Why Marketing Automation Should Be On Your Radar

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, September 26th, 2018 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI online at www.power powered by WSI.com. Boy, it's been a couple of weeks since I've been on the show. Lots of travel, lots of conferences. Apologize to those of you that are frequent flyers here on Free Webinar Wednesdays— almost an alliteration— and showing up for the live shows on Wednesdays, and if I'm not able to make it, but it's good that I see that there's a handful of folks that are attending live, and if you're listening to the recording, thanks for stopping by and taking a look. What I wanted to talk about today, a couple things, just to give you an update on what's been going on in Eric's world here in the, in the world of WSI, some of the new partnerships that we've created and why I think that matters, some interesting things that I've picked up on in the area of social media. And then of course, if there's any questions or comments or thoughts that you would like to maybe pose, if you're listening live, feel free to use the chat functionality and toss it out there. Show's being recorded and made available out at freewebinarwednesdays.com, so you can swing by and take a peek at that later. But a couple things that I wanted to talk about in the area of inbound marketing and marketing automation, online CRM, CRM, or customer relationship management. One of the places, one of the many places that I was at over the last couple of weeks was a strategic planning retreat with our corporate folks from WSI. So we are literally consultants from all over the world flew into Toronto and then took a 3-hour bus trip up to the Algonquin Provincial Park and I think one of the, one of the plans from our corporate office was to get a bunch of us digital marketing people in the woods with no cell phone or internet connectivity so we could stay focused on a strategic planning retreat. And I think that worked. But we were up at the Algonquin Park for a couple of days, and we, we had a lot of discussions about the, the tool stack or the marketing stack. All the software and the technologies that we have available to us as digital consultants to help our customers. And while this isn't necessarily a sales pitch for WSI, I think it's important to note that the technologies that we have at our disposal are ones that are at our disposal because we feel that they're adding benefit to our clients, and our clients being small businesses, medium-sized businesses, large businesses. Our office, you know, works primarily with financial institutions, but there's certainly a lot of different niche segments within the WSI world with consultants in almost 80 countries around the world. And so lots of different industries. And one of the elements that we talked an awful lot about was the marketing automation stack. And so There's a couple of platforms that we actually are partners with that I wanted to just make sure that people out there understood, not as much as, hey, hire me to do this for you. Of course, if that is an interest, we'd certainly not turn that opportunity down. But a couple of the marketing automation platforms that we're working with on a regular basis that are adding value to our customers' worlds. And so The 2 that are probably some of the maybe more recognizable names out there, I would say one of them probably more so than the others, company by the name of HubSpot. HubSpot really coined the term inbound marketing back in the day. They've got a book that they've written, the founders, just on the whole concept of inbound and really producing content that makes it interesting and desirable for you to reach out and learn more about the organization. So a lot of times when you visit a website, you will start seeing companies proactively presenting you with little popovers, or, hey, how would you like to download our white paper or resource guide, or here's an infographic. And so trying to draw you into the site with content that you want to get, and HubSpot really has done a great job with that. They've incorporated CRM capability, customer relationship management tool, which is basically a digital Rolodex that you can use to manage your client relationships. And so HubSpot has been one of our WSI partners for a number of years, and we now have the ability to leverage that partnership, maybe even in a different way, for the benefit of our customers. One of the things That's also been somewhat of a challenge for HubSpot is its reputation of being a rather expensive platform. So while a lot of larger organizations certainly were using HubSpot, or if they were fully vested in the concept, it made a lot of sense. And they've repriced and done something to make it a little bit more attractive to a smaller, or some free options that you can use just to kind of, you know, whet your appetite on the concept. But we've got some interesting arrangements within WSI that are brewing that will allow us to be able to bring a HubSpot solution to a business even more economically and to be able to provide things like landing pages and lead gen and CRM, email, all of the elements that really make up a typical marketing automation system. And so we're pretty excited. I looked at HubSpot personally for our business here in Michigan a couple of years ago when we first brought them to a few of our conferences, and the, the price point unfortunately was not one that was going to be doable for us. And now the rules have changed, and I will be going back and reintroducing HubSpot to some of our clients as a potential option for consideration down the road. The other platform that we work with on a more regular basis, and this is one that our agency actually uses internally as well as support for some of our customers, is a platform called SharkSpring. And they've developed a slightly different business model in the sense that they prefer to sell directly to agencies like ours, and then the agency is able to partner and then provide services to the customers. So rather than having a direct sales force, Or an initiative that goes out and tries to secure relationships with the businesses themselves. They really rely on providing agencies with the right tools to be able to service customers. And so a number of WSI consultants within the network have actually started using SharpSpring as kind of their marketing automation platform. And so the The concepts, and you can see from the screenshot here, just kind of giving you an idea of form collection, different sorts of campaign insights. Both of the platforms provide you as a business owner the ability to communicate with your customers electronically through email messaging. You can collect information if they come to your site via form capture. You can build landing pages that are tied to specific advertising campaigns. So, you know, that are focused on conversion as opposed to just linking back directly to your homepage on your website. They do things like lead scoring. So once a visitor is identified either through an email engagement or a form submission, we can build a profile for that individual. We can assign it to a persona even. We have the ability to monitor what sort of activity they're taking on the website, and we can lead score that, which is basically providing some sort of a numerical value based off of their site activity. So if you think of it, and what I'll oftentimes do is give the analogy of a bicycle store. If you've been on Free Webinar Wednesdays in the past, you know I'm a little bit of an avid cyclist, although spending so much time In airports and airplanes these days doesn't get me on my bike as much as I would like. But the, the concept of a physical retail establishment— if I walk into the bike store for the first time, I might be an anonymous person. I might not say anything to the owner or the salesperson that's there, but I might walk in, kind of browse around, and that's very similar to somebody visiting your website for the first time. not really knowing necessarily where or who they are, but maybe you've got an idea because, um, you know, I went to school at a little college called Alma College, and there's a bike store there that I also happened to work for while I was in school. But if I walked into that bike store wearing an Alma College shirt, there's probably a good likelihood that the owner of that store could see that maybe that was one of the college students. Just like on Google Analytics, you get an idea— did the person come from Google? Did they come from a referral? from maybe the Chamber of Commerce, what geographic region did they come from because the IP address, but you really don't know much more than that. If I go back to the bike store a couple of more times, maybe introduce myself, you know, hey Chris, my name is Eric, I'm looking for a fat bike to ride over the winter. Now that's just like in the digital world, me filling out a form or signing up for an email newsletter and engaging because I've now given the business owner, whether it's the bike store or the website itself, my information. And so now Chris, the owner of the store, knows who I am, and he knows what my interests are because we've had a conversation and I've indicated that I'm interested in a fat bike. That could be very similar to somebody signing up for a newsletter and indicating that they're interested in security alerts and updates, or interest rate information, or special products and services, or men's fashion, whatever the case is. But then you get the ability to profile that individual. And then if I come back into that store and I spend more time over in the area of the store that really has the fat bikes on display, that's going to give Chris, the owner of the shop, a little bit better of indication that I'm really interested. And maybe when— maybe Salsa, which is one of the manufacturers of fat bikes— maybe when they're having a ride demo for an afternoon, I'll get a phone call from Chris and say, hey, just want to let you know Salsa's bringing in, or Trek's bringing in a bunch of fat bikes this weekend. And we'd like to invite you to come down and take one for a spin. We're gonna head to the trails, you can check them out. It's gonna get me further down the line of possibly buying. He's not gonna invite everybody in the world to that demo because those individuals, you know, it's difficult to know if it's somebody that's really interested in a fat bike, whereas I've already qualified myself through engagement. It's that same possibility that you can then do from a marketing automation perspective, where if you're a financial institution and mortgage rates have just dropped, you now have a list of people that have identified themselves as interested in buying a home and they want to know when mortgage rates are going to go down. So now you could send a broadcast message out to those folks, whether it's by email or— the last time we talked on Free Webinar Wednesdays, we talked about chatbots and the ability to send a proactive message maybe through Facebook Messenger or an SMS text message. So however you want to then reach out and proactively approach those customers or those prospects that have identified themselves, you now know who they are. And then eventually what's going to happen is, as I come back into the store, as I take the test drive, that's going to indicate to Chris my interest, just like activity that's done on a website can be assigned numerical value as part of a lead score so that my lead score to Chris continues to go up as he invites me to different things so that at some point he's going to know, you know, now there may be a special offer where one of the bike companies decides to maybe put some models on sale. That might be what's going to be the key offer that's going to get me pushed over the edge and I'm going to, you know, buy one of those bikes. So You know, that's kind of an offline version of what lead scoring really is, but hopefully that makes sense. And you now have the ability to do that directly through a website. And the cool part about doing it through the website, whether it's through SharpSpring or HubSpot, or there's other platforms out there as well, is a lot of that process now can be set up and automated so that things can happen naturally instead of having to remember to make a phone call or having to recall, oh, I totally forgot to invite you this weekend. Um, you know, Trek was in, my bad. Sorry, Eric. In a marketing automation platform, we build those things as part of a workflow process. So when somebody engages and they fill the form out and they're interested in a mortgage loan, just going with my banking experience because that's kind of what we do here in our office, but somebody that's interested in talking with a lender, they've expressed that they're a first-time homeowner, Or they're wanting to refinance, we can build in a series of checks and balances so the platform can automatically send somebody an email. That email can then sit and wait, and if I don't see that the individual clicked on the link to download the resource material that was originally of interest, I can send a different follow-up email that gently nudges the person along. Even though I know that they didn't click the link, we can ask questions like, Hey, we just wanted to make sure that you saw the email. In case you missed it, here is it again. Here it is again. We know that things are busy, but it sounded like this was something that you were really interested in. If we see that somebody did click the email and open it and click on the link to download the material that they were interested in, we could send them a different message. And instead of saying, hey, we wanted to make sure that you saw, because we know that they didn't, so we're giving them a link to download it again. We then can position that message as to, hey, we hope you enjoyed the guide that we sent you, or we hope that you had some time to spend with the information. Here's a few things just as a reminder. If you have questions about what you read or would like to talk to one of our lending professionals, let us know. And, and all of that can be timed so it can be sent, you know, 2 days after, 1 day after, and you work through the process with a consultant like us or you know, if you've got a different provider that you would like to work with, you know, that's fine too. But you work with a consultant that's going to take the time to understand what the ideal flow is of a prospect when they engage with you. Just like if you were to go to the bike shop and have a conversation with Chris and say, hey, somebody walks into the store, what are the things that you typically do? Well, I try to greet them. I try to say hello. I try to find out what type of bike they're interested in. I try to make sure that they know about the community ride day that we do every Wednesday night and different things that are going on on the weekends. So, you know, that's essentially an offline version of, I would like for somebody to visit the page on my site that talks about the product and service. I would like to get them to fill a form out to download some information and let me know what they're interested in. I would like to get them to sign up for a newsletter so I can communicate with them on a regular basis and stay top of mind and remind them of different different things that are going on within the business that might be of interest to them. So you can see that the offline and the online world really aren't that different. It's just in the online world, we have the ability to digitize that process, that flow, that conversation, so that it can take place even when the bank or the business— the bank in this case— but even when the business is closed, when it's on the weekend, when the key person— because the problem with the offline world Is while Chris, who's the owner, might do a really good job, you may hire a college student like me when I was in school that really didn't understand a lot of, you know, I love to ride my bicycle and I race mountain bikes, but I probably wasn't necessarily the best salesperson. The owner of the shop at the time was probably the guy that was the best salesperson. I just was a college student that loved riding my bike and was just excited that I could hang out in the bike store. And, and get paid for my time to help out. So if Chris isn't there, the process that normally goes in is not likely going to take place. And that's one of the advantages of the online kind of process is even when the owner's not present or the loan officer is not responding to the email or the sales rep isn't getting the inquiries, the process still takes place. So it really is, is independent of anybody having to do manual human intervention, yet the capability of jumping in and helping out at some point down the road, or somebody responds to the email and says, hey, I've got a question, I'd like to talk, you know, can you meet next Thursday? The opportunity is always there to pull a human from the organization into that process. So as you think about— and we've got a lot of our clients that are starting to look, you know, October tends to be budget season for a lot of our customers and what sorts of things really need to be on their radar screen for 2019, I want to encourage you, if you've not done so, to take a look at the whole concept of marketing automation. And we've got some materials on our website, we've got some videos that you can watch that just give you some additional information about the concept of how it works. And certainly We'd love the opportunity to chat if you wanted to, to give us a buzz, and we can give you some ideas of budgets and ranges and all that jazz. But think about how you can take some of the processes that go along with your business and automate them so that you can do a better job of nurturing those relationships when people are starting to interact with you and your business through your website, or they hear about you through social media, or they get referred to you through a digital ad campaign. It's collecting all that information and bringing it in. So that's my, my little probably 20-minute exposé just on the concept of marketing automation. So spend some time taking a peek, you know, hop over to SharpSpring. They've got some good videos. HubSpot's got a lot of really good stuff. And then if, if it works out and you're interested in a partner, Touch base. I'd love to chat with you. A couple other things that broke within, I would say, the last week or so. I caught this article from Mashable, and we're all probably familiar with the concept of Facebook groups. I actually facilitate a handful of groups for marketing director forums for some of the banking associations. You know, that are offered from the, from the state associations that are close to Michigan. And what happens, I guess, up until now is individuals themselves have to belong to Facebook, and then the groups, which are private, which are kind of a restricted area— you can make groups private or open, but these groups are kind of private areas that you have the ability to carry on some conversations with a select set of individuals. I belong to a few groups that I paid subscriptions for. So a handful of social media groups where you can jump in. I paid money to be part of these because they give you access to a very valuable community, or maybe as part of a membership, or maybe a special account classification or relationship. Maybe your business would want to think about creating a group where you could bring your VIP customers or individuals you really wanted to spend some time influencing, bring them into a group and figure out how you can provide maybe some additional value to that relationship through restricted content through that group. But it, it's always had to have been individuals joining a Facebook group, and Facebook just announced recently that a Facebook page can actually belong to a group. So using my example for the marketing forums that I participate in, while the marketing directors themselves are all members of the group, what we could do now is, is maybe the marketing director really wants to keep their Facebook profile for personal use. They don't want to use it for business. They don't want to use it for, you know, anything other than just keeping family and friends. They want to keep it separated from their job. But as an administrator of that bank's Facebook page, the page itself, which is the business entity, can now join the group. And so as the page joins the group, the individual can then drop off, still get access to all of the information, that is being shared through the private group so that they don't disengage from the content or lose access to the material. But now they can go ahead and use the actual business page instead of their profile and keep business separate. So, so that's a pretty exciting thing. We haven't implemented this yet. There are some changes that group administrators have to do in order to make this happen. If you hop over to Mashable and just do a look for Facebook pages and groups. You can kind of read through this article. There's some information here that you can check out. So I'm not going to spend a ton of time walking through how everything works, but suffice to say, this is, you know, one of the things that you may decide to implement. And, and if you're not looking at groups as a way to engage your audience, this may even be one other item, not just from a page joining a group perspective, but maybe you're going to want to take a look at this as an option to be able to offer a group to your customers. I know there's one institution that I'm aware of, and you're probably all familiar with, I think in the banking world oftentimes a financial institution will offer like a travel club or a seniors account for people that are 55 and better, and that might offer different trips that happen on a quarterly basis, and you can get access to discounted tickets to bus trips or travel or cruises. This institution actually created a private group for their travel club, and while engagement rates on the bank's Facebook page itself aren't that great because nobody's really are because of some of the changes that Facebook has implemented to restrict organic visibility of page posts, the group itself is actually a really vibrant community because what happens is when individuals go on these trips, they, you know, first probably hear about the trip through the group. So, hey, we're going to be doing, you know, a Traverse City wine tour bus trip. Don't forget to sign up and join. Tickets are only $120, which includes, you know, overnight lodging and dinner or something like that. If you could get a bus trip to northern Michigan to do a wine tour for $120, I'd probably take you up on that. But they probably hear about the trip through the Facebook group. But then what happens is when everybody comes back from the events, of course everybody has their phones which have cameras, everybody's taking pictures. They go back into the group and they post all the pictures and say, oh, what a great time, it was beautiful, the leaves were changing. And that gets everybody else that's part of that group but maybe didn't go on that one trip, whether they couldn't just because of schedule or they didn't think that it was going to be one that they would enjoy. The group now is helping to encourage participation from other members of the group by, instead of the bank telling all of its customers how great of a trip it's going to be, the customers are telling other customers How great of a trip it was, and you know maybe you know Jeff. I'll mention my free webinar Wednesday's co-founder here, but maybe Jeff works for the bank, and he was the I don't want to say chaperone because you know fifty five and better don't need chaperones. But maybe he was the bank representative that went along. Maybe people will come back and go, you know Jeff was awesome. He was so much fun. You know we had cool excursions, and it was so great to have him come along with us. You know, as much as Jeff would be promoting and saying, hey, you have to come on this trip, you have to go, if you got the people that actually went bragging about how awesome it was, I think it's pretty safe to say, and I think anybody that's listening to this would agree, that the, the ability for you to fill up the next trip is going to be a whole lot more likely because they'll go back and say, well, you know, it looks like these are great great trips. Maybe you could even have some conversation. Hey, sorry we missed the Traverse City trip. Was it really as great as you thought? What do you think about this? Have you been on others? And you really get your customers communicating with each other. That's, I think, one of the great parts of the group concept, whether it's at the page or the individual level. One of the other things that plays off of that, as I kind of say that last statement out loud, I've talked about this before, but back in January of of this year, Mark Zuckerberg posted on January 11th. So you can go to facebook.com/zuck and go back to January 11th. He actually posted some information that said we are making changes to the way Facebook shares information, to the way that it's structured, making more of an effort to bring people together with one another and share information with each other as opposed to allowing brands and businesses and other organizations to post and share information. So if you can use a group concept to get your customers talking to one another, that's going to have a much higher likelihood of boding well for your overall Facebook and social strategy, because that's really what Facebook's new algorithm is trying to focus on, is bringing people together to share information. with one another as opposed to you as a brand, as a business, as an organization pushing stuff down individuals' throats because people want to talk to other people, maybe not necessarily to their business. So check out Mashable and then, you know, maybe have some discussions within your organization to see whether or not groups are something that might maybe have some opportunity. Is there a segment of your customer base or a targeted area or particular topic or conversation that, that you'd want to maybe go after and try to build some conversation around? So let me know, curious to see what you think. The last thing that I caught wind of is in the world of algorithms, and again, Facebook, roughly 2% or less of your customers or visitors or fans of your page are going to see organic posts based off of the Facebook algorithm. Twitter made a shift, oh, about a year and a half ago to do what was referred to, instead of just seeing everything kind of natively, they went through, and I've gone to my account settings here. So in the timeline, they switched on best tweets first. And what that was an attempt to do with Twitter, because there's so much information, being thrown into Twitter that instead of it just being basically the actual fire hose with a chronological listing of all the tweets that came through, they implemented this show best first. They have now come back and, and there's been references in a variety of different channels. I know Social Media Examiner had a podcast recently and they talked about it, but you now have the ability to turn that off and you can go back to the standard chronological timeline. Now, I don't know if I'm going to do that because I'll be honest with you, I think the best tweets first have actually helped me when I go into Twitter because I'm somewhat of an active user on Twitter and I've got a lot of contacts and a lot of accounts that I'm following. Twitter's done a pretty good job at figuring out the individuals on Twitter that I'm actually interested in based off of my engagement. So when I retweet or comment or, you know, favorite something, that signal goes back to Twitter, and then as those people that I care about are on Twitter doing things, Twitter does a pretty good job of showing that— showing me that information. If you're not an active, active participant on Twitter and you're probably more there just to follow information, you may want to take a look at your timeline settings and maybe turn that best tweets off and allow it to go back to chronological. So if you click on the learn more link here, that'll actually spawn a separate window that'll give you some additional information that That will talk about your timeline, how that information is there, the in case you missed it functionality. I know that there's a lot of people on Twitter that have talked about this is stupid, I don't like it. I've actually found it to be somewhat valuable to me as well. So I'm not gonna lie, it's— if it went away, I wouldn't like, you know, be upset and miss it. But I can tell you that the in case you missed it has brought some things to my attention that I've certainly appreciated. So this is another area that you might want to just kind of take a look at. Talks a little bit about how you can add things to bookmarks. I've talked about Twitter lists in the past. Those are also very powerful for sorting and segmenting conversations. But I just wanted to make sure that as part of the Twitter process, because a lot of the events that I'm going to now, we're talking a lot about about, you know, tracking and monitoring information with hashtags and events and those sorts of things. And so Twitter seems to still be the go-to place that people think about when, you know, when you talk about hashtags and kind of real-time conversation. So, so yeah, that's— I mean, I'm gonna try to keep these Free Webinar Wednesdays to about half an hour unless we bring in kind of an external speaker Speaker, which you know has been a little bit more of a challenge to do. I'll be honest with you; things have gotten super busy, but I always seem to have something new that's come across my desk that I would like to make sure that the rest of the world is aware of. And so these are a couple of the things that just have been on my mind over the last week or so in my travels. Certainly, there's a lot more, but listening to to me ramble for thirty minutes is is probably enough for most of you. But I appreciate you joining me and being part of the Free Webinar Wednesdays world. We're going to be putting together some more formal webinars down the road. We've got a Banker Education Series webinar being scheduled for a couple of weeks out. So if you are in the financial services industry and part of our BES list, you'll be seeing some information on that. And if you don't, If you're not part of that, you can certainly hop on over to LinkedIn. I'm just Eric Cook MBA on LinkedIn, and you know, let's get connected there as well. And we'll be doing some promotion over on LinkedIn of those particular events. But as far as today's show goes, I think that's— I think that's it. So thanks again for those of you that joined live, and certainly appreciate you. Carving some time out on a Wednesday afternoon with me here. So we'll look forward to seeing you down the road on future weeks with Free Webinar Wednesdays. Until then, make it a great week, and we'll see everybody online. Take care. Bye-bye.