July 2015 Archives

Perry Marshall is a modern day marketing legend. Google his name and you will find over 80,000 references. He has helped over 100,000 advertisers avoid the Google stupidity tax.

He is the author of the " The Ultimate Guide To Google Adwords", the number one book on Google Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

So, you can imagine we were real excited to have him as a client and help him use video marketing to sell enrollments to his "Bobsled Run - 12 Week Intensive Adwords Workshop"!

Let's review Perry's multichannel marketing strategy.

1. Perry sent out 3 to 4 emails per week driving visitors to his Online Content such as webinars, his sales page and the videos we produced.
2. He held 2 Webinars which provided teaser content to promote the program.
3. He extensively uses marketing automation to segment his list and deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
4. We produced the 4 videos to sell this online event and educational program.
5. Three of the videos we produced are what we call "Presell Videos "and video number four was the Sales Video.

The psychological persuasion tactic behind producing presell videos is called inoculation. You are inoculating your audience with desire for your products or services and building trust.

When you do deliver your final sales video, you have already overcome a number of objections, established trust and build-up credibility.

Here is a breakdown of the viewership and engagement with these long form sales videos.

How could this campaign have been improved? We could have added telemarketing to the mix after delivering the sales video. Inexpensive postcards could have been mailed out to promote the program and drive registration.

However, the number of engaged views who eventually attended the course shows the value in Sales Videos, Presell Videos , Triggered and Lead Nurturing Emails and Marketing Automation.

If Perry Marshall does then maybe you should consider it!

For the 5 Most Fascinating Stories in Franchising, a weekly report, click here & sign up.

Sam brings over 20 years experience in International Business, Sales, Marketing and Finance. He has appeared on Good Morning America and has been featured in several publications including New York Times, People Magazine, Ebony, Black Enterprise, and EuroMoney celebrating his business success at such a young age. Dan Clark one of authors of the best-selling "Chicken Soup for The Soul Series" wrote a chapter about him in his 2008 best-seller "Soul Food Volume 1″.

There are some common myths that inbound marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising like Google AdWords' paid search are mutually exclusive. You do one or the other and if you are a proponent of one you are against the other.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

They each play a specific role and can even support each other. Many of the concepts and techniques are the same but the reasons to use one strategy over the other may be different and the results may be different.

Let's take a look at some of the differences.

Getting Found on Search Results

Both will get your website found on searches but the way they do it will be different.

• • Inbound: Working with keywords you build content such as blogs and optimize your on-page SEO to help your website turn up on search results. Where you turn up in the results depends upon your content and the competition for the keywords.
  • Google AdWords: Working with keywords you bid to have an ad placed on Google's search results page. This is also competitive and exactly where your ad shows up depends on a number of factors including the competition for the keyword and your budget. With a properly setup campaign your ad will show up on the first page of search results. Remember, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, not for it to show up in a search.

Time vs. Money

There are no silver bullets in marketing and there is a cost no matter what you do.

• • Inbound: Getting on the first page of search results is not an overnight process. It could take months of blogging and promotion before your website ranks in the top 10 results for a particular keyword in a Google search. The good thing is once your page ranks high on Google Search it will stay there a long time. Success tends to last with inbound marketing.
  • Google AdWords: Success is an overnight process. As soon as you start a successful campaign you ads will turn up on searches and you will start to get clicks. As soon as you stop the ads the clicks will stop. There is no long lasting benefit to doing a PPC campaign.

Similarities

This is an area where there are a lot of similarities between Google AdWords PPC campaigns and inbound marketing. For both you need:

• • Keywords: Both PPC and inbound marketing are based on your keyword strategy. These are the words your potential customers will search to find your website. It is important to understand what those words are, how often people search for the words and how competitive the words are. For inbound marketing you build content around the keywords and for PPC you bid on the keywords.
  • Clear Call-to-Action: Whether it is in an ad, in your blog or in a tweet you need to have a call-to-action that induces your potential customer to visit your website.
  • Landing Page: If someone clicks a PPC ad or a link in a search result they need to land on a page that makes sense. If the ad says "Buy Red Tennis Shoes" the landing page better have red tennis shoes you can buy. If the link says "15 Little-Known Internet Marketing Facts You Need to Know" there better be 15 facts there.

Deciding on whether you do an inbound marketing campaign or a PPC AdWords Campaign depends on your website, customers, budget and time. For information on setting up a Google AdWords campaign check out HubSpot's A Simple Guide for Setting Up Your First Google AdWords Campaign or my blog on 10 Google AdWords Mistakes

For the 5 Most Fascinating Stories in Franchising, a weekly report, click here & sign up.

In today's economy, it's more important than ever to understand the true value of your customers' business and how to retain business-at-risk before it's too late.

But unless you're talking to all of your franchisees' customers on a regular basis, how can you proactively solve a problem before you lose a customer's business - or before a scalding comment shows up on Facebook, Twitter or one of hundreds of review sites? And how do you leverage your customers' positive feedback for word-of-mouth recommendations across all of your social media platforms?

"The days of 'hiding' unhappy customers are over," says Golde, an expert in the integration of social media and customer feedback. "With social media and review sites, everyone is a potential critic or advocate for your business. The only way to know the difference is to learn efficient and actionable methods for listening to your customers."

Paul Segreto states: "Franchise owners recognize that they need to capitalize on social media and integrated, actionable customer feedback. We're thrilled to have Mindy, one of the leading experts in this niche topic, walk us through the latest in optimizing customer loyalty and how to achieve measurable results."

Golde adds, "A customer feedback management system used to be a 'nice-to-have.' Today it is mission critical. The best tools keep you ahead of both the competition and technology such as social media and text analytics. When it all works together, it can make the difference between keeping a customer and losing him to the competition."

For the 5 Most Fascinating Stories in Franchising, a weekly report, click here & sign up.