Increase Inbound Payroll Leads - How Guhroo 10x'ed Their Payroll Leads

It's always nice to have somebody let you know that you're on mute about 2 minutes into your talking. So thank you everybody so much for joining us today. My name is Matt Vadie. I am with Guru, and I'm going to talk to you today about how we work with our sister company, ERG Payroll and HR, to help them 10x the number of leads that they received through their inbound marketing from the period of 2019 into the period of 2020. And so really the goal as we look at the business was to create a sustainable marketing engine that creates leads and tracks where they came from. Now, join me in the chat if you are trying to do this for your business. Is this something that is of interest to you? Let's try to make this as interactive as possible and tell me a little bit about, through the chat, some of the things that you have in place or things that you don't so I can make sure that I try to address those, and I'll do my best to address specific questions throughout. So please don't hesitate to join in the conversation, and we'll talk in real time here as we go. If you're going to hang this up in 5 minutes or you're going to stop watching this video after the fact 5 minutes into it, I'm going to give you the Cliff Notes version right now of everything that we're about to cover. And that is that content is king. And creating valuable content, writing it and distributing it to the correct audience and doing that on a very consistent basis with always making sure that that information is valuable and timely is really how we went about this process and how you should continue to go about this process. And so I know we have every— everyone on this call from single employee owner operators of from payroll companies to marketing professionals who are continuing to try to sharpen the saw and kind of everything in between. So I'm gonna do my best to create value and share things that may be valuable to all of you. A lot of what we're gonna cover today are really just basic things, the blocking and tackling, but we were just very consistent and always focused on our community. And you're gonna hear me say this, I'm gonna browbeat this throughout the conversation, just providing value to the audience. So once again, if you turn this off right now, you create great content that provides value to the audience and do it on a consistent basis and track what's working so that you can adjust. That's it in a nutshell. That's what we did. And so that's how we helped ERG to 10x the number of inbound leads they received in 2020. And, you know, the agenda for the conversation today is gonna be to talk through some of the challenges that they were facing on the onset of this. The planning process that we went through, and then the ultimately the execution and continued execution and things that we continue to adjust today. And so I'm excited to share some of these things with you, and I took that same approach when creating this presentation to make sure that this is going to give you something actionable that you can use right away when you walk away from this conversation. So I'm going to share briefly about me and the companies that we're going to be talking about. I will say connect with me on LinkedIn. We're going to talk about LinkedIn a little bit on here. My name is very easy to spell. I'm very easy to find. Last name is pronounced Vady, and I'm happy to help and serve you in any way I can. But if you do own or operate or work at a payroll company, highly suggest you check out our podcast Payrollin'. We talk about all things payroll bureau related. So from sales to marketing to operations to just sort of general commiseration and everything in between. It's been a lot of fun just having conversations with great folks. Like, I'm the bald-headed guy. Guy on the right. The bald-headed guy on the left is a sales pro who's written about 7 bestselling books. And so that was a really fun conversation. I think y'all will learn a lot from it. So let's talk about the client at hand, ERG Payroll and HR. As I mentioned, full disclosure, sister company of ours, but we spun Guru off for a couple of reasons. And we'll talk about the HR software. We'll talk about the marketing, all that good stuff. Uh, but What we were trying to do is help them to create this engine that we discussed earlier, something that is going to create leads every single day of the week. You know, not with no work, but we certainly want to make things as systematized and process-oriented as possible, which is something that we always focus on. ERG primarily serves companies with less than 50 employees. They really target professional service companies. They have a big focus on the human resources outsourcing. And they also were trying to work this kind of land and expand approach of trying to get more payroll clients so that they can upsell into some of their other HR services and software services. So we had a couple of different audiences we were going after. We'll talk a little bit more about that here as we get into the conversation, but that's the company in a nutshell and a little bit about us. So I look forward to learning more about each of you. And I see some of you already saying you subscribed in the chat. Thanks, Shirley. Courtney, love the enthusiasm. I'm so excited y'all joined us today. And some of these are familiar names from LinkedIn. And so we're going to talk about the power of LinkedIn really here in just a moment. But so, so what was the problem at ERG? So first of all, the marketing was wildly inconsistent. You know, raise your hand, jump in the chat if you can relate to this experience. Started the payroll and HR company, you know, single person, was doing all the marketing by themselves and then, you know, tried to hire in some freelancers off the internet, tried to work with an agency, tried to hire an individual, just tried a bunch of different tactics, you know, write a blog one month and okay, cool, I'm gonna start writing a blog every week and then, you know, not write another blog for 4 months, post on social one day, audience doesn't hear from you for another 2 weeks, you know, just a lot of inconsistency that matriculated into the branding as well. You know, we'd have one set of branding on the website One set of branding on the marketing slicks, one set of branding over here, over there. So, so just inconsistent all over. Really poor experience working with agencies. For those of you that are in the payroll and HR industry, you know that this is complicated stuff at times, that we've really got to find ways to simplify and boil down for our audience. Otherwise, they wouldn't be hiring us in the first place, right? So that's the exciting thing. That's why we get so many clients is because we do things that other people don't want to do. Now the challenge is when you turn that over to a marketing agency, our experience was that we were getting a lot of content back that was not really on point. It wasn't really targeted towards a business owner. Maybe it was missing some things related to compliance that actually could have, you know, led some people down the wrong path. You know, we actually had one agency here locally, we were excited that we finally had $1,500-$2,000 a month to start investing into a little bit of marketing. They were like, ah, for that little amount of money, you might as well save your money. It's a waste of time. And so we had every experience you could imagine with agencies, from just underperformance, to lack of understanding, to inability to execute, to straight up wouldn't even work with us. And then, you know, obviously, as you all know, this is a really highly competitive industry. And, you know, many of us on the call have similar value propositions of great support, great technology, we're local, you know. So how do you stand out in that? There's 16,000 companies that offer payroll in the United States. And so it is hard to stand out. And so that was something that we really focused on with ERG particularly. But, but also here, one thing I want to mention is we started to think about how do people get into our funnel? Who's the ideal customer? What's the lifetime value of that customer? So how much do they pay you per year? How many years are they with you on average? And then what are you willing to pay to acquire that customer? So if a customer pays you $2,500 a year and is with you for 4 years on average, so that's a $10,000 lifetime value, what percentage of that are you willing to invest to actually earn that customer's business? And that, that's a question that many of us don't ask. And so I think it's important that you start there. So let's talk about the approach. Uh, we, we've got an approach here. That's what you might call omnichannel. So we're looking at, and we'll touch on each of these channels, but whether it's the website, the blog, podcast, LinkedIn, YouTube, you know, hitting multiple social channels, hitting email, it really being a lot of different places, small mix of paid ads in there, you know, paid ads, a little bit more of a branding play in the payroll space. Anytime you're going to buy an ad in the payroll space, you're going to see your competitors who offer payroll for, you know, a ham sandwich and $25 pop right up at the top of the page. So paid ads, really not a great play for us, but we were a lot of other places where we were trying to create this right here, top of the funnel awareness. And so, you know, I'll give you a good example of a path some of our clients have followed when they found us. Watched a YouTube video that we created. In the description of the YouTube video, had a link to a piece of content that was associated with the video. Click on the link, subscribe to our, subscribe to our list to get the download. Get the download, get into an automation, an email automation where they then are getting multiple email drips of which we are not touching. This is— goes down to the third bullet of funnel automation. They're getting nurtured right down through this funnel, all from a piece of content we created, and then ultimately going, hey, after the third or fourth email of this valuable information that ERG is providing me, I'm starting to consider them as a potential solution versus my current provider. And then we're able to engage with them in a sales capacity. And ultimately, one of the things when you look at this value, these top two, we want our marketing to extend into the brand once a client comes on board, right? So we want that same brand experience that they had prior to partnering with us to extend into their relationship with us. So marketing doesn't end once they become a customer. So we hit on a lot of valuable assets. And this is something that You will hear me say multiple times during this webinar and any other time you hear me talk about marketing, and that is whatever you think your secret sauce is, give it away for free. And so that could be as simple as templates that you're using internally to, you know, a client reaches out and says, hey, I need a checklist for to determine if somebody's an employee or a contractor. Great. That would, that would fit perfectly on your website. Other people are looking for that information as well. Why not put it on your website? Exchange it for an email address. You create value for the end user, they're willing to give you their email in exchange for that and get continued value from you inside of this funnel automation. Lead capture was a big thing. One of the things when we talk about the inconsistency of the approach at ERG was they're using multiple different form tools. They were— had people kind of— it was next to impossible to figure out how many leads were actually coming in in a month because there was no one way to determine that. And that is a challenging thing for most of us as marketers. And ultimately, we wanted to create this sustainability. And, you know, I'll give you a little tip here. And that's that the sustainability comes from the consistency. And so we'll talk about some of the consistency and the things that we do here over the coming slides. I want to start with some of the results, because as you're reading this, you're probably saying, okay, it's great. Like, what does that mean? What does it mean to get more leads? What does it mean to get more brand impressions? What does it mean Does it mean more customers? What is that? So I'm gonna start right here with, this is actually a screenshot from a tool called ShieldApp. And this is my personal LinkedIn statistics. And so we're gonna talk about the value of LinkedIn here. And I'll just, I'll say it right now, the number of people that reach out to us for partnership opportunities, potential clients, referrals, just people in the community, associations that say, oh yeah, we watched some of that content you put out on LinkedIn, or, oh hey, I love that video you put out the other day, or keep putting out all that stuff. I'm learning so many great things about HR from your posts. You cannot— every one of you on this call right now, and I know a lot of the names on here as I scroll through this list, there are many people with more valuable things to say than me who are quiet on LinkedIn, which is a huge missed opportunity because Everybody who's in professional services right now is on LinkedIn, and only about 3% of the people on LinkedIn are creating content. So even though you feel like it's a flooded area and that everybody out there has got a blog, a podcast, and making videos and doing all that, it's just the same people over and over again. So this is a great opportunity for you to get off the sideline and get into it. And you see some of these results. So we had 215,000 views of content that we created for LinkedIn over the course of the last year. And when you switch up to YouTube, at about 80,000 views in 2020, which I'm not going to get into right here. This is, this is actually an example. As much as this created a bunch of views right here, I'll tell on myself a little bit in that a lot of those views came from a video where I experienced my first ever getting trashed on YouTube in the comments section where I made a quick video on how to complete Form W-4, the new Form W-4 in 2020. And I think I skipped a Step. And everybody just thrashed me in the comments. And it was a very interesting— I've never been like publicly berated online like that, but it was, it was funny looking back. And, and, um, but we still, we had people that started at that video and ended up clients today because they interacted with a piece of content that we had on YouTube, got into the funnel and eventually found themselves in the sales cycle. And so when I look at the results piece here, this was the most important metric to me. So this is from Google Analytics. This is one goal completion. This is a form that is a direct sales form that says contact us for more information about the products and services, select which products and services you want more information about. So while we racked up more than 1,500 downloads of our other materials, which were kind of warm and/or coldish leads, these were the hot ones, right? These were 902 leads that were people that said, hey, I want to know more about your payroll services. I want to know more about your HR services. I want to know more about this, that, or the other. So this was fantastic. If you don't have Google Analytics, and I'm going to go through a list here in a few minutes, and just as a heads up, I'll send out this slide deck along with a whole bunch of other resources after the presentation. But I'm going to list out all the different technology tools we use to get here and all the different things we did along the way to get to, you know, thousands of leads here in the last year. So exciting stuff. Let's talk about how our process worked. What did we follow to do this? So, so we created this process. Where we really are creating a strategy, building the foundation, and then optimizing for growth. And the strategy component was pretty straightforward in that we, we create a marketing diagnosis. And once again, I'm just going to share this spreadsheet with you that we use with our clients. You can use it yourself. It's a very thorough spreadsheet that you can use with the marketing diagnosis. It has everything from buyer personas to industry competitive analysis, and kind of everything in between. Take you a little bit of time to fill it out, but my goal here today is that you can leave with a whole bunch of stuff that you can DIY much of what I've talked about here over the course of the conversation. So then we identified opportunities. Some of this came in the form of making sure we were targeting the right market. Some of it came in the form of just making sure we were being in the right places. And then we put a plan in place and said, hey, this is how we're going to execute. So let's talk about some of these things. So what did we find when we did the diagnosis? First and foremost, probably the most— I don't want to say embarrassing thing, but I was obviously a part of this. And first, first of all, our buyer personas were just not accurate. And so we had what we thought were our best possible customers, were not our best possible customers. And I'll talk more about that on the next slide. We had really inconsistent message and voice throughout all of our content, whether, you know, social sounded one way, the website sounded another way, I talk another way, there's other people on the team talk this way. So there's just a big disconnect in what you should expect from our brand as you interact with it. But most importantly, I think from my perspective is that the technology was disconnected. So we're using all these different systems, and we still use a lot of systems. But there was no way to track the leads, there was no clear and obvious way at the, you know, before our Monday morning team meeting for us to pull up the report and say, hey, did we hit our leads goal for last week. So, let's talk about buyer personas. Buyer personas, many of you, probably a lot like me, either have written buyer personas or think you know who your buyer personas are, or you think you can sell to anybody. You know, too often, I know a lot of folks on this call come from CPA firm backgrounds. Anytime I go into a CPA firm and I say, what industries do you guys work with? What's your specialty? Oh, we work with anybody and everybody. Oh, okay. Well, that makes it really easy for us to refer you into somebody or to try to attract an audience to you if it's anybody and everybody. If everybody's your audience, you have no audience. It's impossible to target your messaging and speak directly to somebody. I heard something a long time ago where anytime you're writing something, you should be writing it to 2 people. And so, when we create buyer personas and I go, hey, This is my client right here. This is Owner Ollie. And I write a message. I know how I would write to Owner Ollie if I was typing him out an email or a message or writing him something. So I can do that when I'm writing my copy, when I'm writing that LinkedIn post, when I'm writing a blog, when I'm writing an email, makes it much, much simpler. So when you look at doing your buyer personas, pick out your best clients. And what I mean by best clients are The ones that are profitable, the ones that are fun to work with, the ones that are sort of least hassle, the ones that use the services that you're really trying to optimize. And then build your buyer personas around those clients, not just ones that you think would be great, but ones that you know could be great. And only focus on 2 or 3. This feels very limiting. Once again, going back to that whole, oh, but we can sell and serve anybody anywhere in the country in any industry. That sort of mindset will once again not allow you to reach your goals because you will have no specific target audience to speak to. Once you start directing your messaging directly to the people you're trying to reach, then you will speak their language and they will understand it and they will start to take action on it and get value from what you're trying to do. But when putting together buyer personas, I'm actually going to send a link over to HubSpot as kind of the, the They're kind of the kings of— they built out a nice little buyer persona tool generator. Also, like I mentioned, it'll be in the spreadsheet. Spend some time, create 2 or 3 buyer personas, and then you'll know their challenges, you'll know their goals, and even take some of the language. One of the things I think we did a really good job of here is we took some of the existing clients and the testimonials that they've given. We asked them for testimonials, we asked them for feedback, and then we took that exact language and applied it to the buyer persona. And we took that exact language. And, and for those of you, one of the things I think that, that ERG Payroll and HR does really well is on their intake form when they bring in a new client, they ask, why did you partner with ERG Payroll and HR? And then your clients, as they're coming on board, are writing your marketing copy for you. And we take that field and we put it in the CRM, and then we actually have it right available on the home screen when you log into the client view of the CRM where you can see why every client decided to partner with you. And so not only is that great marketing copy, but it's also a great benchmark for your team internally to say, hey, are we meeting the goals of this client on why they decided to partner with us in the first place? It's an incredibly powerful way to go about making sure you're delivering on the promises you made to your clients. All right, so next up, we recognize the whole branding thing was just a mess. I mean, we had stuff created in Google Drawings, stuff created in Canva, stuff created by freelancers, you know, people just kind of making things up, sales reps just making things up before they go out on meetings that looked awful. So we took the time to go through, create the brand story, put the logo guidelines in place, make sure that the typography and font were consistent, you know, decide on which icon set we wanted to use, make sure the brand color palette was clear. And once again, establish that voice and make sure it was representative of the brand. Like, ERG Peril HR, very laid-back brand, but also want to develop that trust with the clients. So kind of want to be able to articulate something in a consistent and clear fashion, but also with a little bit of edge, a little bit of humor, with a little bit of fun. I think they've continued to do that, and more and more of the team continues to get involved in the content creation because of the brand consistency. They understand that it needs to extend the same across all platforms. And so that means when somebody goes to get that down, they go to— I'll show a really good example of this in just a few minutes— when they go to a piece of content on YouTube and it's got a cover on it, then they click through that cover and they go to the blog post that has the same exact branding on the COVID and then throughout, same fonts and all that. We want to create that consistency across all formats so people don't get a disjointed experience when they move from one asset to the next. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna really stop here because for many of you, this is a part that you need to take some time to do. And that's to really write your story. And I'll tell you a little hint. And this, most of this is derived from the book, StoryBrand Marketing, and I highly suggest getting it, but I'll paraphrase some of it here. And that's when you're writing your story, you are not the hero. Your client is the hero. And more often than not, I'll go to a website and we'll start working with a new client and I'll say, oh, you wee-weed all over yourself. Because right on the homepage of the website, it'll say, we are the best, we have been doing this for 25 years, we have more than 10 employees, we have more than 1,000 clients, wee-wee-wee-wee-wee-wee. Well, guess what people don't care about? They don't care about you. They don't care about how many clients you have. They care about themselves. They care about their desired end state. They want to be the hero. So what do they need? And how do you address that when they engage with your brand? This is absolutely critical. And you need to make sure you are speaking to them, not talking about yourself, but learning about them and learning about what they want to accomplish. So what are their needs? Who's the villain in their story? What's the current status quo? What happens if they don't change from the status quo? And then what's your proven process? And what is the call to action? And so if you follow these steps when writing your brand story, and even just take this right here, you're trying to create a new homepage on your website, and you're not sure how to write the copy. Great. Here's a perfect format for you. Right? So how do I engage with you? What's your proven process? Step 1, step 2, step 3. What do I need to do to get started? How are you going to make my life easier? People want to see that their life is going to be better. You need to appeal to them on an emotional level that things are going to improve after working with you. And what tells somebody that their life is going to improve? Certainly not that you have 25 years of payroll and accounting experience, but when you talk to them in their language on, hey, we're going to remove all the worry from your plate so you can sleep better at night. That's what makes somebody more engaged and wanting to interact with your brand. And here's an example of ERG's old branding. Now, it followed the StoryGuide model— StoryBrand model, excuse me. And, you know, we kind of had this old little hokey cartoony thing in place, and it was fun, but it wasn't really representative of who the ERG team wanted to be. The internal team wasn't really embracing it. They weren't really, you know, sort of It was on the website, it was on the collateral, it was getting pretty consistent, but I don't think anybody was very proud of it. It wasn't very representative of the team and who they are. People, once again, weren't really getting engaged into the story. We had the compliance monster here, he was the villain, it was great, but nobody really embraced it. Because what we learned was, hey, we want to be a modern payroll and HR services company where people know that they're not going to get the same old, same old as like my local competitor up the road here, Joe, who's got, you know, 300 clients, been doing it for 50 years, and he uses some outdated system where I can't even log in online, and he sends me paper reports in the mail. Like, they did— they want to separate from those brands with a more modern branding experience and story. And so, you know, if you look at the same slide and how it kind of morphed as we did the brand overhaul, here's where that same slide from that point in the deck looked today. And this was more representative, you know, of the sophisticated for not necessarily formal, but modern brand that they wanted to portray. And so this is just one example of what we did with the branding. And when we talk about, you know, I'm going to move off of the branding piece here for just a moment and move into some of the technology pieces that we used. So we use a system called ActiveCampaign. This is that centralized single source place when we look at, hey, What is all the— how can we track what a lead does from the time they hit our site until the time they leave? Well, you can't necessarily track from the time they hit your site until they opt in and start engaging with a piece of content. But so, you know, one of the things you wouldn't see prior to this is that this individual came to the website and downloaded a piece of content. Then they got into an automated campaign, then they opened a campaign, then they clicked on a link, and then it's going to continue to show us anytime they come back to the site, it's going to show us where they clicked. It's going to show us what they interacted with. It's going to show us every time they open, if they download any other assets, all that stuff. And so what we really like about ActiveCampaign is, you know, it's interactive with the website. We can see what people are doing on the website. It's got pixels there. It's got email and automations for emails. So we can set up these 6 email drips that once you engage that first piece of content, you're going to get an email every other day for 6 emails. If you click on this one then it's going to send you the other one faster than it would have sent it, uh, if you hadn't clicked on it, etc., etc. It also has a CRM in it, which for ERG was a little, uh, redundant and still a bit of a sore spot in that there is some redundancy to the CRMs. But now what we're doing is we're managing pipeline in the ActiveCampaign CRM and we're managing clients and deals one in the other CRM. Uh, chat is also available here. And the advanced automation. So ActiveCampaign is a tool, one of the many tools that we relied heavily on to give us a more in-depth experience. Here are several of the other tools. If you go back and look at the branding, the initial setting up the buyer personas, and some of the different things we used, here are some of the tools we use. And once again, I'll send out a follow-up with this with some hyperlinks. So Google Analytics, if it's not on your website today, You need to get it embedded on your site and get familiar with just some basic stuff to see who's coming to your site and what are they doing once they get there. Canva. If you're not using Canva, I mean, this has been one of the greatest apps in the last 5 years. It's a graphic design tool that anybody on this call can create really slick. Courtney loves Canva. I think that anybody who's on this call that's using Canva is like, "Oh." As soon as you log into it and go to it, you're going to be like, "Oh, dang. Where all these people are creating these really great graphics in 5 minutes. That's amazing. Because, you know, if you're like me, and you don't really want to get into Adobe Creative Cloud, which we certainly have to use, because there is some stuff that, you know, you need to create that's a little more advanced beyond Canva. You can do 90% of stuff right here, though. So I'd say this is sort of V1. This is V2. TubeBuddy. So if you're going to spend any time doing YouTube videos, you need to install even just the free version of TubeBuddy. This is going to give you analytics data, on how your videos are performing, keyword information, a checklist on how to optimize for search engine any video you upload. ShieldApp— this gives you LinkedIn data. So this will give you data on your personal LinkedIn account about all the engagement that you have with each of your posts, which ones are performing better than others. You can put tags on them to learn what times of day are better to post than others. Trello. Trello is our project management tool where when we took all of the planning and then we started to put it into an action, a 30-60-90, and moving things in a Kanban fashion from left to right, we did that in Trello. Adobe Creative Cloud, as I mentioned, a little bit more useful for us when it comes to video editing. I did not include Animoto on here, which is another decent video editing tool, has some, some really, um, strict limitations, but And then ActiveCampaign, as we mentioned. So I got, I got 3 more lists of tools, I think, 2 more lists of tools. So we'll keep you going with those. And so, so here's a few action items from sort of stage 1 of the process. Create the buyer personas, install Google Analytics, create a brand book, and get your company on Google My Business if it is not already. And I hope that all of you have already registered your Google My Business. We'll look at that a little bit more here in a few slides. Alright, so now we moved into stage 2. So this is build the foundation. So now we really want to create a consistent web presence. We want to optimize the website, we're going to start talking about search engine optimization here. Then we want to develop what we call pillar content. Our pillar content philosophy has been really the key to all of this. When you start to look at the results that we had, what's driving all of it is this right here. So let's talk about SEO. For those of you not familiar with search engine optimization, this is what helps you to rank higher on Google or any search engine for that matter, based on the key terms that people are looking for when they look for your business. So many of you on this call, people are going to go out and Google payroll services or online payroll or HR outsourcing or timekeeping software, whatever it might be, things related to you. And there's a million different factors that come into SEO, but there are some very basic ones that can help you to improve how you rank. So why is this so important? The absolute best traffic your business can receive is organic traffic. It's just that simple. It converts at a much higher rate than ads. Visitors who find you through a search engine are obviously looking for what you are selling. They're going to the internet and Googling, I need payroll services in Columbia, South Carolina. Who's got them? And guess where they don't look for those payroll services? They don't look where you might even say is the best place to hide a dead body, and that is page 2 of Google. So if you're not on page 1 of Google, you are basically lost in a sea of 500 other payroll companies. And so it is critical that you spend time on your search engine optimization and just every month get incremental improvements on the keywords that matter most and then continue to add to that keyword list. I know at ERG We're up to about 150 keywords we're trying to rank for over there. All right, so how do we improve search engine optimization? This wheel kind of walks through all the different things that are included in search engine optimization. So it's— there's not one simple thing that say, oh, if you do this, you're going to rank higher. There are a lot of different things, and some of them are very technical, some of them are very simple. We use a tool called Webceo. There are some other tools, you know, that's an agency-specific type of tool. I would say if you're looking for one individually for your company that is not built for an agency, maybe look at Moz. It's a really good, easy-to-use one if you don't have a lot of SEO experience. Moz has great tutorials, very simple-to-use platform, very easy to understand. And it's not very cheap, but it is very good. And so That's going to give you access into all these things. And I'll show you a sample. Uh, actually, I don't think I put in a sample report with each of these metrics, but basically when we run a report in Webceo for any of our clients on the marketing agency side, we're going to see, okay, hey, how's the site speed out of 100? Oh, it's at a 13%. We need to improve the site speed. Here are some of the technical fixes we can do to make that happen. Keyword research, we track all of our keywords in there. Like I say, we got about 150 in the basket.. But for you, you're going to want to start— and I've got a great local SEO checklist that I'm going to send out as a follow-up to this webinar— start with 5 keywords that you're trying to rank for. If you're just getting started in SEO, really focus on what are the 5 things that people are searching for and try to go long tail. Long tail means instead of saying payroll, saying payroll services Columbia, South Carolina, and getting 4 to 5 different words in there and localizing it and making it as specific to you as possible. Or payroll services for dental practices, whatever that thing might be that you're trying to rank for. Be some great examples of it on that local SEO checklist. Um, obviously things like the content and how the content is optimized. So you can't say you want to rank for payroll services but not say payroll services anywhere on your page and not have it as an H1 tag, not have it in the meta tags, not have it, uh, you know with a consistent enough cadence throughout the course of the page. Your user experience matters. Mobile friendliness of your site matters so, so, so much. And that is, that is a hard one to keep up with. Because even though sites are responsive, there's often a disconnect between the mobile experience and the online experience. And so I think as you start to look at each of these things, you need to say, hey, first of all, locally, let me appease the great Google here and get my business listing tight and make sure it's got keywords in it that I'm trying to rank for and a clear description and some photos and different things. Now let's make sure my website has all the right tags and has— I have keywords that I've researched that I'm trying to rank for, and I'm only trying to rank for one per page. Let's make sure technically my site is sound, the speed is good, all that good stuff. Okay, now I can start to get into some more things like user experience, etc., etc. Um, and here's an example real quick of WebCEO. This, this is just one of the reports we pull out of there where we say, Hey, what are some of the— here are top 5 keywords we ranked for over the last month. We're number 1, number 2 for each of these keywords. Here are keywords that we've continued to move up the rankings for. Here across the 150 keyword sets, what's the average ranking across them? Where is that distributed? And this will really break down the site in just a host of different ways. Like I said, I think Moz is a good starting point. And then you can start to move into SEMrush, Ahrefs are some great tools as well. Okay, so let's talk about pillar content. We could have spent the entire hour talking about pillar content. Pillar content means that you are creating something with a focus on documentation that is the pillar of your content strategy. So when I say focus on documentation, let's think about this for an exam— as an example. So did a podcast a couple weeks ago about the best practices for terminating an employee. Okay, so now that podcast is not only a great opportunity— looped in a teammate for the interview style. So now somebody else is sharpening their saw, getting some things together to understand a little bit more about best practices for termination. We then hand it over to our internal employees who can listen to it and learn about the best practices for terminations. We then cut up some of the video that we recorded on Zoom and put it out into our social channels. We then turn it into a blog post as well, which is keyword optimized for— after we do a little bit of keyword research to see which key term people search for the most related to how to terminate an employee. And we've got something that's not only audience-serving but it's internal serving as well. And so this can be your podcast interviews that you do with third parties, maybe somebody else's podcast videos that you're creating for YouTube or for internal training videos for client specifics, webinars that you do. Any of these things can kind of be that top tier of the pillar content. And then what you can do is take those things and turn them into exactly what I just said. Okay, great. Repurpose that video, give it to somebody, just, hey, jot up these notes, turn it into a blog post. Great. Here's some social posts of it. I took this 35-minute video and I took a 2-minute snippet of it and I put it on LinkedIn along with some commentary. I use it for internal training. I use it for sales outreach. So now we've got a marketing piece that we add. Oh, hey, I remember last time I came out to see you, Joe, you were having some issues with some troubled employees. We just created this great podcast about how to terminate employees, and I think it'll help you. To do with this situation and if it arises in the future. And so we want to— there is one thing that I am adamant about above everything else, and that is to repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. So once again, going back to that example that we talked about earlier, if we've got that checklist for how to tell the difference between an employee and a contractor, well, we've already got the checklist, and now I can hold it in front of me and I can record a video about how to tell the difference between an employee and a contractor. And then that video becomes a blog, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that same stuff I just said. Repurpose everything. And, you know, one of the number one things I get from people is they say, geez, where do you guys come up with the content? And quite simply, it's, you know, what is— what questions are coming up from our clients? And what questions does our team have based on client questions? And so, you know, I use this example, and I'll talk more here in just a moment. I was getting a little ahead of myself about places to bring content from. But this was an example. So we did a webinar I think we had a couple hundred people live on the webinar about the payroll tax deferral. And then we— so we recorded the video on Zoom that got another 2,000 views on YouTube because we keyword optimized it. We used TubeBuddy, we keyword optimized it, we did the research there, then became a blog on our site, a high-performing blog on our site. We're using our keywords there as well. We're also offering other things as you go down through this blog, you're going to run into this video, which is embedded, which also helps for search Search engine optimization on page. There are so many different things. And then that becomes these social posts over here where we get great engagement on the social posts because it is something that is clearly a topic people want to learn more about. And I often joke, I mean, heck, this past year, if you were sitting on the sidelines in this past year, not creating or churning out any content, and you were just creating all this stuff and just sharing it with your clients and not sharing it with the general public, I mean, you missed out on a huge marketing opportunity, but the great news is it persists and it lives on in 2021, for better or worse. So there are just so many things that the market wants and needs to hear more about right now as it relates to payroll and human resources. And so you have maybe one of the best content creation timeframes of our history for HR folks. So how do you come up with the content ideas? I already mentioned client questions. This one's simple. Heck, I just saw somebody email the team the other day. What are clients asking right now? What are some topics that are hot in the streets that we need to address? You know, what is our competition posting about? What are they, you know, let's put our own spin on it. Let's make sure we're addressing that topic. If we see something that's getting really good engagement, you know, they say good artists copy, great artists steal. Google Trends. So this is another one. So how did we jump on that? How to complete the 2020 W-4? Well, we saw it come up in Google Trends and we said, great, let's crank out a video real quick and get some content out around this. Internal subject matter experts. So for those of you with little bit larger teams, you've got people internally that you can give them an opportunity to share their wisdom. Turning on the video camera, turning on a Zoom and recording the conversation with some notes in front of you. Really simple ways to start to get things out. And video is obviously in high demand right now. People are consuming large quantities of video and embedding video on your site is— people stay 88% longer on pages with video video on the page. And so also, what are you consuming from a content perspective and what's your spin on it? Kind of joked about the good artists copy, great artists steal. Don't just be a parrot going out and saying the same thing as everybody else. What you're consuming, put your spin on it and how does your firm handle it differently than everybody else out there? Or what do you do the same? And what do you do to make sure that you guys are fulfilling that value from your side? So lots of great places to get content ideas. Now, here is a magical little piece that I am quite frankly just feeling the fruits of. So content creation is one piece. Content creation plus engaging with other people's content, with a huge asterisk next to this, in a meaningful way, not just LinkedIn as the prime example of great posts. Well, yeah, great post. Okay. Thanks for the comment. Thanks for filling up some dead air there, you know, providing your opinion, providing your expertise in addition to providing a counterpoint. We get way more followers from the engagement than from the posts themselves. So if I get, you know, 50 followers on LinkedIn this week, I can guarantee you probably 40 of them come from me engaging with content from other thought leaders, friends, prospects, the people in the market. So make sure that you're not only posting. And heck, if you're too scared to post at the moment, which is nonsense, y'all, but, uh, if you're too scared to post, just go out and engage with other people's posts. Hit like, leave a comment that's got some fresh perspective on it, um, and engage with other people's stuff. I think you'll start to see some really good results when you do that. So, all right, this has lived at the top of Anything that I've had in front of me when I'm taking notes related to working with a client, when I'm writing copy, when we're doing marketing stuff, it is about them. When I say you, we need to you phrase, not we phrase. So going back to that we, we all over yourself, what can you do for your prospect? What can you do for your clients? How does their life get better? It is about them. Not about me. And when you start to write in a way and start to create content in a way that says, hey, would they have paid for this piece of content if they had to? Then you'll really start to see the more engagement and those things become more natural because people are attracted to things that are of value. And if you're just putting out generic sales pitches on your website, on your LinkedIn posts, on your social posts, wherever you are, then you're not going to get the engagement because nobody wants to engage with a sales post. They want to engage with something that's thought-provoking and meaningful and provides value. All right, so a couple of things when we look at the, the site optimization. Here's, here's the ERG site. And so this is the existing home page. It's once again, the brand extension is there. We started getting slightly more sophisticated. You know, one thing you'll notice is these people are happy and smiling, even though it is a stock photo, which I absolutely cannot stand stock photos. So, um, But we are showing this aspirational image of what it's like to work with ERG. We are also giving incredibly clear and accessible calls to action on the homepage. And so one thing I noticed on so many sites I go to is that above the fold— so this is what you see when you— on your screen right here, the fold would be this area right here. So anything below would not be visible when you turned on your monitor. You have to have a clear call to action. And so these are almost primary and secondary in the respect that here's a get started, here's a schedule call. We're doing a lot of testing. More often than not, you'll find that these, these are the same, and that we want some consistency in the calls to action. In this particular case, we will split test these from time to time, which, as you start to move forward and you start to get some subtraction and some of these other things we've talked about in place, then you might want to look into more split testing and heat maps. We use Zoho PageSense for heat maps. What that does is that shows us— it tracks the page and shows us every time anywhere, anywhere somebody clicks on the page. And we actually had a really good example of that on this next page. We noticed a lot of people clicking, and I'll forget off the top of my head, but I think it was right here. They weren't clicking this obvious hyperlink, but they were clicking there. And so we hyperlinked it. So we made it where, okay, if they're clicking there, then people clearly expect it to be something that they can hyperlink. So let's go ahead and hyperlink it. It's simple enough, right? Let's give the people what they want. Um, but now when we talk about that creating value right from the start, I mean, this, this is just below the fold on this website, and this gets downloads nearly every single day, if not multiple every single day. It's just, hey, 5 free HR templates to help you grow. So this is an email automation that we set up, and you can go there and subscribe, and you can, you know, steal what you want from there. It is what it is. Everybody does these things. But you go there and subscribe, and you're going to get an email drip over the next week and a half that's going to provide you with 5 free HR templates. And as it moves through that funnel, it's going to start to turn on some language around, hey, here's why you might want to take a meeting with us. And so it's about providing that value though first before asking You do not walk into a bank and ask the bank for money. You have to deposit money first. This is the deposit, right? Give people something valuable before you go and ask for money. All right. So what are some of the tools we use for this particular stage of the process? We use Zoho PageSense for heat maps. We use a tool called Keywords Everywhere. I think I've got a screen cap of it here on the next page. Google Search Console is invaluable. Google My Business, that's where your job— or excuse me, your business posting will be. We use Anchor for our podcast. That's been completely fine for us. We use Hootsuite for our social posting and WebCEO for tracking our search engine optimization. So what's your action item? I would recommend creating a piece of cornerstone content. For ERG, that cornerstone content really is that 5-email drip, those 5 free templates. I would review your calls to action on your website, make sure they're clear, and make sure they're engaging. Engaging people. One of the things you would have seen if you'd move further down that page, and you can go to ERG's website, ergpayroll.com, and check it out, is that, hey, what is the process? Okay, it's got a very simple 1, 2, 3. Schedule a call, pick the solution that's right for you, get into your kickoff call. It's just like, oh, okay, it's very simple to onboard with ERG. That makes it much more interesting. And you phrasing, don't wee-wee all over yourself. All right, so next up, we want to execute and adapt. This is the final stage, and I'm going to be coming in hot right at 3:30 here. So we want to listen and learn to what the people like, what they want more of. We want to double down on that. We want to continuously improve it. And a lot of the tools I've already mentioned will help you to do that as you get more sophisticated with them. Um, and you know, one of the tools that we use all the time, and this is a really nice Chrome extension and it's really cheap, it's called Keywords Everywhere. But it makes it really simple. It's just a Chrome extension where you can turn it on or off. And then any search term that you throw up here in the search bar, it'll tell you how much people search for that, other terms that people search for. It'll show you where you rank. Well, this just happened to show us where we rank because we ranked number 1 for it. But so, this one, you might say to yourself, "Well, that volume's only 10 a month." But this is the local keyword, right? So like, we want to be page 1, even if it's only 10 searches a month for this one, just way too low to really prioritize. But it's long tail and it's local. And so we want to make sure that we're up at the top. But now I might see, you know, one of the things we learned from this is, oh, hey, people search for ERG payroll login 40 times a month. Well, do we have a page optimized for ERG payroll login? We really don't. And none of these would make me too excited because we really want to see If it's any, you know, we want to see at least a few hundred if it's a localized search term, and, you know, thousands if it's something that we're trying to rank for nationally. Now, Google needs you to stay active. So, you need to be adding photos. Once you get onto Google My Business and you get the app and all that, I mean, it's going to send you constant reminders to add photos and do all those things. But you will see results the more you, once again, appease the Google master. You know, you want to create a consistent Google review campaign with your clients. So, you know, we have a simple 2-email campaign where we say, hey, would you please provide us with a Google review? Here's a link directly to— if you click on this, write a review, or where— I don't see it because on this one, but there's a button on there that says write a review. It linked directly to where that button is and say, tell them exactly what to write about in there and what to do and let them know it will take less than 2 minutes. And have one follow-up email that says, hey, did you see my prior email? No big deal if you're not comfortable with it, but it would be very helpful if you would provide us with a Google review. All right. So let's talk about social. So post daily on all your social channels. And once again, you can use a tool like Hootsuite where you can schedule all those things out. But if it's your personal channel, I will say this once again, going back to smaller firms, single owner firms like people want to I know in your mind you can get a little bit of insecurity around how small your business is, right? Like, we've been there, we've done that, uh, we still are. You get a little bit of that imposter syndrome. Post daily. People want to know who you are. They want to know more about your company. They want to know more about you. They want to know more about the people that they're working with. You really need to optimize— and this is something I should have referenced earlier— your About Us page on your website too. Now, it's interesting because the About Us page is typically the second or third most visited page on any website. I mean, think about it. Every time you go to a website of a small business, what do you do? You go to the About Us page, you look at the pictures of the people, you look at their bios. But really, you still want to maintain— even though that page is about you, you still want to use that you phrasing. And, and what does it mean for your customer that your team is as good as they are? And so if you post daily on all your social channels, then you'll start to get some really good information on what's driving engagement That'll help you to create more followers and ultimately more opportunities. You just want to stay relevant in your audience's mind. For some of you that are on this call right now, I know that we engage on LinkedIn a lot. You're probably like, dang, every time I open up LinkedIn, Matt's posts are right at the top. Well, that's because I post it almost every day. I post, you know, hopefully valuable information. You've engaged with it once before. LinkedIn's algorithms push that stuff to the top once you start engaging with it. And so that's what people are going to see more of. And quite frankly, that's the way their algorithm works, where it trickles it out to your connections based on engagement. And so it doesn't just automatically go to, you know, if you got 1,500 connections, not all 1,500 connections see your posts. They need to get some engagement. Guess what people don't engage with? They don't engage with shoddy sales pitches and, you know, here's why we're so great and all that stuff. So, but also keep it real here. One thing I will say is that people do engage at a much higher rate with pictures and videos of your team and things that you're actually doing, real stuff. You know, the stock stuff, we've got to crank a lot of it out. And we certainly are, do a lot of that, but the engagement rates are way higher when it's like a picture of our actual team doing something or collaborating or what have you. Alright, so a couple of last things here. So if you're interested in the marketing options that we have through Guru, one of the things I will not spend a lot of time on here is telling you about what they are. I mean, basically, I've outlined a lot of things we already do. But if you go to the go to the guru.co website, click on marketing. You can see the pricing and the overview right there on the website. We're pretty transparent with the way everything works. Um, you know, there is a list on there of monthly expectations of what our team can do for you. So if you just listened to everything I said and you said, oh, that all sounds great, but there's no chance that we have the time, bandwidth, expertise to do all that, great. We've got somebody that can help you. Um, but I'll leave you with a couple of final points here. And I think this is something that that will really start to flip the script on where you, how you create content, how you attract people to your brand. There's an old image, I'll never get it out of my head, of a piece of string laying on the table. And when you push it, it just crumples up and goes back into like a little squiggly line, like a snake. But when you pull it, the string comes with you and it stays straight and stiff. And so when you are trying to push your services, your company, your things on people, they tend to recoil back. Back, right? Whereas when you create things of value that people want to be a part of, they tend to be attracted to that. They want to be a part of it and they come towards you and they create that straight line. So, you know, we— I've been preaching this acronym. I'm waiting for it to become a movement, but, you know, I guess I haven't gone viral with the ABV yet. Always be valuable. Don't be always closing. That's old school. It's not— you don't want it from your contacts. They don't want it from you. Create content, things about that provide value for others, not sales material. And don't wee-wee all over yourself. And if you want more info about us and what we do— Guru provides HR software, HR support, and digital marketing— you can text the number on the screen or email karen@guru.co. We'll be happy to help you all in any way we can. I'm so honored that you'd spend a little bit of your time with me today, and I'm hopeful that the information that was provided will help you on your journey to create more inbound leads for your firm. And I'm certain that some of the resources that we're going to provide over the coming days in the email drip will do the same. And if you're watching this video online after the fact, make sure that you, uh, go ahead and opt in on the website to get your email in there so we can send you these resources referenced during the recording. If you have any questions at all, you can just shoot me an email as well. I'm just matt@guru.co, and I'll be happy to help in any way I can. I really appreciate all of you spending some time with us today, and I hope this was valuable. Thank you so much.