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.
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.
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.
Today’s episode is a simple solocast of me talking to you. I’m recording in an extraordinary time when stress is being put on healthcare, public institutions, whole industries and even entire economies. All the uncertainty out there is invading our digital marketing world. What’s going to happen? Just thinking about current events can induce fears about budgets getting cut, teams getting shrunk and we feel an existential threat to our very career.
To help, the first part of the episode goes through how uncertainty affects everyone’s mindset. I share what some authors like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Kurt Vonnegut have observed about these reactions change over time. By understanding them, we’ll hopefully cycle through these emotions more quickly.
Peter Drucker said we shouldn’t scale back at times like this, but to make investments that “enable a business to make its future. That, in the last analysis, is what planning for uncertainty means.” So having dealt with how we respond to uncertainty as humans, I devote the rest of this episode to how we can respond as marketers.
I talk about investments we can make around planning, doing, analyzing and improving processes. I share resources that have helped me during crises so the way I market fits with new outside realities. Hopefully it helps propel you to act in a way that you can look back on with pride when it’s all over.
People/Products/Ideas Mentioned:
Mr. Micawber from Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”
In this episode we talk about how to write persuasively for prospects. Our guest is Nik Paprocki, the founder of Websuitable, an ROI driven digital agency serving small businesses all across Canada.
Like many in the agency space, he has seen enough bad copy to almost expect it, but when he was researching some product purchases, he found himself being drawn in by the copy they wrote. It wasn’t hard-hitting, buy-my-product Direct response writing that worked on him, rather it was copy focused on helping a buyer, giving answers to their problems.
He feels this use of copywriting is just as effective in terms of generating leads, because it speaks to everyone, not just those who are in-market to buy from you now. He felt so strongly about how it works that he swung his whole agency around to this writing approach.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to find insights on what problems buyers have, and tactics to write in a way that convinces buyers you can relate to them.
Today we’ll talk about the production of videos to use in your marketing, all the way from the planning stage to the appearance of the final product.
Casey Li is the CEO and Founder of BiteSite, a Custom Software and Video Production Firm based in Ottawa, Canada. He started the company in 2012 after years of passion for the two fields and today, BiteSite serves small to medium businesses in the Ottawa area helping them execute their vision.
Listen as Casey takes us through the steps that his production company follows for making any video. You don’t have to involve an outsourced firm to make your videos, but you can use the same principles at any scale so your final product ends up telling a story that will keep viewers engaged.
