The Riches are in the Niches - How to Target Niches with Lucy Flinn, Sonya Ahola, and Brian McVicker

Face to face. Come on up, y'all. Let's go. Tough act to follow, huh? Good grief. I was hoping we would be after a tax session or something after that, man. That's a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure. All right. So we are really excited to share some great information with you guys here over the next hour. But first and foremost, can we just give Cheryl and the rest of the IPPA A round of applause for this amazing event. This has been awesome. Alright, so we are gonna be really focused on giving you guys some actionable insights that you can use in your business immediately to focus on niches and target verticals for marketing and sales. And so what I want you to do, we are so focused on giving you those nuggets. Can I get a little snap every time you hear a nugget that you're gonna be able to apply? Can everybody practice for me right now? Give us a little snap. All right, so if you get something that you're gonna be able to take home with you today, give us a little snap so that we know that we're doing our jobs up here. But before we get started, I actually have a really fun thing to think about. He plays off of what Jesse was talking about really well. When we talk about mindset, we talk about belief. When we talk about niching down, some of the biggest pushback I always get from folks is they don't believe that they should be focused on one target vertical or one target market, cuz they think it's gonna limit their opportunities. It reminds me of the study they did in Japan back in the '90s where there were 13 people that were all highly allergic to poison ivy. And they took one of their arms and they rubbed it with a harmless placebo and told them it was poison ivy. They took the other arm and rubbed it with poison ivy and told them it was a harmless placebo. So they're highly allergic to poison ivy, harmless placebo arm that they told them was poison ivy. How many of those people out of 13 do you think broke out with poison ivy on the arm that was told it was actually poison ivy but it was a harmless placebo? Out of 13, how many do you think? 10. What else we got? 4. 13. All 13 people that believed it was poison ivy broke out with a rash because they thought it was poison ivy. How many do you think that were rubbed with actual poison ivy that are once again highly allergic actually broke out out of those 13? 0. Pretty close. 2. 2. So plays really well off what he was just talking about, right? Our mindset, what we believe. We believe whether we believe we can or we can't, we're going to prove ourselves right. So let's look at how we can believe some things about finding the riches in the niches. We're hoping to give you guys a little eye of the tiger when you walk out of here today. And I am so excited to be joined on the stage by some amazing people, some badasses. After following up Jesse here, I feel like I got to spice it up a little bit, but, um, First, I've got Sonya Hola from Hola HR. She is an inbound expert. She is going to help us to determine some of the great places where content fits in our sales process, how to deliver wonderful content that's going to drive more leads, drive more sales for our team. Fun fact about her, she actually is training her golden retriever Zeke right now to be a service dog in hospitals. And I thought that was a really fun one. So appreciate it. We're really looking forward to hearing from you, Sonya.

Thank you.

Next up, we've got Lucy Flint. She's the VP of Marketing Communications at Payroll Network. She is a brand maven. We are so excited to hear what she's going to bring. How does brand play into all this as we're looking at it? What does brand even mean? When you're in Vegas and you start to see all these billboards, it's going to make a little bit more sense to you how much brand matters in the grand scheme of things. And fun fact about her, she was captain of her varsity basketball team and also senior superlatives, which plays nice into our little prom theme here we got going, right? So, uh, Thanks, Matt. And then Mr. McVicker down here on the end, Brian McVicker, the stone cold sales assassin. He is representing the sales side of the house for us here. So we got marketing in the middle, sales on the ends, and we're going to go ahead and Brian, as you would probably assume from looking at him, was also prom king. So there's his fun fact about him. And yes, I know, right? Round of applause for that. And he has been in sales for how long now, Brian? Forever. Forever. Forever. Very well put. Many awards winning with national providers, heads up the team over at Payroll Network, going to give us a ton of actionable insight that we can pull out of here today. And my name is Matt Vadie. I'm CEO of Guru. This was the hardest one to give myself an intro because you don't want to pump yourself up, right? But I've sold, I guess, over $30 million in human resources software and technology and outsourcing. Wrote a book, bestselling book called Ping Pong Is Not a Strategy: How to Create an Awesome Organizational Culture. Fun fact about me, I guess we'll stick to high school. I always had the after-prom party. That was my deal. So we're really excited to get into this. And I want to start first by just kind of talking about what are some of the pros of niching down? What does that mean? And let's start with Lucy. Why don't you share with us a little bit? What are some of the pros of actually niching down and focusing on specific industries, target markets, whatever it may be?

Sure. Thanks, Matt. Well, focus matters, right? And especially when you have limited resources. So for me, I've been with Payroll Network for about 3 years, and the majority of my career was with much larger companies where I had much larger budgets, but I've been able to leverage expertise from Ogilvy Worldwide, where I spent the majority of my career, and I've actually had this campaign brief, which I borrowed from Ogilvy, that I've shared with Sonya, and some other colleagues that really requires you to sit down and do your homework and focus on who your target audience is and think about how you can make your product the hero and develop a strategy, business objectives, a pricing strategy, identify your strengths, your weaknesses, and come up with a content strategy And this has really enabled us to scale and grow and achieve our revenue objectives, especially with COVID because prior to COVID, traditional marketing was the mindset of Payroll Network, and a digital transformation was really required, you know, with the stay-at-home orders and such. So that really became an advantage for us. I mean, Sonya, how about you?

Yeah, I'll just echo that. I think there's a lot of FOMO with niching down, and people get nervous that they're leaving money on the table. So I think having a focus is not a bad thing, and I think sometimes people do get nervous that they're losing opportunities and they're walking away from options. But today, as Lucy was saying, We're all small businesses. We're competing against national providers that have millions and millions of dollars in marketing budgets and teams just dedicated to bringing in leads and creating opportunities for the sales team. So you have to, just out of the scale that we can do, focus on a few and really build that scalability and that volume for just a few. Because again, you can't be an expert in everything. So I think just out of pure need, you have to niche down to be able to have success.

Right, and for us, looking at our customer base, you know, we have a 94% client retention rate, which is pretty awesome. So we looked at what verticals we were really succeeding in and decided to hone in on those. So associations, independent schools, healthcare, and interestingly enough, alternative medicine. Also known as cannabis, which has become very successful.

That— nice, okay. All right, we already got one over there, I love it. That was one for like, there's a dispensary out there, go ahead. So Brian, it's not all sunshine and roses when we start to niche down and start to focus on specific industries. What are some of the cons and challenges?

Yeah, it's probably some of the things that people are thinking about is that there's an opportunity cost, right? So if I spend my time, money, effort in one particular vertical, I'm going to miss out on everything else. I think the other, the other thing that probably is going through a lot of people's mind is that you also, you can't just choose a vertical and sell it and market it. You have to implement, support those clients. And so you got to find one that you're really good at and make it work, and then, you know, invest the time in the training, the team, to be able to provide solutions to the day-to-day challenges of your clients.

And collaboration between sales and marketing for us has been incredible. Brian and I work very closely together every day. His sales team has been instrumental in helping us identify target personas, ideal company profile, working with our clients to come up with testimonials. So I think that cross-business unit collaboration has been a real key to our success.

Yeah, let's dive into that in just a moment. The collaboration between sales and marketing. We all know as your organization continues to grow, the walls continue to grow, right? So between finance, sales, operations, marketing. So what can we do to break down some of those walls, build bridges? We're gonna dive into that. But how do you define niches? So one of the things that some of you, I've already heard a great little insight here of just going through the CRM, going, putting an Excel spreadsheet together of going, hey, are we already really doing well in some niches that we weren't even aware of? I know for us nonprofits, we didn't even realize at one point nonprofits were 25% of our client base. So, oh geez, I guess we should start marketing to nonprofits. Turns out they like us a lot. But how do you define niches, Sonya, and what are some examples, ones that you guys focus on?

Yeah, sure. So back to that comment about identifying niches, I think a really good exercise on that collaboration point as well is to sit down with your implementation team and your operations team and think about some of those industries or niches and talk to them. What are we doing differently? What systems do we integrate with? Do they have any specific— is asking about? And write those things down, and then give that information, that bulleted list, to your marketing team or to your agency, and have them create— that is your unique process. That is what you're doing for that industry. So I don't think it's throwing a dart. I think a lot of times, as you had said, Matt, we're already doing these things. We just may not know it. So I don't think it's any secret sauce. I think it's just identifying what you're already doing to get those unique processes.

What about you, Brian? What do you think? Are you thinking in terms of verticals? Are you thinking in terms of industries or are you thinking in terms of employee size? What's your— how do you define niches?

No, it's about what's unique in your brownie.

Right?

So I think it's by service bureau, it's going to differ for you. Is it a strategic integration? Is it a partnership that you have? Is it a regional specialty? Is it a competitive advantage like Sonya was mentioning, something that you and your service bureau can do that the others can't and build something around that?

See, we're not paid speakers up here, but did you hear that callback, how well he did with that, with to the brown? Great job, man. I love it.

Exactly why I'm here.

All right, let's talk about your marketing toolkit because I know that's always one of the things we sent out a poll, who uses which CRM, how do you guys have marketing in-house, outsourced, not at all. And talk a little bit, Lucy, about some of the resources that you guys use in your marketing toolkit, specifically when we're looking at campaigns related to targeted marketing.

Sure, so I think the real game changer for us over the last year and a half, and you know, Brian, feel free to hop in here, has been implementing HubSpot for us as a CRM, both for sales and marketing. So previously, our inbound and outbound communications had been, I would say, somewhat haphazard. So again, utilizing COVID as a catalyst to drive that digital transformation and really encouraging our executive committee to invest in a marketing technology stack, which has driven a brand transformation within the company and enabled us to use HubSpot very robustly to do all of our campaigns has been remarkable. And then from a KPI standpoint, our CFO and operations and C-suite level folks love the dashboards. As does Brian. So we were able to have visibility 24/7 into how marketing is driving revenue.

Yeah, I would agree.

Thank you. Yes. Yeah. All right. So now, and so we asked a lot of you folks, HubSpot getting a lot of press, but I mean, one of the reasons why HubSpot is so effective is you talked about it, data transparency, but also automation, right? So we've got to think about automation and how we're touching people without having to manually follow up with them whenever they download an asset, whenever they engage with a piece of content inside of our funnel. Lots of other tools that do it, but HubSpot's definitely a good example. What about you? What's in your toolkit?

We are also a huge HubSpot supporter. I love it.

It's really— sponsorship from them.

Yeah, I know. Where's HubSpot? Are they here? We are huge, huge supporters of HubSpot. It's really transformed our ability to put out content at a scalable, scalable pace., and it's really, as Lucy had said, it's transformed our brand and has really, you know, the amount of leads that we're getting inbound now on a weekly basis just from SEO, from our placements on landing pages, our social, our email, it's— I don't even have the statistics, but it's gotta be at least 5 to 10 times what we were previously getting. So huge supporter of HubSpot. People with small teams or that, you know, if marketing people are doing a lot in-house. I'm a huge fan of Canva as well, so that's a great free tool. If anybody doesn't have Canva and you have a marketing team, that's a wonderful thing to create branded content, and it looks really, really professional. So I would also really highly recommend Canva.

What about for social? What are you guys using for social?

Um, I was just gonna talk about quality, and then I'll talk about so— social. We had like one of the best meals I've ever had last night at Lago, and I was thinking about the sashimi, like, in the context of the quality of your data set, right? So we recently did a campaign in HubSpot and had a very high-quality, focused target audience, right? So when you think about the quality of your target audience based on your target persona and craft a marketing campaign and assets that is very focused on that target audience. The leads that we are getting are converting at such a high rate because of the quality of the dataset, the prospect, the quality of the asset, and it's, it's just magical. So I think that's something to consider as well. It's quality over quantity.

I think if you're listening to this and you're not getting consistent inbound leads from your content, you need to really be taking some notes here because that's the thing that you're gonna hear over and over again. We're getting 50 to 100 inbound leads every month from our website and the content we're pushing out. We're hearing the same thing up here. So this, we're gonna get to content here in a moment, but you really need to make that a big focus. Talk about it all the time. COVID was like the Super Bowl for our industry when it comes to content. People were thirsty for PPP, ERTC, everything. The opportunity was so great. If you weren't pushing out content then, you should have been, but it's never too late, right? You need to get in the game. So let's talk about that bridge between sales and marketing, Brian. I know you've rebuilt the sales infrastructure over there, and how does that work with how you guys play nicely with the sales team or with the marketing team as far as execution?

So yeah, Lucy and I work and collaborate very well. For the sales team, in doing a campaign, we typically get some of our experts on the sales team that might be working in a particular niche, and we find out what's working, what's the message that we're using, How do we differentiate ourselves against the competition? Then we spend time showing what's the message we're going to use, what's our compelling message to our, our 6 buyer personas. And then we turn that over to marketing and they craft emails, templates, all the content based on the input from the sales team because we're the ones out in the field having conversations. We're talking to our trusted advisors, to prospects every single day. And we know and understand the challenges that someone might be having, and they take that messages and then find that targeted audience for us.

So you're feeding the objections to marketing, who can then proactively overcome them with your content, if I hear that right. Is that correct?

Absolutely.

Love it, love it. What about from your perspective, Lucy? How are you continuing to— I know you're newer to this industry, right? Last few years, if I'm not mistaken?

Yes. So I'm new to the HR industry. So I've been in the tech industry and obviously the marketing field for some time. But just to piggyback on what this Brian was saying, there's another Brian at this table who's a $500,000 Brian who's been upselling our customers brilliantly. And he's just a fabulous guy and has been giving the marketing team incredible feedback because he has such great relationships with the customers that he's been able to give us, you know, not just testimonials but full-blown case studies. And in particular with the cannabis vertical, he has again developed such good relationships that it's enabled us to come up with some pretty crafty content that's enabled us to be very provocative in our communications in this super fun vertical.

You get a lot of fun puns when you start selling into the weed industry.

It is fun. Roll with us, we'll help you grow.

A little bit more fun than when I'm selling to marketing agencies and nonprofits. So, love it. So how, what are you doing on the preparation side, Brian, to make sure that the campaigns that marketing's putting together are being executed well on the phones, in the field, during conversations? How do you prepare your reps for that?

So training, right? And I think for, for me, I think about education of the reps to know and understand what are the challenges, what's the message? Providing some of the sales automation within HubSpot to make it easy. You know, I always say the hardest part of the job as a salesperson is to get out of the car or to pick up the phone, right? So as a sales leader, if I can provide tools to help speed up that process, give them confidence in making that phone call, then I won, right? And so we try to build things on the front end to make it easier for the reps and then give them a compelling message education, show them who we're gonna call, what we're gonna say, what's the email content, and then really the proof is in the pudding, right? So when we start getting leads and we start making sales, then it's, uh, you get a commitment from the sales team.

Just to echo one part that was, that Brian was saying about the sales and marketing relationship, I think our sales team maybe a few years ago didn't really understand the value that inbound marketing brought. It was just, oh, marketing's gonna go make some flyers or make a PowerPoint. Okay, I just gotta go on this sales call. But I think now that they're seeing the volume of leads that are coming in the website and they're qualified, they've already looked at our landing page, they've read a case study and downloaded it, they've followed us and they're subscribed to our newsletter, they've looked at our pricing page, that is a very qualified lead that's already through the funnel. That should close much, much faster than somebody that they're cold calling off of a list from a chamber. So I think, like you said, the proof is in the pudding. They're really starting to realize the value that HubSpot is bringing us and the value that marketing is bringing us. And that, that took a little bit of a transition. I think, like you said, the proof is in the pudding, and we really had to prove it to them.

So, Matt, one of the things I'd mention is that I worked at some of the national providers, and if you went, the relationship with sales and marketing, if I needed something and I said, hey, we wanna do a campaign based on healthcare, they would take the stale old flyer and then put a nurse picture on there, and that was our healthcare flyer, right? So one of the things I enjoy and is an advantage of everyone here is that we're nimble. We can make changes, we can, you know, so when I go to Lucy and say, hey, let's do a campaign in this certain area, we can customize it from the ground up, and that builds a much better brand image. It builds a much better message, and the content matches that.

What are some of the typical steps in a campaign that you guys are putting together for the reps?

So we— I guess the campaign would be social media posts, video content, um, the emails that are going out, the which will build some of the inbound traffic. We do have some landing pages that we've created on our website to have additional content, webinars.

So Brian's super disciplined. He's got the 5 Ps that he's created for his reps, which are fabulous. And then I'm like the marketing guru that comes in with the branding. And I actually have 3 different business cards for 3 different verticals depending on you know, who I'm prospecting or what conference I'm attending. But it's been a lot of fun. I've actually hired a documentary filmmaker who has been helping build out our landing pages and creating brand videos. So if you go to our cannabis landing page, it's very different from our restaurant landing page, which is different from our GovCon landing page, our schools, etc. So each one, uh, Tells a very different story through video communications, projecting our expertise in that vertical. And then the messaging, to your point, Sonya, earlier, it's like our product is a hero to these different verticals. And if you just sit down and do your homework of how we can help these people and tell that story, that's how we can convert them to our clients.

Just to echo that, I think we talked about this earlier. The prospects want to see themselves in your marketing. They want to know that you can help them, that you understand them, you understand their unique industry, their unique challenges, and that you're the person for the job. So the way that you can do that today is through the content that you're putting out showcasing your expertise in that industry with those challenges that that specific prospect is having.

And it's okay if people see it and it does not apply to them. So think about this. If you get a phone call when you leave here today, if you own or operate a payroll and HR company and somebody says, hey, I provide insurance services, I'd love to come and talk to you about your insurance needs. Okay, great. Really exciting. I provide insurance services to 500 different payroll companies just like you all around the country, and I know your unique needs better than anyone else. It's a very different, more compelling tale, right? We want to talk to people that know us, know our industry, and once again, make us the hero of the story. Let's talk about content because I know this is big. We talked about it just for a moment. Tell us a little bit about how you guys approach content, the types of content you're pushing out, and how you put that into the right stages of the buyer's journey.

Yeah, we're— I'm a personal big fan of the HubSpot flywheel and content that relates to people as they're going through the buyer's journey. Similar to Payroll Network, it's all types of medias, but the messaging remains consistent. And we're finding, again, video is huge. We're continuing to push landing page and social. We've really stepped up our social game over the last 2 years, and it's just continuing to pay dividends with how much visibility we're getting. I think webinars are, are tough. I think some of us are a little webinar-ed out, but they're still really, really good. If you have the right message for the right attendee. So we're still continuing to focus on that. And I think the only other big thing that we're finding a lot of success in, which isn't a surprise, is case studies. So getting our clients on the phone and getting their problems written down, and then again using those case studies to tell those stories to someone just like you. We understand your needs, we understand your problems, and we're the ones to help.

And Matt, I was going to say, um, on the sales side, I always felt like I needed to communicate to the prospect in the manner in which they wanted to communicate. So if they like to text, I'll text. If they like to email, I email. If they want to pick up a phone call, I, I change and cater my communication to what the prospect is. And I think it's the same thing when it goes over to marketing. So marketing is going to do a campaign, and there's going to be a, a number of different, uh, pieces related to content, and it's about what the prospect wants to hear. Maybe they want to attend a webinar. Maybe they just want to download the PowerPoint afterwards. Maybe they want to fill out a form that gives them a survey on your website on, you know, how they can improve their business. So you just, you have to have multiple channels and then speak to the prospect in the way in which they want to be heard.

To me, one of the biggest misses for the sales professionals in here— sorry— is that you're not becoming locally famous. You're not taking the content that your team is creating on your company page, putting your own spin on it, creating a video, putting it on LinkedIn, putting it on YouTube, wherever your avenue of choice is. TikTok right now is blowing up. I know a lot of collective eye rolls in here, but there's a ton of eyeballs on that platform. And so make it your own, put your own unique voice on it. And I'll just say it, she touched on video and everybody in here, I mean, I see Larry, is Larry in here? Larry's got his professional videographer with him, which is awesome. Our, our best videos, we've got videos with more than 60,000 views on YouTube. Took me 15 minutes to make that video. It was not well produced. The audio is terrible. But guess what? It's getting views. It's getting leads. People are coming to us. I can point to clients that came to us from a YouTube video. That was their first step into our funnel was just a YouTube search. YouTube is huge for us. Let's talk a little bit. We've talked, Lucy, you and I, about pillar content. What is pillar content and how does that apply?

Sure, so we redid our website when we implemented HubSpot, and we were very thoughtful about re-architecting and doing a lot of SEO research and coming up with pillar topics based on our SEO research. And for each of the verticals that we were focusing on, developed a very intense content strategy and hired writers to basically craft all of the content while we were building the website, which I think is really the way to do it, as opposed to doing it backwards. We also hired consultants to help us do it. So I think, you know, you need to have, like, really good advice and a great team. It's not something that you can just kind of do on the fly. It's a very kind of thoughtful process, which we continue to iterate and evolve. But it's been a real game changer for us, especially when you're putting together an inbound marketing strategy. It's just a must-have. Sonya, would you agree?

Yeah, absolutely. And just to echo Matt's comment about surprising pieces of content that created so many leads, we have a couple blog articles that are— they are the highest viewed pages on our website. And they're very random. So one I think is, what do I do if an employee fails to return company property? That article is like our highest viewed page on our website because people are searching that content. And again, we just kind of stumbled into that. Another one that's a really highly viewed blog page and a highly viewed website page is, "What do I do if an employee makes an anonymous complaint?" Those kinds of topics, those what-if questions, we're just stumbling into traffic by default because we happen to write an article that's ranking really, really high, and we're on the first page of Google for when people are searching those topics. So to your point, you could always be surprised on what kind of content you stumble into, but then how do you find that realization that that content is working and capitalize on it.

Right, I mean, we've quadrupled our LinkedIn followers over the last couple of years and have found that polls are what are most engaging and interesting to our followers. And that was surprising as well. So we continue to do a lot of polls. Yeah. But thought leadership as well. So cybersecurity, especially with what's going on in Russia and Ukraine has spiked enormously over COVID over the last couple of years. So I've worked with our CTO to craft a series of think pieces on cybersecurity. So the think piece is not as beefy as a white paper, but we take the 4-page think piece and then carve it into a bunch of other smaller pieces of content. So a whole series of blog posts and then push that out on LinkedIn. Put it on our blog, and that's been very well received as well. So just taking that sort of macro piece of content and carving it into smaller pieces of more easily digestible content, again, kind of guiding people through the funnel.

One other thing to add, just a little nugget. I think we've also found that fun, engaging content on LinkedIn also does really well. We started our LinkedIn content plan and We're gonna post 5 articles a week and we're gonna be the functional experts and we've got all this great information that we're writing and pushing out. And it was great, but then if I post a fun employee photo from a trip or I tag an employee in like a luncheon, the engagement is like 10 times. So I think it's a balance of again knowing what is working and we always find that when we're tagging employees in photos, photos of people in our office, it does really, really well and it performs really well.

Totally agree in there. And you got a home run.

I think when our executive committee made pancakes wearing toques in the office for our entire staff, that was our most engaging LinkedIn post ever.

So in going back to that LinkedIn piece, a lot of people very active here on LinkedIn. If you're not, you should be modifying those company posts and making them your own. If you have a similar number, number of connections or even much less than your company following, you will see the engagement numbers on your personal LinkedIn, whether you're the owner, a sales rep, whomever it may be, are way higher than the company pages. And the reason why it's so much more personal, right? It's not coming from a brand, it's coming from an individual. So even if it's the same information, just slightly crafted differently in your own unique voice, it's going to get way more engagement than your company pages. So don't lose out on that content that's already sitting there ready for you to use. And let's talk about that for just a minute. You hit on it earlier. How do you find ideas for content? Does anybody ever struggle with, all right, what are we going to post content about today, this week, this month? Right. Go talk to your customer support team. What questions did you get yesterday? What questions did you get last week? Did you ever get the same question more than once? Oh, there you go. They ask, you answer, right? Same with your sales team. What objections are you getting? How can we proactively overcome those? What things are you getting asked out in the field regularly And then also we like to lean on Mineral where it's just going, hey, look, here's the topics that are most popular in Mineral's portal right now. Cool. We'll modify it and make our own version of it and put it out publicly. Let's talk a little bit about kind of repurposing content. Lucy, I know this is something that you're passionate about. What are some ways— and you guys are literally sitting in on repurposing content right now. So we're doing something brand new here. We are recording the Payroll In podcast right now as we speak. So we will take this content right here where we're going to talk about the IPPA a good bit. We're going to put it on a podcast. We're going to cut the videos up. We're going to post them on social. We're going to distribute it over email. We're going to distribute it a bunch of places. So we've got one piece of pillar content that is being created right now that we're going to use over and over and is going to create tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of views over the lifecycle of this piece of content. So anytime you're doing any interview on stage, whatever, flip on the camera, you need to pick that up, dice it up, turn it into multiple pieces of content. That you can use on different platforms in different ways and make sure that you're adapting to the platform. What are some examples of how you guys do that in your world?

Sure. So we are actually developing an adult beverage slash booze and bars campaign right now. And my documentary filmmaker colleague is putting together a longer video that kind of makes the viewer feel like we are experts in this arena. And then we're going to take that and cut it into smaller pieces specifically focused on wineries, breweries, distilleries, speakeasies, and then send that out to very targeted individual campaigns because within that vertical, there are sub-verticals. So we're gonna take that larger piece and create much smaller pieces and, you know, micro-segment that campaign.

We do something similar. Again, repurposing content. I have an HR consultant on my team, and I've bribed her into writing an email Q&A every 2 weeks that she does. So I'm very grateful she does that, 'cause it's trending HR questions. She writes that, we send it out in a newsletter subscription. I take that content, I make it into a blog post. We take the blog post, we put it on social. We take the content and we make a poll. And we put that on LinkedIn. Then we'll take like a little nugget in a quote and we'll put that on LinkedIn. Then we'll put it on a landing page and we'll drive it to the HR consulting page on the website. So it doesn't have to be complex. It can be as, you know, as built out as a long-form video, or it could be a Word document or an email that someone wrote. You can take that and repurpose that. So there's a lot of options.

Yeah.

And you're hearing the side of, you know, we've got consultants and we've got a VP of marketing and we've got content people, we've got writers and all this, right? And then there's also, where did it start from? Well, it started with me as the owner of the company flipping on my phone and recording a video with terrible audio that somebody told me it sounded like I was underwater during the video, which was pretty great. But, uh, doesn't matter. Message got across, views got across, it improves over time. So don't think you have to have the whole thing built out from the start. Just start making some incremental progress. You'll start to see the gains over time as you continue to implement. Let's talk about one of these things. So, so Brian, you and I actually talked about this a good bit on a recent episode of Payroll and, uh, client-facing marketing and the role in actually upselling clients and how this plays a role in that. Tell us a little bit more about how you guys use marketing to upsell clients.

Yeah, so it's very similar in the same type of campaign. You have the same buyer personas and you're trying to solve their day-to-day challenges. But oftentimes what I've found is that Clients come to us for one reason or another, maybe just for payroll, and over time they've grown and now they have disparate systems, they have timekeeping somewhere else, uh, Ben Admin's being handled in another way, and we're able to find them, understand and educate what we can do to make that a better overall experience for them, and then sell them product, right? So I think everyone's always afraid to talk to their clients because they're like, well, they're going to want a cheaper price, right? So during the pandemic, everyone was like, well, I don't want to call the clients because they're going to ask me for a discount. What we found is that if we're not talking to our clients, someone else is, right? And they're calling them right now, and they're telling them that they can get a better deal and all the reasons why they shouldn't be doing business with you. So if you're not proactive, then you're going to be put behind the 8-ball, right? So Take a proactive approach, get with your clients, find out what their challenges are, and then show them a better way. Show them that you can help them take their organization to the next level.

One thing that we've done for current client upsells is we've created quarterly focuses. So each quarter we'll look at, you know, a product in our portfolio or a set of products, and we, we focus on who is the ideal client that needs this. So Time and attendance, for example. We'll pull our client list and we'll go through anybody with hourly employees that's a phone and fax input method that has over 10 employees. That is our target market for that campaign. We delve out those lists to the assigned sales reps. They know that this is their hit list for the top 50 or 100 clients. We create content related to that, a video, an email educating it about that, educating them about it, a landing page. Social post, scripting, call ideas, and that is the focus for upsell for 3 months. And we found that giving a focus and doing a little bit of that legwork for the sales team and identifying their clients for them has taken a lot of the barriers out of getting those campaigns off the ground. 'Cause I think sometimes salespeople, I know ours, they have a large book of business, they may not be in front of or looking at those segments regularly. So if we can do a little bit of that heavy lifting and give them that, that really hot prospect list and then give them the content, it should be a win and should be an easy win.

And it only takes a couple of sentences, a couple of moves to take this, to take it from client-facing marketing to prospect-facing marketing and vice versa. Right. But you have to speak to— and partner. You should have 3 lists at any given time: clients, prospects, and partners, if not more. And then diving into segmentation from there inside of those lists. But it just takes small tweaks to make sure that it's speaking directly to the audience. I've gone to so many of your websites in here and you wee-wee all over yourself. We are great. We have 96% client retention. We have this, we have that. Stop wee-weeing all over yourself. Talk in you phrasing. Speak to the individual so that what did they, once again, how are they the hero? They don't care about you. They care about themselves. We're all selfish human beings. We want to know what's in it for us. Us, not how great you are. I want to know how you're going to make me great. So what are some ways that you've made your clients great? Now that I've gone on that little soapbox, Lucy, let's hear how you leverage some of that you phrasing in your world.

Sure. So we actually just gave our clients a fabulous Valentine's gift of giving and volunteering modules. So we have this giving and volunteering module that enables employees— like, I'll use myself as an example. So let's say I wanted to deduct out of my paycheck $100 a month to go to the Ukrainian Orphan Society. I'm making that up, but I would like to do that. I would be able to do that. So we sent a campaign to our clients for Valentine's Day. We took a picture of employees, a Zoom photo of doing hearts, and said thank you for your business. Happy Valentine's Day, we're giving you giving and volunteering to enable you to give your employees the opportunity to give to the charity of their choice, and the feedback has been extraordinary.

And what it's done is it gets some interest in talking to clients, and then the upsell team can look to see if they can find other solutions that they can also help them. So you think about Like, you gotta have an opportunity to talk to someone, and this opens the door with a free product. And while you're having that product, it's like, hey, well, we could probably do a whole lot for you as well. Why don't we have a conversation, see what are some of the other opportunities that we can do?

And I think too, that comment relates back to the LinkedIn fun posts performing really well. I think it's really important to find messaging that can cut through the clutter of We have a great software. It does amazing things. It's all in one system. It does this, it does this. Everyone is saying that. So finding those little bits and messages that will cut through the clutter and show up at the top of your feed that you wanna learn about is really, really important. And again, you could call it kitschy or cheesy, but some of that stuff will rise to the tops of people, to the top of people's inboxes.

So true. I mean, we do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, regular post, Monday Motivation, Wellness Wednesday, Fun Friday, and it's like appointment viewing. I mean, people love that stuff. They really do.

Love it. And all of this is defining your brand. When we talk about being different, when Jesse was talking, you don't be different by being the same as everybody else, right? You be different by being different. I know that sounds silly, but when I ask everybody in here what their value proposition is, 85% of them are the same, right? We got great customer service and we're really awesome. Yeah, okay, great. Yeah, me too. Um, but, but how do you define that? How does that extend into your marketing, into your sales process? And how do you make it fun and unique and people get to know you? They want to do business, whether you have hundreds of employees or whether you have 2 employees, they want to do business with the people behind the brand. And how do you make that an extension of your, your marketing efforts and your sales efforts? It's really important. It's our easiest way to stand out from the ADPs and paychecks of the the world. All right, I want to hit one last question, leave a couple minutes for Q&A. If you could focus on just one target vertical, one industry, or one niche, what would it be, Brian?

The one with the most money.

The one with the most money. Straight cheddar.

Yeah, it's interesting because the niches that I focus on today at Payroll Network are niches I've never focused on before, and really it was a disciplined process to find out What is our client base? What are we good at? And what can we service and support and implement? And so that's how I decided that nonprofits or Canvas, whatever, were the niches that we were gonna do here, but they were nothing I had ever done before. It's not like that's my life calling, I gotta, we're gonna make that work here at Payroll Network. So I think what I would encourage everyone to do is look at their own service What makes them unique? What industries do their clients happen to be? And then just get involved, right? So join an association, start looking for trusted advisors that also connect with those individuals for the, you know, the 4 pillars that you have of, you know, CPAs, brokers, financial advisors, consultants.

We are literally sitting in one of the best examples of this. If you go over in the room next door, there's a whole bunch of vendors that serve this industry. You know what they're doing? They're networking with each other right now so they can share referrals and they can continue to generate more and more momentum to sell more of us their products and services. And it's such an easy thing to do. What about you, Lucy?

I'm just thinking about some things that Jesse said earlier in terms of think about what you're passionate about and really lean into it. And remembering what he said about all his people that he cared about referring him business. So I think caring, like showing your clients that you care, showing your partners that you care, and really, you know, living your life, whether personally and professionally, with passion is gonna make you a success.

I'll give an example, I'll answer the question. I would say, personally, I really like the professional services industry, It's one of our 3 core verticals. The reasons I like it, they are compliance-focused, they care about compliance, it's important to them. They care about investing in their employees, they see it as a value, not as an expense, and they're very comfortable with technology. They probably use a lot of technology in their day-to-day world. They wanna use the things that we can provide, and it's important to them. So that would be mine.

And I didn't mean to dodge the question, so. Sonya's like, I'll answer the question. So, I mean, I keep talking about cannabis, that might seem weird, it's even weird to me. But if you think about, again, what Jesse was saying about differentiation and market opportunity, and I've done a lot of research personally into the market. And the fact that ADP and a lot of the big players are prohibited from participating in this space, there is a very unique market opportunity for us to go after it and crush it, and that's why we're doing it.

Yeah, if you show up at the association event and all the booths next to you are ADP, Paychex, Paycom, and Paycor, then go pick a different vertical. So yeah, and for us it'd be nonprofits. So we're a mission-based company. We give away 5% of our entire company to nonprofits— 3% of our revenue, 1% of our time, 1% of our product. I've started a nonprofit. I'm familiar with the space. I love it. We love to see the missions. We'd love to see see it come to life. So it's just fun and engaging and gives us energy when we, when we help them fulfill their needs. So I didn't want to dodge the question either, Lucy. All right. We got about 4 minutes left. Does anybody have any questions for the good folks before we leave you with a couple other parting words here? See it even. I'll let you all address that if you'd like.

Yes, so we are all about pushing that traffic. So we have a lot of new conversion points on our website because again, traffic is traffic. It's an arbitrary great thing that our traffic is up 20%, but if we don't have converted leads that we can nurture, then traffic is just traffic. It's just a number on a chart that I can feel good about that I'm doing my job. I'm sorry? So we primarily post articles that we host on our website. So that is what we're posting. When they click the article, they're taken to our site. There's an option to subscribe on that page.

We also post articles, thought leadership pieces, and invitations to register for a webinar. So if they come and register for a webinar, obviously we get all of their contact information, and hopefully that would lead to an ongoing conversation.

Or, or you could also have downloadable content. So you bring them to the website, there's some form or survey or report that they can download, and that engages them.

Here, here's the thing with LinkedIn, any social platform, always be valuable. If you're creating value and once again answering those questions for people, and it's not just always a veiled sales pitch, if everything is about getting you to my website and getting you to buy from me, people tune out, man. They don't want to be sold. They want to know that they're getting something of actual value from you. We use ABV. Everybody always says ABC, always be closing. We're ABV, always be valuable. If you keep that mindset, then you're going to create more people in your community that know, like, and trust you and will refer you and find you when they have that need instead of going straight to the site. Got one back there. Yeah, uh, I had a question, uh, in terms you guys are doing, uh, marketing up there with HubSpot and your articles, can you tell me what is, you know, your average number of MQLs you're receiving through your site and what percentage is SEM versus SEO?

For us, total MQLs that are coming in, it's probably, I don't have it off the top, but I would say 15 to 20 a month that are coming in through a form, whether that's a demo request, a subscription, or they've hit a certain nurture level and we're flagging them, say, sales rep, go call this person. They just viewed the pricing page, they downloaded a case study, etc. So 15 to 20 a month.

So just to add to that, and Brian, feel free to hop in and correct me if I'm wrong, um, so when we implemented HubSpot, we had no baseline. So the— our projected MQLs were about 114 annually. We actually killed that the first quarter. I believe it was 130 that we did in the first quarter. So I think last quarter we did 234.

It was over 200 for the quarter.

For the quarter. So, you know, we're continuing to evolve as we learn about our metrics and tweak our content as we find out what's working and what's not.

And so I'm seeing lots of good questions out here. Well, the zero on the shot clock, so I'm gonna have to cut you off. Come and find us after the session, happy to talk to any of you. We don't want to run things behind on our session, that's for sure. Make sure you check out the Payroll In podcast. We created this podcast to create value for payroll bureau owners and leaders. If you Google Payroll In podcast, you'll find it. If not, come grab me. I created some business cards with a QR code on the back where you could go right to the podcast, because that's what it's like to create targeted marketing for a specific event, y'all. But thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it a ton. And thank you guys for all your expertise. We appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Thanks so much.