going to perform. So over time what we’ll see are our, when you first set up your campaign it will, we’ll recommend this too, is we’ll say give the machine and it’s a function of how much data you’re putting into it right, the more data the better.

21:22

So as your audience builds we know more and more about who your perfect prospect is, your perfect customer is, and as the clicks come in, as the conversions happen, the algorithm knows that this is the kind of profile that somebody is going to match in order to be able to convert. And in the future the next customer or the next individual coming through. So there’s a time process that also comes into place too where the more data that we’re collecting the better the thing is and the better and the higher performance it is. That’s very true. So then here on our next slide we’ve kind of got some of the important things that you are going to need at your disposal to get the data that you need right. Like these having these things in your arsenal or in the platforms that you use are going to help you get the data, the correct data that you need and help you kind of see all the things you need to see. So on the right side here we have a screenshot of the PA dashboard or one of the PA dashboards, and you can see you’ve got clicks CTR, CPM, CPC, etc, all side by side and you can also kind of change these things around to be what you want to see on a daily basis. I think it helps to, it helps you to figure out which individual publishers, which one individual websites are performing better than others. And so I just realized I’ve seen this screenshot like probably four times now in the last day and I had, I did not realize that we also have a screenshot or there should be a screenshot that we should have put this that actually shows you by the publisher by the website what these metrics are right.

23:22

So if you know that the New York Times for example, let’s say your ad is showing up in the New York Times is outperforming Yahoo.com by 1.5:1, you are going to be able to see that in a more granular way right? And you’ll be able to do exclusions, maybe there’s further down the list maybe there’s a publisher that is showing your ad a lot and you’re paying for that. It’ll add a lot but it’s not producing any kind of real results for you over time right? And again I would stress over time because it has to have enough data going in and you have to give it enough time to be able to see whether or not that particular domain is or that particular publisher is going to perform. But you know over time after you have some data set you can look at and there’s enough data in there to see you should be able to start trimming back the less performing campaigns. Maybe doubling down on the ones that are performing better right, and that gives you the ability to tweak and measure and I think that’s sort of what the little bubble box to the left is right? It talks about the ability to sort of have both transparency and see what’s going on and it’s not a black box right? One of the things that frustrates me and I don’t mean, actually Jalali and I sort of complain about this a lot together is, I don’t like black box solutions that don’t tell me like what’s happening right, and I’m a little bit of a numbers nerd too right, so I’m going to look at these things and I’m going to say, if I’m just going to trust this thing to work and I’m going to trust the metrics, and I’m going to trust that this thing is happening and I’m going to have no way to see what’s driving those numbers, I get a little bit of anxiety around that and I want to be able to, you know at the ad creative level right, what is happening with my 300 by 300 ad verses my 970 by whatever right.

25:24

So I mean there’s a layer of transparency that I want to see and there’s also a layer of control that I want to have. I want to be able to turn the dials so that I know what’s going on and I can optimize the campaign as needed. And then I don’t know Jalali you want to talk about sort of the reach and the ad like sort of the ad channels and things like that.

25:51

Yeah sure, so Eric was talking about how he’s looking at different and he really is, he’s looking at different aspects of the funnels and trying to figure out where to make improvements and if you’ve ever seen one of these I get these all the time, like Facebook feeds and LinkedIn feeds where the guys talking to showing his garage full of Ferraris and he got this funnel scaled up to x right? And then now they have this profitable business and you’re thinking like how did they do that you know? it’s like I’ve been working on my e-commerce for years and like never gets that, and it’s all they’re doing is exactly what we’re talking about here’s my glory. Yeah yeah so it’s like Eric, he just came back from waxing all his Ferraris. No it’s like, it’s though they used that to try to sell you on their thing right? it’s like that’s kind of reverse thing but actually you can see it right here in the little boring chart. You get $1.67 on your biggest campaign, your biggest spend is your most expensive that may be good or maybe better but what if we move some of that spend down to one that’s only 21 cents right? And what if we then went and said okay well I’m going to change this hat to get this one that was at 0.2 to 0.35 against this volume right? And then you run into the situation where. you say well we’re probably maxing out like for example in this case what SharpSpring Ads can do for us, which is hard to do but let’s say you got Google or you got SharpSpring Ads totally working then you have to take that whole thing and move it over to the next channel and I think one of the big mistakes that I’ve made in my career, two of them, lots of them, but two of them that stand out, one is had a good business had a good value proposition had everything set up. Marketing was not correct right? So you think oh this business isn’t working like it’s just nobody wants it or it never makes money right?

27:27

No it’s just the funnel was wrong right. Like if I just spent time on fixing that, the other I think the other side of it is kind of just you start getting so overloaded with data and stats coming in and reports coming in you don’t know what to work on right? Like what’s the thing this week that you need to change in your business and that’s hard right? And I thin that’s where as we get into more of a modern age of where automation is kind of standard and business intelligence and AI is just kind of commonplace, it’s going to make our jobs more of just interpreting what’s coming in and making decisions based on that rather than trying to manually like figure all this stuff out and I think to a degree that’s kind of what perfect audience does for you. And I’m not trying to pitch this product or anything, it just takes multiple channels, these real time auctions where you’re bidding on placements in different places and retargeting to certain groups of people at certain times right? Like you could never do that by yourself. So it gives the people that are doing it a big advantage. And a lot of times you don’t realize that’s what’s going on right? It’s like you’ve over here like pushing buttons and pulling levers and nothing’s working. You gotta zoom out, slow it down, get a big picture, then really focus your brain, your marketing, on what’s important, creative and customer journey right. And even understand what your ROI is, what are your costs?

28:58

Like Kathryn was saying, it’s one thing this is like take this product costs out of the equation but then what are the costs your staff, what is the cost of this webinar for us to put this webinar and advertise this webinar. All that goes into our calcs. So yeah, there’s a lot of info and it can be very overwhelming. [Inaudible] and then find the people that can help you. That’s I think why we wanted to have, this is just you know, if you’re sitting there wondering like how do I scale what I’m doing never seems to make money or it’s always close, that’s a great reason to reach out to us. We’ll take a look at it for you and help you. Something too, I mean I just thought of is, there’s a, you talked a lot about like sort of the overwhelming numbers and data there is no shortage of data. You can go and look at Google Analytics and you can go and look in spreadsheets and charts and you’ve got a million data points coming at you. The making sense of which ones matter is really the most important thing and in my experience, just looking at these campaigns most often, and I’m gunna sort of, I’m gunna put a number on it I guess and I’m gunna say this is one of those situations where the Pereto rule or the 80/20 rule is really the most important thing that you could possibly have in your arsenal right? When you wake up in the morning and you sit down in front of your computer and you’re working through the problem and you’re trying to figure out how to drive more sales or more conversions or drive more leaves, how do I increase conversions rates, there’s all these numbers, what do I start on first? What’s the most important thing right? Understanding what the most important thing is and what you’ll find is it’s probably only three or four things right? So I’ve got, I don’t know I mean I’ve got 65 numbers in front of me every morning. Google Analytics has got more tabs than I can possible spend my time on right? PA does too for that matter. And so when I’m looking at it I’m saying what is the driver that I need to focus on today? That is going to give me what is the most leverage? What’s the biggest lever that I can pull today? And if I just focused on that one thing or, and again, and it’s usually, you guys can disagree with me if you want, but in my experience anyway, and maybe somebody needs to chat with me and yell at me, but my experience is like, it’s really kind of like three numbers, three, four, maybe four right, and those are the things that if I pay attention to those things, everything sort of clarifies and simplifies and all of a sudden you’re in a position where you’re making decisions that you feel good about when you go to sleep at night.

32:03

You turn your computer on right, that anxiety especially if you’re an entrepreneur I mean, I’ve been an entrepreneur in my life, I’ve been a director of marketing in my life, you know I’ve done these things and sort of being in your shoes you do have sort of again a level of doubt, sometimes about am I, like I’ve got all these meetings I’m doing all of these things but I am doing the right things and so the idea of having it all in one place is simple is sort of why PA or SharpSpring Ads was built, originally it was because the people that were running their campaigns were looking at these numbers, all of these different numbers and all of these different channels and trying to pull it all in under one roof. So it’s fun. I went to, years ago I went to a company called revival [inaudible] I think they got bought a long time ago, but I remember it was very simple. This huge warehouse, all these people working and went into the executive room they had on one wall they had customer acquisition costs for the day. On the other wall they had lifetime value, and that’s all they look at, that’s all the executives looked at. Like their marketing teams are digging in and doing stuff, but if that was above a certain level, they were good. If not, they all started fire drilling and stuff like that, and I think that was smart right? It gave those guys clarity to where they didn’t have to get into the weeds, they just knew it was working or not. And that was a good kind of calm that calmed everybody down. Yeah, because there’s a frenetic nature in marketing right? There’s, Kathleen will attest to this, there’s a million things that you can do and then there are the things that matter you know, and so if you sort of just focus on the things that matter, that have the highest leverage and just sort of got to put your focus on that and say okay, these other things are great and they’re important and we want to do these but we’re going to set them aside right? You know kind of Steven Covey right, that kind of approach. And that’s why I like to take an 80/20 hatchet to things and I say there’s, and I see really good market that’s sort of the difference. Really good entrepreneurs, really good marketers, that’s what they do is they just take relentless focus and they just take a hatchet to everything else, and they’re only focusing on those big big levers.

34:35

Yeah that’s right. I was going to say wait, I wouldn’t necessarily classify myself as a data or a numbers nerd, but I know that those are important and I’m thankful for people like Jalali and Eric so that they give me that clarity of what to go and do and what to go and focus on. Or else like they said, I would be losing my mind trying to do a million things because I don’t know which of them are actually driving the bottom line. So even I don’t know if, Kathryn you can attest, but I don’t know if you would call yourself a numbers nerd, but I’d definitely have a respect for that even if I’m not into that as much as Jalali and Eric.

35:12

Yeah no that’s definitely why it has to have a platform to kind of drill down for you and be able to locate the most useful analysis without kind of having to crunch everything yourself 100 times. Yeah that’s how I feel. So we do have a couple questions now. If you have questions and you haven’t sent them in, go ahead and send them in. We’ll try to get through some now and if there are too many to go through we will do a follow-up but. So our first question is from Brian Walters, and he’s asking, do you introduce third party data or demographics to help in your AI process? So Jalali as our Ai expert I’m going to hand this question to you.

35:57

Yes absolutely and I’d love to if you have some third-party data let’s just see what you’re talking about. Yeah so I just hit on the answer to that question is, Eric was kind of saying so AI is this kind of big buzz word that I get annoyed, I think these guys know I get annoyed when it gets used too often because it’s really nothing new right. It’s just this kind of analysis on a large scale and Eric kind of hit on a thing well, the only issue is that it doesn’t work unless you feed it data. In fact like a Tesla, tesla you could, I’ll use that example they have the by far the most mature self-driving platform just because it’s driven around the most right, and that gives them a huge advantage over everybody else whether you like the car or not. It’s just been on all the roads and then like most people drive the same places all the time. You get it learns real fast right. So to the degree we can train our stuff, our algorithms ahead of time to give you guys the best ads. Absolutely. In fact there’s a whole project going on right now with pre-trained audiences and people that we already know about and we know their behavior and we know they’re not robots just scamming people like we do a ton of that stuff and then wrapping other stuff to your question like demographics around that only helps make that better and make it work better. And it’s really like, I think in a few years we’ll be amazed that we ever did the kind of advertising we used to where you get a tiny tiny conversion rate or a tiny response rate because this stuff is getting better and better trained. So yeah, absolutely the more stuff you can throw in I think my only [inaudible] would be like, be careful you don’t make an already complicated problem more complicated right? And that does back to just what is it you’re trying to solve for goal wise. Maybe you don’t need to introduce a new demographic information yet because you’re still just trying to get funnel information, like how are people moving through the process. So but yeah, I’d love to see any stuff that people are working with or questions related to that.

37:56

Awesome yeah, so Brian if you have some follow-up to that. Definitely reach out to us and we will see what we can do but we have another question from Tracy Lynn. So Tracy if you’re on here, her question is, do you have any advice for a product that has a fairly long lead cycle? For example, higher education. Yeah that’s a good one. So long on sale cycles that have to mature and be nurtured over time, there’s a, so and jumping in completely blind feel free to maybe correct me if there’s comments and things that you wanna put into the end of the chat box there, but basically when I’m looking at something that has an extraordinary long, maturing lead cycle, you’re looking at coming in and optimizing around a particular lower commitment kind of offer right. So a good example is actually the webinar that maybe brought you in, or sorry the ads that brought you into this webinar so we have lots of ads that we’re running on our own behalf for SharpSpring Ads and we will have a soft offer that will come in and we’ll have you come in, click on a particular high performing ad, you will visit the site and then we’ll also launching retargeting ads in the event that you didn’t fill out the email capture that we asked you to fill out and bringing you back if. you did get to the landing page. And you’re looking at it, we’re giving you the information, but it’s a super super soft offer right? We’re not asking for credit cards or anything up front right? That’s not a hard offer. And then what we’re doing it we put you into a drip series. And a lot of higher education obviously is in this sort of bucket of types of advertisers where they have to, over time, like your email list honestly is the most valuable asset you have right. We talk a lot about that on webinars is the email list that you have, that’s like the one thing you really own right? You know you own that audience, that that email audience and you got to treat them like gold you know, and you have to develop relationships with them. So maybe you’re not hitting them with hard offers for your product every time but what you are doing is delivering content for them. You’re giving them access to case studies or ebooks, things like that sort of drive that conversation forwards when they are at that point where they’re making a decision.

40:50

And some of them will be and if you sort of view it like a funnel there are going to be people that are still further up into the buying decision phase that you are bringing to the further down into the funnel so that when they are making that decision they’re going to convert. So there’s email marketing, that’s why marketing automation is incredibly popular right now and allows you to be able to do a lot with a little right? So that you’re able to build email sequences and you’re able to do triggers based on behavior of what kind of landing pages they visited or what kind of actions they took and then also again sort of tying all of that back into some of your paid ad strategy too, so getting people to do that and then..it’s funny like marketing a lot of times you’ll see them stop right there at the conversion right, and then at the end like you go further right, you take that relationship further because then there are upsell opportunities across all opportunities, things like that that you’re able to send and you’re able to track. I mean we are in a time right now where we can track everything right? So the idea of being able to see where somebody is in the buyer journey is incredible valuable right? And allowing you to be able to very specifically target them with certain types of messages that they’re going to find useful at that particular time.. and again, you can actually overcomplicate it. You can get super complicated and you can have 55 different triggers and all these other kinds of things, but I would go back to what we just talked about a couple of minutes ago, focus on the three or four metrics that really are what’s driving each one of those sort of steps in the funnel and make sure you’re concentrating on those every day. Have a I want a post-it note or something or a dash that you just have on your screen as it’s, you know throughout the day so you’re paying attention to making sure that those things are top of time. But yeah great question, if there’s obviously more specific things you want to talk about I’m sure we can do that too.

43:05

Yeah definitely, just reach out. Same for Brian and everyone else who were going to go over their questions today. But we will go ahead and jump to, we’ll take two or more minutes and we have one from Felix and his question is, is there a particular kind of ad that will give you a better conversion rate whether that be video, interactive, or any other type or does it depend on the industry that you’re focusing in? Yeah I think that’s a good question. Yeah so generally I’d say, I hate answering these questions because it all just comes down to testing the two ads. Like every situation is going to be different, every channel is going to a have a different type of app that works better. Generally what we tell people to do in that scenario though is test four or five different types initially , get your best click-through and your best conversion and then run and scale a little bit with that one. So you’re not trying to continuously change your ads so you kind of have a general idea what’s going to work best. Anecdotally I just did an analysis on one of the bigger advertisers hands down across the board, animated ads work better than static ones. I can’t say whether that’s really going to work for everybody, but it kind of makes sense. The motion of it, the video ads are performing way differently, so you don’t get click-throughs on videos as much anyway in most scenarios so you kind of might think it’s not working but we’ve seen advertisers where the videos are actually their number one driver right? So you have to be a little bit careful but yeah we just test, like literally I think 20 plus years of doing this that’s the one things I come back with, I don’t know, like I’m probably going to be wrong, so we set up real structured testing and all this tuff we try to move through it quick, not get too carried away, but just like is this working, is this working, is this working, and then moving down through. Jalali’s extraordinarily humble.

45:03

Yeah so he, that is something that I think is true, through you know, we’ve done a series of live webinars over and they were live, they weren’t taped, recorded, not edited, nothing, and they were just live webinars where people would send in their ads and they would send in their landing pages and they’d say help me figure this out, like help me optimize this, and then we would go through live and take a pretty methodical approach at what works and what doesn’t work right? And then they would go and test it, they would come back with the results right and what would end up happening is you would find that what you thought was going to work really well ultimately flopped for one reason or another. Or over here on this side something that you tried, that you tested, and you dialed in really well, outperformed everything else two to one, right? So one of the, I totally agree with what Jalali said, everything’s about testing. Testing and iterating and doing it quickly. It is not a static, just you know pull an ad out and one ad and you put it up and you hope for the best. Those campaigns are not gunna work. In fact, we discourage it because we know if that is one thing for sure, that’s not gunna perform for you.

46:39

So I’ve seen that, like I’ve seen, I’ve gone where I’ve tested ad creative different types of offers, different types of copy, different design layouts, the whole bit. And you know, I could never beat the, I’d launch something and I’d have my control, and I couldn’t beat it. And like three months would go by, it might be iterating on the 40th times or something I couldn’t beat it in that 41st time was something that just absolutely destroyed that the first control. And in that methodical approach as you go through and you start honing in on who your audience is and what they’re responding to is really where the value is, and you can ask it’s like okay well, for the first 40 days or 40 creatives was that worth it? Well in that particular case based on the volume that we were doing at the time, that was another million, million and a half a year in revenue right? And so million, million three. And so that kind of deep devotion to testing and getting it right is super super important.

48:01

Wow that’s awesome. So we have kind of a similar question, I think this will be the last question we take for today, but this is from Lyrielle and she says, I’m sorry he or she says that my question is, what marketing campaign or marketing strategies are recommended for startup internet companies? So I’ve kind of asked a follow-up of what kind of internet companies are we talking about here? So literally if you have a little bit of background you can give us that but just in general I think we kind of touched on startups in our earlier talk about business models and stuff. So maybe you guys have some better insight about how to do the marketing strategies for startups. Personally I would say, focusing on content marketing is a really promising avenue for startups in particular just to be able to build the brand and be able to create an educational portal on your website and then obviously using ads to generate leads and drive traffic to those, to your content, build up your social channels.

49:11

Personally, yeah. That’s with all of the startup clients we work with, that’s where we tend to prioritize kind of building out who are the buyers, understanding buyer personas and then creating educational, useful content that’s designed to appeal to them and then using that as an avenue to generate impressions through advertising and then ultimately generate leads. I think that’s a good point. There’s, especially for startups that they’ve built a product, they have designed the product, they feel like they kind of know what the audience is, and you know who the customer is, and content marketing does help with that right? It helps as you figure, as you start educating people and you lay things out, it does help identify. Yeah that’s right, it helps you to identify and sort of hone in on what the, and who the prospect is that you’re targeting. I think there’s a combination of that plus, if I were starting a brand new company from scratch and I had no product, or sorry I had a product, I launched my product, it’s a software let’s say, it’s just a software as a service model, and I kind of, who I’m building this thing for right, I’ve got my engineering team and we’re building something and I have a pretty good idea of what that is, but when I start something I actually, what I try to do is I actually start with a PPC, and because it’s going to allow me to be able to see very quickly the drive traffic to my offer and find out if they have any interest whatsoever right, and drive some traffic through, it allows you to be able to judge and see who is clicking, who’s interested, what kind of ads they’re clicking on, that sort of thing so that you can kind of get a feel for who your prospect is. And that is super informative when you have no data at all right, if you’re starting with nothing. So getting that, have an idea, are they even responding? And it’s interesting, like I would actually take a step back before, and I know I’m not precisely answering your question now, I’m actually taking a step before that, and I’m saying that before I even launch a product I still have a PPC campaign running. That’s what tells me whether or not the product is going to resonate with my audience and whether or not I can get them to do anything.

51:56

At the end of the day what you want them to do is be able, and if you’re like a SAS model or something you want to be able to pull out a credit card right, that’s the goal right? You want them to be able to pull out a credit card and convert. And if you’re running a PPC campaign through, and you’re driving traffic to your landing page and nobody’s doing anything, then you’ve either got an offer problem or you’ve got an audience problem right? You don’t know, what you find is, and I know I advise for startups and stuff over the years and one of the things that I find is a product is built, there’s lots of startup dollars put into it, maybe outside investments been raised, and you get everybody excited around it and you built the wrong product for the customer right. And you find that out six months after you’ve launched your marketing campaign. And your marketing partner comes back and says we can’t sell this thing right. I see that time and time and time again right. The most beautiful products you’ve ever seen in your life, well-designed, or here’s another way to put it, existing products for an existing company that you are now launching right? So same sort of thing. You’ve got your core product and there’s a lot of excitement around this new product idea or this new feature. And there is no pre-testing or anything has gone into it right, there’s been a thousand [inaudible] hours have been put into this new feature and then it just falls on deaf ears and you can’t get the adoption right? So there’s a lot of being able to do that and if you have, especially when you’re in that situation where you already have a product, you have an audience, and you’ve built something up you an actually go, and this is sort of where retargeting is good because it’s less expensive than PPC, and you allows you to be able to bring back people that are already familiar with you and your brand right. And they’ve already seen your messaging, now you’re sending them a new message do they do anything with that offer right?

54:06

Yeah I’m sure everybody’s sort of experienced that sort of thing. So I’m not sure if that answered your question but maybe, I don’t know Kathleen, Jalali, anybody else want to chime in there. I think that, no I mean that’s everything that you said makes sense and I don’t think I have too much to add except for that I guess for startup companies like you said, it’s just the biggest thing in my mind would be awareness right? Like exposure and awareness and focusing on your audience so as much as you can put your name out there is probably going to be like your number one focus for strategy. I don’t know do you have anything to add Jalali? Yeah I was actually going to use their same example of using apps to test the business concepts ahead of time. It’s a great way to do it. If you’ve already launched then I think aren’t you going to put this up here, we’re offering free ad credit and some free creative, that would be a great way to get started if I was a startup. So you get a professional designer so, and we get, we might, there’s a limit on this, so I’m not sure how many people are gunna do this, but yeah get some good creatives, get them spinning in different places, start to look at your funnel. Like what’s happening with this, are people coming through? So we’re fronting the budget and giving you the ads. You really have nothing to lose on this one. But it also just gives you a great amount of info, like we could even do some different ads, one with message, the other one with another and just see what works. This is such a valuable piece of info, especially when you’re early on, before you raise all the money and before you spend all the money, at least like get some data points on what’s happening.

55:53

Yep yep that’s right. So I’m going to go ahead and drop the link that’s on here in the chat box below so if you’re interested int his or you want to learn more about it, it’s perfectaudience.com/match and the link is in the chat box on the bottom right. So with that we just want to give a reminder that we have webinars every two weeks, so our next webinar is coming up on August 6th, and the topic for that’s going to be retargeting best practices. So for anyone who had questions about marketing strategy or how to get started, this is going to be a super great webinar, kind of like a 101 for retargeting in general. Eric I don’t know if you want to add any bullet points on there. I think it’s going to be one of our more popular events that we hold. We get these types of questions all the time. Luckily with quite a bit of capacity with go to webinar, where we can see lots or we can get lots of people on at the same time, and then we’ll probably allow it to be viewed as a recorded series too in case you can’t make it. Yeah it’s gunna be I think one of our more popular ones for sure.

57:04

Yeah I also agree I think it will be, it it’ll be, and we do send out a recording of every webinar to the registrant so if you want to go ahead and just register and not sure if you can make it, that’s totally fine. You’ll get a recording and then all the information will also be on our blog after the fact. But with that we just want to say thank you Kathryn for joining us today. Thank you, we also love seeing your dog there at the end for a few seconds. She needed a hug, Yeah well thanks for showing her to us and thank you for coming on here and then also thanks Eric and Jalali, as always for your knowledge and expertise. So with that we are going to call this, but we hope you guys enjoyed, we hope you got some good nuggets out of it. As always if you have more questions email us at ads@sharpspring.com and we will take care of you.