Paul Slack:

From there, we really want to move into the next key phase or pillar we call it at Vende, which is activating your audience. Because once we know who our ideal customer profile is, now we need to figure out what are the watering holes that they hang out in? Like where are they spending their time? Where are they spending their time and consuming information that’s related to our subject matter expertise? And so in our world, that’s digital watering holes. So sites like LinkedIn or YouTube or maybe even Facebook or Twitter. And so we need to understand when we activate our audience where they’re hanging out so that we can be hanging out there as well and sharing this information with them that’s going to help them really understand our perspective on how to solve problems.

And so key areas for that would be search engines. You mentioned you want to talk about search here in a little bit Mike, that’s great. Social media and then social selling or what we also call employee amplification. So once I have a plan, I need to go activate my audience. From there, the next key, and this is an often missed key is establishing authority. So I can activate my audience all day long. I can know who my customers are, but if I’m not doing a good job of establishing authority, which is just communicating, hey, I’m qualified to solve this problem for you, but not only am I qualified to solve this problem, I actually have empathy. I care about it. I want to solve this problem for you. And we believe the best place to establish authority is really your website and your blog.

And so, you might activate your audience on sites like Twitter or LinkedIn or in social or search for example. But ultimately, you’ve got to drive people to your website and your blog because that’s where your long form information is going to live. That’s where you can really establish authority. And then finally, the last phase of our framework is the nurture relationships. And we’re B2Bs here and so we know that we can’t control when that buyer is going to be ready to say yes. But what we can control is that when they are ready to say, yes, they think of your business first and not your competition. And that’s why nurturing relationships is so important. That’s why things like Salesforce and marketing automation and making sure that we’re staying top of mind post visits.

So, they came to our website, we established authority on our website. Maybe we got them to opt into something and now we need to nurture that relationship over time. Staying top of mind. One of the things I say often Mike, marketing is an exercise in memorization. So part of our job in this nurture relationship phase is really just to reinforce, hey, this is the problem that we solve. When you have this problem, you need to think of us and nobody else. And so those are really the four keys, planning, activating your audience, establishing authority and then finally nurturing relationships.

Mike Boyle:

Talk a little bit about generating leads here. What do you think are some of the best ways that leads can be generated online today?

Paul Slack:

Mike I’m glad you asked that question because it’s a loaded question. You can get multiple digital marketing consultants in a podcast like this. You’re going to get a lot of different answers. And I’ll tell you most businesses really want to generate those bottom of the funnel leads, what we call SQLs or sales qualified leads. We all love those, those are the demo requests. Those are the people that are ready to engage in an opportunity with us. And they’re very important. But I promise you, if you focus on the bottom of the funnel exclusively with your digital marketing, you’re destined to fail. You’re going to fail because you’re going to spend way too much money on advertising and way too much time and energy trying to get those folks to actually schedule a demo when you haven’t done enough of the groundwork to really establish authority and to create awareness.

And so, if you want to generate leads via digital, we’re all about that. But you have to begin with a good content marketing strategy which is really developing information that you know. And this is why in the planning phase we talk about coming up with those ideal topics that are around those problems that your customers are trying to solve. That we need to build content consistently, weekly, every day in some cases and promote that content out to our audience. The beautiful thing about being a B2B marketer in today’s world is we have lots of avenues that we can get in front of our ideal customer. And so let’s create content that they care about. Let’s promote that content. And when we activate our audience and the channels that they’re spending time in, and let’s spend a majority of our effort creating awareness. And awareness simply means, hey, they didn’t know you exist, now they do. And now they understand the problem that you can solve for them.

And we can’t stop there though, right? It’s the opposite side of the coin. If we spent too much time, energy and effort on bottom of the funnel, we’re not going to have success. But if we also spend too much time, energy and money exclusively on top of the funnel or awareness, we’re also not going to have success. We need to be balanced. And so we create awareness, but then we also need to provide reasons for buyers to engage with us or to make a micro commitment. This is also what you would think of as a marketing qualified lead. And so, we recommend that clients, our clients, at least once a quarter are producing some type of gated downloadable, we call them lead magnets, where somebody is going to give us information about themselves in exchange for this information that we create.

Now the thing about that Mike is we used to say that offer has to have a fair exchange of value. Meaning they’re going to give us information about themselves, that’s their value. We’re going to give them something in return, more information that’s going to create momentum for them to make a good decision about this problem they’re trying to solve. But I’m telling you in today’s world, fair exchange of value isn’t enough anymore. I think it needs to be outrageous exchange of value. So it’s almost like going to Disney. They’re going to give us their information to get this asset, whatever it might be, this lead magnet, but when they get it, you want them to go, oh my gosh, this is fantastic. This is exactly what I needed to help me on my quest of solving this problem. And then once you have those marketing qualified leads, then they go into that nurture relationship phase where you’re using your CRM and your marketing automation platforms to really stay top of mind and nurture those relationships with email marketing over time.

Because what you don’t want to do is give those marketing qualified leads to a sales rep and tell them they’re a sales qualified lead, that never works well. You might want to have an SDR or somebody call and qualify them and put that information in Salesforce. But at the end of the day, it’s marketing’s job to warm up those marketing qualified leads. And when they fill out that demo form or reach out to sales, that’s when they become a sales qualified lead. So if you really focus on top, middle and bottom. And top is really content and promoting that content, middle is having a gated lead magnets and a new one every quarter and then using email marketing and digital selling and other things as a way to warm them up so that they raise their hand and say, I’m ready to talk to sales. That’s a great way to generate leads online today.

Mike Boyle:

Businesses Paul, they struggle with their websites in terms of improving conversion. So are there any tips that you can offer in that arena?

Paul Slack:

This is another question that’s near dear to my heart Mike because we deal with this challenge a lot. And especially in the world of B2B, I think so many businesses just feel like, oh my gosh, my website, it’s got to get everything out there about who we are and our history. And we’ve got to have jargon and all these words that describe what we do. And quite frankly, that’s the worst possible thing that you can do. At the end of the day, your website has to answer three questions and three questions only. What do you do in clear plain English, no jargon, no acronyms, what do you do? Number two, how will this benefit me? Or what’s in it for me? The thing that you do. And then the third thing is it really has to tell them, or answer the question, how do I take the next step? And the next step always needs to be the first step in your sales process. So what do you do? What’s in it for me? And how do I take the next step?

And that needs to be clear and prominent above the fold on your homepage. A contact us button, a learn more button is not answering the question, how do I take the next step? And so you need to take a step back and think about your business and go, okay, I want a new client. And this new client is coming to my website. They need to learn what do we do? And what’s in it for them? And then I need to clearly define a nice, easy process that takes them from where they are right now, which is somebody visiting my website, to actually having an appointment with my salesperson and have that not feel like a salesy thing, but actually a quest in helping them accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish.

One of the things we say a lot is we need to turn our customers into the hero. We don’t want to be the hero of the story. Rather, we want them to be the hero. We’re coming alongside them as the guide. And we want them to feel like, oh my gosh, this is so great that I landed on this company’s website because they get me. They’re speaking my language, they’re speaking my language clearly, they understand the problem I’m trying to solve and they’ve given me a plan forward. And when you can accomplish that, then you’re going to have a website that’s going to generate a lot more conversions. And so a homework assignment you might take from today’s podcast is go look at your homepage and ask yourself, is it answering those three questions above the fold? That’s one thing you can do. Another thing you could do is literally take your homepage and maybe your conversion pages and try to cut 50% of the copy out. I promise you, you will be doing your prospects a huge, huge favor if you’ll cut 50% of the words off of your web pages for sure.

Mike Boyle:

Everybody just got a homework assignment. They’re all diving for their mouses right now. In a previous question, we talked about generating leads online today and you brought up email marketing. So my question is, can you talk a little bit about some email marketing tips that could help move prospects through the funnel?

Paul Slack:

Absolutely. And let me just touch on a couple of things there before I even get into it. So building an opt-in list right now is super critical. We’ve all been watching the news. We know that privacy and cookies and all those things are on their way out the door. And so as a business, how can we insulate ourselves from that? Well one of the best things we can do is build our own list because that’s first party data. When you have an email address of somebody that has given you permission to market to them, that’s better than a cookie. That’s better than anything that you can possibly do. And so having a mid-funnel lead magnet, like we talked about earlier, is a great way of insulating yourself. So you build up this big whole opt-in list of potential prospects. And so to your question Mike, what do you do with them now?

Now that I’ve got this email list, what are we supposed to do with them? And so what we found is there’s really two things that you should be doing with these email addresses. Number one, as soon as they opt-in to something, set them to go through a sales drip process. And for our clients, we typically will write five emails that walk through a specific process or framework if you will that communicates in bite sized chunks to that prospect how we can help them or how our clients can help them. The first email usually is very problem solution. Hey, do you struggle with? Here’s some information or here’s some resources that’ll will help you think about how to deal with that thing that you might be struggling with.

The second email is often like a testimonial or a case study or a success story. So this one might come out a week later to that same email list or email that opted in. And you’re basically saying, a lot of our clients struggled with whatever that problem is, and here’s what they thought about that. And here’s how they felt about that. And here’s what they discovered when they worked with us. And we call that the case study or the testimonial email. Then the third email is usually an objection email. I love letting marketing deal with objections and your sales reps are going to love that too, because you know, your sales reps are going to be able to tell you, what are the top five objections they hear about your service over and over again. Why let them deal with that in the sales process? Why not deal with that in the marketing process? And so we’d love to take those objections and deal with those objections as an email. And so that’s usually the third email.

And then the fourth and fifth ones just depend on the client, but ultimately the calls to action in those emails are always, remember going back to what I said about your website. You need to have a plan and give the customer a plan forward. So we always end every email with, hey, if you’re ready to take the next step, here’s your plan forward, here’s the next step. So that drip email Mike is very, very important because it gives that new opt-in an opportunity to get exposure to how you can help them solve their problems.

The second type of email that we like is what we call a nurture email. And really it just depends on the type of business, but often we’ll send out a nurture email to the entire list or a segment of the list. Obviously segmentation is really key. But that email is going out to a whole segment of the list. So maybe you’ve got an industry vertical that you’re going after, or a size of business, or even a persona that that email will go out to everybody within that segment at once a week. And it’s giving useful information. And really the primary purpose of that nurture email is just to take up real estate in their inbox, which is one of the most intimate places that we have online is our inbox.

And it’s also one of those places that has long shelf life. If you get an email on some side of somebody’s inbox and they don’t delete it, and often they don’t, I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many emails are in my inbox Mike, but I almost use it like a search engine. Who was that vendor that had that thing? And I do a search and so lots of people do it that way. And so that nurture email is just another way to keep your brand in their inbox. And so those are really kind of the two big ones is nurture and then a drip email when somebody opts into something.

Mike Boyle:

You were speaking about sales folks a little while ago. So I just thought that would be a great way to go into our couple of questions about sales and marketing. This is an age old issue Paul, but I’d love to get your take on it. Can you talk a little bit about some ideas that would help get sales and marketing to do a better job of working together?

Paul Slack:

Well sure. And one of the first things that I always try to mention when we talk about sales and marketing alignment is that in today’s world, those lines are so blurred. Sales and marketing have to work together as a system within an organization. It’s not the sales department and the marketing department, it’s sales and marketing working together because at the end of the day, buyers don’t buy the best solutions. Wouldn’t it be awesome if they did and we had the best solution? But what they actually buy are the solutions that they understand the most from people that they like. And so when you think about that statement, that they buy the solutions that they understand from people that they like, sales and marketing plays a role in both of those. Marketing’s job is to make sure that there’s a solution out there that your solution is one that they understand. Sales job is to make sure that that solution they’re buying is from somebody that they like. That’s that human component.

So, marketing is the message to many, sales is applying that message specifically to a person’s situation. So, marketing can talk broad strokes where that salesperson needs to take that broad concept, that problem that you solve and apply it very specifically to that person. Sometimes I jokingly say Mike that marketing’s job, if you’ve ever been deep sea fishing, I don’t know if you have Mike, but when you go out there in the boat, the first thing they do is they chum the water. They throw some old fish and bait and stuff out in the water. And that attracts all the fish. Well, that’s really marketing’s job. Marketing’s got to chum the water that’s going to attract the fish. Then the sales rep gets to drop the lure in the water and catch all the fish and get all the glory. And that’s okay. That is totally okay, that’s their job, but they wouldn’t catch any fish if the marketing department hadn’t gone in and chummed the water first. And so you really need to think about it as a partnership like that.

And so, when you think about marketing, its job is to really support this thought process around problems that you solve and why they should change to all selling is ultimately about change. So marketing is ultimately about change. And so we’re trying to convince a prospect that they need to change from status quo to your solution. And so marketing needs to support that thought process. And then sales really needs to be about starting that conversation and really applying, as I mentioned that situation specifically to that customer or that prospect. And another key part of all this is in digital selling and you hear that term or social selling. Man, I cannot implore your listeners Mike enough to be thinking about how can they get their sales reps to do more in social today.

And I know this is a B2B audience primarily. And so in my mind, that’s man, they’ve got to be pretty serious about what they’re doing on LinkedIn. And one of the things that I encourage folks to do when we’re talking to sales teams and they ask, hey, what can we do on LinkedIn to be more productive for the business? I tell them a couple of things. Number one, go make sure your profile looks like you’re a guide. Remember we talked about being a guide earlier to help companies solve a problem. You don’t want your profile to look like you’re looking for your next job. That’s not going to help you be successful as a digital seller. So make sure that you’re representing yourself as an expert that can solve problems. And also the company that you’re working for as that we have the authority, we do want to solve this problem for you, we can solve this problem for you. Your profile’s got to communicate that.

And then the next thing that we recommend is what we call three by five digital selling. Do these three things five days a week. And if you commit to it, you’re going to have a lot of success. And those three things are reach out to five new contacts. So basically send connection requests to five new contacts. Comment on five posts that are in your newsfeed, especially those that pop up from people that you’re connected to that are also prospects. And then send five direct messages a day. But don’t send those direct messages out as, hey, do you want to buy something from me, but share useful information.

And if you’re doing this in tandem or coordination with the marketing department, again sales and marketing alignment, then you should have lots of great resources that you can DM or the sales reps can DM to their audience. So if they’ll do that, if they’ll update their profile and make it look like they’re there as a resource and then send out connection requests, comment like, and share posts and then also send out direct messages. And they do that every business day of the week, man, they’re going to have a lot of success.

Mike Boyle:

I kind of paused when you gave the fishing analogy there Paul because yeah, I did go out deep sea fishing once many years ago and it didn’t go very well.

Paul Slack:

I totally know what that’s like.

Mike Boyle:

I wanted to throw myself over and be chum.

Paul Slack:

Yeah, the first time I took my boys deep sea fishing and they started chumming the water. About five minutes later, they were hanging over the bow adding some chum to the water.

Mike Boyle:

Exactly. One other question here in sales and marketing, and a lot of businesses struggle with this. That’s cutting through the noise to get in front of buyers online. Can you offer any insight into that?

Paul Slack:

The best way to cut through the noise is really goes back to topics and talking about things that really matter to your prospect. There’s a lot of content. Everybody knows about content marketing. It’s a buzz word today. There’s a lot of useless content that’s out there. But if you’ll take the time to really understand who your customer is and what are the problems that they’re trying to solve, and not only as a business, but what are they trying to solve as a human? And really began to talk about what we call kind of an aspirational identity. What is their business going to look like when they solve their problem with your solution? What are they going to look like? How are they going to be the hero of their organization? And you can create content around those things. Instead of speeds and feeds, instead of features and benefits, really talk about the customer where you can kind of begin having, engaging in the conversation that’s already going on in their head.

So having great content will help you stand out. But if you don’t promote the content that you create, you might as well not even create the content. So take the time to understand the customer, take the time to build content that answers the questions that they’re trying to get answered, and then spend some money promoting that content on sites like LinkedIn. And I promise you, you’re going to stand out because a lot of businesses out there today really aren’t doing that, especially in the B2B world.

And then Mike, I’m going to go back to digital selling. Did you know that on LinkedIn, only 1% of the people that have profiles on LinkedIn actually share anything? 1%. So if you can get your sales reps to actually share that remarkable content, that content that answers those questions that we just got through talking about on their LinkedIn profile, they’re going to be a 1% or they’re going to stand out way above their competition. And now’s a good time to get into that. But if you were to ask me, what are the easiest ways to stand out? Those are the two that jumped to my mind right away.

Mike Boyle:

Good advice for all salespeople for sure. You know we could talk about SEO all day long and perhaps that’s an invitation for you to come back another time and we could do a podcast just about SEO, but I wanted to just touch on it briefly with you because I wanted to ask you what you think is the most important things to focus on now?

Paul Slack:

Yeah, in the SEO world right now, one of the most important things you can focus on is making sure that you’ve got good technical SEO. And I know we can come back like you said Mike and talk for hours on this stuff, but make sure your website is loading fast, make sure that you’ve optimized your images. And I know that may seem like an odd answer to your question, but Google’s actually come out for the first time ever about a year ago and said, hey, we’re going to do a huge algorithmic update in 2021. And it’s all about user experience. And if your site doesn’t load fast and your images don’t load fast and the information that a user needs to access to do whatever it is you want them to do on your site isn’t happening fast, you’re going to lose. And so we call that technical SEO.

And so, make sure that your website is performing well. And Mike, you mentioned that we might put some things in the show notes, there’s an actual website that Google has made available where you can just plug in your URL and it’ll tell you how you’re doing related to the Google core web vitals update which is what they call that update. So that would be number one. Number two, be consistent in content marketing. If you’re blogging once a week or twice a month, at a minimum twice a month. And you’re making sure that you’re blogging around A, problems that you can solve, that B, words that your prospects would type into Google to try to figure out how to solve those problems, that’s the kind of content that Google loves. It’s periodic, it’s long form. If it’s optimized well, you’re going to do well. But step one is make sure you’ve got your technical SEO taken care of first.

Mike Boyle:

And we will put a link in the shows notes to a Google search console where folks can play around a little bit and learn a little bit more about core vitals that you were talking about. You know Paul social media is also another big area. I’ve just two final questions to wrap up our podcast today. The first one revolves around I’m a business. Do I need to be on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram and LinkedIn? What say you?

Paul Slack:

So, it goes back to the strategic planning that we talked about at the beginning of this podcast Mike. At the end of the day, after you’ve built out a plan, the next pillar is activate your audience. And so the question really is where does your audience hang out? Where are those watering holes that they’re spending time in and on? And so if they’re on LinkedIn, you better be there. If they’re on Twitter, you better be there. I do get the Facebook question quite a bit. I feel like Facebook is kind of like that trade show that you’ve gone to for years and years and years and you’re almost afraid not to go because not being there is saying more than you want in a negative way. And so I feel like a business has to have a presence on Facebook for that reason.

There are also some cool digital marketing things that we won’t go into today that you can do once you have a presence in sites like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. But ultimately, the driver that needs to be go where your customers are. And if you don’t think your customers are on LinkedIn and you’re a B2B, I promise you, they are. In fact, over 70% of the folks that are on LinkedIn today are decision makers in some form or fashion.

Mike Boyle:

Bottom line is do your homework, find out where the audience is.

Paul Slack:

Absolutely.

Mike Boyle:

Last question is about running social ads. You’re bombarded, advertise on Facebook, advertise on Twitter, advertise on LinkedIn. Should businesses be running social ads to get more leads?

Paul Slack:

I absolutely believe that social ads are critical to a B2B’s success today with digital marketing. And so the way that I would recommend that you look at it is we’ve talked a lot about content marketing and creating content that solves problems for customers or gains momentum in helping them solve problems. That content is what I would be promoting in social media. So one of the things for example, that we do to promote our business or our client’s business is we take that blog that they’ve written. That’s a really well-written piece of content and we go and promote that blog article in LinkedIn. So we spend advertising dollars to make sure that our clients’ ideal customer profile is going to see that content. And what’s beautiful about LinkedIn is you can target so precisely. So if you’re looking for a certain size business or a certain industry or a certain role, you can do that for a very affordable price.

And so that’s going to create awareness. And then also Mike, we mentioned having these lead magnets or ways for people to opt in and become marketing qualified leads. Whatever that offer is, we call that that mid funnel lead magnet. That’s a great thing to promote in social media to generate those marketing qualified leads. But I’ll tell you, it works better when you’re also promoting content first and then you’re seating that audience with content. But then you’re also once a quarter doing a big promotion around a new gated asset. And that works really well. And then from a Facebook or Instagram perspective, for most B2B companies, the only type of advertising I would do over there is retargeting, which means they’ve come to your website already. Maybe they came through LinkedIn or maybe they came through search. Now they’re on Facebook. Because they were on your site, you can actually have ads appear there. But that would not be my first attempt. The first thing I would do Mike would really be promote your content and your gated lead magnets in sites like LinkedIn or wherever your audience is hanging out.

Mike Boyle:

Great advice. I know businesses ask those kinds of questions all the time. But again, it just kind of goes back to doing your research. At the end of the day, you got to put the time in. Paul listen, thank you so much for joining us today and giving us all this great information and wonderful tips that encompass B2B marketing. I know we’ve only scratched the surface, so I would be thrilled if you’d come back again and we can get a little bit deeper like I’d mentioned the SEO and some other things too.

Paul Slack:

Would love to come back anytime Mike.

Mike Boyle:

Wonderful. Thanks again, Paul. And if you’d like to learn more about what Paul and his team do at Vende Digital, visit vendedigital.com, that’s V-E-N-D-E digital.com. And you’ll also be able to connect with Paul directly that way. And I will put some very helpful notes and links in this show’s notes. Some of the things that we were talking about here on the podcast and some other special little gifts and surprises as well. And if this is your first time listening to our podcast, and you like what you heard, well please make sure you let your friends know and let them know that they can hear this podcast and follow it on any of the podcast channels that are out there. You get all the past episodes as well.

And additionally, if you happen to be a podcaster and you’re looking for guests who can talk all things Salesforce and MuleSoft, well just contact us here at Ad Vic and we will hook you up with one of our experts. I’ll put a link to contact us in the show notes as well. I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Vic. Thank you for joining us for today’s Salesforce Simplified Podcast. Our next episode is just around the corner.