Transcript:
Welcome to the to the vision success digital marketing workshops. These are three marketing workshops that are designed to help you take your vision, and hopefully realise it into successful business. The structure of the next hour is going to be going over a short introduction as to what vision success is all about, then we’ve got an educational presentation, you’re welcome to ask questions through chat, I’ve got chat here, I’ll be able to keep an eye on it. We’ll then offer you the opportunity to drop your details into the chat so you can gain some new connections. Then we’ll open the floor to questions around digital marketing general, I’ve got some some questions that I’d like to ask you guys. And, you know, as you saw, we were having a chat then, and actually explore some of these marketing issues that you’ve got. So it’s different from last to where I kind of felt that we were I was doing far too much talking.
I’m quite a big fan of this book, The the Coaching Habit which is about saying less and asking more if you’re into coaching and start leadership, and I wanted this this workshop to be like that as well. I didn’t want people to get answers to the questions but I also want you to think about some of the questions I’m going to ask as well. And then we’re be asking questions that you’re going to take away from today.
So without further ado, we will share the screen. Hopefully you can all see the digital marketing form. So today is all about getting an understanding of the customer journey. To help you understand what information and actions are appropriate at different stages. We’re digging into that in a little bit more detail.
For those who don’t know who I am, Peter Dickinson business and digital coach, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now I’ve been actually working with technology, like shell and so forth, plus small companies since 1984. And got over 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. We are both a coaching business, but also the bulk of our income comes through an agency that my daughter drives, Vision2Success successes to is all about giving stuff back and giving you the tools that you need to to get better at marketing. And of course, we’re always available to help if needs be.
Whilst we’re running in the presentation, brilliant speaker view. I’ll make myself spotlight. So hopefully that’ll help us. Put yourself on mute when not talking. Raise your hand to contribute when we’re having the discussions and, as you put your hands up, I’ll write down who’s next and then we’ll do some succession. So Orderly Conversation. If you want to ask questions through chat, please do during the presentation. So it’s on my right hand side here so I can see it comes up. And when we’re in the discussion mode, please keep your video on. And we’ll include you in the discussions.
So what’s the purpose? For us to compete in this digital world as Jane quite rightly says it’s changing rapidly and COVID has brought a lot of changes and things like Jim saying a lot of things used to work don’t work anymore. And we’re finding we’re having to take more sophisticated approaches. And hopefully you’ll get some answers some digital marketing problems.
We’ll be launching a product hopefully next month, which will be a community tool that will allow us all to get to know each other better and to build up a community of people then we can go to for some ideas on marketing, so forth. In the meantime, we have the WhatsApp group.
So vision success. So this is a brand called KUB, which stands for knowledge underpinning business, which is the main agency. So we’ve got the free Wednesday workshops, 11 to 12, we’ve got the book, which we’ll talk about in a minute, we have got a couple of online courses, one on social media and one on LinkedIn lead generation. We used to charge for LinkedIn lead generation, one to one, but actually, for just the cost of 45 pounds, it will give you everything you need to learn it. And it will teach you to do it properly, not just pitch, which is what a lot of people do. And then we’ve got various coaching programmes like the fast track 90-day challenge, we can do an overview of your current marketing or put the whole thing together by using a set of tools. This is the book 60,000 words six years in the writing. The actual management process doesn’t really change. But the tools and how you use tools does change. So hopefully this gives you a broad view of what to do going forward. And then there’s the Whatsapp group. So if you could email if you aren’t part of the WhatsApp group, which you will put the link in so forth. Please email your number to Rachel at (email).
Okay, let’s get on to the main meet. So from today’s educational workshop, you’re going to understand the marketing process. And it is a process, it’s got to be joined up if it’s going to work. In our early days as an agency, we used to do bits of a bit of social media, LinkedIn, and so forth. But we soon realised that that was not working anymore, and you had to actually join all the dots. So now we offer a meu driven, tailored and designed system before we can actually pick your approach. And it’s not a major task and I’ll show you some tools to make it easy to do. And therefore you should be able to identify the marketing approach that’s right for you.
So it’s all about being systematic and sustainable. If you’ve got a low budget, it’s better to do some things well, and then bolt on do the bits that are less important. We showed this slide earlier on, but I need to show it again, just in case you’ve not seen it in the first week or as a refresher. So basically, the website is your that is pretty much the only thing you can control. You own that. It’s up to you to look after it and so forth. But nobody can take it away. Although you can get sandboxed by Google so nobody can find you if you do inappropriate things or you get site gets hacked, or whatever. Generally, it’s that you can control. Amazon and people like that will switch your business off if they feel you’ve done something wrong. And it could be minor indiscretions like we’ve not quite got the email matching the domains matching can be the name of a register, use the wrong company registration details or something like that. And, and they’ll switch a million pound business off, not just small players. We lost access to Amazon for about six weeks. Because we’d not filled a piece of registration document, right.
So your business will revolve around that, then you have the social media pulling into it. You have content. We were running a big campaign for a client over several years, and we have social media, articles and so forth. But it’s interesting, as soon as you stop that activity, the visitors soon drop off. We’ve got to keep that momentum going if you want those visitors coming through the site.
Jay mentioned search engine optimization, and we’ll have a look at where that fits. We’ve talked about LinkedIn lead generation, which is pretty much in business to business platform where you get at your contacts. An example though somebody wants to get hold of quite a high level production director in a particular organisation because I’ve got 30000 Contacts it took three seconds. If you develop the right network, you’ve got the six degrees of freedom with LinkedIn and with the right connections, you can reduce that down to one degrees of freedom. And then with the LinkedIn messaging, you can get in touch with them. So you can see it all relies on each other. And if you’ve not thought through each of these things, (you may not need all these components) it can lead to difficulties. So when we look at a business, we look at all these components.
This is more in reality. So we use a programme called creately. Love Creately, I can do this, whilst talking to you via zoom. I’ve got to meeting later on today, where I’ll be doing this with a client. And by the end of an hour and a half, we’ll actually of determined what their digital marketing ecosystem will look like.
We’ve got to remember that when we’re talking about marketing funnel, which is why people coming in at different stages. But remember that your audience will come at you from quite a wide range of angles. So what are the basics? If you Google Marketing funnel, you will get a wide variety of descriptions and complexity. And I like this one, because it matches onto the know, like just buy.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an E commerce site, or whether you’re a high volume, global consultant, a large corporate or small and medium sized company, you’ve got to go through this know, like trust. To get to know you, that’s the awareness stage, where people are trying to solve a problem what problem are they trying to solve, because then they know something’s wrong. But they’re not actually sure how to solve the problem. So that’s where you need to have information and resources available to people to explain to them, this is how you solve a particular problem.
And then hopefully, at the acquisition stage, you’re going to get some email addresses, because email marketing still works. It’s still a powerful tool, the ratios are getting worse, because open rates being lower, and so forth. And you’re having to do more with making sure that the email lands in the inbox or not in the spam box as more and more checking was put into the email service. A
And then it’s about building that trust. This is why we run these workshops, it’s to build that engagement and trust so that you feel more comfortable dealing with an agency, should you need an agency or a coach should you need a coach. Then hopefully, they’ll then buy from you. And as we’re going to see, we need to pick up on this visitor behaviour. So, as I say, top of funnel TOFU is what do I need, the middle of funnel, can you solve my problem? Can you as a supplier solve the problem? And of course, you then get drop off as you go down.
So what marketing resources? So this is the key question. So we know we’re going to need something different. So in terms of digital marketing resources, things like social media. I mean, in the early days, people oh I’ve being doing loads of social media but it’s not bringing in sales. Yeah, well, because it’s top of funnel. There are things you can now do with Facebook ads and Instagram ads and LinkedIn ads which drive people down this funnel- so hopefully you’re converting.
We’ve probably all been on either Instagram or Facebook and clicked on something that looks really interesting go down the rabbit hole and the end up nearly getting your credit card details out to buy whatever it is you’ve you’ve looked at. So the linkage is getting strong, but for most companies, it’s a high level things, it’s about brand awareness. It’s about getting engagement on social media platform. And we’ve got quite a few examples where companies have put a lot of effort into LinkedIn and because we’ve done that, they’ve then got enquiries from LinkedIn. But then they’ve still got to get to be aware of them and know them, so they’ve still got to make that happen.
And so then acquisition, so we’re in workshops, it’s an example of acquisition stage, none of you are committing to anything, you’re here to learn. The website stuff goes on the website, that adds to more learning material. And then should you wish to, there’s always the opportunity to either if, if you’re on a website, like an E commerce site, or if you’re selling to a higher volume to consumers, you’ll have web chat, which which which will have Question and Answer built in, and so forth, so that you can started Mass customised conversation with a lot of people, and then only needing to get involved in emails or Zoom meetings later on. And hopefully, they’ll drop to conversion. And a lot of website people sell on the website, and say it’s not working. But then you actually look at the website, there’s no call to action, they’re not taking them through the. So you can go onto the vision 2 Success website, there’s events, you click on the event, we then grab your email, and then you hopefully get something back in return in terms of information that you want in order to solve your problem.
So what gets measured gets done. So it is important, and I do have this conversation with lots of clients about putting together a digital marketing dashboard of some kind, or understanding what those stats are. Some of this stuff, especially if it’s E commerce sites are just as important for you as your profit or loss. And if you”ve got a marketing budget, and you’re spending money, then you should be looking at this stuff, what’s working, what’s not working? Where is your money being spent, what’s working, what’s not working.
So the top level, you’ve got website visitors or sessions, visitors might be unique visitors, you might have had 500 visitors, but they may come back several times. So every time they come back, that’s called a session. So my preference is for sessions. But it’s that’s just a preference. Bounce rates are an important one, if your bounce rate is 80-90% Bounce Rate is where somebody comes into the site, and then go straight back out, again. Not much use, they’ve not they’ve not travelled down that customer journey. So bounce rate, time on site, then if you’re sending out emails, the open rates, maybe videos, video views and so forth.
Then for the acquisition stage, you might want to look at likes, comments, shares, how many people have clicked through on your on your email marketing? Or if you’re using display advertising, the advert clicks.
And then when you get into conversations, that’s how many people have been web chat, how many email inquiries and phone calls. How many of you here keep a record of inbound inquiries whether that’s made an inquiry when you’re creating an enquiry sheets and you’ve actually asked the client, where did they find you? We did this with a quite a large cleaning company. And they were getting several calls a day for inquiries to their business, but didn’t actually ask the customer already hear from us? If you don’t ask where they heard from you, how do you know what’s working and what’s not working? There are clever things you can do to your telephone numbers and things like that. But by that I’ve not really come across that these days. Because hopefully a lot of people go to your web chat function itself – the thing on the bottom right hand side that’s becoming increasingly relied upon by customers. I rely on it quite alot these days I’m always looking for that bottom right, and have you got one?
So then bringing it all together, bringing that chain together. So we’ve got our website, which is the core, then we’ll look if it’s applicable, putting content on. Don’t forget, we use content to drive traffic through search engine optimization, but quite often by putting content on a website and then putting a post to it on LinkedIn that still works. It’s not as good as it used to be. We used to get 2000 views for post for decent post. But now you have to get quite a lot of engagement and so forth. But it’s still has that benefit and you’ve got there. And we write our articles in a way so if somebody asks that question we can say, Oh, well, here’s the answer. So they can go away read it, if that’s what they want to do. And that’s where the search engine optimization comes in. But if you’re paying a company to do it, we’re going to come onto why you would or wouldn’t to do later.
Mustn’t forget the mobile, that is very important these days. When we design a website, once the site’s been designed for desktop, we have to design it for mobile, to make it mobile responsive. So it works in both situations, and Google measures your site not on desktop, but it measures it on mobile, how responsive is on mobile, and you’d be quite shocked, at the difference in speeds and so forth.
And then we still use email marketing still does work. And if you’ve got a strong brand, then obviously branding, and so forth. But you can see it builds.
And then increasingly, video marketing. We’re working with a display network company. You can go into Google and do this yourself, but it doesn’t get you onto all the websites and give sufficient control. They just launched at the moment, the adverts are moving static images. Whereas what we’re finding is more and more we’re having to develop a video for somebody, they’re only 15 seconds, but it’s that intention grabber and wanting to find out more on the ads.
So this is the creatley version of what we just looked at. But obviously, everybody’s different. You’ll start off with competition, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. It’s important to understand what keywords work, what don’t work. This is becoming more complex, unfortunately. So we recommend people suggest and we’re going to confer the workshops looking at that more detail. But we’re doing some keyword research for someone now on divorce and separation. And some keywords work really well and some won’t. We’ll be covering in next week’s workshop. And we’ve got the creating the content so forth. But yours might be different. Can’t just copy this and go oh, yeah, that’ll do. There’s a lot more to take into account.
So it’s interesting, we’re all getting engaged in the digital side of things, but we mustn’t forget we’re human beings. And in the 1920s, this rule seven came out. And it’s probably actually increased – maybe more than 11 more than in those days. But it’s surprisingly number how many touch points you have to have with somebody, either via email or social media, or whatever. And part of what we’re doing this year, when working with a client to launch a community networking programme, which sits between LinkedIn and CRM is about how you maintain your community, how you as a business, keep your customers engaged, and stop them from getting distracted from looking at the competition.
And you can do it all these ways as we’ve shown social media, websites, and getting found by Google you know, the advertising landing pages. This is where you could drive people to a specific page with specific offer on and Facebook and LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn groups don’t work very well. We do tend to use Facebook groups a lot. But all that’s, I think, open to change.
And so one of the things that people think of – so I’ve drawn a marketing funnel in a nice straight line- but it isn’t, unfortunately. People can circle back when they’ve researched the problem, and then we’ve had a chat with the mates down the pub or whatever, they might instantly go whoa, have you thought about this? And then the whole research start process starts again. So it’s just making sure that every one of your touch points in your business, it could be that you’re talking to a driver. We used to run a haulage business, taking organic waste away and we used to give leaflets to the drivers to hand out to customers and so forth. So understanding your competition.
So there’s a book called The Infinite game into game by Simon Sinek, he talks about worthy rivals. One of my questions is, who are your worthy rivals? Not who you copy, but think, yeah, they’re really good. And and what things can you learn from them to improve what you do?
The slides are available. If you go on to the free workshops menu at the top. And then if you hover over it, there’s a drop down. And then there’s the link to the page, which is where we’re putting posts, the recording, which is also recorded, and also a slide deck as well. So that you can come back to it, because I appreciate there’s a lot to take on board.
Yeah, thanks, Rachel.
So one things first question is How competitive is your marketplace? What is it that? You know, if you’re a telecoms company, for example, you’ve got to have a very aggressive outbound, nobody’s gonna find you. There are one or two people who are – and we met one guy, we interviewed one guy, and he was an expert at getting your telecoms company found on Google, but it costs a lot of money, and a lot of work to do that. Whereas we worked with an industrial rubber manufacturer, they made big rubber mouldings for trains and things like that, and mufflers and stuff like that. They know, dark satanic Mills type business, just having a website was it was actually made them a market leader.
So you’ve got to understand what people are doing and who’s really working with digital marketing, who’s not. You can’t be complacent doesn’t matter what industry, if somebody is digitally savvy, and working in that business, then they will give that business a competitive advantage. And then it’s looking at what’s their approach to market? Do they just wait for the phone to ring like a lot of companies still do? When I’ve been running workshops, I’ve asked the question Where do you get your sales from, a lot of people still get referrals and during lockdown that got a bit tricky. Because things dried up. But you know, business is back up and running again, for most for the most part. And we can use tools to identify and again, we’re looking at that, in the next workshop.
One of the things you got to be really clear on is do you need to be an inbound strategy, ie, you can put all your stuff up, and you put your stall up, and the stuff will come in, the orders will come in, because there’s not a lot of competition, you’ve got a uniqueness. You may be able to use pay per click and Google ads might work for you. It can be an extremely effective tool for that for the right products and services. I would always recommend regardless of how competitive your marketplaces is is that you do sought out your Google my Business. You know, you say well, we’re a national company or whatever. It doesn’t matter if somebody types in your company name and where you’re located. And if it comes up and people put one star and three star and two star reviews on your Google profile that will damage your business. You need to respond if people are doing that you need to know this stuff is happening. So don’t neglect Google My Business. It’s kind of crapped upon everybody. And I was working with a company in the day and we had to try and get hold of their Google My Business because unfortunately, Google registered these things but then doesn’t tell you that what it’s done and so forth. And then you have to claim it.
And then obviously, posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc. How often you post on those dictates as to what impact that’s going to have on your marketing. If people are looking at what you’re doing, great. Go ahead. But if not, you’re into customer feedback, pilot reviews and things like that if you have e commerce site. Using social media, LinkedIn, lead generation, where you’re actually going after going out talking to people, and we’re doing lots more marketing automation, so we’ll have a series of emails lined up, dependent on whether you open or click through and so forth. And you might have four or five emails in that chain. But depending on what you do, how you react to an email, and so forth will depend on how you go through that process.
Obviously, just putting a post on Facebook, and being seen by lots of strangers, finished a few years ago – that’s called organic reach. And LinkedIn is going the same way. And because of lockdown, everybody said, Oh, you’ve got to post on to LinkedIn, you’ll be able to save and so forth and of course the whole world jumped on LinkedIn, so now we’re all going to pay for it. Because in order to get exposure, we now need to do linkedin ads.
We marketing’s a powerful tool. We were talking to display networks provider the other day. And it’s surprising how many people didn’t put in some sort of a piece of code which is now easy to put on your website. Which then so if you go on the website, then show you the adverts and remarketing can be extremely powerful. And then you can develop relationships and we’ve now done virtual networking, but it’s also obviously the face to face that.
Okay, so bring it together. What are some of the actions takeaway is what does your digital marketing process look like? Have you captured it? With Creatley, the free version it’s easy to do. In your funnel, what percentage of customers drop off? Do you know, do you measure it? Do you look at the number of people on your website, how many people are entering into chat. People who are placing enquiries etc. Who are the competition? How good are they? And what do you need to improve your marketing?
