Anfernee Chansamooth - How To Create The Perfect Case Study To Make More Sales

We get so focused on just the content itself, like trying to do the how to's and teaching great information and these sort of things. But often the case when I'm reading B2B content, there's no indication of the values of the organization or the business owner. What I'd like to see injected in the article that would actually make it more engaging is storytelling. I want to hear about clients you've worked with, I want to hear about your philosophies and what do you stand for. To be honest, a lot of it's generic. I could take the same piece of content, put it on your blog, on my blog, on digital market, I could put some else and it's the same thing. What makes it different? The core message is the same. Right? Here's how to run a Facebook ad campaign. But what makes it different is, you know, the personality you inject into that content piece.

What's up everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

What's up?

Hey, today it's your boy Joe leading us off. Don't worry, Matt will be back shortly. Today on the mic we'll we're gonna have a good buddy of ours and also a fellow Hustle and Flowchart member. Well, I guess in the memories sense that he's a listener, he's a subscriber, he's in the Facebook group. You should go to the Facebook group, by the way, flowchartgroup.com, go get there. But his name, I don't wanna take any shining lights from Anferny Chancenmuth.

Oh my God.

Anferny is a beast. And he's gonna present a completely different concept that we've never chatted about on the podcast and that is all about how studies for your business and into your marketing. But these are case studies that aren't like boring case studies that you're not gonna wanna read or that don't do anything for you.

These are very strategic case studies that.

Are written in a format that he gives us, I mean, crazy step by step processes. There's six steps to do that. There's a whole strategy behind it. So he's gonna deep dive into all of this. He is a content ninja. He's a strategist, he's a writer, He's a podcaster too. He speaks and he is the director and I believe the owner of simple creative marketing. And that basically is a company known for case studies and content that drive leads and sales for fast growing service businesses, but also, let's be honest, that's any businesses. So he's really cool and has set up a free gift for you and you definitely want to take him up on it because I've gone through this and essentially this is going to deep dive into basically how to expand on these case studies. Six steps to create, you know, the winning case studies that he'll cover here. But he deeper dives into those bunch of ways to share your case studies. And then of course you can get in touch with him as well. If you go to simplecreativemarketing.com hustle, that's simplecreativemarketing.com Hustle, you can get Anferny's free gift to just the Hustle and Flowchart listeners like yourself. And that's about it. So I'm not gonna say anything more. AMPH is going to be a rock star and do that. If you want to join him, say hi to Anthony. You can definitely go that URL I just said but or you can go to our Hustle and Flowchart community facebook group@flowchartgroup.com not only can you chat with Amp and ask him some cool questions about case studies, but you can chat with us and all that stuff. But more so than that, you can get the notes from this episode if you're quick. Of course we're always taking the action notes for you there action guides you'll get. So there's a lot to be said in this episode. Just know that we have actually condensed all of that into a very cohesive format and flow that you can follow and put into action right away. That's our goal is to make this easy for you. Not only do you get the cool, you know, just the walkthroughs from AMP and our questions and all that inside those notes you actually get the action steps specifically on what to do with what we chatted about. So go to flowchart group.com and you will be just be quick. Within two weeks those notes go away and they get locked up into our paid membership which is not that expensive. But either way Flowchart Group.com is the place to be. And lastly, we have AHREFS as our sponsor. They are go to SEO tool, content marketing tool. Pretty paired up well with these case studies, I might add. So I know Anthony uses it as well and you should as well. I just noticed today, actually I noticed a little while ago, but I've actually haven't dived into the courses until just recently. They have a whole academy that's totally free. And there's a specific course that probably works well with what we're chatting about today as part of a content strategy, and that's blogging. A lot of people have a blog, but they don't really have a strategy around it and how to get visitors that then turn into paying customers. So if you actually go to Ahrefs.

This is totally free.

You don't need to be a member of Ahrefs or a paying subscriber. You can actually go to their Blogging for business course. And what they say is you can learn how to grow Your blog past 100,000 monthly visitors and turn thousands of your readers into paying customers. It's 10 tutorials, it's something like five hours long. You don't have to watch it all or listen to it all, but they have an intense amount of just training that's totally free. If you are an intense is a good thing. Don't overwhelm yourself because you can just check it out yourself. If you go to ahrefs.com, that's a hrefs.com you can go check this out. Look for their Academy section. I think it's at the top in blogging for business course. I mean, it talks about the compound effect of content marketing strategies to grow a blog, how to analyze the potential for traffic around keywords, how to generate content ideas, how to optimize, optimize your articles around keywords, how great content actually promotes itself, how to get links. I mean, there's a lot of different things. There's even cool bonus content in there. One from one of the guys we follow, Noah Kagan. Is an interview in there. Go check it out.

It's free.

I'm just saying this because this is a great way to kind of, if you haven't used Ahrefs and you kind of are looking for direction for writing and content and how to be strategic, go check out their training. It's totally free. But even better, go get the trial of Ahrefs because that's the tool that really is going to open up a lot of magic. It's only $7 for seven days for that trial to test out hrefs. Go get it at a H R E F s dot com. That's hrefs. Go get it.

It's awesome.

We love it. And I think you will too. So let's get into the episode with Ant Fernie Anthony.

We're live. Finally. How you doing, my friend?

What's happening, guys?

Man, I felt like this conversation's a long time coming. You've been, you've been, you know, around our community for a long time. I feel like just have some kind of conversation going every week in some format for a while now. And you've been such so helpful to our community and given so much value connections too. So thank you. I wanted to thank you publicly, man.

You're welcome. I appreciate it. I love what you guys are up to. Since I found out about. Well, I first heard about you guys on Schramko's podcast and so that was like, okay for any friend of. James is a friend of mine, so. And two bearded guys who live in the States.

James is coming back too. I just chat with him the other day. We're gonn do a little simulcast thing, you know, or.

Yeah, I think. I think for James it's going to be round five, I think so.

It's always a good time. So we'll have to go to you and be like, hey, what should we talk about? Somewhere around affiliate marketing. Yeah, man. So enough about us, I guess, and how like, let's talk about you. So you're in Australia, correct? Right now?

Correct. Currently in Sydney.

Yeah. That's close to Shram Coast. That makes sense.

Yeah. Like he's probably a boat ride away. Like he's in Manly, which is about 20 minutes from here.

Okay, gotcha. Yeah, Gotta make my way out there. So you're out there. Give us the scoop on. I know you do a ton of content strategy, a lot of, you know, some writing as well. You've also been, what, Matt, you were on his podcast.

I was on the Bean Ninja podcast.

Bean Ninja, yes, that's right. So there's an accounting side to everything. So give us the scoop of what brought you here.

I was working in corporate. I was working for American Express and then I was working for Hewlett Packard.

Project management was the role and leading teams. Right. And we were doing a lot of technology rollouts across.

Globalization was a thing and it started to become. Outsourcing was becoming huge in a major way. Around that time, I had the unfortunate reality of essentially firing my entire team of 10 staff and then go and hiring the 10 staff that were going to replace them in India. Learned all about the challenges with outsourcing and we from that point on, sort of I kind of cut my teeth in learning about content, but not in the way that we think of in terms of writing articles and things like that. It was more around internally for the company. I was managing the Internet at the time, so it was all about how do we put stuff up on here that would be useful for the employees who want to read. Right, yeah.

Which no one wants to read that stuff anyway. So.

I'm not sitting here reading the company portal, but what I discovered was, you know, if I started interviewing the team members and the managers and the senior leaders, that was interesting to people because they want to know behind the roles they wanted to know, okay, well, what does this senior leader, what do they care about outside of their job? Right. Do they have families? Do they, you know, like to go gambling and drink on the weekend, whatever it is? Right. And so that kind of was the genesis of this whole idea of just doing case studies. And I know that's something that we'll talk about more later, but for me, I started to realize, hey, there is. We all have a story, and we all have the story that we put out publicly. And then we have the story that only a small circle of, you know, close mates, family members, trusted people, maybe our lawyers have that information. You know, I'm really big on that because I think we have a lot of shame and guilt behind.

Those things that happen, you know, outside of work. And sometimes it happens at work, too. But typically we hold it close to ourselves, and sometimes it can really break us down, you know, because we don't know who to talk to be on our wives and partners and whatnot, whatever else. Anyway, so I got into. Around that same time, I started a blog, a personal blog, because I was having all these feelings, emotions around just what was happening at work, what was happening at home. And I started to, like, explore this thing about, you know, what's his blog thing? Like, I saw this come up somewhere, and I thought, I'd better try this out. And. And so I started just writing. I wrote every day for about five years on this blog. And it was just a way, you.

Know what it was?

It was therapy. Like, it really was just me going, this is all this stuff that's in my head. I need to get it out. And I don't care if anyone reads it or not, because at that point in time, I didn't understand traffic. I didn't know what the hell that was. And I just wanted a place to express, right? And then I found, yes, people were starting to read it, because then I would get comments, people would start saying, like, sending me messages and going, I read that thing that you put on your site about that particular topic, and it really resonated with me. And then I started to get this idea about, you know, well, how can I actually turn this into a thing. How do I make money from this? How do I make it a living? Right. Which I know a lot of writers will have. And I struggled for years. I didn't know how to do it. I ended up landing a marketing role for one of Australia's largest co working spaces here a few years ago. And one of the main things they wanted me to do was to write content. All right?

So.

And it wasn't just me writing the content, but I had to manage the content coming out from all the other office spaces in the three different cities that we had at the time. And so I had to learn to become the editor and also how to, you know, empower the other team members to write content within a really hectic schedule that they had. Right. So one of the biggest challenges you have, and if, you know, when you run an agency, you learn this too. It's like just getting content sometimes. Like pulling teeth out of people.

Sure, yeah.

And so these were skills that really helped me develop what became simple creative marketing, which is the business that I have now, run it for five years now. And I've been producing content, articles, video, you name it, for different clients. And one of those we interviewed, Matt on was Being Ninjas, which is an online bookkeeping service for e commerce businesses. Right. So I had to learn within that industry, okay, how do we produce content that is engaging and also that converts.

Right.

Because one of the things is, you know, they're hiring me to really come in and improve the lead generation aspect and also the conversion aspect. Right. And one of the key strategies we worked on was, okay, well, being that you're in accounting, you can't be too salesy. You can't be like sending remarketing ads and buy my stuff and all these things. It has to be driven through stories. Right. And it's got to be content that ranks in SEO and it's got to be informative and it's got to be useful.

Right.

So what I've learned is there are sort of five key challenges that comes with content strategy. One, they don't have a strategy.

Usually, like someone said, you know, I listened to these guys, Matt and Joe on a podcast, and they said, you know, content is king. And then I go and try and produce a bucket load of content, and it doesn't produce the results they want. And one of the things I look at is, well, let's look at the quality of content and how do you stand out with your messaging? Because if you're. I'll use it being Ninjas as an example. You know, the thing that really stood out for that particular company was the story of the entrepreneur, right? It was, you know, launched in seven days, got their first three clients, and then within nine months they went to six figures, right? And that story was a story that the media wanted. That's the story that, you know, other podcasts like Mixergy and these guys, they love those type of stories. You have to understand what's the narrative that the market wants to hear and who's like, I read, I listened to your recent therapy sessions episode and you're on it, man.

Came out today. The day we were recording this, I.

Was on this morning getting my coffee and like, this is it. You got to know your audience. Like, you really need to know who you're talking to and who are, who are the competitors in your niche or in your industry that are really standing out in that market, right? And what are they doing and what are the gaps and how do we close that? So that's how I got into the whole. I realized for a while, SEM started off as a blog writing service, actually, and we wrote tons of articles. And then within six months, the clients that came back to me and said, hey, loving the articles, they're sitting on our sites, but they're not really doing much.

Right.

And I said, well, how are you guys promoting the content? Like, what are you doing with the content? Oh, yeah, we put on Facebook.

We put it in buffer and then we, we send it out and like, how many times you do that?

Once.

Okay, Right. And so this is the problem. Like, you don't have a strategy to move people from reading the content. Right. The content could be amazing, but if no one sees it, it's never going to get you the results you're looking for. And I'm sure you guys would understand this. There's a big myth out there that you can really accurately measure the ROI of content. And Gary Vee likes to say, you know, it's like measuring the ROI of your mother.

Yeah, no, it's true. Because we've actually done this in the past. You probably heard it from episodes. But when we ran a content marketing agency, we wanted to make sure we can derive some result from the work that we put in so we can show our worth. And so we want to get fired after they get enough. Enough content, quote, unquote. So it was, yeah, we, we tried to attribute to leads and did fairly well, but still got fired because the new marketing manager came in. I mean, that happens all the time. But yeah, I know this. We know the struggle. Because for the longest time we're like, how the hell do we quantify our results? We can't just do this to do this. There's no security here.

Yeah, totally. And that's what we learned. We actually took us, like, with being injured, it took us three years for us to actually see the return coming back to us.

Wow.

At that point, the content started ranking. So we ranked number one for E Commerce Accounting guide. If you go and Google that, you'll see it and some other keywords. So we worked with an SEO consultant, got very strategic on what where the opportunities from a keyword perspective. And so we then we start to see, oh, okay. At the same time, three years ago, we started doing the podcast, which we hit. You know, we just hit 100 episodes a month ago or two months ago, same deal. Like we were every month looking at the metrics going, is this doing anything? Like, is it moving, you know, the needle? But what we started to see was, you know, we'd go out to events and people would come up to us and go, yeah, we heard you on the podcast. And we go, okay, so there's where the feedback is, right? We could see the numbers move. So from the, from the data. All right. But we didn't know was that helping with converting to sales. And I know James Schramka talks a lot about that where you can actually, there is. There are ways you can measure, you know, the ROI of podcasting.

Right.

I know you guys have a real system behind this, but for a lot of businesses that I work with, they just, you know, particularly in the, let's say, boring niches like accounting, they don't really get conceptually how does that all work? And so I had to sit down and offer, I started to offer content strategy sessions like two hour workshop. Let's map it all out. Let's look at what your next 90 days looks like. And if you don't, before we even get there, I usually work with them on the business strategy, the marketing strategy, and go, okay, well, what's the actual marketing strategy and what does that look like now? I don't know if you guys have aware of a book called One Page Strategy or something like that by Alan. Dibs.

Don't think. No, no. Yeah.

And so I just use his template now with all my clients, shout out to Alan and one page, break down the different elements. You need to understand what your marketing strategy is. And then from there you can then go out and do your content strategy, which is okay. Over the next 90 days. What are you producing that relates to driving acquisition or driving. For some clients it's a case of retention. So it's not always acquisition, it's sometimes how do we keep the clients that.

We have recurring businesses and whatnot.

Yeah, And I know you do that with your membership really well. So you're producing content which is specific to membership only. You don't have it publicly.

Yes.

And so, you know, that's a great strategy. So that's, that's an area that I work closely now with a handful of businesses on is what's the strategy? And then let's go away and implement the strategy. Now one of the pieces within that strategy is case studies. Right. It's, it's going to be, I'm like going hard at going, okay, I'm going to be the guy for case study marketing and let's make that a thing, let's make a category. Because I just feel people do a poor job of it. Like they kind of make it the last thing on the list. It's like, oh, we, we should get Google reviews from our clients. We should get, you know, some testimonials on our landing pages. We should get some case studies to put on our, you know, in our collateral. Right. But when I do it, it's kind of half assed. It's like, you know, okay, what was the problem? What was the solution? What, you know, what did you like about our service?

Right.

And that's okay.

Right.

But the kind of case studies we've been doing for being ninjas and other clients, what we've seen happen is they don't, they're not only great stories to share, but they actually do lead to conversion.

Yeah. It's like a positioning in the right part of the offer. Right. It's probably a case study that relates to whatever thing you're trying to prove about yourself, you know, right. Before they have to commit. So it's like, boom, here's a case study here. Relate to this person or this scenario 100%.

You know, we see the best ones. The best example I like to use is personal trainers because when you see when they're putting up photos on Instagram or wherever it is, you know, the before and after he's. Anthony was 50 kilos overweight. And you know, after, you know, three months, here he is and he lost 20 kilos, then he looks pretty, you know, pretty good like that. That's a boom. Like you're sold. Like if I'm wanting that, you don't even have to Convince me because I can see it visually.

Right.

It's a bit harder with business because we don't see the physical change, but what we can see is a change in the numbers or the data or the traffic from. In your analytics dashboards and things like that. So there are ways that we can do it from a B2B or business perspective. We just got to get more smarter around using it.

Yeah, well, let's, let's, let's break down some of your strategies here. You know, you started to talk about the, what was it? The five things that people are doing wrong with their content strategy. Right.

So you mentioned the first one was no strategy. Did you, did you say the other four?

No, I didn't.

Okay, let's, let's, let's dive into that. Let's talk about these five mistakes that people are making with their content. And then after that, let's, let's dive into the case study marketing and really sort of deep dive into how people can leverage case studies in their business.

Sure. So the question is, what are the common challenges with content marketing? Is that right?

Yeah, I believe that was it.

Cool. Okay, so first one, definitely no strategy. So there's no plan of attack. It's like, okay, well, what's the relationship between the content that you're producing and the business goals and the business objectives? Is it revenue? Is it retention? Is it partnerships? Is it, you know, whatever it is for you, you need to understand what that is. The second one has to do with the. I like to think, I like to say showing up at the wrong party. And what I mean by that is you, you, you are dressed up, let's say I'm a fan of Avatar, the animation, if you guys know what that is. Yeah, big, big fan. And I, I'm dressed up as Aang. And then I walk into a party, which is for Trekkies.

And the Trek is look at me and go like, what the hell, man? Like, I think you're in the wrong party. Right. And so, and that's exactly what happens with content. Like, you, you, you have the intention of putting content out on different channels. So you go, okay, my target audience sitting on LinkedIn, they're sitting on Facebook, Instagram, whatever it may be. Right. But all you do is you take that article or the video you've produced and you just re share the same thing everywhere in the same format. You don't customize it, you don't tweak it based on the platform you're sending it to. And that's exactly what you're doing. You're showing up with one costume to all the parties, Right? And that doesn't work. Okay. Because people can see through that. People can see it. You know, like you've have. I'm on Instagram and I'm looking at your video and it's not even. The dimensions aren't even.

Right.

So it's even hard for me to read. Like, this text is cut off, so I don't even know what that says.

Right.

So you really want to understand the nuances of each platform that you want to play in and, you know, or community that you're playing, if you're doing sort of going to different communities. And you'll learn very quickly that each party or each event or each place has its own language, has its own preferred formats. Right. And so you need to really customize the content for that. And I know you had, I think you had Hani Miura from repurposed on the podcast a while back, and he's got this fantastic tool. It's one of my secret weapons. Just for taking, you know, like a live stream and turning that into like 30 pieces of content.

IO. Yeah, yeah, right.

But what it does beautifully is it customizes for you.

Right.

It basically takes the content, the video and goes, okay, let's make it square or let's make it long, let's make it whatever. And automatically does that for you.

Right.

So that's something to keep in mind. So that's number two. That two.

Yeah, those two.

Okay. The third one is a lack of understanding of brand.

Right.

And what I mean by this is.

We get so focused on just the content itself, like trying to do the how to's and teaching great information and these sort of things. But often the case when I'm reading B2B content, it actually lose. There's no indication of the values of the organization or the business owner.

Right.

So if I'm reading an article, what I'd like to see injected in the article that would actually make it more engaging is storytelling. I want to hear about, you know, clients you've worked with. I want to hear about your philosophies and what do you stand for? Right? Because a lot of. A lot of it's, to be honest, a lot of it's generic. A lot of it is, I could take the same piece of content, put it on your blog, on my blog, on digital market, I could put it somewhere else and it's the same thing, right? What makes it different?

Right.

Because the content is. The core message is the same Right. Here's how to run a Facebook ad campaign.

Right?

But what makes it different is, you know, the personality you inject into that content piece, right? And because you guys are doing a podcasting, it's brilliant. It works well because you automatically inject.

Your personality, always, almost too much sometimes.

But it works for you because that also qualifies people out, people who don't like, you know, the beards and whatever else. It's not for me, right?

There's damn beard haters out there.

Made hat haters, man. Even though I have hats, I'm not your guy. I know.

I'm always. You're always right on the hat game, man.

And that's it. So, you know, in your content, you want to actually infuse, you know, I was working with this type of client, and it's also a good place to drop. Like, do your name drops where you drop? Who's the client you've worked with?

Right.

Here's someone, an organization, particularly if they have reputation. Even if they don't, it doesn't matter. But you can even talk about the stories about, you know, if you've got pets that you love pets, you've got kids, you love kids, or don't love kids, whatever it is, right? Infuse some personality. And so when I talk about brand, it's actually what stays connected to the people or the business that's reading. When they're reading or consuming your content, what sticks with them is, you know, well, what's this particular. What's your business about? What are the values where we have alignment, you know, because that's who I really want to play with, right? If the content, if this, you know, five steps on how to do X is great, that's a minimum of what people are expecting these days. Because I can get that from anywhere, right? I Google that. 200 articles that show me the five steps.

Well, and the thing with Google, if you think about it, if you relate it to. With no personality, they're just going to index that where they don't even need to click. You don't need to click to the blog anymore. It's just like, boom. All right, here's your recipe for Facebook ads. You want to be in there, but you kind of don't want to be in there.

Absolutely. And that's the thing I kept on going back to my clients about and said, what's your, like, point of difference? Or what is, you know, your.

Three or five values that. That you care about, you know, and what is the business really about beyond Just making money. Because I think I have a belief that most entrepreneurs and business owners have a why that extends beyond just making cash right now. I know there's some that do, but I think for the most part, like, I know you guys have families and that's who you're really supporting. Like that's what it's about, right? So brand is a good one. I would really recommend people understand it, read about it. That ties to positioning, which is there's a great book by April Dunford called obviously awesome and that, that, that she's been working in the world of corporates and startups for the last, you know, 10 or something years and been able to really help people understand positioning because brand and positioning are tied. So one of the key. There was a book by Al Reese and I can't remember the other guy that the co author, which was actually called Positioning, that was, that came out in, I think in the 80s. And they talk about, you know, what's the difference between a Coca Cola, which is a number one. If you ask people anywhere you go anywhere around the world and you ask, what is number one? Coca Cola, like Coke brand, right. Most likely they're going to say Coca Cola.

Right.

There's a position that sits in their mind and they talk about this concept of a positioning ladder. So in every consumer's mind there's a ladder, and in that ladder they're ranking 1, 2, 3, 4 to whatever. There's a maximum. Like you could probably rank 10 brands and beyond that, you just forget everybody else, right? And so when you're looking at your own business and where you sit within your, your niche or your industry or your vertical, you need to understand how do you position in your consumer's mind or your buyer's mind, where do you sit? Right. Are you the Tesla of automobiles or are you the Lexus or are you the Ferrari?

Right.

Each one of those have different positionings, right? They're all cars. At the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They get you from A to B, Right. But they have different plays in the market to position. Right. And so that's very important, you know, even in your affiliate marketing. Right, because we're going to talk about affiliate marketing and that's something that you guys are really big on, right? Where do you sit in the realm of affiliate marketers who are marketing one particular product or service?

Right.

And how are you different from all the rest of them? Right? Because. And that's where you got to understand, you know, okay, I'm, I'm gonna focus on this part of that particular product set, whatever it is that's that most people aren't really looking at.

Right.

And I will highlight that because then when people are searching for that thing, they're gonna find me and they're not gonna find the rest of the other people. Right. And that's positioning.

This is, this is like kind of freaking me out. And so, like, no one else knows, but I was on a call the other day with someone from Michael Gerber's team, and he was talking about this exact book, this exact same concept, and this whole thing I was talking to you about right before starting this conversation was exactly this and how powerful this is. I mean, we're talking in the context of content, but in general business. And I don't want to open up a wormhole because we got a lot to cover. But I just wanted to say this is kind of like my mind's like, wow, okay. Yeah, it's supposed to be important. Yeah. Showing up a lot. So.

So branding and positioning was the, the third thing. Right.

Okay. Yeah. Two more of these. Let's. So let's jam maybe through this so we can get enough time for case studies too.

Yeah, cool. And then, yeah, so then I look at those. The, the fourth one is tone of voice and that this relates to branding as well. But, but I also mentioned that in terms of your personality. But tone of voice is important. Most small businesses that I've worked with, they don't really have. They've got, they usually have a brand style guide, which is the visual element. How does your website look? What are your colors, what are your logos, these sort of things. What they're missing is what is the brand voice? Okay. And you know, is it professional and funny? Is it serious? You know, like you've got, if you look at who, who does this really well. Comedians do it really well.

Oh yeah.

So if you look at, you know, different comics, will someone comic will be really dry humor. And they'll get on the stage and they're just like straight faced and you know, but they get a ton of laughs. And then the other side, you got the, you know, the outlandish comic who's out there saying really ridiculous things and pushing people's buttons and that works for them. Right. But they differentiate based on their tone of voice. Right. And that's something that you can apply to all your content is, you know, beating Jews is a good example. We're accountants. Right, but we're accountants that talk about surfing and talk about, you know, going to A pub and having beers with each other and networking in different ways. And we now we've introduced our company mascot, which is Wayne. He's the director. He's got a new puppy. And so the puppies become the mascot and the puppies appearing up in our email onboarding sequences and things like this.

Now, you guys are accountants that have fun, that are just like cool dudes.

Yeah.

And that's what it is. You know, people show up, go, yes, I know you guys. You guys are fun. And that's. And that's by design, right?

Yeah.

So brand voice, what that is?

Yeah.

Cool.

And then we've got one more.

You ready? Let's hear it now. What do you think it is?

Yeah, what do you think it is? Let's not get it.

So the last one is actually a system. Okay. So what is your content system or your content engine? So how do you tie all this together? We talked about repurposed. That can be your system. But, you know, what is the system from the buyer's journey interest into consideration, into purchase, into post purchase, or what we call turning into an ambassador. Right. What does that look like? And how does content fit into each piece of that journey? Right. And do you have content that fits in each piece of that journey? Okay, and so we, you know, we talked about case studies earlier, and case studies fit within one piece of that journey.

Right.

But I've actually worked out a way to actually utilize case studies across entire journey because they can be valuable and we can. So that's the five. Do you want to recap those, Joe or Matt?

We got strategy is the first one. It seemed like. Right. Showing up to the wrong party basically is number two, because we're taking our notes over here. Lack of brand and values. Number three. Number four, tone or brand voice. I think that's a big, powerful one. And then the system is the fifth. And I like that you did this because now we could talk about case studies and the fact that you can use them in different ways along this journey, which is, I think, probably one of the most important things that business owners don't realize is, yeah, you could scattershot this stuff everywhere. But unless you connect on a cohesive path, give them off ramps or ways that they can go down a different journey. Now, with case studies and affiliate marketing or any kind of marketing, you can apply these things to that specific scenario. Case studies, absolutely. Yeah. How do we get started? Or I guess, why case studies over testimonials? Because people talk about testimonials, I would say way more than case studies.

Yeah.

The biggest challenge I have with testimonials is testimonials can be faked because it's usually text, right? It's text on a screen, text on a page. And that's been a challenge for Yelp. It's been a challenge for Google from day one. It's like, how do we know that the testimonial hasn't been fabricated? Right. When you do a case study, it typically takes a lot more work.

Right.

Because you actually have to have, you know, I advocate having video of the interview that you're having with the client because then you can actually utilize the video.

And I always, you know, look at the, if we go, let's, if I share the format, it will make this, this makes more sense. But with, with testimonials, now there's a place for testimonials. I'm not saying don't do testimonials at all. I actually think, you know, like, you can't leave a case study in a Google review. You can't leave a case study, you know, on a podcast review.

Right.

Like, like it's got to be.

Good point.

Yeah.

Right. A paragraph or a few sentences. Right. So you can use them in different places on your landing pages. You can have it as a testimonial with someone's face or company logo. That's fine. Right. Where it becomes more compelling is if someone is in that consideration phase. If them, if they are reading a testimonial that says, you know, I hired Ant for I worked with Matt and Joe and they were great. Right. And usually a lot of like not the worst place to say this is on LinkedIn profiles because you go and look at the recommendations and it's all generic, like boring stuff. Like you're reading it and going, you know, he was such an asset to the organization and he'd be an asset to yours.

Right?

Yeah.

Right.

I think a lot of these platforms even have like pre filled things that can kind of help you out. Like no, it's like the word. Here's an example of what you can write.

Yeah.

And so you don't you want to move away from that. If you're doing it, don't blame you because it's kind of the industry, everyone does that. But you can definitely stand out by having solid case studies now. Case studies are more in depth. So it's actually, let's go through, let's walk through the format. If I share the format with you, then perfect. Okay. So we start off with the headline has to be like copywriting101 or advertising101. The headline has to pop. And what I mean by that is it's gotta have a clear metric. Right. I've seen case studies that start off with satisfied customer.

Like, really just satisfied, huh? Yeah.

You know, or super happy. You know, I was super happy with Anthony's service. Like, what? No, you want it to be really strong. And I'm going to share one that I did recently for Beninjas, which is a company called Bento. Their client is a company called Bento, which is a SaaS business for E commerce. And the headline literally reads, reducing Bento's bookkeeping time to five minutes per month.

It's pretty good, right?

Okay. And so, you know, and the target audience, obviously, are business owners who don't have time to do their books because that's. They don't want to do it. They don't want to read.

They don't.

They're not accountants, so they don't want to do that stuff.

Right.

And so you start with a headline, make that pop. And then we go into. Okay, well, let's profile the client. All right, so who. Who's this interview or this case study about? Right.

Any ideas as to why we wanted to profile the client first?

It feels like that's your context. Right. Like, that would be like laying the. Or it's a relatability to the ability. Yeah, it's a before. That's what it is. Before and after.

So with your case studies, you want to. Before we even start this process, when I sit with my clients, we start with a strategy and we go, okay, well, who. Who are your. Who's your target target audience? What are the potential buyers or the avatars? Right. And then who are you going after?

Right.

Right now. Okay, so if you're going after E commerce businesses, for example, then we would go, okay, well, let's do case studies on E commerce businesses first before we do. If you do other businesses, that's fine, but let's pick and be very clear. That's who you're going after. So we're going to do case studies and put that to the market so they know that you serve that type of client.

Right.

And so that's why we chose to work with this particular example was we, okay, we. We sat down, we profiled the company. So we give a bit of a blurb about Bento and the business and what they. What it does. Right. And a bit about the entrepreneur as well. So the entrepreneur creates relatability. It creates personalization. So we can go, okay, I can relate to this guy. He's, you know, traveling and living Japan. He's, you know, is his. I can't remember. He's married or not. But, you know, there's human elements to that. Right. And then we move from. Okay, what's the company profile? To move to the challenge. All right, so this is number three in the format. Okay. The challenge is. And in the interview, I'm uncovering with the subject, I'm asking questions like, okay, well, what were you. Who. What service were you using, or what product were you using before you decided to use this particular product or service? Right. Or it could be product or products or service, like, they might be. And also, what were you using? But also, what were you evaluating? Because, you know, when people go through a bias cycle, they're looking at options. Do I go with lead funnels? Do I look at click funnels? Do I look at, you know, what are different things? Right?

So you're kind of calling it out so they know that you understand them. You're not like, you're calling out the elephant in the room. You're not the only solution out there.

Yes, absolutely. And, you know, Tim Solo from Ahrefs does this really well, right? Because he gets on a podcast and he goes, yes, we exist, but so does Semrush. So does all these other ones. He just calls it out straight away.

Yeah.

Right. And so this is what you want to do, because you want to say, we understand that the competitors are there. We know they're there. Right. And we're not going to pretend like we're the only provider out there.

Right.

Because that's, In a way, you're assuming that the customer or the client is dumb. You know, you don't want that to come across.

Right?

It's. It's. No, we respect that you're evaluating us amongst many. Okay. And so we asked, you know, when I asked Jesse, okay, what were you evaluating? Who are you looking at? He told me, okay, we incorporate that in the mix, right? In. In the story. Okay. And then we also asked, well, what were the pain points? And he said, oh, I had. I was working with a. An outsourced bookkeeping company in India before you guys. They were terrible. You know, they did the okay job. But the problem was when it was tax time, I had to go back and relook over the last 12 months on my books. And that took me literally hours sitting there trying to fix their work because they were screwing up. Right? And I went. And I went, that's gold. Okay, like. Like, who else reading this has outsourced to someone in India or in Philippines, and they're struggling, all right? So. So they can relate straight away, you know, so you've got a challenge, and then you go, okay. Then I went, okay, well, how much time are you spending? Because this is where the reverse engineering is important, because when you understand who your avatars are, you also understand what their pain points are, right? So when you're doing the interview with the client, you want to elicit those pain points and actually dig into those specific pain points. How much time are you wasting on this thing? How much money have you invested in this thing? How much, you know, resources have you put into it?

Right?

How much, like, so you get. You're pulling these different elements out of the client, all right?

They're like emotional triggers. You're trying to get the juice, like the. The real meat out of that stuff.

Give me the good, right? Yeah. And that's it. And he comes out and gives me all these things, and he goes, and to be honest, man, I just hate zero. I don't want to be in there. I don't even look at the damn thing. I just want to be selling product, right? Because he's the founder. That's his role, right? I'm going, boom, tagline. That's it. Right? And you'll see that that's what it is. Okay, so. So we move from. So number three is the challenge. Then we move into the solution. Okay? And the solution here is your prospect. I mean, your process. So as the business, what is the process that you take your clients through to get the result? All right, so, and I've been asked on another podcast, well, how much. How much of the secret sauce do we give out here? Ant, like, do we give it all?

Do we.

You know, because some. Some companies want to hide their ip. They don't want everyone to steal their stuff, right? I'm going, is it in your interest to tell more, to tell less? Because remember, you're trying to convert a sale here, right? And if you're hiding information from the prospect, right, Then how do you think they feel? Because they're going to go, I want someone I can trust. So. And trust comes from sharing, right? And so. And I'm not saying give everything away. I'm not going to go to Colonel Sanders and say, give me your five, you know, special spices. Right? I'm not saying that. I'm just saying give me the process that you took the client through, right? And if you can add, you know, I Had Ilana, she interviewed me. You guys had her previously on the show. And she talked about, you know, when she did a case study. She had a screenshot of the Google Ads account of the traffic and the. Sorry, of the Facebook ads account before the client hired her and revealed these were the ad spend that they had allocated, you know, for that month or three months. And then she had the after snapshot, which was, here was the change in ad spend and here were the results, you know, return on investment, these sort of things. And you could clear. This is the personal trainer before and after. Like, you literally could see the difference and change. Right?

Yeah.

So in a solution piece, that's what you're revealing. These, these, here's the before and after, and here are the steps. Does that make sense?

Yeah. With screenshots, I guess if you put visuals, then you have even more anchoring, like in people's minds, not just text or video.

Yes, 100%.

Right.

So when you can do it, do it. And for affiliate marketers and what we do, this is where product, like product walkthroughs and things like that make sense because you can actually walk people through. Here's how implemented the campaign, here's how I use the product, whatever it may be. And I know you guys do that really, really well. So, yeah, you know that that's the solution. Then we move to the result. Okay, so this. Now we're cycling back to what you put in the headline. Because the headline was a short, punchy sentence. Right. But now you're going to elaborate on that. And when I say elaborate, you're using the client's words. Okay, so, you know, because in the interview, they didn't, like, Jesse didn't say to me, oh, what you did was reduce my bookkeeping time to five minutes per month. That's not what he said. He literally. We spoke for 20 minutes to me to get that out of him. And then, you know, he said things like. What did he say? He said, it was kind of interesting. When I talked to my accountant, I told her that I was using you guys. She was like, oh, you're using all the pro features, like your general. You know, she was just going on about how good it was comparatively, you guys, zero is being used correctly and properly. I'm just happy that my accountant's happy. Right. And that's, you know, that's it. Like, you know, like, that's, that's. That's a result. It's not the only result, but that matters for some people. They don't want to Piss off their accountants.

Well, you want to highlight, it seems like the big result that they're after the pain point that they. Before they found you.

Yeah. So we're looking at the tangible. We saved X number of hours or increased, you know, percentage of revenue, whatever it may be. But we're also looking at what are the emotional benefits tied to all of that. Right. There was another case study I did where it was all about transitioning this person from working full time in their business to. They hired a coach and they worked for a program. At the end of the program, they ended up in a position where they had a system in place that they were able to bring their VA in. The VA took over, and that freed up the business owner's time. Right. And so when I interviewed the business owner, I said, like, love that you were able to free up, you know, 10 hours a week, whatever it was. What did you do that time? And she said, and to be honest, I got the time back with my son. Right. Like, every Sunday, I would be doing admin work. Right. And so he'd be going, mom, mom, mom. You know, And I just hated having to say to. To. To my kid, I'm working.

Right, Right.

And this is even more powerful with COVID Right. Because now we understand, like, presence with our families is the best thing we can have.

Yeah. Yeah, man.

You know, and so. And that was the thing I said, dude, like, when I'm back. When I went back to my client as the business owner, I said, dude, like, that's the thing. Like. Like your clients want time with their family members because they're so in the business, stuck in the business. You help them unlock that. Right. That's what you lead with. Because people, your potential clients, are going to want to hear about that stuff. Right. So that's results. We're clear on that one.

Yes. Yep. That's awesome, man. Okay. You got more? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. And then the last one is. You got a lot. The last one is your call to action.

Got it.

Like, piece of content. You want to have a call to action. Okay. So book a call with us. Check out our free course, whatever it is that you have. Lead magnet things. Here's a free training. Make sure there's a call to action on the bottom of that page.

Got it. Any. Any best practices around call to action, or is it just. Yeah, just pretty straightforward at that point. They should be sold. There's no more, you know, I guess, like, explaining the process of what happens after.

No, I think at that point, you're going to overload the person. If you go into the post onboarding and let's get into all of that, I think let's not do that. Pretty straightforward like said, I link your call to action to. If you can remember this, they're considering the service or your product. So at this point in time, straight to the product or the service. Right. This is, you know, our next step.

Yeah.

So how would we apply this to affiliate marketing? So, you know, we going through this whole thing again, you know, you've got the headline, that one is, you know, fairly self explanatory for how you apply it to affiliate marketing. But then you go into like profiling the client. Who is this about? Like what would be the equivalent sort of thing we would do if we're writing content to promote an affiliate offer? But we want to follow the same framework.

Yeah. So in that case you'd have to like, I know you guys build relationships with your, the product creators. So if I had, for example, if I was doing an affiliate program or a campaign for Ryan Dice and what he's doing with Ask Method, you know, I'd be going, hey Ryan, can I work with, can I use some of your case studies? Right. Can I either have access to the people or I'm sure he's already done the case studies so maybe I can leverage those and share their stories. Right. Because this is the thing people still want to see even if it's an affiliate product. Like they still want to see other businesses like theirs having used the product. Right. So you want to make sure that you going, you know, in most cases, like I know there's some other products I've done work with where they've literally just gone, here's seven or five case studies that you can use in your email copy. You can use it on the landing pages or whatever it may be. And I like to go a step beyond that and go, can I bring that person onto a Facebook Live and have a chat with that person? Right. Or something like that. So there's different ways you can do it, but you definitely want to access, you know, now if you've already used a product for yourself, which I recommend you do, and now you guys do then and you've used it with your own clients, then that's easier because you can go to your clients and go, hey yeah, remember how I told you to, you know, get onto ConvertKit and you bought the thing and you know, and, and thanks for the monthly occurring payment. But you know, how has it helped you?

Right.

And then you, you basically Go through the process with that particular person. I mean, you share that, right? So. So that's a way you can go about it.

So if. What if. So what if the case study was about, like, our product? Do you think it loses some power because it's us creating a case study about something we did to promote an offer or, you know, do you kind of get what I'm saying here? Like, if. If we're the ones that we're profiling with this case study, do you believe that it. It's not going to be as effective of a case study? Or can I use myself as the. The company that we're profiling?

You can use yourself. I would always supplement if you can, with additional. The reason for that is when it's just you profiling yourself, it becomes a bit of a. A, Like a dicky thing. Like, it depends on who's. Who's. You know, it's like, I'm out there going, I'm the best, right? You know, now there are situations. I'll give you an example where I did. For example, I just did a walkthrough video. I'm about to do one for Repurpose, right? For Honey's product. And that's just me walking through my system on how I use the tool. And that's perfectly fine, right? But that's not me going, I'm fantastic, or anything. That's just, this is the tool, is the tool how I use it, right? So when you do your walkthroughs of, you know, Thrive theme, Thrive cart and those sort of things, that's all perfect. No issues with that at all. And you can actually say, here's the results. You know, having implemented this product, this is how we were able to generate X sales or whatever it is that came from that. That's perfectly fine, Matt. Like, I think that's cool. Just if you can get additional. Where you've also given the product to some other clients and they've done it right? Now, just like you're stacking it up, right? You're stacking the value. Where people go, oh, it's not only you guys done it for yourself, because they. People can question that. They can go, yeah, but that's you selling it, you know, like, that's you.

One easy way to just go to a Facebook group where the users are all at, like, we have a ThriveCart group. There's a convert box group, there's all these. Just put a post in there and be like, hey, what? Best thing. Like, you know, just ask it how do you prompt, actually, what would you recommend as a prompt in that scenario? Because I feel like you can get a lot of case studies in that way, you know?

Yeah. Like, I've seen that done in groups where they just. The group owner just goes, we're gonna do an article or a video or something about this particular product. Would love to hear from you guys. You know, what's been the biggest advantage or the best feature? And they just go, boom. They just slam it, right? And then you just pull and. And you just go to each one of those people and just make sure you get okay for them to share it publicly.

Right.

And once you got that, you've got gold.

Yeah, I would probably, like, not even say, I'm gonna make content where I'm like, hey, I just want to know about this. You know, you can almost like. Like, there's no weird thing, like, and then later ask for the permission, like, okay, hey, actually, I want to highlight you a little bit further here.

And that's how. That's exactly how I do it. Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah. There's one last rabbit hole I want to go down before we start to wrap up, and that's how do we get eyeballs on these case studies?

Beautiful question. Okay, so I've got this. Obviously, I've shared this article, you guys, but I've got 15 ways to share business case studies to people who most likely would buy. I'm going to add a few more to that since I've been doing these interviews. I've just had more ideas come up now, but let's go through. I'll give you the first five, and then we can. People can go check out the resource later. Number one is you definitely want to share the case study on social media, and.

I'll tell you why this is powerful, and I'll give you a case study of a case study.

So essentially, that one we did with Bento for Being Ninjas, we did a. So I took the headline, right. I put that into a tweet, right? So high success. Here's how we reduce, you know, companies, blah, blah, by five minutes per month. Read more. And that links off to the page that sits on the website, right? We tagged the client in that tweet. Okay, so. So he receives the notification on his side, right? And he immediately retweets it. Okay. Within five minutes, literally five minutes of him retweeting someone on his Twitter feed, comments and says, hey, man, I need that too. I'm going to contact this company. And so a call was booked and Then within three days, that person became a client. Right? Because when. Yeah, when it's the right mix of message, right. To result driven message to, you know, obviously that person checked out the case study before they booked the call, right? And they read through it, they saw how it worked out and they're seeing their buddy, you know, getting the result and they're like, I want that too.

Right.

So that, that's a good way to use social media. Now, someone else who does it really well is Brian Harris. I think you guys know who he is.

Oh, Video Fruit.

Yeah, Video Fruit Now Growth Labs. So he literally has a tweet and he does it once every week or so where he basically has number of clients, had wins last week, total revenue impact. Then he's got four bullet points of each client with specific outcomes. I'll read it from looking at it so I can read it to you. He's got one where he says 104 wins. Last week, total revenue was $82,282,000. Bullet point one, dawn landed at a new 15k client. Bullet point two, Shane closed two clients for 20k. Bull three, he just lists four clients and what their results were and then puts a link and it says, see all 104 wins. Click here and you click it and it sends you to his results page. Client success page. Right. Which is tip number two, which is you gotta have a client success page on your website somewhere. Right. And this is where you, you load it up with all your case studies. All right. And then the way you break that down, you know you want to break it down, is into verticals or industries that you support. So if you support e Commerce and SaaS and coaches and consultants, then call that out. Right. And have case studies listed under each heading. Right. One. One business that does this really well is Xero, which is the bookkeeping software.

Yep.

With the accounting software. Yeah, yeah, with an X. Thank you. So they have a page on their menu which is meet our customers. And if you click through that, it's all video. Like they're beautiful. Like images and videos and things. And it's broken down by industry. So that's a good example if someone wants to look very cool. Okay, that's number two. Number three is proposals. Right. So I'm again, I'm usually talking to B2B. So use your case studies in your proposal templates. So if you're, if you are an accounting firm, you know, whatever, dentists, I don't think dentists send proposals, but if you are sending proposals out you want to include embed within your proposals, you know, one or two case studies that are relevant to the client that you're sending the proposal to. Right. And this is really good. Again, this is about conversion. So this is. Now we're using this content in a sales conversation. Now we're at the point where, you know, we've already had the discovery call, we've already gone through. You need this. And they've gone, yep, I need it and I want it. Here's a proposal. And he's. Just in case you were evaluating other options, here is another case study, you know, just to show what we've been able to achieve, you know, and that works really well. So that's number three. Number four, everyone can do this right? Now, put a case study into your email signature.

Ah, smart.

Right? So go into case study. Same headline that we use for the tweet, same headline that we use for the case study itself. Put that in the email signature. By the way, we helped XYZ Company to achieve X. Click here to read more about it.

Boom.

Right? Straight to your. To your customer success page.

I like that a lot.

That's a good one.

Right. And then number five, for a lot of us who are doing presentations and going out there and doing talks and webinars and summits, embed your case studies in your. In your presentation decks. Right? So make sure. This is where I see a lot of small business owners mess it up. They do so much effort to get onto podcasts. They get onto stages and they present and they do a whole ton of, you know, 30 minutes of teaching someone a concept or how to. And, but they, and for some. Or industries like accounting that they have no pitch events, so you can't end your talk and start pitching a service. Right. But the way you can sneakily, if you want, Ninja, Ninja trick, right. You can actually embed your case studies so you share stories of clients you've worked with and the results you produced.

Right.

And what typically happens is someone will come up to you and go, hey, Joe, that case study you mentioned, I want to know more about that.

Right?

And that opens the door into the sales conversation. Okay, absolutely. Yeah, that's. That's worked well for me and it's worked well for others that I've taught this to as well. So they're five and then there's another 10 more you can look at on the, on the website and we'll link.

That in the show notes because I think it's a very long URL.

Also, how's. How can people get the. I think it's free and correct me if I'm wrong, but to get the kind of like the. The case study really Deep Dive PDF. And you have a bunch of email templates as well.

Yes. So I put it all onto a nice little page like the guide, the blog post I just talked about. Just go to simplecreativemarketing.com hustle. If you go there, it's all there for you guys and just go grab it.

You made our life and everyone listening so much easier. Thank you. I wrote down Hustles for some reason. No, because I remember downloading that stuff. The case study, where it walks through probably even more in depth than what you can do here, or at least it follows along. Then you have templates, email templates, like whole strat. What. What are the templates around? Actually, I didn't really dive in those as much.

Good question. So one of the, you know, a common question I get is, you know, how do I get my client to agree to doing the case study?

That's it. Yeah.

Right. So we use a template to. Basically, there's a template in there which is the one that we use for our clients, and we send it out to their clients. And it basically says the rule rule number one of anything around this is, you know, what's in it for them, Right? So if you're going to ask someone to be profiled on your website and in your marketing, okay. Like, unless they really love you and they're like, sure, I'm happy to help you.

Right.

In most cases, you're gonna have to convince them some way. Right. And there's got to be a benefit for them. So, you know, one, one, one. One benefit that really works really well is we're gonna profile you. You get your five minutes of fame in front of our audience.

Right.

We know you serve a similar type of audience or one of one segment within our audience is the type, same type of business that you go after. Right. We're gonna put you in front of them.

Okay.

And so that's one way. Another way is for a lot of agencies that, you know, I've got a client I'm working with now who supports agencies. And what she said to me was, well, some agencies don't want to be on a customer success story page with another, like 10 other agencies, because now they're all competing. And I'm going, I get that. So what would be a benefit to the agency? And she said, well, maybe, you know, I don't know, they like to get a backlink because that's going to help their SEO. Boom. Okay, so understand what's the benefit for the person you're asking.

Right.

And put that in there. So one of the templates goes through that. The other templates are all around.

So there's a follow up on that. There's also, if you're working.

With writers and things like that, templates to give to the writers so they can do the writing for you. So there's other pieces of that in there.

Yeah, no, I saw that and I was like, oh, wow. You just like took the thinking out of a lot of this stuff too.

Yeah, I'm going to have to go grab all this stuff.

We're going to use this. Yeah. And for affiliate because, like, that's really what we're doing. We're reworking a lot of stuff in the business where other folks can kind of really take and run what we used to be caught up in a lot of. And we're just heads down into content. So I know Matt specifically is going to write a lot more of our style, but probably even weave in the case study thing even further.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

I dig it. Cool. Well, we're going to link everything up. I know it was a long simplecreativemarketing.com hustle for that. Amph. This is awesome, dude. Thank you.

Thank you so much, guys. Love rocking with you today and yeah, we'll just continue doing what we do. And I love your group. Everyone should join that group. If you're not already in there.

Thank flowchartgroup.com for anybody listening.

We'll speed up the outro.

That's where you get the notes for all this stuff from AMP too, because we took the notes for you. Flowchartgroup.com.

Thank you, brother. Appreciate you.

Awesome, man. This has been great. Thanks so much.

Thanks, guys.

All right. Roland. Roland.

Roland.

Roland. Roland. He doesn't need free shoutouts.

Okay.

We'Ll edit that part out.

No, I'm talking about the. You mean the Roland from Schitt's Creek, Right, Right. Have you not watched that show?

I have not watched that show.

You have not watched that show?

Did somebody recommend that to us?

No, I've just been watching it. But it's one of the most popular sitcom shows that have been running for last five years, I think on cable, I think. But it's on Hulu. It's really good.

My sister in law told me to check it out because somebody else brought that show up recently and I'm pretty.

Sure it was Cambria probably. Yeah. It's clever as hell. I recommend it. It's just one of those 30 minute things. 20 minute things. Just like quick comedy. That storyline we start watching. There's a guy named Roland on there, and he's the mayor and he's a dirtbag, so it's kind of funny. It's a little different than, like, totally just, like, just sloppity, sloppity, you know?

We actually started watching Parks and Recreation again. We watched all of the Office all the way through. Since quarantine started, we've watched Community all the way through every single episode. And now we started on Parks and Rec.

Wait, are these all rewatching?

Yeah. Rewatch. No, no. Community I'd never watched before. Okay, we did. I rewatched all of the Office, and we're watching Parks and Rec. But Community I'd never seen before.

Got it. Okay. Okay. I probably should watch them fully through. Yeah.

Community is some of my favorite writing. Dan Harmon, he's the same guy who writes Rick and Morty. Like some. He's my favorite, like, TV show writer, for sure.

Yeah.

There's one season where they fired him and he didn't write for one season. And it's like a shitty ass season.

Really?

Yeah, it's really bad.

Okay, cool. Well, check out Schitt's Creek. See what you think. All right. It should be one of those things. First episode, you're like, all right, this is interesting. Yeah, I'll check it out. Saying all that, Anthony.

Yeah, good transition.

I mean, who needs a transition anyway? But, yeah, no, this guy. So it was just really cool to have Amph on because he's been, I would say, just such an ambassador to our community. He's been just like, he's always there to give advice, make connections, make intros to us too, for the podcast. And it's cool to have him on the show too, because I didn't really know Deep Dive, like, what he does until now. And then he's just content galore. Everything, like Deep Dive content. Yeah. Yeah.

I've been on one of his podcasts. You've been on his Virtual Summit.

Right.

He's been in our Facebook group for a while, interacting and providing value in the group. And yeah, I mean, we've gotten to build a good relationship with him over the last year or so. And so it was really cool to have him on the show to talk about this stuff and talk about this case studies. And I feel like, you know, there in. In the marketing world, there's very few topics that we really haven't touched on already, but the concept of case studies, I think is kind of a new one that we haven't really dove into in other episodes.

Yeah. And even said he kind of wanted to be. He wants to be the case study guy, like, known for case studies. I'm like, well, seems like one of those areas that probably is very effective.

Yeah. It's a blue ocean right now. Yeah, seems like it.

Yeah.

So he, you know, he started off with the content strategy. So, I mean, there's. There's probably tons of takeaways here from both of us. But the fact that I think the strategy side, even though it's one of those that, you know, it's more the broad stroke thing, it's not like here are the tactics. But yeah, like the five things he said, there's so much going on in each one of those. I think the big one, I. I think that has helped us a lot with our strategy. I guess a couple things. What were you going to say?

The third one, the understanding your brand?

I was going to go fourth, more like the brand voice. But, yeah, there's kind of overlap, for sure. Yeah. And then I was going to say our system, which is like, basically he was calling it the buyer's journey, that. Where you're going to have content, strategic content along this whole journey that someone takes with you from pre purchase to purchase to post purchase. And you got to be strategic. I feel like we've done those a lot and we've been. Yeah, our brand voice. I guess the tone come off as just two dudes that are just having fun hanging out with people on Zoom now all the time.

I feel like our brand voice is literally us making the decision that we're going to do the exact same thing on the mics as we do if the mics weren't turned on. That's our brand voice.

Pretty much. That is true.

Because I think in the beginning we listened to other podcasts and there was a lot of shows sort of in our head that were sort of influenced.

Yeah. Modeling, right?

Yeah. So we were influenced by a lot of other podcasts. We would, you know, we would get on these shows and we'd interview like other interviewers. We have banter and discussions like other shows.

Oh, I was like studying Tim Ferriss, I remember. And all of the questions he had in Tools of Titans.

We even asked some of the questions.

Used to ask, I think, so many people. Yeah. What would you put on a billboard if you had the.

We never asked that one.

I know we didn't because it's such an obvious one. But I have heard other podcasts, like, come on. Yeah, but I remember, like, we would. I was in my head a ton because I gotta ask the perfect question. I gotta sound perfect.

Yep.

It's like, no, just. Just be you.

I don't even remember where that, like, transition came, but it was there at some point.

Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But for our.

Our podcast, at some point, we just made this conscious decision of, like, dude, let's just stop caring.

It felt like last year.

I think that's a bad way of putting it. Stop caring. We care about our podcast. Let's stop caring about what comes out.

Of our mouths and what people think about. Yeah, that. Yeah. I think this last year is where we were starting to talk about on here. We just kind of just let go of a lot. And I know more so even this year. But, yeah, it only took us, like, almost four years to get there.

Stick with it, y'. All. Just like Amph was saying with the content strategy. Yeah.

So coming back, you know, he broke down that whole flow, which is gonna be something that is gonna be amazing on the notes. You know, when. When sue makes these notes, and she's just gonna have this breakdown of, like, here is the template you can use for these case studies. The headline, the profile of the client, the challenge, the solution, the result, your call to action, like, that's going to be all mapped out on a. On a cheat sheet. So that cheat sheet is going to be amazing. But also when we got to the part about, like, how do I actually get eyeballs on it? One of the things that I thought was really, really good was.

The use the case studies when you send proposals.

Right.

Like, I really, really like that concept. If somebody's like, like, coming to me, you know, wanting to potentially hire me, they're asking for a proposal, I send them back a proposal. And in that proposal, here's some links to some case studies of clients getting, like, results from what we taught.

That'd be huge. Like, right before the buying decision. Yeah, yeah.

Like, that, to me, is really, really smart.

I wish we knew that back when. Well, we'd never done a lot of proposals, but especially not now. But, yeah, for consultants, coaches out there, I mean.

If that's your jam shoot, use all those case studies or people success stories and then turn them into case studies and then plug them on your proposal right before the person is choosing to commit to you. Yeah, it's really smart.

How about for.

I want to get your thoughts around how you think we'll apply this to our current strategy with content marketing and affiliate marketing. I want to hear your thoughts since that's your brainchild.

Yeah, so I mean I've got, I've got a few ideas. First of all, I really like his flow, right. So I'm definitely going to adopt his flow for a few of our case studies. I have a, I actually have a flow, a template that I created myself for case studies that works as well, but I'm going to test this one as well and we'll kind of compare them. But I think one of the, one of the big ideas that I took away that I think is going to be really killer if I can make this work. Right. Is promoting affiliate products, but going and finding customers of those products and essentially getting them to break down like the before and after of them using a product. I'll write an article around that other person's use case. And so now, so basically what I'm saying is creating right now the template that I use is a case study based on us using this tool that we're promoting, correct? Right.

Yeah.

Well, this opens the doors for me to create a lot more case studies on the same exact products but from.

Other people's perspectives with Jill, with Sam, with their stories and yeah, I mean that I think would be, I would think it might be more, you know, applicable to. So like this whole thing. Yeah.

So like real world example. Right. Like Convert Box, that's one of the ones that we promote. We actually have a couple case studies online, but both case studies that we have online are like our own use case of. Here's the results we've seen from Convert Box. Right. There's some people out there who might read that case study and go, well that's you guys, right? A, you're an affiliate of the product so you're going to try to make it look as good as possible. So this case study is very self serving. Right. Which it is, we're affiliate marketers is what we do. But that is, you know, that's going to impact the buying decision for people. Them looking at it going, okay, this is their result. Oh wait, but they're an affiliate of it where if, you know, now it opens the doors for me to make more case studies on the exact same product. But I'm bringing somebody else's credibility. I'm not saying this is my story, I'm saying this is somebody else's story of using Convert Box now. And then I can break down a case study of somebody else using it, giving more Credibility and still using our affiliate link.

So you gave me an idea how to extend what you're saying right there is if you want to, say, promote ThriveCart, let's say in a different market, call it bookkeepers or accountants, if they need. Probably not them, actually, because they just have QuickBooks or Zero, but some other industry, maybe a sector of coaches or consultants.

Pornhub.

Sure. You're really obsessed with that. You mentioned that twice in this episode.

Was that in this one? I think so. Oh, shit.

Maybe it was the last one. I don't know. Well, you know where Matt's head's at.

I don't know.

It came up in a conversation earlier somehow. I don't remember why.

That's funny, but that's an example too.

You can go.

Do you want me to run with that example?

They need credit card processors too, Joe.

Okay, so if we use the pornhub example. So if you have someone in the porn industry, which I don't know any. Actually, I know one person. I won't name his name, though, you know, and do I. I don't think he's Stone. It's actually his family. But I'll leave it right there. You might be listening. Is because you find someone like that who has, you know, that can be. That voice can tell that story. So when you Want to Market ThriveCart to the Porn community, which hopefully Amphrity.

Doesn'T mind this comparison, but because it's.

In his episode, I'm not naming him in this scenario. He just did give me the idea.

A little bit, as did you.

But, like, you get someone like that, you place them in the case study, and now, boom, you have the ability to go market to the porn industry to this affiliate product that you never like, Matt, as far as I know, I don't think you're in the porn industry. So you used to be, huh?

No, I'm just kidding.

You did it and then. But that's the whole thing. It's like, think about how many other niches you can get into if you use. Okay, take your mind off of porn now, Matt, because in all seriousness, take what use is.

Don't think of purple elephants.

No, you go find someone in whatever industry you want to go after. And now you don't have to act like you're the, you know, the freaking expert there. Go find someone. And you could probably do that just going to these Facebook groups like I brought up there. It's like, yo, who's using, you know, convert box. Yeah, really cool. And then you find Some industries that maybe you find some overlaps and then boom, you find your person, your avatar, and now you have an entry into that market with your affiliate product.

Yeah, I mean, an even simpler way too is like, you know, we're in the ThriveCart. We, we run a ThriveCart Facebook group, but we're also in the official ThriveCart Facebook group. And there's people going in there all the time sharing, like their success stories. Right. There's people in there going, hey, I use ThriveCart. This is what it was before. This is what I did. Check out my results. You know, there's nothing that says we can't go on Facebook, shoot that person a private message and just say, hey, that, that testimonial they wrote about thrivecroft, I'm writing a blog post. Do you mind if I use that in my blog post?

Yeah, right.

You don't need to tell them that you're an affiliate and you're going to use it in a case study and you're going to make money off their testimonial. But you could go to them and say, hey, I'm writing up a blog post about ThriveCart. Do you mind if I use that quote that you just put on Facebook?

Sure, you can do that. I mean, that's the thing. Yeah. I mean, as long as you're getting permission.

I like the idea of using other people as avatars in these case studies, though, and making sure there's a benefit for them. Of course, for that person, you find whatever benefit there is if they need it. I mean, sometimes, like he was saying, some people will just be glad to give you their story. And that's why his templates, Anthony's are so interesting and probably helpful in this scenario too, is he literally has all these templates and how you can communicate this to folks. You don't have to think about how do I woo this person to give me their life story for my case study that I'm going to make money on. And they're probably not going to make money money on, which is the case with pretty much all case studies. Right. But you want to give them a little cred, a little PR or whatever.

I mean, really, at the end of the day, for me, there's only so many case studies I can write about how I use a tool. Right.

I mean, you do like you, right?

I like me.

Your ego is.

No, I'm just kidding. It's not.

But I can only. But not from an ego perspective. If I'm using convert box and I'M using it in two different ways. You know, I can't write 30 case studies on the two ways I'm using Convert box, but I can go and find other people that are using Convert Box in ways that I'm not and get case studies from them and, you know, give people even more ideas on how to use ConvertBox by leveraging the stories of others.

Well, they give you their. They're making the content for you. Basically. That's what's kind of cool. You're just putting in a format that works, that's proven, making sure it fits into that buyer journey that you have. You know, using the voice the, that we have. Yeah. I mean it's. Now you start applying all those, those five strategy points that Anth talked about.

Yep. Fo show.

I like it.

Cool. Well, he gave us a URL, a special URL. So all of these templates and all in this blog post we were talking about and all of this good stuff he put together@simplecreativemarketing.com Hustle.

Yes, he did. Yes. And you can also get the notes of this episode.

Yep.

You can get our notes@flowchart group.com. i guess I already said that when AMP was actually on there, he was basically saying do the same thing flowchartgroup.com go there and you'll meet Amph as well. He hangs out and comments a lot. So if you have any questions for this episode, boom. Go there.

He'll be there to answer.

He'll be there. Yeah, that's about it. We got Easy Webinar, our lovely sponsors and thank you very much.

So lovely.

They are lovely.

They look very pretty tonight.

Tonight.

Yes.

It's getting dark. Yep.

Joe's got to ride his bike home.

Ride my bike. I might ask for a ride, but.

I'll see you already turned down my ride.

Oh, I can't.

No, that's a one time offer. It expired. I put a countdown on it.

So Easy Webinar, if you're making webinars. Think about this though. You can actually use all these case studies in webinars as well. That's one of the applications.

Yes.

So it's like a perfect application actually.

And I think I have a case study about Easy Webinar on our blog. So somewhere talk about it. Well, no, it's a kst. Sorry, it's not a case study.

That's true. But we'll work a case study in those KSTs maybe in the future. But yeah, either way, think about how if you're using webinars Right now or thinking about using webinars. Easy Webinar is the tool for you because they do all types of webinars.

Including webinars with case studies and.

Case studies. Yeah, that's one of the types of webinars. Yeah. Yes. I think we're making that up. But unless you see it on their sales page, it might be true, but it's probably not. But you can use case studies strategically in the way of the buyer journey during a webinar. So think about what you just learned here in this episode and apply it to webinars and your tool to use all of that to make that happen is Easy Webinar. And they've hooked us up with a fat discount. If you go to EasyWebinar.com hustle easywebinar.com hustle, get a fat percentage off. Go join. We love it. We love the guys over there that run that thing, and we use it ourselves when we do webinars. So go get it. And thank you very much for listening. Share this with your friends.

Share it with everybody. And, yeah, make it your email signature.

Wow, that's aggressive, but go for it. Thank you.

That'd be awesome. If I got an email and this was in their signature.

You will be royalty in the Hustle and Flowchart community. Foever engraved in not gold. That's for sure. Engraved in something.

I don't know where you're going with that. Let's just end it here.

VIP status. That's all I'm saying.

Okay. We love you. Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreen profits.com, find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address, and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it.

We love you.