Increase Inbound Payroll Leads By 10x

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 of of independent payroll and HR companies. Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoy the show. So, Karen, I remember like 6 months after you started, we— I was sitting at my desk and I was like, oh, we keep getting all these leads all of a sudden. It's so interesting. We've never had so much inbound activity before. I wonder what is going on. Why have things changed? And it's like that person who loses 15 pounds and then it's like, I can't really understand why I lost 15 pounds. Oh, that's right. Because I've been dieting and exercise. And doing all the things you need to do to be healthier. That was kind of the whole ordeal with why are we getting so many new leads? Oh, because we're creating really valuable content. We're optimizing our website. We're doing all the stuff you need to do to attract more leads to your business. And so today I want to take some time to talk to you about what were the things we did for ERG Payroll and HR back in the day that we've now turned into this system that we replicate for other payroll companies as well. And I am honored to be joined by Ms. Kieran Altman today, the director of marketing— marketing director. Um, she, she— I call her director of marketing, she calls herself marketing director— and, uh, for the ERG family of companies and Guru. Pleasure to see you. How are you?

I'm great. So excited to talk through this today. There's a lot of points I know we're going to make that'll be helpful, and it's been a fun year kind of seeing what we've done for, for ERG Payroll and Ready to chat.

Yeah, so it has been a great time getting into all this, and I just had the same conversation with somebody earlier. I was like, I could talk about this all day. This is the fun stuff, right? Especially when you talk about marketing and what you're doing to create demand and create new leads. And, and I'll kind of start with like the problem from my side. So, so I started ERG Parallel in HR 7 years ago, spent a lot of time on marketing, uh, in the early days when I wasn't really doing anything with any sort of strategy whatsoever, trying to get a website up and going, trying to create content, you know, post a blog here, a blog there, you know, go 6 more months, no more blogs. The website looked different month to month, no consistent branding, any of that, no way to tie leads back to where they were actually coming from or if they were coming in at all for that matter. And so like that was probably some of the most frustrating One of the most frustrating pieces for me was not really being able to consistently track and monitor leads and where they were coming from. So, so we'll kind of start there and then let's talk about what we did to kind of get away from that over time. I mean, from your perspective, what were some of the things that we first did when we started moving past the whole where is any of this coming from and cluelessness that we were in at one point?

So I think you hit on two points there that really, once you focus on, on these two It's when your success happens. It's when you see the leads. So it's strategy and it's consistency. So the overall strategy, it's not just doing one thing right is going to work. You have to have the overall plan in place. So we started off in seeing where we were lacking, where we were not sending out enough content, where, what our website was doing. So was ERG Payroll's website working for us? Are we putting the content out and where we're getting leads from it, or we just putting out pointless content? Are people searching for our content? And then the consistency part is we have to keep it going. So like you said, not putting out enough blog posts, it's not going to work. You need to keep putting out the content. What someone searched for last week, they're not searching for this week. So being consistent with what your user, what your target audience is searching for is what got us those leads. Being in front of it. We really, at the start of COVID was when we started seeing an uptick in a lot of our leads. And that was because ERG was the forefront of what a lot of businesses were going through during this time. They were having HR issues. They were having a lot of challenges with employees. Being in front of every aspect that came up for businesses, what got us in the door with more leads. We were doing webinars weekly. We were doing everything we possibly could to get in front and provide value to the audience. So when our audience was looking for something, we were ahead of it. It wasn't 3 weeks later after all the competition had already done webinars, had already had blog posts out, was already posting on social about it. We were ahead of it. And that was the biggest strategy to keep it, be consistent by constantly being in front of it. We had to do work on our end. To figure out, you know, what's currently going on and then providing that content. So I think that that's the biggest thing, and then we've just taken it from there. So we're never behind on everything that's happening. We are providing to our clients, to potential clients, to partners what they need to know right then and there.

Yeah, you hit on a couple of probably the most important thing that we can mention throughout this entire conversation, and that's being valuable, right? So if I think back to I guess it was probably last year I stumbled across some of the early writings that I had put together when starting ERG. And like, I like to write. I was totally fine writing blogs and putting them on the website. Time is an issue of how much time do you spend on that kind of stuff. But I was writing posts about things I wanted to talk about. And they weren't necessarily things that our audience cared about or that connected directly to the services that we provided either. So there's that sort of magic zone where it's something that you enjoy or our knowledgeable on or have deep expertise in, that your audience is looking for, the people that will actually utilize your services, and then that it connects in some way, shape, or form to what you do. So it's great to write a blog post that a lot of people click on. We have a great example of this on our website right now. I don't want to rat us out, but over at ERG's website, we get a ton of clicks every day on how to submit my South Carolina unemployment, how to get it faster or something like that. And it's like a lot of false traffic. It's a nice little vanity metric where people come to the website, but then it's actually had a negative effect that people are reaching out to us, asking us for advice on how to get their unemployment claims approved faster. So be careful. Um, not all content is good content. Not all clicks are good clicks, but let's go back to that kind of, uh, planning process. I mean, you know, we had tried to do some planning in the past. Obviously everybody reads about marketing strategies. I had found dozens of different marketing strategy templates online and all over the place. And we actually created one that I think was pretty decent that we were using for a little while. But, but what do you think really changed when we started to see things kick into the next gear?

So I know we're going to talk about this a lot, but as we were planning, we would have different aspects of content. So we would have what we call pillar content. And pillar content is that main, that like really juicy, like that guide or that resource that we can put out and it'll work for us and over multiple ways. So we can write a blog post about it. That will be up on our website. That'll be driving for SEO traffic. We will then create a video on it and put that on YouTube to get search traffic there. We are now making shorter videos and putting them on social to drive back, and that drives back to the website, and then that also drives to YouTube. So having this plan in place for what content falls in what bucket. So we have our pillar content, which has all those steps around it. Then we have more relevant kind of newsworthy content, quote unquote, You know, that's the— this is what's happening this week. This is, you know, this is the main trends this week. We need to just put a quick blog post out. We'll post the blog post on social and that'll be it. You know, and then there's also kind of just your industry-specific content. These are more your pages on your website that we can do social posts around. We can create some guides around it. You can put a lead gen form on the page. You can drive for downloads. So there's different forms of content that we go after, and keeping that in place, that we are hitting on all aspects of those, that's where we start to generate those leads, and that's where we are seeing that constant traffic flow because we're hitting those different target audiences at that point. So I think that that's a big part of the planning, is to determine what content falls into what bucket, and then how are you gonna market around that content? Where are we gonna put that? What's the emphasis on it? What's the importance of it? Does it need a video? Does it need different social posts? You know, so that is the number one thing, you know, if you're creating all this content, you've got to prioritize the importance of it and that's how you market it. So the abundance of content that we put out, I do think that strategizing where it goes and how we're going to push it out was one of the biggest success points that we've had over the last year or so in getting in front of our audience.

Yeah, that's a really good point. You hit on a couple of important things in there. First and foremost, that's to have a content strategy. What are the big macro topics we're gonna talk about? And then how are we going to talk about them? So that pillar content might start as a webinar, a podcast, a long-form video, whatever it might be, and then dice it all up and repurpose it like Karen was talking about. But interestingly, one thing you didn't mention that I think was critical to our success, especially over the last year, not to keep focusing on the last year, but I'll say this, right? So we just talked about this. I had a marketing sort of strat session with somebody before this call. And like this past year, if you're in the payroll and HR industry, it has been like our Super Bowl of content, right? Like if you were not creating content around FFCRA, ERTC, PPP, you know, state law changes, et cetera, like somebody is and your clients are getting it from somebody. So if it's not you and they get into somebody else's funnel and they're getting that content and, you know, it starts with the webinar. Then the email drip, then all the stuff we're doing where we're certainly taking our fair share of clients from our competition. That's how, right? They're getting into our funnel because we're providing super valuable content that they can access in an easy fashion. But so, so that also trees into the one point I want to make is that as much as I wish that planning was always like we could plan the next year out in advance and I would know that Q1 we're going to talk about performance management, Q2 we're going to talk about hiring, and Q3 we're going to talk about compliance. Like, you have to be ready to adapt. Like, we have had to If there's no lesson to be learned from COVID it's that you better be ready to adapt or die along the way. And not meant from illness, obviously. Hopefully that doesn't come across in poor taste. But the, you know, as a business, this has been a critical point where you've got to adjust plans according to what's going on in the market around you, and your marketing is no different.

With— and yes, absolutely. So there's been so many times over the last year where a new, you know, law or something has come out the night before and the next morning we are on there for 3 hours trying to figure out everything that's going on and then we're putting out content for it. It's going out the next day. So that is a— and I know I can't believe I failed to mention that, but that was a big part of what it took is, you know, being in front of everything. In some ways to do this are Google Alerts, keeping up with following news sources, having emails come through that are relevant to your industry. So keeping things coming to us as soon as they came through, we needed to put those out. We needed to put them out for our audience. So if it's coming from a news source or it's coming from an outside source, we put it in the language that our audience needed to hear. So we cleared it up. We took the points that were necessary for small businesses and we put them together. We took out everything that didn't apply. Because it can be overwhelming. I think most business owners could easily say over the last year with HR and payroll that it's been an overwhelming amount of information coming through. We broke that information down and that took time. I wish there was like an easy button for it and we could just, you know, hit a button and there it is. You know, this is what you need to put out, but we had to read through everything. We had to look at different sources and then and put it in a way that our audience could easily go through and be like, okay, I needed to know this, I'm good to go, and take out all the non-necessary items. So I think that was another big part of it. You know, if you're just copying and pasting from a news outlet and sending it out to your, to your clients, to your potential clients, and they don't understand what you're talking about, they're going to stop reading it. But if they, if you put it in a way that they can understand it, they're going to start following you. And once they start knowing that you're putting in their language, they're going to look at your emails, they're going to look at your social posts, they're going to attend your webinars over anyone else's.

Yeah, that brings up a great point on the like, okay, what's, what's the one of the next things we did, and that's getting clear on our target audience. And understanding that, you know, we're not calling on companies with 500 or more employees, we're not calling on, you know, these particular industries and understanding that, okay, hey, and getting our tone and our voice right from our brand. It's not going to be the most stiff, sterile news that's going to come out at you. We're going to give you what you want to know, but we're also going to have a little bit of fun doing it. But I just cannot— the more that we're talking about this and the more that I'm thinking about it, I just— for those of you that are listening to this and we're not pushing this information out to your clients, somebody was, man. Like somebody, they had to search it. They had to find it. They got into somebody else's email list. And if— I'm not saying you're going to lose them tomorrow and, or maybe you already lost them or maybe you'll lose them in 3 years, but like that's That's— we saw more people get into our funnel this way where they just, you know, just kind of indirectly interacted with our content and now they're customers of ours. And they, because their other provider was not giving them the information that they wanted and needed.

I think as an HR and payroll provider, since COVID has started, if you have lost clients, you've done something wrong and not gained clients. If you have not gained any clients over the last 12 months, you haven't put out the content. You have not put out what your audience, what your target audience needs. Someone else is doing it and that's where they're going. That's why they're not coming to you. You know, it's been a prime time for HR and payroll right now. You know, businesses need that expertise. They need that knowledge. They don't have that. And not being in front of them, you've lost, you know, a lot of businesses over the last 12 months. I know we keep just talking about the last year, have started with HR services because they need that information. They are so overwhelmed with everything that's going on with their business that they have for the first time probably looked for that outsourced, you know, company. And if you weren't in front of them, you lost out on it.

So I know a lot of people listening, this are CPAs or accounting firms or bookkeepers that also offer payroll services. Some of y'all are definitely just straight up started a payroll and HR outsourcing bureau, but there's definitely a lot of folks that came at it from the other way. And one of the biggest pet peeves I have in that industry is whenever I ask, "Who's your target customer?" They go, "Oh geez, anybody and everybody." And it's like, we'll take a 500-man construction company and we'll take a sole proprietor who we just need to do their taxes. And we always say, if you don't have a target, you'll hit it every time. But I think getting crystal clear with your— especially when it comes to trying to— when we look at marketing, we're trying to attract people to our business, right? That's the sole intent of what we're doing is we're trying to create value outside of our walls that attracts people back to our business at the end of the day. And the only way you can do that is by setting— being attractive to the right audience. And you can't be attractive to every audience. So I talked to— I glossed over the buyer persona there, but Share with me a little bit more about how we approach the buyer persona process and how you think it was different, or—

So I think that we are much different than others in the form that— so we are established from a payroll and HR company. That's where our knowledge is. That's where our industry is. We know what's going on. We know about the target audience. So why would we market to anyone else? Why don't we have payroll and HR? Clients, accountants, CPAs that are in this world. We know who you're going after. This is what we live and breathe. So we know how to market to this audience. That's why we are in this niche. We're not going after, you know, some manufacturing company down the road, or we're not going after the ice cream shop up the road. We are focused on payroll and HR services because that's what we know. You can go to an agency that has 45 different industries that they focus on. And they don't know what content to put out. That's where the issue lies is a lot of digital agencies will take in anybody and, you know, they want clients, they have their strategy and they'll put it in place, but they, do they really know your industry? Do they know how to talk about HR? Do they know how to talk about payroll? Do they know how to put out that content for you? That's one of the biggest parts of our buyer persona that we focused in on is that we are going after the audience that we know.. And that's how we're able to help these companies. We can talk about it. We know how to, you know, we know what the audience needs. We can template out basically these different resources and guides and put them out there and get you the leads. You know, if you're going through a full service agency that has no idea of the specifics of your industry, then you're going to get very generic content. That everyone, you know, has that content out there. So you're not going to get the search quality, you're not going to get the web, you know, you're not going to have webinar topics to talk about, you're not going to have videos on YouTube that go after what people are searching for. So having the buyer persona and going with a, you know, marketing agency that knows your industry, and that's what they focus on, I think is the biggest win for anyone, you know, and that's how we started, you know, we took in what we knew, and then went from marketing from there. So I think that that's, I hope that answers the question about the buyer persona, but it's just knowing your audience.

Yeah, let's look, let's look at that from both sides, right? So let's, you were talking about it from Guru's perspective, and that we serve at Guru payroll and HR companies because Guru was born from a payroll and HR company. And so we know the audience inside and out, we know what they care about, we know who their target market is, we know the type of content they're target market cares about. And that takes me all the way back to the, the kind of beginning of this is, you know, before, uh, using marketing services through Guru, we had worked with several different agencies over at, over at the payroll and HR side. I know this gets a little bit confusing. We've got ERG payroll and HR, and then we've got Guru who provides the marketing services for ERG. Um, so, so ERG had worked with multiple agencies, and to your point, Karen, we had always struggled with, you know, some of Some of these blogs look like they were written overseas. They were clearly wrong. Like there were things in there that were just flat out wrong. And we're talking about payroll and HR compliance related issues where like we could have people not only showing up to our website and being confused, but we could actually potentially have liability there because people are just, don't even know what they're talking about that are writing the posts. Um, and then, so that meant that we had to try to stay away from that. It meant that we also, you know, it took forever for the agency to get to know us, get to know our industry. And by the time they did, we We'd go frustrated with it and realize that they couldn't do what we had hoped for. But so now let's look at how that applies to you, the person listening here, in that, like, what do you know really well as a payroll and HR company? Because whenever we bring up the buyer personas thing, people start to go, "Oh geez, I don't want to just pick one industry or one client type or one, you know, business size. Like, that's too limiting. We have, you know, 100 clients, 50 clients, 300 clients, 500 clients, 5,000 clients that they're scattered across the board and people hesitate to really focus on a buyer persona, but you can't market, once again, everything to everyone. So the easiest thing I always challenge people to do in the short term is to look at your client list and say, who are the most fun clients to work with? I really enjoy working with them. They're good customers. They treat us well. They pay their bills. They use the services the way we intended. And then who are our most most profitable customers. And then when the people who fit those two things, those go to the top of the list and build a buyer persona around those. And when we went through this exercise at ERG, I was actually really shocked at some of the people that went to the top of the list because they were not who we were marketing to at all. And, you know, I always think about Finance Queen Jane. Like, we have this CFO buyer persona who was not at all where any of our content was directed in the past. But once we realized, like, oh hey, some of our best clients fit this prototype, that's who we want to start talking to.

Exactly. And once we— you put it basically all out there for that, but once we set that, then that's where we can go in and find what they're looking for, find exactly the— so when you are so honed in on certain industries and certain clients you are able to tailor the content around them. We are able to pick demographics. We're able to see what they're on, on social. So one industry may be only on LinkedIn, one may be more on Facebook. You know, how are we going to, how are we going to choose which one to go to? We can then put our research and our target audience information together and really put the content out that works against that audience. So I would say, you know, by picking those top 3, You can put the content around it and all your content may not be for all 3 of them. You may have to tailor your content to go just for one or to go against your second audience because you, with the understanding in mind that all content doesn't work for everybody. So if you have those 3 audiences and you know that we're, you know, this industry, it's much more women-based and around this age and they're much more social on Facebook and they like to look at videos Well, we need to make sure we're pushing content there. But this side's a little bit more male-focused, a little bit older, a little bit more old school. We need to go and put this content out there more. They like to read, they do their morning, you know, scrolling of emails. So that's where we need to get in front of them there. And that's what pulls it out. And that's what makes the leads generate and convert. So that's another part that we haven't really talked about is you may have all these leads coming through. And you're like, Oh, I've seen all these leads and a big uptick, but if they're not converting, then it's not worth it. So if you're getting 3 leads instead of 30, but they're your target buyer persona, your target industry, and you can start putting out content to them, they're going to convert over. Except for the 30 that you're not putting out the right content, and then they're not going to convert. So knowing your buyer persona, having all that information available, and then being able to present it to them, it will work and in turn convert potential audiences and also retain your current clients, which is hugely critical.

You know, a lot of this marketing should be directed towards your clients. And so I'm going to put a cap on the content creation piece here because this is something that people often struggle with, is, is what do we talk about? What do we share? How, how do we create it? Your customers call you every single day with questions. Your answers are content. Your employees come to you every single day with questions, or you have questions, or you have created things to use internally. That is your content. Documenting and sharing information is the content. You are not going to give away your secret sauce. I can guarantee you that. I mean, even if you look at us, like, we've written a book, we've got hundreds of blog posts on our site. Everything that we know for the most part, is publicly accessible information. So wrap your mind around that for a second, right? Literally just about everything we know about what we do, you could find on our website or in my book. And does that mean that we're worried about not getting customers? No, quite the opposite, right? They have to be able to pull all that stuff together. They have to be able to automate it. They have to have the systems in the background in place. And quite frankly, more often than not, they can learn about it, but they don't want to actually do it. So that's the other key element of it. It's like, I know how to fix that toilet in my house, but I don't want to do it. I want to pay a professional to do it so that I can focus on something more important. So I think people get a little bit sideways when it comes to, should I create content? What kind of content do I create? And I don't want to go to continue to get further astray here, but if you're listening to this right now and you own your company, You should be on social sharing about your company every day, if at least a couple times a week, if not. Like, there is no better salesperson that you will ever have. You need to put yourself out there. You need to share content. Yes, I realize it is hard to carve out the time. Yes, I realize it is super kind of embarrassing or whatever to be constantly putting content out. I struggle with this more than anybody, but you have to do it. It's just a piece where, like, once again, people are going to be attracted to the business because they know who the people are that make it work. And that's you. So this is another, probably, I don't know, we've maybe done 10 or 12 episodes. It's probably the 5th time I've called the people listening to start creating more content. So maybe this is the 5th time and you heard it and it's going to resonate. But all right. So let's transition away from, even though the bedrock of all this stuff, yeah, you can bring that on. But the bedrock of all this stuff is creating valuable content consistently and then giving people a clear way to interact with that, which is what we'll start to go into after your next point. But what is the technology? What is the conversion funnel? What have we— some of the things we've done there.

So real quick, you just hit on about your, you know, constant questions and all that you're getting. My biggest hint is use your employees as well. Ask them what questions they're getting all the time. Ask them to share your posts on social. Ask them to post. You can give them what to post, but ask them to post it. They're also the face of the company, so use them. Them. They know what everyone's looking for. So I just want to hit on that real quick because they're a great asset. If they're taking in all the calls that your company is getting, they know all the questions that are coming in. Ask them, you know, that's the information that people are looking for. So use them as your biggest resource.

That's a really great point. And I'll just kind of talk about what that looks like in, in action. So Amy from your team reaches out to the ERG team every week and says, hey, what are some of the things that customers have been asking about recently or hot topics? And for us internally, whenever we have a post where, you know, for For example, we've got a webinar tomorrow, we really want to make sure we're driving attendance. So when I post on LinkedIn about it from my personal account, I'm going to share that link in chat with everybody on the team and say, hey, can you guys boost this post so that we can get some additional exposure to it?

That's exactly what it'll be.

Smash the like button. Smash the like button, y'all. I really want to start saying smash the like button more on my videos because I just think it's my favorite YouTuber thing to do. All right, so let's— so, so we're creating a bunch of new content. How are we getting it out in the world? What are we doing to measure effectiveness? What are some of the tools we're using to, to keep up with all this great stuff we're creating?

So I want— I'll tell you a couple of the biggest tools that we use and a couple of my favorites. So, um, we use a platform called WebSEO. And I'm going to get into more of the tracking first. So web SEO basically is your keyword research, you put your keywords in and it drives to what position you're ranked. So this has been a huge asset for us and all of our clients because we can see if someone for the keyword payroll services, for the keyword HR company, for, you know, those relevant keywords, what's ranking and where we need to improve at. If we see that we're number 1 on these, these, these, we need to stop going after that and provide content of the ones that we aren't getting traction for. So WebSEO is a great one. There's other ones like Moz and, you know, so I know that that one's a little bit more, but WebSEO is definitely a great resource that we use. Another one that we use is ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is similar. A lot of you all may use MailChimp, but it basically has our email automation. So in there we can send out on-the-fly emails. We can, we have all of our email drips going. So when someone, ActiveCampaign also holds all of our forms on our website. So when someone fills out a form for a certain download of a guide, they then are entered into an email drip and they get emails. So it's that automation. It's doing it behind the scenes. We don't even know it's really happening. It basically puts them in and then sends out a series of 6 or 7 emails. And then from there we can see how they're converting. We can track, we can see where they're going on the site. So ActiveCampaign is a great resource that we use for our clients and it lets us really see the user journey on the site. It lets us, you know, put a whole life cycle together from basically a form fill to an email drip to, you know, every conversion tracking there. So we do love that. And then of course just Google Analytics. Analytics. You can't do enough with Google Analytics. It's telling you where people are going. It'll show you what blog posts you're using. It will show you, you know, everyone has it set up on their site. I hope you have it set up on your site at this point, but it's pointless if you're not using it. So you may not use WebSEO or you may not use ActiveCampaign. That may be a little bit, you know, you're just starting or It's smaller and you're like, I, I, but you're going to have analytics. If you see that one blog post is performing over the others, you should take that blog post and mimic it and use that as your resource. So we definitely still, and every day we're constantly in Google Analytics. We also, some of my kind of favorites, I would say that we also use Canva. Canva is like, the best program platform, whatever you want to use. I know that most CPAs and most payroll company owners aren't going to know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator. That's not in their, you know, wheelhouse. But Canva allows you to create any kind of social template, a webinar graphic, you know, if you are starting a podcast, you can, you know, do your podcast intro on it. It lets you do that easily. So Canva is definitely one of my favorites. And then we use Zoho as our CRM, also as our kind of internal project manager along with Trello. And then also our social sharing and basically anything under the sun. So Zoho is a big one company-wide that we use, but I do have to say that if you are doing social, it's much easier if you're busy. You're like, I have a busy week ahead. You know, I need to— you can schedule posts. So having automations in place, scheduling, so you carve an hour on Monday and say, I'm going to schedule these posts throughout the week. So that's what we can do. That's what we do for our clients. We have a monthly social media calendar that is presented to them beforehand, you know, by like the 15th of the month before they review and approve. And then we schedule these platforms. Automation is the key, and any platform that we use has some form of automation. So I have to like emphasize that, that if you're not automating your process, it's not going to work. And us creating automations for all of our clients is the one of the biggest keys to success. Everything is working behind the scenes. It's not taking man hours. It's not, you know, we are monitoring but emails are getting sent out, forms are getting here, you know, it's where it needs to be to convert leads.

I'm going to give a short example of all that in practice because of a webinar that we are getting ready to have tomorrow. We're doing a webinar on ERTC for ERG Payroll and HR for our clients and prospects. And so, and I'll maybe throw in a couple of other tools along the way. So obviously we scheduled the webinar in Zoom Zoom allows you to create a little landing page. We created a landing page on our website in WordPress so that we can track the traffic to our site and drive traffic to our site instead of to the Zoom link, right? So kind of key thing right there from the start is while we could drive all the traffic right to the Zoom landing page and people could register there nonetheless, well, now we don't get people who might come to our website for the first time and hang out after they register for the event or click on some other assets while they're there and get us that additional brand exposure. So we're driving people to the site. Now they register, they get put on the Zoom. We are creating, you know, we created that, that landing page. As I mentioned, Karen's team created some graphics in Canva and/or Adobe for the event, took some of the language from the event description, put it on there. Now we're going to have the webinar tomorrow, and obviously we'll have, you know, 100 or so folks show up to the webinar. We'll probably have a couple hundred registered. Now we've got them in our email list where we can add them to our subscriber list, where they'll get a 6-email drip automation for being a new subscriber, which kind of walks them through our welcome funnel and gets them acclimated with our content and what we're all about. We'll also have a follow-up to the webinar with the recording for all the people that missed it. We'll then put that webinar also on YouTube. We'll cut that down into some smaller clips and put it on LinkedIn under personal and company profiles. So we'll continue to amplify the content after the then we'll also gate the webinar on the website where the landing page used to be so that people can get access to the video in exchange for their email and contact information. And that once again gets them into the automated funnel, gets them more exposure to us and our brand. All that's fueled by ActiveCampaign and WordPress. And now in reality, that, that exact thing has gotten us multiple clients over the last year, particularly when you look at the the webinars we were doing around PPP loans, webinars we were doing around FF CRA. We picked up a lot of new clients at that time. And that's how they— even make sure you're sharing if you're not a CPA firm and you have, or if you are a CPA firm and you have partner firms you work with, share it with the other firms to spread the word about the events that you're having and things like that. But so, so that's an example of a funnel where somebody engages with that first piece of content, then they keep moving through. We automate a lot of that and we take the things that we have, a we repurpose it, we create it into something of value for our potential clients. And ultimately, they have the opportunity during those email automations to click through and say, hey, I want to talk to you more, or just respond to the email and say, hey, tell me more about this, uh, this particular thing that you've mentioned here in the email. So that's a good example of it and something that we're getting ready to do this week. And, and hopefully, uh, well, this, this won't be published before we do the webinar, so you could show up.

And I have to hit on one thing of that whole process that you just said. So one of the biggest aspects that we've been talking about content the whole time, but any other marketing. So as a marketer, your mind is so set on sales, you know, as a business owner, it's on sales. People don't like sales. Providing the value, like you mentioned, they want the content that they want, the guide, They want this. They don't want to call you right away. They want, you know, they're going to call you after they've received 5 pieces of content that directly relate to them and help them. Then they're going to call. So if you're focused on just sales pitch, you know, if you're like, I'm going to set up an email drip and I'm going to provide all this and everyone's going to be sales oriented because that's the way that your mind works is more on the sales. And that's the hardest thing to overcome is not to be salesy. What's your term you always say? Always be valuable.

That's right. We're not an ABC shop, we're an ABV shop. Always be valuable. It's a fantastic point, Karen. And I think we'll start to kind of round the corner here on this of whenever you look at your website, whenever you look at the copy— I actually, I have a letter sitting right in front of me that we just had to rewrite for an outbound marketing campaign that we're doing. Where it was like, here's 3 reasons why you should— you will benefit from partnering with us. Like, it was very you-phrased. You always want to make sure you are you-phrasing things. If I show up to your website and it says, we've been in business 20 years and we do this and we do that and we are experts, we like to say you wee-weed all over yourself, right? Like, all you've done is share about what we, we, we. Nobody cares about you. They care about themselves. How will you help them solve a problem that they have? Have, as much as they want to know that you're an expert and you want to validate that with some social proof, your experience, and all that good stuff, they need to see themself as the hero, not you as the hero, right? And I don't want to call out once again our friends in the accounting industry, but when I go through 25 accounting pages, it's almost always, here's why our firm is so great. We've been in business this number of years. We are this, we are that. It's very rarely you phrase. It's almost an industry-wide challenge. So make sure you're focused on the people you are trying to help, right? So are we being valuable to these people? What is in it for them? And I talked about that letter. We completely rewrote the letter and just said, you know what, the focus of this whole thing should just be trying to get them to engage with our content by saying, hey, here's 3 free things you can find on our website that might be valuable to you, and here's why they would be valuable to you. We're not asking for an appointment. We're not asking for this. We're trying to drive them into the content because guess what? People do business with people that they know, like, and trust. And there's no better way to get people to know, like, and trust you than by providing value for free and showing your expertise before they engage with you.

Exactly. Exactly. It's the key to success almost.

Amen to that. So, so I— we've covered a lot. We still have a lot that we could cover. I mean, I think that for me, if we pull this back out, and once again, I've got two hats on, and I'll probably give a little bit more of a disclaimer in the intro to the episode of like the ERG payroll and HR hat. I feel like through Guru and this marketing system we've created, we've kind of flipped the model on its head in some ways because I worked at ADP for years. I was in sales. My job was to pick up the phone, pick up the email, hammer and dial away, outbound, outbound, outbound. We don't do very much outbound stuff anymore. We're just starting to pick outbound back up because we've been so fortunate, we've got so much inbound coming in. And that's not like, oh, hey, we're growing uncontrollably and all that, but we've got enough leads to work every single week to continue to grow at the clip we need to grow at without having to pick up the phone and bother people every day with interruption-type marketing or sales calls. And so So I would challenge you, if you're one of those folks like me that came from the outbound sales model, to start to think about how do we create inbound? How do we create so much value that people want to be a part of our atmosphere and want to, you know, be a part of the things that we're sharing? And, you know, that starts with being hyper-focused on your target customer and less focused on yourself.

Yeah, exactly. And then leads will convert.

So, all right, anything else you want to share before we wrap it up for today?

I think we cover a lot. We could— obviously me and Matt could talk about this for hours. Yeah, but maybe stay tuned for another one and we'll get into more.

Well, and I'll say that if you've made it this far, thank you. And if there are topics that you want to hear about, I know we talk about marketing, I know we talk about sales a lot. I think they're important. I think operational expertise, obviously super important, but we want to share things that are valuable to payroll and HR company owners. So please Don't hesitate to reach out. And also, don't forget to rate us 5 stars and smash that like button wherever you're listening to this. We appreciate it so much. It keeps us going and creating new episodes. Thank you so much for your time today, Karen.