Episode 27: Leveraging LinkedIn Ads with AJ Wilcox
Episode 26: Wrangling Performance out of Site Content with Michel Fortin
Today we’re talking about how to think strategically about website content. The primary reason we’re told to focus on content is SEO, but the true beneficiary of well-structured content isn’t the search engines. Another myth is that focusing on keywords will win the SEO contests when it’s actually more about “topical clusters.”
To improve how your content performs, it all boils down to following the fundamentals of communication. My guest is Michel Fortin of Shelly Solutions, whose strategies get to the heart this. He is a 30-year marketing veteran, who has done copywriting and marketing as a coach, under his own consultancy, and within an agency. He’s active in industry associations spoken on stage at conferences, holds industry certifications, and has written hundreds of published articles.
As you hear our conversation, you’ll hear him refer to many sources: a half-dozen books that guided his thinking on sales & marketing, several tools, conceptual frameworks, and companies he’s worked with. Also listen to him tell, on a personal level, how as a young salesperson, an ADHD-related condition called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) led to him writing marketing content and becoming so good at it that he left sales to sell his copywriting services.
Concepts Mentioned:
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
How prepared is your audience to take an OATH:
Oblivious
Apathetic
Thinking
Hurting
The PESO Model of Media
SERP – Search Engine Result Page
Google’s EAT acronym:
Expertise
Authority
Trustworthiness
Authors/Books/Tools:
Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising
Al Ries & Jack Trout’s The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
Brian Tracy’s Psychology of Selling
Dan Kennedy’s No BS Direct Marketing
Tom Hopkins How to Master the Art of Selling
Tony Alessandro’s DISC Assessment
Data Transformation client MB Foster
A/B Testing Tools
Episode Reboot:
Don’t try to please the Search Engines, try to please your site visitor.
Episode 25: Conversational Marketing with Andres Tovar
Are you speaking AT or speaking WITH your prospects? Companies are increasingly turning to messaging agents to chat with their prospects. This show focuses on how marketers can use this technology to have conversational interactions with their audience.
I’m speaking Andres Tovar, with a Southern-Ontario based marketer who has built chat-based campaigns for many organizations. He began offering his skills on a contract-basis while he was still in school, doing a business degree at the University of Ottawa. His work was noticed by a faculty member, who hired him for the business school’s own marketing. Since then, he has picked up industry certifications and set up his own consultancy called Noetic Marketer which serves mainly B2C clients.
Andres will talk about the two types of chat tools: ones that use someone’s social log-in and ones that are native to a website. He takes us through selecting the steps in the customer journey when chat interactions make sense. Tips are given on how to brand a chatbot and how to script a bot’s reactions so they flow nicely towards a human touch-point.
People/products/concepts mentioned in this episode:
Episode Reboot:
Put chat functionality on product pages or other places with a call-to-action.
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Episode 24: Social Media Marketing with Amanda Relyea-Voss
In this episode I talk with Amanda Relyea-Voss (who also likes to be called Mandi), owner of a social media marketing agency that serves B2C and B2B companies. Listen for the ways Mandi has used social media to interact with prospects and how this has propelled them to buy from her customers. We talk about creating social posts from a single piece of content, what kind of text and images to use, applying hashtags and the KPI ratios you can use to measure your effectiveness.
You can connect with Amanda on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as well as find out about Amanda’s agency, likeavosssm.com
People/products/concepts mentioned:
OttawaKiosk, local site within CanadianKiosk
Social Media Rule of thirds
Episode Reboot:
Once you have built your organic audience, consider leveraging it by using the platform’s lookalike audience feature to put your content in front of a wider audience.
Episode 23: Qualifying Prospects with Martin MacArthur
Remember as a kid at the amusement park – you must be this tall to go on this ride? This closely parallels a key part of all complex sales – Qualification.
So when marketing gets a lead, capping off their piece of the process, sales is far from the end, it’s actually the beginning of their work with the lead. The main question that sales has to answer is “Is this buyer capable of buying from us?” Are they tall enough to ride this ride?
The process of answering that question requires a rep to do offline research as well as having one or several conversations. In larger sales where multiple internal people are needed, the lead may not progress to involve anyone else, because the rep spoke with them and determined they aren’t a sales-qualified lead. The process varies depending on the company, but in all cases, it takes a bit of human intuition. There’s a whole art to it.
To get a salesperson’s perspective on how to do this, I spoke with Martin MacArthur, who is passionate about getting on the phone and helping companies fill their pipelines with qualified leads that drive sales. Let’s get into that discussion.
Cover concepts including how we arrive at a qualified prospect.
People and Products mentioned:
LinkedIn profile reviews
Retinitis pigmentosa (condition which affected Martin’s sight)
Martin MacArthur’s LinkedIn profile
Reboot:
Look into these good books about conversation: