Implementing Inbound Marketing Best Practices

Greetings! Welcome to the Wednesday, April 15th, 2020 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook over here at WSI, where we work with our clients in helping them to connect and engage with their clients online. Hop over to poweredbywsi.com if you're interested And learning more about what we do. Today's show is a continuation of conversations around our 3rd edition of the best-selling Digital Minds book. And although the author has provided me with some great info and certainly would strongly suggest you check out his as well as all of our other chapters in the book, Marco is a native Brazilian and out of respect for some of his conversational capabilities in English. He's a great guy to chat with, and I always enjoy connecting with him and many of the other folks from Brazil during our global conventions. But Marco was not super comfortable presenting a webinar and doing it in English, and I said You know, you probably wouldn't be able to do it in your native tongue because most of our audience wouldn't understand you. So we chuckled about that, but he gave me some good ideas, and I'm excited and honored actually to be able to present his chapter of the book on inbound marketing best practices for today's webinar. Before we officially kick things off and get started, I just want to remind everyone that today's show and all shows here at Free Webinar Wednesdays are recorded, made available. And you'll be able to visit freewebinarwednesdays.com to check them out. Also, if you are joining the show live, which I see many of you are, it is always good to hear from the audience. And if you have a comment or a question or feedback, or just wanna say hello, feel free to do that using the chat panel, which is likely over on the right-hand side of your computer screen. And I will look forward to maybe building a little conversation with you during today's show. The other interesting parts about Marco and his team from Brazil, just a little story before we jump in, is WSI, as some of you may know, is a global digital agency network with offices in about 80 countries around the world. And one of the things that's so fun to do when we have our global conventions is to be able to reconnect and meet new people from all sorts of different countries. It's one of the things I didn't do a whole lot of when I was a community banker in little Marshall, Michigan. We didn't have a lot of Brazilian or French or Spanish folks coming into the office and speaking different languages and getting the opportunity to learn about their cultures. But that exists every single day of my life here in the world of WSI. And so during one of our our conventions where I was actually selected to be the emcee in Montreal a couple years ago, the Brazilian team was getting together after the convention and they were taking a team photo and I was getting off of the stage and they grabbed me, roped me in, brought me on stage and informed me they were making me an honorary Brazilian. So I still don't know if I know even any words in the language to be able to effectively communicate to my newly acquired Brazilian colleagues, but they made me an honorary Brazilian, and that's one of the bucket list places that I would certainly love to go. And the cool part about the WSI family is there are plenty of people there that would be more than happy to host me, and I'm sure would exude hospitality, and we'd have an awesome time. So a shout out to any of my Brazilian friends if you are watching this either live or catching this On the replay. So with that being said, today's discussion is really going to be all about Marco's chapter, and I would encourage you, you can learn a little bit more about him as well in his bio, as well as the bio is included in the book, which is available on amazon.com. So you can download that and get a Kindle version or the paper copy if you wish. But his chapter is all about the concept of inbound marketing. And if you've not heard that term, many of us in the marketing space certainly have heard of inbound marketing. We've been following its practices and protocols for a number of years, but we're going to talk about inbound and how that's different from maybe the traditional marketing and advertising strategies that you might have grown up with. And Marco, in his chapter, which is number 5, shares some interesting advice and some kind of how trends are going. And then we'll talk a little bit about the elements of an inbound strategy and some suggestions of what you might be able to put together as part of your own business strategy to really play off of an inbound practice and why it's, it's better than the alternative of outbound marketing. So we're gonna define it first and talk a little bit about the methodology. We're gonna compare and contrast the age-old concept of a marketing funnel, which is where you pour leads in and then eventually a customer spits out the bottom, and how the flywheel concept, this has really kind of been rethought and re-engineered by HubSpot. And so that's one of the companies out there doing a lot of thought leadership in the area of inbound marketing. They might've even been one of the first to actually use it and coin the term. We'll chat a little bit about the main components Of what an inbound marketing platform consists of or a process, and then the importance of a content plan and what you might want to think about when you're developing that. And of course, I've got questions at the end, but this is a live webinar, and if you've got any questions or something that I talk about doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, or you want to offer an observation, feel free to go ahead, type it in the chat, and I'll be keeping an eyeball on that as well. So. I was looking for creative images to represent the differences between an old-school marketing strategy and a new-school marketing strategy. And so you can see in this image, this gentleman is actually pushing that gigantic bale of hay. And much like the old-school marketing and advertising tactics, whether you consider it as like the newspaper or the radio or television, we're not going into those mediums to learn about, you know, a bank trying to sell us a mortgage or to find a new dentist or to buy something on Amazon or to purchase a new car. We go into those media elements to read news, to get our entertainment, to maybe disconnect from the world for a little bit. But a majority of the marketing tactics that are out there today are really trying to push. That's where you got the connection between pushing the hay bale and pushing a marketing message. But you're pushing your marketing message on someone, almost trying to intentionally interrupt them and divert their attention from what they originally came to that medium to do, whether it's watch the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory or hop on the newspaper and get caught up with what's going on or listening to a podcast or watching a video on YouTube. The interruption and the push marketing of trying to force yourself and almost demand attention from folks is much more of the old school mentality when you compare it versus what an inbound strategy is going to be. And I would be willing to suspect the vast majority of you are probably doing a component or some elements of this. Not everybody, even those that have embraced inbound, might still be doing some old-school push-based marketing as maybe a smaller segment of their marketing strategy, but in the inbound world, much like this little puppy is trying to pull on the little tug toy and gain our attention, what you really want to do is you don't want to push your message in front of them, you want to pull them to you because you've developed something that's attracted their interest, that has gain their, hmm, I wonder what that's all about. And we'll talk about how you do that through the creative use of content and thought leadership. But it's a very different strategy between the concept of pushing yourself in front of somebody and hoping that you can divert their attention and get them to read what you're talking about or watch a video versus putting information out there. They come across it because you're building relationships, you're in areas where you know that they're hanging out and you're creating information and content that makes them think, I want to learn more about these folks, I want to get access to this, I want to read their blog. It's very much content-focused, and because it's focused a lot on the generation and creation of content and having to get a little bit more creative with why somebody would want to be pulled into your organization, your message, you have to be more creative with what you're delivering, and the time it takes to be able to build that influence is longer than if you were to implement some sort of a push strategy. So you have to have some patience as well as creativity. And so hopefully that helps somewhat visualize the whole concept of push versus pull. A pull approach, an inbound approach, is going to be much more effective on the long term. So I mentioned HubSpot in my intro, and, and this is one of the graphics that they've created over the last year or so to really represent the evolution of going from a funnel to more of a flywheel approach. And both of those are predicated on the concept of an inbound strategy, but you can see the way that we're managing our customers is a little different over on the flywheel. Side of the fence. But your inbound strategy, which is going to be driven by your content, which we'll talk about before we finish today, in an old traditional funnel approach, you're going to be pouring those people in at the top. That's what your marketing and your sales activities are doing. You're gaining attention, you're gathering them, and then through that nurturing process, eventually at the end of the day, your customers are going to spit out. Some of them won't convert. Not everybody that hears your brand message or sees your advertisement is going to end up buying from you. I think that's a pretty safe bet, and, uh, I don't think anybody would argue with that. But what HubSpot is proposing is it's not really a linear function where you, you put things into the top and it goes through the magical sequence and then maybe a smaller number spits out at the bottom, because that was demonstrating an effect or, or some, uh, a sense of finality that once they're a customer, that's basically it. And so the flywheel approach is really more of a cyclical perspective on the customer acquisition and retention process, where we, we provide service, we've got marketing, we do sales to gain their attention, and we wrap all of that around the customer. And instead of being a funnel approach where your ultimate goal is to spit a customer out the end and then you're successful, in the flywheel approach, What you're really leaning towards here is your marketing and sales efforts get the attention and get people to do business with you so you can provide them with service and they become a customer. But on a flywheel, you want to have that perpetual motion where you may have other products and services that you could market to those customers. So I go back to the banking analogy. You might capture the attention of someone To get them to open up a checking account or a savings account, but you may want to continue providing them service and marketing to them because there's other functions that you can provide them as a bank. Maybe they're interested in buying a car. Maybe they're interested in setting up a savings account program for their child to go to college. Maybe they need to buy or refinance a home. So it's not a one-and-done where our goal was to get a checking account and the customer has a checking account. And we've been successful. That's really just the first step in the process. And I don't have a statistic officially because I've read it a bunch of different ways, but nine times less expensive on average to sell an existing customer another relationship than it is to go out and try to find another brand new relationship. And a lot of that really is because of the flywheel approach and the concept of the customer has already gotten comfortable with you. You're already taking care of them with one product. or 2 products, it's that much easier to be able to reach them and convince them to do more business with you, assuming that you're doing a good job of taking good care of them. That's where things like Net Promoter Score and customer survey feedback and that sort of information is going to be critical in ensuring that this flywheel continues to spin and spin as quickly as it can possibly spin, because the, the faster it's spinning, the the more retention that you have and the, the greater the impact you have on the customer because you're doing more for them, creating convenience and providing them with their services. So you can take that flywheel concept and you can also replace it with what had been, and I think still is very relevant, to the 3 stages of an inbound approach. And this is again different than the outbound push marketing concept. This is really the fundamental element of an inbound strategy. The first is you want to create something that can get the prospect's attention, and it's important. And I've got a lot of sub-elements underneath the attract bullet there. It's important that you first have a clear understanding of who is it that you want to attract. If you are, you know, going after first-time homeowners, for example, versus college students that just need to get a checking account and might be interested in your online. Banking services, that's going to give you an idea of your persona. We've had conversations here on Free Webinar Wednesdays. You can go back and watch the, I think it was chapter 3 or maybe chapter, yeah, chapter 3 with Cormac. And we talked about personas and, you know, how to develop them, what goes into it, you know, really kind of dissecting your ideal customer. What are they interested in? What are their pain points? What are their buying habits? Where do they hang out? What sorts of websites do they visit? What sorts of content do they read? What type of engagement do they use? Mobile devices, or are they primarily desktop-driven? Do they watch video? Those are all elements, because if you're going to insert yourself in an area where you're going to hopefully gain the attractiveness and the attention of someone, you need to understand where they're hanging out. Organic search, paid advertising— those are just different ways that you can leverage search strategies when those folks are going out. So You may not jump right in and try to take somebody right into application process with an inbound strategy. You might use organic or paid advertising, for example, to promote a piece of content that's purely educational. You know, download our first-time homebuyer's guide, and that will, you know, for free, there's no cost or obligation. It's a very low risk, but that gets somebody to interact with you. They download some content that you've created. It gives you the ability to demonstrate your subject matter expertise. And that then allows for the individual to get to know and like and trust you. They're going to start reading other information that you share. Now you've started that attractiveness, that tractor beam is starting to ramp up its power, and you're going to start pulling them towards the mothership of your organization because you've attracted them and you're going to pull them in. Social media is another great way. To attract people to you by demonstrating your subject matter expertise and sharing information there, and certainly multimedia, especially through video content, live video content, where people can see and hear you beyond just reading or downloading information. But once that initial attraction is there, you've got them interested, they're like, hmm, I wonder what these guys are all about. You have to make sure that you can engage them, and in the book, Marco kind of Kind of paints the picture of like a first date. Okay, well, you've found somebody on Match.com, you've attracted them to your profile, you have got them to the dinner. Okay, the attraction is done, they're at the dinner. Now you have to engage, you have to have good conversation, you've got to have similar interests, you've got to, you know, have a reason to keep in touch. Or that might just be a one-and-done first date and there's really no spark, there's really no interest, and you start all over again. Well, that same process is there for a business. So just because you've attracted somebody to your business doesn't mean that they're going to automatically buy from you. And depending on the complexity of your product or service, or how much it costs, or the amount of personal commitment that somebody has to devote in order to buy your product or a service, that engagement process is going to take a whole lot longer just based off of the complexity. So I think I gave the example in my presentation on conversational marketing where I, as an avid cyclist, get targeted a lot on Facebook and other platforms with bicycling-related information. And there was a laser light that had caught my attention that was a rear tail light that goes on your bike that draws a couple of laser lines on the ground to help kind of define a bicycle lane, if you will, for cars coming up behind you. So it attracted me very quickly. The engagement basically happened over a chatbot, which is why I ended up buying it, because it was a very easy and convenient way of making a purchase. And it wasn't a real long courtship because it was a $15 light. It was easy for me to purchase. I basically used the Facebook Messenger tool. I didn't even have to go to a website. And put in information. I just bought it right there on Facebook. And so that engagement process was super quick, super simple, but it was a low-risk, low-dollar, low-value purchase. I would never think of going through a process that fast if it was something like buying a car or getting a mortgage or picking a financial advisor. Those are going to have a much longer courtship, a much more complex and involved engagement period because you're going to have to provide a lot of information, a lot of validation. There's going to be a lot of questions that people are going to have. And so this inbound strategy is going to have different timeframes for different businesses, but the concept is still there. So in that engagement process, this is where you're producing your thought leadership information that's not really trying to sell your product or service, but educate, inform, And you have to be comfortable with the fact that a lot of this information might very well be used by people, and then they're going to go someplace else. Or if they're already working with a competitor of yours that might not be doing as good a job with an inbound strategy and producing this content, they might still take your information and then use it to help them be a better customer of your competitors. And there's nothing really that you can do to stop that, but you have to have faith in the process that if that happens, Multiple times, eventually you hope that that buyer is going to say, you know what, I've considered this 3 times in the last several years, and all 3 times Company B has been the one that's given me the information, and I'm working with Company A. Maybe it's time I take a harder look at Company B because they seem to be more interested in educating me and making me a more informed buyer. And that's going to pull them in. So you might have a 2 or 3-year sales cycle. In order to allow for that engagement content to do its work. But you need to have faith in the process because that's what's required. A lot of that educational content can be delivered obviously through email marketing. Talked about SMS text messaging a couple of weeks ago. We also have educational content that goes on our website through blog content. We redistribute that information through social channels. It's okay to maybe take a blog post that you've written that's on your website, and then you could reproduce that over in a LinkedIn article. Or you could reproduce that over on Facebook or provide a hyperlink back to that, or chop it up into little micro tweets and send it out through Twitter over 240 characters in a series of a couple of weeks. But that content—it's a good idea that that content resides primarily, or at least initially, on your website because that's really where you want ultimately the people to come to, where they can then sign up for more information and engage and learn more about you. In addition to email and text messages. We've also talked here on the show about the power of chatbots, which is also a component of the chapter that I wrote, um, purely on the whole conversational marketing content. The flywheel concept is really where the delight comes to play, and it was always part of this inbound stage, but until the flywheel concept was developed versus the funnel approach, I don't think delight really had as much importance in the process. But delight is where you're not just meeting their expectations and providing them with the service that they have asked for, but you figure out ways to go above and beyond. You want to make sure that, you know, okay, it's good to have a happy customer, but it's really good to have a raving customer, a raving fan, not a raving mad customer. That's a bad thing to have. But you want to have customers that you would consider to be raving fans that are going to be amazed and excited and maybe even surprised by you going above and beyond and doing things that they wouldn't necessarily expect. This is more of a cultural element that you need to maybe have conversations with your staff members and explain to them the importance of this flywheel concept. And the attract and engage is what everybody's used to, but what are we really doing at the end of the day to delight our customers? And that is a very different process today than it was a month or two ago because we're having to communicate with our customers in a completely different manner. A lot of businesses are either not in business anymore, which is unfortunate. They've had to drastically shift and change the way that they're providing business. You know, I, I mentioned banks. A lot of their lobbies, pretty much every bank that I know of, their lobbies are closed. Customers can make an appointment to come in. But they're primarily serving their customers through drive-up windows, through electronic services. If you're a restaurant, you've maybe been able to shift gears a little bit and you're doing things that are maybe more takeout-related or curbside delivery. But it's that experience that somebody would normally have had when they came into the restaurant with your waitstaff that they're missing. How are you going to be able to shift and delight your customers Especially when the global pandemic shift that we're all experiencing now has caused you to rethink your business model entirely. Those are the customers that will hopefully become a source of referral for you. Oh, if you need X, Y, or Z, you should really talk to these guys because they've taken super good care of me. They could go out and actually provide recommendations and referrals. They could do ratings. out on Google and Yelp and other places, maybe even offering written testimonials where you could put that information directly on your website. They could share that information through social media. So there's a lot of reasons why you want to get that customer to the delight stage and make sure that they are considered as attractors from a Net Promoter Score perspective, because they're going out and they're trying to generate and drive their friends and people that they get a chance to talk to back to your business because they're so excited about the services that you've been able to provide them. So there are 5 elements that we present in the book that are part of the inbound strategy. And so the first 3 here are your contacts, and these could be either the prospects that you're trying to convert into customers, people that have expressed interest in learning from you but they haven't bought anything yet, or it could be the actual customers that you're already dealing with now that have bought something from you. But what you want to make sure you do— in a recent webinar today, one of my colleagues out of California was talking about the importance of developing a CRM. We're going to have Allison on to talk about strategies of nurturing your database here because it's one of the other chapters in the Digital Minds book. But Allison today talked about the importance of making sure that your contacts are in some sort of a customer relationship management tool. You've got a good way of actually segmenting them and providing different ways to filter the information and generate lists so that you can communicate, whether that's through email, text messaging, um, or just knowing what their phone number is going into the CRM so that everybody's got the same consistent information and just maybe being able to pick up the phone and call them and say, hey, how are you doing? Is there anything we can do to help? Just wanted to touch base. Here's a new article that I thought you might be interested in. Those sorts of things. So your contacts are certainly important because those are the people that you're going to be building this conversation with and having communication with over time. We've already talked about the importance of buyer personas, but it bears repeating because as you've got these contacts that you're putting into your CRM, it's also important that you have a clear understanding of what personas do they fit into. Is it the persona that's going to be You know, is this the marketing manager? Is this the CEO of the company? Is this the chief financial officer? Is it a salesperson? If you're a B2B company, when you're crafting your message to send out information and educate, a marketing person is going to have much different interests and look for different things in articles and other sorts of content than the CEO of a company. And so the CEO is going to be looking for things like strategic partnerships and does the company have a vision with where they're headed and are Are they going to be there to help me figure out different ways to serve my customers and maybe take care of my employees and remain a viable differentiator in the marketplace? Whereas a marketing person, if that's one of your personas, they're interested in figuring out how they can leverage maybe current digital technologies, how they can engage their customers, how they can help their employees build their brands. So the message needs to be shifted. Based off of the personas of who you're talking to, and hopefully those personas can feed back into your CRM to give you a much more holistic look of who it is that you're communicating with. Once you get those 2 elements done, you need to start thinking about what the buyer's journey looks like and understanding that at a persona level, like somebody that's interested in a mortgage, Or somebody that's interested in buying a house for the first time, because a first-time homeowner is different than someone that maybe is buying rental properties or is interested in buying a cabin up north because they already own a house. They're going to come into that discovery process at much different stages, what we refer to as the buyer's journey. And so when you're producing your content to pull people into you, you also need to take into consideration, well, where they're at. in their, in their learning stage, and you need to be where they are so that you can attract them. You need to produce the content that engages them, but based off of their buyer's journey. And so it might be a little bit easier for me to explain this in a couple of graphics. So we've got the typical process of a buyer's journey really is awareness and then consideration and decision, and we'll talk about that in the next slide with a little bit more detail. But you can see from a color coding perspective, that also corresponds to when somebody is actually discovering you as part of the process. So at the awareness stage, they're going to just maybe visit you on social media, or they might visit your website, and if you can entice them because you've attracted them and you've got some content that's engaging, remember, you've got awareness and then engage, Then they may give you their information, which generates them as a lead. So now we've been able to say, okay, now they're a contact. They maybe haven't bought anything from us yet, but now they're a contact. They're in our CRM. Then what we want to do is we want to take them through the process. We've got a mortgage, or I'm sorry, a mortgage. I got banking on the brain. Go figure. You've got a marketing qualified lead, which means that. They're open to your marketing messages, your educational content. They're reading your blogs, they're watching your videos, they're subscribed to your podcast, they're looking at your white papers and downloading your infographics. Those are the sorts of things that constitute a marketing qualified lead. But then if you're doing your job and that information is doing its job and you're enticing them and you're further, you know, pulling them in through the process, they move from a marketing qualified to a sales qualified lead. And that's when they're starting to ask some specific questions about, well, how much would that cost? Or what kind of a term would that be? Or they're now starting to demonstrate some questions and some behavior that might indicate that instead of just them being interested in your marketing information, that they would be interested in sales information. If I take a look at myself as it relates to HubSpot, I'm Pretty much in that marketing qualified lead status. We use another marketing automation platform called SharpSpring that I'm very happy with, but they don't produce a lot of the marketing information that HubSpot does. So I visited HubSpot's, I've provided them my information, I get updates and emails from them. I use graphics and take the data and the research reports that they've created. Doesn't mean that I'll never become a customer of theirs because something could happen at SharpSpring. There could be a change. I might have another project that comes along that could very well necessitate a different solution than what we currently have with the SharpSpring system. But right now, I'm perfectly content at that marketing qualified lead status. But it doesn't mean that I wouldn't ever pursue if they came out with a different offering or a different program that I could potentially move into sales qualified. Because once somebody jumps into that bucket, now we all of a sudden have an opportunity to sell them. We have an opportunity to follow up and give them the information they're looking for, provide them with pricing. This is where your raving fans, your customers, your satisfied, happy, delighted clients are going to come to play because they're going to help take that opportunity and push it over into customer status. And if I start reading that a lot of my colleagues are moving to HubSpot and they're really happy with HubSpot and things are so much better and the grass is so much greener, That might be one of the elements to get me to move from the mortgage to the sales to the opportunity to becoming a customer. So that is how the, the buyer's journey really translates to that customer journey, if you will. But if we take a look at the 3 elements of the buyer's journey, we've got the awareness, the consideration, and the decision stage. And if we take any product and somebody is just learning about it for the first time, you are going to have a lot of questions. And in the days and age of years gone by, some of that information you didn't have the luxury of getting access to without maybe having to call the company or set up an appointment, ask a question, or going to the library and doing research, which was a real pain in the butt. But now we've got the joys of the World Wide Web and the internet, and so we can go on and we can do a lot of learning. We can download This is where that awareness and being able to push out the content that's going to engage people to allow them to download information and learn about us, learn about our products and services and what we have to offer. So this content also likely is going to need to be delivered by you in a manner that doesn't require them to give their information, or if it does, you might not get accurate information, because if I'm at the awareness stage and I don't even know the questions to ask, I probably am not going to want to identify myself to any business for fear of looking stupid or, you know, just kind of putting off the aura that I just don't know what I'm talking about, even though that's very well the case. You know, if I've never bought a mortgage or a house before, I'm not going to want to sit down in front of a loan officer and ask a bunch of really dumb questions, even though I've been in banking long enough to know that loan officers love it when you do that because they like the dialogue and the teaching. But you're gonna go through that process in the awareness, and you're gonna learn that information before the person on the other end even really knows what you're asking. Then when you start learning and you start getting ideas, then you can start developing considerations and saying things like, well, you know, is a bank better than a credit union? Or what about— I've heard about this company Rocket Mortgage. What are they different Or maybe a mortgage broker, or, you know, so now you're going to think of different questions to ask. And at that point, you might reach out and start interviewing people and asking specific questions. This is where some of the testimonials will start coming to play to validate that when people are going through this consideration stage, that, you know, you are in the right spot. There are other people just like you that gave consideration to us and were very happy. getting their loan from us or having their will drafted by us or helping them put together their financial plan and helping them achieve a retirement that they've been really happy in. And then at the very end of the process, the decision stage is when the final elements that really are going to come to play are being given consideration. So you're gonna maybe have top 3 or top 4 vendors, you're gonna have pricing considerations, you're gonna look at case studies depending on what type of service you're looking for. Maybe even setting up a time for a live demonstration. We are in the process of looking at possible learning management systems to provide online courses and to be able to teach folks things about digital marketing, and we're at that decision stage where we've whittled it down to a couple of different vendors and we're trying to figure out, okay, well, how are they really different from one another? And we're having conversations and comparisons. Between the two of them. This decision stage, once you get through that, you're gonna be either granted the opportunity to do business or nope, sorry, you came in number 2, but you can still keep in touch, put them back into your flywheel, maintain connectivity with information, and at some point down the road, you never know, just like my HubSpot example, something might change in their world a year, 2 years, 5 years down the road and That would give you back into consideration. The other thing that I want to note as it relates to the buyer's journey is once somebody has gone through this process, they're not always going to go through this process the exact same way every time. In fact, I'm almost willing to bet that they won't. So if you go back to the example that I gave using someone that's interested in buying a house for the first time, they may come to the realization that, you know what, doing business with a community bank is really In my best interest. They support the community, they're here when I need them, they service the loan. So if I ever have a question on my escrow or my taxes, they're there for me. I got my other services there. So they've gone through the awareness and the consideration stage. Now they're at the decision stage. So maybe 5 or 10 years down the road, they get ready to do a refinance, or maybe they want to buy a cottage on the lake. Are they going to have to go through the awareness and the consideration stage again, or are they going to jump right into the buyer's journey with the decision stage and pick up the phone and call their local lender and say, hey Jeff, it's Eric, I'm interested in buying a cottage, so tell me what's involved, what kind of an interest rate can you get me, and, you know, how does this all work? And there's no reason to go through the first 2 stages. So, if I made the customer start at the awareness stage and go through that all over again, I'm going to insult their intelligence, I'm going to waste their time. But conversely, if we didn't have some of that awareness and consideration information on our site and we just went right to rates and fees and closing times, some of the people that are interested in learning about a mortgage, fixed rate versus variable, what's an adjustable rate, what's a 10/1 ARM, what's that mean, what's an escrow, what does PMI stand for? All the banking jargon that I'm very familiar with because I was a banker for so many years, but the general consumer doesn't know. If I don't educate the customer and tell them what that information is, they're going to get scared and they're probably never going to make it to the decision stage because they're going to find someone that's going to take the time to educate them. And that's where that inbound process really comes to play, is we're pulling them into us, we're building that We're convincing them that we're educational, we're trustworthy, we're consultative, we want to help them make the best decision for their home, their household, their family. So that's really where the buyer's journey is. So as a reminder, any thoughts or observations or comments or questions, feel free to use that chat function. I'll be curious to just make sure if there's any insight on if this is all resonating with you folks. The last couple of stages as it relates to the inbound strategy goes back to that content. So we talked about a number of examples in that buyer's journey where, you know, we've got different sorts of content, but it's important to think about the concept of creating a content map. This is discussed in a little bit more detail in the book, but in a content map, what you do is you kind of take the concept of, well, what is it that we want to create as a piece of content? What is the question that we're answering for the customer? And then map out how you're going to be able to use that in a variety of different ways. For example, if I wanted to educate a first-time homeowner, I could maybe take the main question that somebody would have and say, well, we're going to interview one of our, you know, main mortgage lenders and we're going to ask some questions. You know, what are the top 5 questions that you typically get when you're talking to a first-time homeowner? And we could write that information out. We could craft an article, but then that information, maybe while we're having that conversation, we could record it and we could then publish that as a podcast. That could be an element on the map. We video it. That might be a nice YouTube video where we just kind of create an Ask the Experts series, and maybe that could be a YouTube video. We could take the 5 answers and get creative, and we could hop over to Canva or one of the other platforms, and we could develop an infographic. We could take that question and a number of other questions that the loan officer suggests, and we could build that into more of a comprehensive white paper or a guide. We could share that information out through social media. So the content map is going to give you the ability to to really visualize and see where all of those different pieces can be displayed and shared. And one base article could be converted into, you know, 15 or 20 different pieces of individual content when you think of all the different venues where that information could be shared. It's also important to make sure that when you're creating that content, you tie it back to your personas. So you think about what are their key challenges, what are their concerns, where are they hanging out, because that's going to help you ensure that the way that you're answering those questions is as relevant to those folks as possible and you're presenting that in areas where they're hanging up, or hanging up, hanging out is what I meant to say. And then the last element of the inbound strategy is really kind of setting your goals and making sure, and we may have all seen the SMART acronym of making sure that your goals are SMART, but Making sure that, that they're specific, making sure that they're measurable, making sure that they're attainable, they're relevant, and then lastly timely. And the exciting part about spending my days in the digital world is thanks to digital strategies and services like marketing automation tools and Google Analytics and other sorts of tracking mechanisms, a lot of what goes into this SMART process of goal setting can be automatically collected as part of just the general analytic data collection process. And we can then pull that information into platforms and other third-party services where we can go in and we can see whether or not the goals are actually being achieved. So if my goal is to drive people back to a particular landing page to get them to download a white paper guide that helps them be better prepared to buy their house for the first time. I can figure out, well, the people that are seeing that information, how many are coming back to the page, how many fill out the form, how many download the PDF. And because I'll maybe collect their name and email information, I can furthermore see what other products or services or information we're producing that they may be interested in. And if that name shows up on a closed loan report and we actually end up financing their dream home and helping them buy a house, I can completely close that loop from the minute they saw the post on Facebook all the way 3 months from now to when they went and sat with a loan officer and got the keys to their new house. And so being able to do that from a digital perspective is, uh, is a really exciting thing that, um, is, uh, is very powerful. So let me see here. Do you have a question? So let's take a look at this here real quick. Thank you very much, Rebecca. So once you've gone through the buyer's journey and you've built the relationship but not the sale, How often do you check back in with that potential buyer to educate them about your new services? What's an effective strategy to retain these connections but keep your marketing strategy fresh for them? Good question, and yes, you do not want to over-abuse that opportunity. Somebody downloads your white paper and they haven't bought, and you send them an email every single day. That's gonna run the risk of probably driving them away more so than it's going to pull them in and get them interested in doing business with you. The best way to do that, quite honestly, is to ask them, and a lot of the marketing automation platforms will give you the ability to allow for them to tell you what they're interested in, maybe even the frequency. I don't think that there is any harm, and at least on a monthly or maybe a biweekly basis, depending on the complexity of what it is that they're interested in purchasing from you, to be, you know, every couple weeks, 3 weeks, maybe every month, just to remain top of mind. But when there's something that happens that is very relevant to that particular persona, if again we, we go back to a prospective first-time homeowner, They may not necessarily want to be hearing from you every single week, but if you sent your regular monthly update out and then 3 days later something significant breaks where interest rates change or a new first-time home program is, is announced, then you're going to want to make sure that anybody that you have in your contact database, your CRM, that you have labeled as or categorized as a first-time homeowner Gets that notification, even if that's three days after you've just talked to them. You might not want to send regular emails every three days, but if it's relevant and it's something that you feel would be of interest to them, and it certainly plays off of you know the the the questions that they've been asking or the content that they've been consuming, that's where the power of a marketing automation platform can really help you kind of balance the timing and the cadence of those communications. Um, some of it is gonna be, um, a little bit of test. So if you start sending messages every couple weeks and you notice that they're not getting opened, you notice that you're starting to get some unsubscribes, um, you might wanna dial that back or reevaluate, um, what it is that you're sending. Um, you also have the ability within a lot of those platforms to just provide a survey. So one of the things that you could do when someone signs up for, or when they download you could give them the option and say, hey, we wanna make sure that you're getting the right content from us on a regular basis. Would you be interested in, and maybe you provide some options. So for example, set the expectation and say, we normally send out email updates and notifications every month to keep you informed of what's going on. But if you'd like to hear from us more frequently, you can opt into our chatbot or our SMS text message service or some other means of communication. Where it's on a more frequent basis. And if I'm a new homeowner and I'm looking at houses, I might be interested in signing up for your text notification service because you know what, I hope I don't have to be looking for a house for the next 3 months, but it's good that you're emailing me. But if something changes or you've got ideas or tips for me, send them my way. And then I have control under the text message platform to be able to say, you know, once we found a house and we bought it, then I can go ahead and unsubscribe to that and I can opt out. But then I might wanna get text alerts and notifications on other stuff from you if that's going to be your channel. Or you could invite them to follow us on social media because that's where you're posting on a more regular basis. I would say give them options and set the expectation of where they could get more info if they wanted to. And then, you know, just make sure that you've got a good way of actually meeting those objectives and fulfilling the service that they're asking for. So hopefully that answered your question and made good sense. If not, chime back in and I'll, I'll try again. So we were talking about the SMART process of establishing our goals, making sure that we've got those in place. And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, We're kind of at the end of, of our presentation today. So, as you, as you go through that process of thinking about your content and pulling people into you, because it's a whole lot harder to get somebody convinced that they want to come to you to learn about what you offer versus shoving your message in front of their face and hoping that you capture their attention. Today, I, my goal was to just get you thinking about what are the things that you could be talking about? What are the things that you could be sharing that would get people interested in what you're talking about, what you know? And I will tell you that that information is probably not going to be your products. Now, you'll want to answer questions around your products or answer questions that maybe gently relate back to your products. But simply producing a rate sheet or, you know, a financial calculator, you know, those aren't going to bring those first-time homeowners or bring someone that wants to, you know, have a will drafted or financial planning or any other service. You need to figure out what sorts of things they're challenged with, develop those personas, and then provide the content that they're going to want to read And come back to you because you're educating them and teaching them as opposed to just trying to put product information. That's what your website's for. Your website is where they will go when they're interested in your specific products and services. That's, I mean, that, that's a good use of your website, but everything else from an inbound perspective is really going to be focused more on just the whole concept of educating and trying to get them to know and like and trust you. So that they stay part of, of your communication process. Get them on that flywheel so you can hopefully get them to that delight stage and, and they'll be advocates for you to help you gain more customers at your business. So with that, I'm going to quickly check the question and answer area to see if there are any other questions. But if not, We are good to go. So on last week's episode with Carlos, I mistakenly mentioned that Chuck Bankoff would be on today's show. He was actually listening to the show last week and we talked right afterwards and he says, I don't think I'm on until the week after. So I kind of freaked him out a little bit, but Chuck is on for next week. And so we're going to talk about his chapter on Converting site visitors into customers, the whole concept of conversion and landing page strategy. Chuck is also a 3-time author to the Digital Minds book series, as I am, and his chapters are always awesome. He's a good resource in that regard. He teaches a lot. I know whenever we have a WSI conference, Chuck's usually the one leading the whole conversion discussion, and so he's going to share a ton of really good information with us. next week, and I'm super excited to have him join the show. So with that, I will wish you all a continued safe, socially distanced, but hopefully healthy rest of your week, and we'll look forward to seeing you all back here next Wednesday at 1:00 PM Eastern on freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, make it a great week, everybody, and thanks for joining me today. Take care.