How To Craft Your Marketing Strategy for Selling Season and Beyond with Karen Altman

Welcome to Payrollin'. If you own, operate, or work for an independent payroll company, this is the show for you. We talk to the brightest minds to learn what people are doing to create payroll companies that matter and share those tips and best practices with you. I'm looking forward to learning alongside you and finding innovative ways that we can create the future independent payroll and HR companies. Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoy the show. Okay, so in the last week I have gone to 3 different websites. Of 2 were for similar services. We needed a Ben Admin system for the PEO. Um, one was for another software platform that we need. I filled out the forms on their websites, and not only one of them said they got the response after I chased them down over social media. Uh, so he said, oh yes, you know, I just haven't gotten back yet. And it was, you know, it was basically the equivalent of 24 hours since I submitted it. I submitted on a Friday afternoon, this was Monday afternoon. I was finally fed up and I said, they're probably not getting the forms like these other people whose forms I filled out and they haven't responded, so I'm just going to chase this guy down because I really to talk to them. But the other ones, I mean, one of these was recently acquired by a billion-dollar player in our space, and they just have a good old Gravity Form out there on their website, uh, that nobody's replying to, and it's probably going to, you know, some former intern's email address, and just nobody's even getting these inbound leads. And so I've got to now, if I want to do business with them, which I don't, after that, I, I would have to do the same thing and chase them down and go try to, you know, ferret out a salesperson instead of just having a nice little handy link on their website where I could book a call, uh, directly from it. Instead of that, that was the feedback I had for the first guy was, hey, you made me fill out this form, it took you a while to respond, and then you sent me an email with a calendar link to book a calendar time. Why not just put the calendar link on your website? And so that's what we're going to avoid here at year-end when we start talking about our marketing strategy for Q4 of 2021. So we are, we're filming this on 9/21/2021, and we are just finished up yesterday going through what is our marketing strategy for selling season? What are we going to do? What's our focus going to be? And I thought it'd just be helpful, Karen, if we just kind of walk through it with folks. I know for some of you, this is going to be stuff where you're going to say, ah, that's, that's, you know, that's level 1. We're way past that. For other of you, you're going to say, wow, that's level 10. How do we get there? And there are going to be some in between, but hopefully everybody can take some small takeaways out of this conversation. So thanks for joining me, Karen.

Absolutely.

Excited. Absolutely. All right. So let's kind of start there of like, what are some of our overall goals? So we want to start with, you know, I mean, you know my cliché line, right? Like if you have no target, you'll hit it every time. And so like, what are some of our goals, more general and specific, as we look at what we're trying to do here Q4?

So, um, For everyone listening that doesn't know, we just had a rebrand and part of the rebrand was we are now offering PO services. So a whole new service line going into selling season. So a big part, one of the overarching goals we have is to gain some interest, gain some brand awareness almost on the PO services. So that's a whole new focus that we have this year compared to last year. So that's a big one that we wanna focus on. We also, just like you started with, is the subscribe, subscriber base, getting more subscribers into our funnels and converting them from there. So making our funnels work for us that we're putting into place. Also getting new clients, that's always one, but we've broken it down. So we have so many clients we want on this model and so many clients we want on this model totaling this total number. So me and you walked through yesterday what we want to have. So to get to the numbers we need, we need to have this many on this client, this many on this client. So breaking it down from top is just general brand awareness of a new service line and then getting down into our bread and butter service lines that we need this many new clients to close out selling season.

Yeah, and it's interesting for us. So, so most people listening to this are not going to have the quote unquote problem we had last year, and that's that we found in 2020 about 70% of our new business came from out of state. Which doesn't seem like a problem, right? Like, oh cool, like we're getting, you know, good, our marketing's working and our inbound is working. And that's where most of these folks are coming from is from referrals, from inbound, from our SEO, from, you know, Karen alluded to sales funnels. We're gonna say sales funnels 50 times on here today. So I'm gonna apologize in advance, but it's all about sales funnels right now. And so for us, we kind of have this renewed focus on, well, We have so much, uh, runway or green space here in South Carolina, and even just in Columbia particularly, that we haven't even scratched the surface. So what can we do to make more South Carolina businesses aware of our products and services? And also, obviously, we're trying to educate that rebrand and the PEO at the same time. So we've got a lot to navigate here, uh, coming into year-end. So a lot to keep in mind, but ultimately, yes, we need to be able to track marketing back to, hey, how many new clients did we get as a of these efforts? And did we retain our existing clients because we did a really good job of educating them and providing them with resources and providing value that helps them to stay as a part of our business? So one of the things that we did here first that I really liked as part of our conversation yesterday as we're putting this together was talking about some of our successes from the previous 6 months. You know, as you look at this list, and we can kind of go through the list, I mean, what's the one thing that jumps out at you more than anything else when you look at some of the successes we've had from the marketing side?

I would say the amount of traffic and social increase that we've had. So that is from all the marketing efforts. What we're trying to do is drive traffic. We're trying to get people to come inbound so we don't have to do all the outbound sales. So having— putting more value by content out there, making sure our funnels are working properly is something we've been focused on very heavily for the last couple of months because it's something I don't think last selling season, we had all, you know, planned out so much. We had, we thought we had the website down and we hadn't really looked into funnels as much. So now I think getting people into these funnels, getting more traffic in and getting these inbound leads. I will also say that we had a rebrand and we have seen, you know, that's a brand new thing for us. We've never rebranded. So having this new brand in place, everything went smooth. Smooth. That was a success. And then a smaller one was we are finding opportunities and taking them and trying to market them as much as possible, ERTC being one of them. So we saw that there was an opportunity there, and we had, you know, we did the entire marketing process. We created the, you know, the landing page. We started pushing out on social. We created videos. We did paid ads. We did everything we need, and we've seen great success over this small opportunity. We might not be doing those 2 years down the road, but it's working for us now. So finding those opportunities, getting, you know, having a process in place where we can just quickly turn it around and start driving some traffic to that is what, you know, I feel like has been a big success over the last 6 months.

Yeah, absolutely. The 2 things I hit on there is if anybody's got interest. So, so the rebrand thing, and I know many of you are like us where you start out with this generic name of ERG Payroll and HR and then You know, we're 7 years in, so there's a lot of brand equity there, particularly in the local market, that we were scared about giving up and, and still have concerns about, right? But, but one of the biggest things that we've decided to do as part of this was to do it slowly. So we started that in, you know, August, September this year, and the goal is to have it done by March of 2022. And so it's a long process, and it's something that, you know, the website's going to come up multiple times in this call because our website has 280, 300 pages, something like that. I mean, it's a deep website. That's part of our SEO strategy is constantly be pushing out more great content that's helping people. Um, but yeah, we've kind of also created a mess over there with all the, all the stuff we've created over the years. And so, um, that, that's going to take a while and we're going to talk more about that. But, but if, if you have interest in a, in an episode on the rebrand in a couple months, drop me a note on LinkedIn or, or drop me an email. I know a lot of y'all, um, or, you know, Matt at guru.co, G-U-H-R-O-O.co, and let me know. I think that would be a fun one. But, um, yeah, and I think that you're right, the ERTC thing I think was really cool. One thing I'll touch on there for, for anybody listening is really interesting piece of that funnel that's been working really well, uh, was what's called a video sales letter I created, uh, regarding ERTC. And if you just Google video sales letter, there's lots of great templates and formats for this. I don't think I've ever taken the time to actually be strategic in the format of any videos I've created as far as how I phrase the problem, how I phrase the potential solutions, how I, you know, continue to agitate it throughout. I'd followed just kind of like what I've done over the years and not really strayed just because it's working. But we've never had a YouTube video that multiple times in one week people were picking up the phone and calling our office and saying, we want you guys to do our ERTC, we saw the YouTube video. And like, I mean, that's not even the call to action from the video. Is to call the office, but they found it. Um, and I think it was the perfect example of something that was just executed with just a little bit higher level of, you know, strategy and immediately showed results. And so like, don't forget about how those small tweaks can make big results. Um, all right, let's talk about the things we don't want to talk about as much, but we've got to. We already talked about— so, so failures from the previous 6 months. We, we kind of alluded to the website's a bit of a hot mess, not just because it's so deep and so wide, but also we're in the middle of that rebrand. And so We've also got two different markets that we're serving that we're merging together. So we've got our direct-to-small-businesses side of the house, which represents, you know, 300 pages of website that's been there for 7 years. And then we've got our, you know, partner side of the house, which is folks that either resell our payroll, resell our HRIS, use our payroll and HR marketing services. And so we're trying to merge those two sites to one domain, which also happens to be a .co and confuses people. So we've got that additional— I cannot wait for whoever this is. I hope if they're listening to this podcast right now, whoever owns Guru.com— Guru.com— I'll give you $25 for it right now. $25. Come on, just do it. Do it. So what else on the failure side? What else have we run into over the last 6 months?

So I would say one of the biggest ones is paid ads. We have— we've been doing paid ads for a couple of years now, but we are not doing them as consecutively as we should be. So we should be running them nonstop. They should be going more towards— very geared towards our target audience. We've also done a lot of testing, and I know testing is this cliché word that marketing uses, and a lot of people are just like, does it really work? Well, we found that it's— it's worked for us. So Matt is much bigger on the LinkedIn side. He loves LinkedIn. He— I think he dreams about LinkedIn. And then there's Facebook, where he does not even get on Facebook. So there's two sides of social platforms right now., and both have almost the same targeting capabilities. Facebook may even have a little bit more targeting abilities these days, but we tested some ads and we saw a lot higher conversion for a lot less cost on Facebook than we're seeing on LinkedIn. So it's something to always, you know, we put the same ads out and we saw those results. So that's something just to, you know, put out there. You can also see If you go to Facebook Ads Library, you can look up any competitors in the market and see what they're running at any given time. So that's another thing to also consider. So we keep our eyes out once a week. We go in and we look and see what our competitors are running. For instance, Justworks is a competitor for us right now because of the PO services. So we're seeing what they're running constantly and seeing that we aren't running as much, you know, and obviously we're a smaller company, but we can be running at all points in time. We can be doing a little bit more targeting in the creative. So I do think that paid ads has been something that we can continuously work on and use for us, like gain leads, because there are a lot of targeting options. So there's lead gen, which you can just go in. We just tried this out, what was it, a couple of weeks ago, and it just automatically— a form comes up and automatically populates with the person's information and then it sends in, we get the information and we can reach out. So that's a very nice one on Facebook. And then just your general traffic ones, driving it to a landing page and using it there. So I will say we have not done as many paid ads as we should be, but we're getting there. It's a work in progress.

Yeah. So go ahead. Now, two quick things on that. You touch on like first and foremost, just Google find my competitors Facebook ads if you're like— because I don't know if we're giving a very good description on where they are or not. But, but if you just Google find my competitors Facebook ads, you can find them. And now the key thing here is look at the ones that they're running over and over and over. These companies with, you know, use Justworks as the example. This company that's raised $150 million or whatever it is, like they're not going to keep pumping money into ads that aren't working, right? So clearly they're seeing traction on this. Same with Gusto. And now on LinkedIn, I just over here on the other screen, I pulled this up. So if you go to a company page on LinkedIn, click on posts. And then on the very right side, there is an ads button and that will show you all the ads that they are currently running. So I'm looking at Gusto's ads right now. Gusto is really doubling down on their partner side. So all their ads, and this is the same for Facebook, are towards trying to get CPAs to get this People Advisory certification, which is obviously a very intelligent marketing tool because the more certified CPAs there are, the more they're going to be recommending their payroll services. So take that what you want and do with that what you want. But like, that's a really good strategy. Twofold of, hey, how do I find what people are spending money on ads? But B, okay, so why is Gusto so focused on this partner advisory certification? Interesting, right? How can I grow my business from there? So, um, good stuff. Let's look, let's look ahead here and follow our handy little notes. So, um, this is one of the first episodes we've ever had notes for, so that's pretty dope too. You know, usually you can, you can probably tell from the quality of the conversation that we're just winging it most of the time, but, um, So looking ahead, potential obstacles. What do we have on here for potential obstacles?

So we're going to open up a whole new ballpark for everyone listening to this podcast. We have got into a new CRM and this CRM is a very intricate CRM. It has so many different features, it has tons of integrations in it. And we found this, I want to say, probably 6 months ago-ish, maybe a little bit less. Played around with a little bit. There's a couple that we worked with before that really didn't get to where we needed to be. It was missing features. We were going back to our current CRM. Well, we found one that works for us. Now it's a little tricky because it's not— it's got some, you know, funkiness in the user, you know, trying to get through this. But in starting this right before selling season, that's definitely an obstacle. So we have made a lot of progress in this CRM. But it's a learning game. So making sure, you know, the CRM has all of our funnels in it, we can build landing pages directly in the CRM, we can have Facebook ads running through. There's just so many different features and that we are not experts in yet. And so learning the system is definitely an obstacle. I'm sure any of you listening that have started with a new CRM, you're pretty familiar with that. Some, you know, getting used to it, getting everything set up in there can take some time. We're very excited for it, but it's definitely an obstacle going into this.

Yeah, and, and that's one of those things. We've worked with Zoho CRM, we still work with Zoho CRM for our client data and for past potential opportunity data. We use HubSpot, we use features of HubSpot for mostly around their emailing component and their templates, which are really nice. So we don't really log into HubSpot a lot. It's like the Gmail extension is really practical, but this is like We haven't been able to have that single source of truth that says how many leads did we get last week, where did they come from, and how did they find us? Like, that's really ultimately— and in order for that to be the case, like, you've got to have each of those touch points in the same CRM. Otherwise, you know, you're just trying to string together a bunch of systems. So we found that, and to Karen's point, it's, you know, it's like I always like say, the system can split an atom. Uh, we just have to figure out, you know, which pieces we actually are gonna use in a heavy fashion. So yeah, definitely gonna be, uh, challenges there. What else we got going on?

You have mentioned this a couple times, but our current website, all that is just— it's one of those, you know, with the brand, with the rebrand, we now have two sites into play that we need to— that we need to merge together. So finding out how we're going to do this without losing all of our SEO, how we are, you know, with this new CRM, we have all new forms that need to be— like Matt said earlier, we have almost 300 pages on the site. Most of them have forms on it. We have to integrate new forms on the site. We have to make sure that all of the downloads are redone. Also in this CRM, we have, you know, when someone downloads off the site, we have email drips that are set up, making sure they're linking correctly because we're using a whole new system for that. So it's just not the website design at this point. It's also the functionality of the website that we are hitting some obstacles on. We're putting a plan in place, probably could be a whole nother podcast episode, but we're getting a plan in place and it's just taking time to really nail down what we want to do on the website. Also, this is a smaller one, but with the new CRM, we use Mailchimp. That was our main email platform. We are now inside the new CRM using emails through there. We had to set up a new domain. So a lot of our emails that were trusted before are going to spam folders. So that's just— it's a smaller aspect and it's, you know, one of those parts you just got to do to get this set up. But not being able to get these emails in front of trusted emails and subscribers that we've already had, that's definitely a little bit of an issue. So we have to do more emails to get that trusted, you know, aspect back into place so they can start seeing these emails and it's not going directly to spam. So that's definitely a little obstacle. It's just, you know, once we might have been doing one email a week before, and this year we have to do 2 to 3 just to make sure we're getting back in the mailboxes.

Yeah. And so just to kind of get a little bit more transparent on that. So we're using a white label CRM that was built for marketing agencies because what we've started doing on to, like I said, we address those two different markets. We sell to other payroll and HR companies where we give them, you know, our obviously our HRIS is kind of the primary product there over the years., for folks that were on the same payroll platform we were using. And then we started offering marketing services. And one of the things that we, we struggled with was how do we get all those things into the hands of our clients in an easy way? Like, instead of just copying and pasting, oh, here's a Google Doc with this email campaign on it, it's 6 emails, like, now copy and paste it into your MailChimp or your ActiveCampaign or your this CRM or that CRM. We're just preloading a CRM with all of our, you know, so when we go to create a campaign, we just replicate it for clients inside of that CRM. I have no problem sharing the name of it. It's called GoHighLevel. You can find it online. I mean, it wouldn't make any sense to go buy it directly, but it, um, it's a, it's a great system. Like I said, it's, it's definitely, you know, in some ways more robust, but like everything, it's always missing one button right where you want it when you want it. But, um, there's one—

so let's go though.

What'd you say?

There's one other big obstacle.

Okay, what is that?

And that's the rebrand. Um, ERG being very well known, so we mentioned before How we are driving a huge local campaign over the next couple months. Well, we're known as ERG in the Columbia, greater South Carolina markets, but we're now Guru. So how do we get around the naming? Do we keep it together? And for the next couple months, do we completely separate them? We also have two different sites. So all of that plays into a part of selling season for us and obstacles that we're getting through just because we want to throw that extra layer of rebranding in right before selling season.

Season, right? Yeah, which I was advised against doing, for the record, and I appreciated that advice. But it's kind of one of these things where this rebrand was inevitable, uh, so it was like, look, we're going to be doing a big push at year-end. We've got a big event that we also host here in Columbia at year-end. It's just the time, sort of a now or never. Let's just do it and rip the Band-Aid off. For years we've thought about merging the two brands, and so You know, we ready, fire, aimed it like we always do. Or, well, I always do, and Karen just kind of comes along and says, all right, I guess so, Matt. Um, all right, but, but so along with that, we've got plenty of opportunities. So what are some opportunities that we have, uh, before we get into the actual strategy here?

Um, one of the biggest ones is the local. There's a lot of businesses still in specifically Columbia and in South Carolina that we can be saturating. So that is the main opportunity that we're going after. Some other opportunities, as most people hear this, they don't normally take it as much, but niching down. We need to figure out our top 3 audiences and then from there we need to be targeting them. And then eventually, hopefully, we will just niche down completely. But You know, it's a work in progress and that's always an opportunity. PEO, that's a huge one. This is the first year we're going into selling season with a PEO service offering. So that is a huge opportunity to be promoting that, to be marketing that as additional value for coming on board with us. So those three, along with upselling to current clients. So that's another part of our clients right now are not in the PEO system, you know, they're not part of a PEO with us. So upselling to them, making sure they're aware that we now offer PEO services and any additional services like ERTC. If they're not, you know, if they need their help and we have— we haven't gotten the word out to them, well, that's an issue. So we need to make sure we're constantly in front of our current clients, our current base, and making sure that we're letting them know the other benefits that are with us.

Yeah, I think that's important all around. It's some of the feedback we get every time we run a client survey is like, I'm not aware of all the other things you guys do. And, you know, that hurts your heart when you hear that, right? It's like, oh man, like, we didn't— we're not marketing to our own clients for possible upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and they actually want to know about it. Which is, you know, it's one thing to say, hey, we're not browbeating them with our services. Like, I'm a big fan of meet people at their point of need. I don't want to upsell people for things they don't want, they don't need. But also, like, there are clients where they're going, oh, it'd be great if you guys, you know, offered benefits. Well, yeah, we've offered benefits for the last 4 years. Uh, so, so definitely, you know, don't be shy to market to your clients. They actually want it. Um, and but you can do it also in a way that's educational and, and provides some value. So, um, yeah, and I'll just, I'll say as it relates to the PEO thing, there's these two sides of that coin too. There's a market of folks that are familiar with PEOs and need to know how we sit against the competition. And then there's a market of folks that have no concept of what a PEO is at all. And so like putting the term PEO into it doesn't even matter or make sense. They just need to be educated on the concept. And that's not our traditional, you know, this isn't $150 a month, uh, 8-man payroll client. Like this is going to be somebody where you start getting into larger deal size. And so they're going to be slower to close. And so that's something that we've also got to be conscious of, you know. You know, uh, I struggled coming into this market. I never worked with an account below 50 employees in the payroll industry before starting this business. Now we work with very few over 50 employees, and we've really embraced that SMB market because of their ability to act quickly and act swiftly if they find things they like, whereas a PEO is definitely going to slow that down, get it into a little bit longer buyer cycle. So the marketing strategy has to be on par with that as well. Exactly. All right, so let's talk about the actual strategy. Okay, what are we, what are we doing here? So what are we doing here?

We have a whole different plan this year. Well, it's not completely different, but last year Matt and I, this was in the middle of COVID when we talked about our selling strategy. We have seen so much success with providing free content, giving value, giving value, giving value. If we can, the more we can give the better. So we started with that marketing plan. There was no selling, quote unquote selling, but there was all giving. But there's one little piece during selling season that we missed a little bit, and that was we were still trying to sell. And then afterwards, after the salesy, you know, marketing pitches and all of that, we would then provide the content. You know, they had to subscribe and then they would get the content. Well, this year we're going all content. So we are doing, as we've mentioned, we are focused very heavily on South Carolina, specifically also Columbia. So why not do a local campaign and give out 25 HR templates for businesses in South Carolina? We have all these guides, we have checklists, we have guides, we have every template. Here. We don't want to hold them in and keep them for us. We want to give them out. So that is a strong sell of here's the 25 templates, everything you need as a small business for HR. We're going to promote that across the board. So we're going to do ads, we're going to do mailers, we are going to do emails. This whole— this is going to be our big seller for the next couple of months is just trying to increase our traffic and increase our funnels and get more subscribers into our base through providing content.

And yeah, no, that's great. And so like, I'm going to start to break this down a little bit on like, what is the actual funnel? How are we going to get people into the funnel? What are they going to get? So when we talk about that, so basically what we're doing is we're putting together this landing page that's going to have— it's going to be gated, which means you are going to have to just give up an email to get to it. But it's going to have 25, 30 templates. We haven't exactly finished it up yet, but it's going to be, you know, interview guides, hiring guides, new hire packet, you know, state-specific laws for South Carolina, performance review templates, termination guides, everything. All the most used stuff by our clients, we're just going to give it away, right? And we're just going to— and we're going to give them a breakdown in the email sequence to follow of how to use them. Videos, you know, information on, okay, here's what you actually do with this stuff. What do you do with the COBRA letter? Like, who's supposed to send this and when? So we're going to give them everything they need to DIY if they want to, if they have to, if they need to. Right. So in reality, DIYing HR for a company with less than 25 employees or less than 50 employees is very challenging to do. However, hopefully this will help them on their way to doing it if they choose to get on that path. So first thing we want to do is— so, so let me kind of outline when we talk about a funnel, like what the different stages of the funnel are and what we have there at each stage. So we've got getting traffic to the actual landing page. So what are some of the ways that we're going to drive traffic to the initial landing page where we're going to have this content?

So we are going to do mailers this year, Columbia-focused, and we are going to put a QR code right there on the mailer so they can just hold their phone, get the code, and it's going to take them directly to that landing page. They can get those assets right then and there. They're not going to have to remember it. They're not going to have to go to a computer later to download it. They're not going to have to do any of that. They can simply just use the QR code, which is something we have not done in the past, and they can get access to this landing page and then they can get all the templates. So that is one way we're going to do it. That's a little bit outside of the normal digital realm that we've been focused on. Paid ads. So I mentioned that this was something we have not been doing enough of. So we are going to target some specific industries so we can really niche down and put, you know, if we're going after a financial firm, here are 25 templates templates for a— that every financial firm needs for, you know, so we're going to start really being very specific in our messaging and driving people to that landing page via paid ads. Email campaigns. So in our subscriber base, you know, they're already in our subscriber base. So that is— this is not going to get more, but it's going to provide that value so we can then create, you know, here are all these being in front of them. You know what? First thing comes to mind when I need payroll or I need HR services or I need benefits is, oh, Guru, not here anymore. Guru is, you know, they've been sending me all this, like, let me contact them. So that would be that. Just constant organic social, making sure that our SEO is strong. But the mailers, the paid ads and the emails are the main way that we want to drive and get people to this landing page.

Yeah. And so, and then I'll add one other thing in there, and, and this is something that we've been working on too, is so also borrowed audiences, right? So whether that be through partners, uh, with our, our, you know, we've got lots of local business groups we're a part of, CPAs, brokers, but also podcasts. So we've got one of our virtual assistants right now who's building out a list of South Carolina small business-focused podcasts and trying to book us as a guest on the podcast so that we can, you know, espouse to all the great ways that small businesses can grow on the HR side and then, you know, lead them back into this, this funnel at the end of the day. Hey, as a special, you know, special gift for your audience today at Guru.co/youraudience, we've got these 25 free HR templates. So now one thing you probably picked up on there as you heard Karen talking was like, wait, hold on, like, now you're going to also make this specific to financial advisory firms in South Carolina? Like, how are you going to talk to all these different audiences? One of the cool things that we're able to do inside of that CRM is like, once we've built out a funnel, which is going to include this landing page and then a booking form and then a show-up sequence of email drips and then a call and then a follow-up sequence, like, we can just hit duplicate on it and then just change the verbiage to say, for financial advisory companies, for real estate agencies, for nonprofits. And so we can make it so custom when you start to— you're niching down by size, industry, and geo helps us too. And we're not chasing more than 3 of these, uh, going into year-end. And we pretty much just listed them all right there. I think we've got 3 or 4 or 5 on here, but a couple of them are, um, yeah. So we're going after, you know, nonprofits are a big one for us. Real estate agencies here, a big one. Independent financial advisory firms, a little bit trickier one to pin down and actually finding. But so yeah, so we're going to drive a lot of traffic to this front end of the funnel, which is that landing page. They exchange their email, they get put into— they get access to all of the assets. But then the nice thing about this automation piece is they also just right there get the option, hey, you want to just book a call with us and we'll walk you through all this. And we're going to make the promise on there of, hey, look, we're going to just walk you through how to use these assets at your business. This isn't a sales call, right? So now we've got some nice value-creating conversation starting. And then, yeah, as I mentioned throughout that funnel, we're going to do a couple of things. So once they, you know, if they book a call, great, they're going to get an email sequence that makes sure that they show up for the call. Then if they don't book the call, then they're going to get a different sequence that says, hey, you should book the call. And one of the things that you have to remember here is that, you know, we've probably mentioned this on another episode, but I don't know if I can mention it enough, is your prospects are going to need to spend on average about 7 hours with you to make a determination on whether or not they want to do business with you. However much of that you can automate, so think about things like podcasts, YouTube videos, um, you know, guides or resources that they're, you know, they're— you're creating that know, like, trust and creating value for them without actually having to to them for 7 hours, which is like the traditional model, right? We've talked about on a prior episode where this poor woman called me up. She said, I spent 8 hours with ADP last week. Well, there's a reason why ADP wanted to spend 8 hours with her, because that's how long it takes to create the type of relationship where somebody is going to do business with you. But at the end of the day, like, we don't have time as smaller agencies. We don't have 50 salespeople running around that can go spend 8 hours with every prospect. We need to automate some of that. So see, these are some of the ways that we do that.. And I'll just say, not to get too far afoot here, but on the podcast side, so we were doing two podcasts for a while. We were doing one for ERG Guru, direct to market to the small businesses, and then this one, Payroll In, direct to payroll bureau owners. So obviously there are— I think I learned yesterday there's 30 million small businesses in the US or, and there are 16,000 payroll companies. But which of those podcasts do you think got more listens? The one with the 16,000 hyper-niched audience of payroll companies, uh, gets more listens, more engagement. It's more fun. It's more valuable. So like, if you're going to do some of that type of content, niche it down to an industry, to your city, to something beyond just small business and entrepreneurial podcasts are just cliché. Broken at this point. Like there's a, there's a, there are a dime a dozen. Find your angle and you don't need 500 people, 500,000 people every episode, 50, 100, 200, 300. Like you're really like, that's enough to make an impact. So just, just a little bit on the podcast side, cause obviously I'm a big fan.

It's all that testing and learning. So, you know, the HR Simplified is where we basically started and that was our other one and we saw it wasn't working. Well, Payroll is now, so we haven't recorded. Well, you haven't recorded anything for HR Simplified because we've been more focused on this one. So take what's working and use it and keep going with it. Yeah.

And I think our strategy going forward is going to be that borrowed audience because that's kind of like the same principle you're operating on with your referral partners is going, hey, if I can create value for them, then they're going to share that with their, their clients. Well, it's the same on the content side of if I can create value for the audience of the podcast, then that creates value for the podcast. And they're going to share my information. So, yeah. All right. So where are we on this document here? So we're driving traffic, paid ads, cold outreach, landing page, doing some referral incentives. Obviously, for current clients, we want to have a referral campaign and some, some real meat in that where people know, hey, look, if you're happy with this service, here's what we'll give you in exchange for sharing the good word. You're a TC. Absolutely. If you're, if you're not doing the RTC, great. Hey, if you're not doing the RTC, we'll do the processing for you and split you back on the, on the fees. Quick shout out on that one. Now, we talked in here website focus, better, better user experience and funnels throughout. So one of the things that happens when you get a website that's as wide as ours is it starts to, you know, your conversion rate optimization, which means like, hey, is this website built for people to take specific actions based on where they are on the site? Some of that can start to get a little sideways the wider you get.

Absolutely.

What other goals do you have coming out of this season as we get into this year's marketing season?

So definitely a little bit more presence on social. So Matt has talked about this on another episode, but about LinkedIn especially, um, more organic traffic on there especially. And this is no secret here, but you are as a business owner and as one of the faces of your payroll company, it's just important for you to be actively involved on posting, on engagement than it is for the company page as well. So Matt is doing absolutely phenomenal on his page, getting back up to speed with the company pages and just making sure that we are getting the right messaging down. So, you know, last year we did a little bit more salesy. We need to do this year and we need to be focused on breaking down every single guide and template that's in this, you know, 25-pack guide, I guess you want to call it, and breaking them down and putting them all on social, making, making sure that when we have paid ads going, that when they land on our page, it's on our social page, it's got everything listed out. They can see it all connects. So that's a big one on top of everything is just increasing our social engagement, our social followers. At the end of the day, people, I think it's, they spend over 3 hours a day scrolling on social. If you think about that within the time of your day, if you can be in front of them. Number one hint is also the more that people like your pages. So if you're going for ads, making sure that you're also driving for people to like your pages because then you can be in front of them all the time. Every time you post, it's going to come up on their feed. Paid ads, when you're doing a little bit more of traffic and they're just seeing it once, it might get forgotten about. So if you're trying to drive, you know, making sure you're driving to like the social page. So I would say that's another one. And then I think the biggest one is just keeping providing content, making sure that we're also in front of our current clients, you know, that we're constantly in front of them just as much as we're trying to get in front of the potential. Because at the end of the day, those are your biggest leads. They are the ones that are going to refer people to you. They are the ones that you should be selling to all year long, but not selling to, if that makes sense. You know, providing them with everything they need, being in front of them. If any new, you know, every— anything that comes out, if you're the first one to let them know about it over the other 4 of your competition, if they're coming in first, they're gonna be like, well, I just got all this information from them. Why isn't my payroll company in front of me? Why isn't my HR char company in front of me. So that's always top of mind for us too, because the minute you also in selling season are always focused on selling to potentials, you lose sight of your current audience. I mean, your current clients. So you need to be in front of them always, number one. They are the ones that trust you. They're the ones that are going to give the referrals.

Well, and also they're going to be getting hammered by your competition. Yes, it is selling season, right? So that means every one of the pays, ADP, they're all just going to be picking up the phone and blitzing them too. And so, so that comes back to this marketing equation for us is like we've always tried to find ways to say, all right, how do we do this without like forcing ourselves onto people? There's that old analogy of, you know, like the, or that, that image of the piece of string that somebody's pulling that's nice and taut. When they pull it out, when they push on it, it just kind of bunches up, right? Like cold outbound sales is like pushing on the string and it just kind of bunches up and recoils back away from you. Whereas If you're leading folks to you, then, you know, they're, they're pulling and they're coming along. Um, and I think this, this time of year it's more important than ever. Like, obviously that's a whole other episode is like, how does marketing convert to sales? So what do we do once that person opts into the funnel? How do we nurture them? What do those sales calls look like? What's our process look like from there? I think if you go back to last year, we did a top 12, uh, or something along those lines. It was one of the very few listicles, which is why I remember it. But, uh, the We did a top 12 sales mistakes you make at year-end, which will be a nice complement to this, especially for those of you that aren't as sales-heavy. Because I think that you need to understand, once again, you start to think about that amount of time, energy, and training that our, our competitors in the market have as compared to what we have as small, uh, smaller local and regional providers. And you've got to be equipped to compete. And I think to me, like, we go back to biggest concerns, and that, that to me continues to be, you know, every week when we log in to CRM and look and see, you know, last week we logged in and we had 30-something leads in there from the last 2 weeks. And it was like, nobody's even following up with, you know, we're just automating some follow-up and, and only cherry-picking out the absolute ones that have raised their hand and said, I want to buy. And everybody else is basically getting ignored. So I think like my bigger concern is solving some of that sales side of what happens to these people once they actually opt into our funnel and taking it from there. But Karen, you touched on something there and I want to come back to it. So like, for me and my dumb brain, I think about a paid ad and I just want to pay for an ad on Facebook or LinkedIn that send that— that somebody, 1 out of every 100 people buys. And that's like, you know, to me, that's the way I wish it worked, right? It was like, okay, cool. This is a signup form from a Facebook ad that you click through and you sign up for my services. And huzzah, great day. What are the actual good uses for ads as it relates to our type of funnel?

So good uses to ads, I quickly hit on it, but so we'll go through, we'll start with Facebook more specifically and then get into some LinkedIn. So Facebook has, I think it's 10 different types of ads that you can do. You can do everything from traffic to the lead gen. Like I mentioned before, you can do video views, you can do conversions, you can do store visits, you can do calls. There's a lot of them. And then there's some that I would highly never do. So there's one for reach, and then there's one— I think it's reach— and there's another one that's just like general engagement. Now under engagement, there is a page like, and you have to click on engagement when you do this. And anyone who has any questions about getting into paid ads, so Facebook uses Facebook Business Manager to do the more specific ads. So if you're just trying to boost a post, that's not the ads we're talking about. So you have to go into Facebook Business Manager, set up your account and link your Facebook there. Facebook also owns Instagram. So if you have an Instagram account, it will also connect in there. And then that's where it lets you get these So if you're just going in and you're just on your Facebook page and you're trying to boost a post, it's not going to give you any of these options. So that's just a hint. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I'll be happy to help. But when you're in there, you have a bunch of those different options. Well, Page Like is one of my biggest ones. I'm so supportive on Page Like. Like I mentioned before, if you can get 5 people to like your page, but yet you get 150 people on a reach campaign, that just means that it reached— that post reached their page. Page, it reached, that's all it did. They will glance over it, keep scrolling, keep scrolling. But if they hit that one button, it's just, it's going to drive them to like, and you have to come up with a catchy phrase. They're going to see everything that you're putting out because they now like your page. So you're going to constantly be in front of them if you're posting. So that is definitely on the paid ad side is something that I think is underestimated on Facebook ads. Most people do traffic authentic or leads, but heavily consider a general branding for a page like campaign and have people like your page and you can do it for get all the free HR resources like we're handing them out weekly, like it and they'll start getting it and then give them out a free guide or you know what it may be. So that would be my suggestion there. LinkedIn, there's outreach messages, there's a bunch of different in there. LinkedIn though, I I will tell you, I think it's $10 a day you have to spend, and I— is it $30 or $50 at least you have to spend in total? So it's a little bit more. If you, you know, depending on your budget, you might have to spend a little bit more on LinkedIn. Facebook, you can do $2 a day, you can do 50 cents a day, you can do $125 over the next 2 weeks, however you want to do it. So that's just—

hopefully that answers If you're, if you're a payroll company selling to small businesses, you shouldn't be doing LinkedIn ads unless you just have a lot of money and expertise and you can really dial in those knobs to see where your conversions are. But, you know, the sort of general rule of thumb in the marketing world is like, unless you've got a $20K ARR deal at minimum, then you shouldn't be playing with LinkedIn ads. And even then, like once again, you're driving top of funnel with ads. So you're not squeezing somebody down here in the decision phase to push them out the bottom. You have to have a tight funnel the rest of the way, or it's just going to keep leaking further they get through it. So that's where Facebook is nice because it does create that brand awareness. It does get people into the top of the funnel. And does it mean they're all going to convert? Absolutely not. But to Karen's point, they're going to continue to see your stuff. They're going to get all those brand impressions they need, all positive stuff, because you're going to give them something of value. Instead of just saying click this button and buy something, which just doesn't work, right? We're not selling socks here. So although socks does sound like a good industry to get into, write that down. All right, what, what, what else you want to leave the good folks with today as it relates to crafting your marketing strategy going into selling season 2021 and beyond?

I would just say don't ever think that you're giving away your secrets, that you're giving away the stuff that's going to bring them in and lure them in. Give out everything you have. The more that you give, the more potential you're going to have pulling in. So I'm so excited to see, you know, we started getting into this more mindset last year. We didn't take it 100% like we're doing this year, and where our whole basically strategy is over, you know, providing value and content. Last year we were about 75 5%, but still in the mindset of selling. We still were in that, you know, right off the bat, book a consult, schedule an appointment, you know, right off the bat, you know, if someone— it's not going to work as much. But now getting into just get your free guides, here's 25 of them, and then working the funnel from there, getting in front of them, you know, in a couple of touchpoints after, that's when we're gonna, you know, if you want to book a time Here's my calendar. So I'm excited to see the transition that this year does over last year. But my biggest thing is, you know, I'm such a marketer that going into this last year, I was like, no, we need to be more silly. Now, seeing the success that we get over providing the value and providing and having the value work for us. So when we're putting out a piece of content, having the main focus of how are we going to get that lead from that content though. So we've built it, we've taken a lot of time to build out these funnels to make sure that we are getting the forms in the right places, that these email drips are going to convert, that all of our content is going to work for us. And that takes time. And it, you know, having a good CRM like we found is definitely very helpful Yes, there's some challenges of getting it all set up and getting used to it. But the opportunities that this is going to allow us is going to be ever-changing, you know, and I do think that this is going to be our most successful season, hopes, yet. But that would just be my biggest thing is don't think that if you're giving something away, you're giving away your secret. Give, you know, anything that you have that could be valuable, give it out. Out. Let's earn their trust through value. Get your brand out there that you are not, you know, you're not just trying to get a call, you're not just trying to book an appointment. You are here, you're giving out everything that you have.

That's awesome. I have next to nothing to add to that. Yeah, I'm so excited to like see the way the automations have come together too. Just the sequences, the little, just the little touches we've been able to automate between the calls. When people show up to meetings now and they're like, hey, I watched that video you emailed over yesterday, and it's like just to know that that was an automated thing that was set up that was meant to help nurture them prior to the conversation and did its job. Same with the post-conversation nurture and so on and so forth. It's been really exciting to watch it all come together. And yes, the mindset doesn't change. Give it all away, man. They can't do without you. It'd be like, you know, give them the payroll system. If you're not doing the tax filing and the money movement on the back end, they can't do it. Like, they can't do anything with just the software, right? So, so it's, it's kind of the same mindset of like, just give them all those tools and, and, you know, let them get as far with it as they can. And then if they If they find one day that, hey, they can't do it all on their own, then great, they'll come back to you and do it with you.

Think of it like you want to overwhelm them, overwhelm them. You want to make them be like, oh my goodness, this is a lot of stuff that I need to be doing. You know, here's another checklist, here's another template, here's another one. Like, this is everything I need. There's a new regulation out. I didn't even know this. You know, how am I going to keep up with all this? So overwhelm them. You know, get them overwhelmed with everything they're gonna have to do.

I love it. Sign it there. Overwhelm them with value, my friends. I appreciate you, Karen.

Thank you so much.

Bye.