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Transcript of Making Sales Prospecting Fun and Easy

Transcript of Making Sales Prospecting Fun and Easy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by AXA Equitable Life. That’s AXA.com, advice, retirement, and life insurance.

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Tom Martin. He’s a speaker and author. In fact, Tom was on when his book, The Invisible Sale, came out. You could go back … In fact, we’ll have that in the show notes. He’s also the founder of Converse Digital, and he’s got a new course that he’s been working on called Turning Conversations Into Customers: The Sales Prospecting Method for People Who Hate Sales Prospecting. Welcome back, Tom.

Tom Martin: Hey. Thanks for having me back, and thanks for saying the name of the company correctly. I think you are one of the few people. Everybody always says it like converse, like the tennis shoes, so thank you for that.

John Jantsch: Well, I do love the tennis shoes, so maybe that’s why I made sure I studied it.

John Jantsch: Let me ask you this, though. Who doesn’t love sales prospecting? I don’t understand if there would be a market for this, even.

Tom Martin: There’s actually, in some of the research I was doing, they recently had a study that came out that 43% of sales people are afraid to make a cold call. I think in general you have people like myself who are introverted or shy who really don’t like the idea of prospecting. Maybe not so much they don’t like it, but it’s really uncomfortable. They really have a hard time at a conference or a trade show or a networking event just walking up to someone, sticking their hand out, and saying “Hi, I’m Tom Martin,” and starting a conversation. They tend to be the person that’s got way too much email to do on their mobile phone at the side of the room like an eighth grade dance.

John Jantsch: In case it wasn’t obvious, I was being facetious. I don’t know anybody who likes prospecting, to tell you the truth.

Tom Martin: I don’t know, I’ve seen you prospect, I’ve seen it in action. (sarcastically)

John Jantsch: A lot of people’s dislike or disdain for it is because of the way they have been prospected, and what we think of as cold calling today. Would you agree?

Tom Martin: Absolutely. This whole course came out of I gave a talk locally recently in New Orleans, and it was one of those where I wasn’t getting paid. I was doing a favor for a friend, and thought it was a perfect time to tryout new material. Basically, I gave an entire talk about just that. People hate prospecting because the way frame this concept of sales prospecting is in a way that’s very selfish, and it’s self serving, and people don’t like that. It’s not what we are taught to do when we’re children.

Tom Martin: If you reframe it, that it’s not only fun and enjoyable and works… I was blown away by the audience reaction after the talk. And I was like, “Okay wait, I think I might be onto something here. I think I might not be the only guy in the world that doesn’t like to do this.” Exploring a lot of these schematics and various talks and blog posts and different things, are implying that people are hungry for, especially entrepreneurs, freelancers, solo printers, people like us, they know they have to prospect for a living. They only eat what they kill, right? They’re really searching and looking for someone to show them a way that is palatable, maybe even enjoyable, versus some seven step process that has them sending out cold, LinkedIn invites right after somebody connects with them – which is everyone’s favorite thing in the world to receive.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I think anybody who starts a business, you talked about freelancers and solo printers. I mean, an accountant, a lawyer, they start their business thinking, “This is great. I’ve got my website up. Here we are, I’m in business.” Then come to realize that 50% of this job is selling. I think those people come to the realization kicking and screaming. Then they have to go and figure out how to do it. I think that that, maybe, is sort of the reluctance. It seems like they’ve got to learn this whole new skill. What would you say to those folks in terms of how they should frame this idea of Everybody Sells Something?

Tom Martin: What I try explain to folks is they really don’t need to necessarily learn a new skill. One of the things that have really come into light is this whole concept of social selling. I hate the term because it’s really [inaudible] that people talk about social selling as how do I sell using LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook, these platforms. It’s a very platform based training, selling theory.

Tom Martin: What I do is talk about is social selling is actually great, but what you have to understand is what social selling means is you sell by being social. And that you know how to do. You know how to be social, you know how to have a conversation with someone to engage them, to try to find some common ground that you both can stand on. From there, you can continue to have a conversation and find things you know about each other that you have in common. That’s how you sell. You create this connection between you and that prospect, then that connection point, maybe not in the first conversation, what you do will come out.

Tom Martin: The basis of your relationship with them is that you formed this connection, this bond if you will, and that gives you something you can build on. Then when they need your service, you’re the top of mind preference. You’re the person they want to call, and they’re pretty sure they want to do business with you as opposed to just do business with somebody. That’s how you prospect. That’s how you build thing flywheel of leads that takes while to get going, but once you get it going the leads just kind of come in because you’re that person people enjoy being around. You’re that sales prospecting they actually welcome into their life versus running, screaming buying technology to avoid etc.

Tom Martin: When you help them see that, a little lightbulb goes on. It could be a little bit more strategic than just talking, but that’s the core. Be social. Be someone people want to talk to.

John Jantsch: I think that’s one of the things that really is the promise of social media. Again, as you said, a lot of people have ruined it, but there’s so much data there. There’s so much information to help you derive a sense of propinquity. Only the second time that word has been used on this podcast, and the first one was when I interviewed you for the invisible sale. It’s getting a long day, I’m tripping on my words. I had that one queued up too.

John Jantsch: Explain that concept. It is what you just said, and I’m surprised you didn’t use the word.

Tom Martin: Nobody can everybody pronounce it, but they love it. It’s a great conversation word. But really, it’s defining how relationship are goaled. It’s really like dating. When you met your wife for the first time, you met her and learned a few things about her you liked, then you had another date. You had more conversations, you found more things you liked. Propinquity is all about that. It’s about making sure there is a connectivity between you and the person you want to do business with. That connectivity might be you in person. It might you as content. It might be you as you’re on a podcast and someone listens it. It might be you social media touching.

Tom Martin: You want to create a proximity between you and your prospect where they can continue to learn new things about you. And that’s the key, they have to always be learning something new about you. Because, what they’re doing is filing all those things away and maybe half the things they find out about they actually like. Eventually Mathematics takes over and they find enough things they like about you they decide, “Yes, this is my preferred provider. Or in a social world, this is a person I want to be friends with.” That’s the way it works in life.

Tom Martin: I think it works the same way in sales and marketing. But you know, the key is you can’t just have that proximity. You’ve got to be present in those moments. That’s probably the biggest thing that trips people up, is that they just can’t be present in the moment while they’re having conversation. Or, while you’re being interviewed on a podcast, be wholly present in having this discussion with the person interviewing you versus thinking about, “Oh I’ve got this other thing going on, I’ve got to do this call later.”

Tom Martin: That part is key. If people can get to that, where they can truly be present in that moment, really focusing on “How can I connect with this individual? What is our common ground? There has to be some common ground.” That’s when the magic can take off, and they can really a) be very successful touching, but b) leave a real conversation, feeling like “Wow that was really fun, I enjoyed that, I really liked that person. I don’t just like them as a prospect, I kind of like them as a person, that was kind of cool.”

Tom Martin: As soon as you can get people to understand that, then they’re won’t mind sales prospecting. Yes, you don’t. You just don’t like it the way you were taught to do it because the way you were taught to do it just feels self serving and selfish. When you were a kid, your mom told you to share your legos, not keep them all to yourself.

John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by AXA Equitable Life. It’s time we start giving life insurance the credit it deserves. That’s because life insurance can be so much more than protection for you and your family. It also helps you live, keep, and potentially build more cash value over time. To learn more, go to AXA.com.

John Jantsch: Obviously an essential part of this is what you just said is kind of that proximity, having that common ground. That’s probably not hard for people to get. Are there some consistent, sort of core activities, you have to surround that with so that it does ultimately lead to, “Hey this is a smart person – or a person that can solve my problem?”

Tom Martin: That’s where those of us who are trying to prospect, especially with trying to prospect outside of our local geography, that’s where content can really play a big role – both your own content resident on your own site to the internet or world via podcast, posting on relevant blogs, or third party media platforms, speaking at the right conferences… things of this nature. In that content, at the same time, you have to build the content where you are finding that common ground. You’ve got to build content that someone can read and say, “Oh, this was written for me.” Granted, obviously you didn’t write it for a single person, that wouldn’t scale very well, but it should feel like, “Hey, this was written for me, this person understands my pain point or my frustration, or more girdle.” Like they get me.

Tom Martin: When you can do that. And look, I wish I could say I’m the greatest person in the world at that, I’m not. If I was, I’d be even more successful. But, that is the key. If you can do that, that’s you having that connection with them even before you’ve ever met them. To me, if you can get to that, the sky’s the limit. You’ll always have prospects.

John Jantsch: I wrote a book called Duct Tape Selling, and essentially I was encouraging sales people, and anybody who had to sell, that it really is marketing in a lot of ways. Obviously there are some core belly to belly kind of things that were not included in there, but in terms of how you raised your expertise and became the welcome guest… I went out and spoke on that book quite a bit, and I would have a lot of sales people and folks in the audience say, “Yeah that’s great, but that’s a lot of work.”

John Jantsch: I’m sure you hear that all the time, too, because we’re talking about building a long term pipeline here. What do you say to that person that says, “I’m just trying to sell something today.”?

Tom Martin: I think you can look at a sales prospect in one of two ways. You can look at them as a transaction, or you can see them as a relationship. If you see them as a transaction, then yeah, you’ll close the deal today. But, that means you have to go close another deal tomorrow, and another deal tomorrow. It’s always with new people. You’re spending all your time meeting and finding new people, and that’s a lot of work too, frankly.

Tom Martin: Instead, if you can build a relationship with a person, you can see them as a person and realize this person can be a relationship, and that relationship can be a series of deals. Not just deals between you and that individual. If you can find somebody who you can convert into what I call a social agent, somebody who not only refers you but takes invested interest in you. They want to refer you, they want you to be successful, they kind of passionate about how they refer you? Holy crap. That is gold, because now you have an army of people out there doing your heavy lifting for you. They’re not just referring you, they’re basically telling the person on the other side of the conversation, “You’d be a damned fool if didn’t hire this guy, or this gal.”

Tom Martin: And what is that worth over the lifetime of your business? You’ve got to invest in that. Nobody is just going to step up and go, “Hey, I want to sign up to be a solider in your little social agent army.” You’ve got to invest in those people. You’ve got to invest in those conversations. You’ve got to find that common ground. You’ve got to make that connection. When you do, it’s beautiful.

Tom Martin: For me, it’s all about long term. I want to create deal flow for years, not just today because man, that’s really hard.

John Jantsch: If I’m listening to this, and I’m thinking, “Okay, the ideas of this sound great.” You want to kind of lay out what they can expect looking into the course turning conversations into customers, how is it constructed?

Tom Martin: What we’re going to do with the courses is doing it a little bit differently. I’m building it as a series of small video classes. They’ll come in, they’ll have a short video class. It might be five minutes, it might be fifteen… but something that is relatively consumable with a lunch to make it easy. Then with that will be some additional reading or homework or other things they can read to round out that course module. Then they’ll come in and move onto the next module, the next module, the next module, and so forth and so on.

Tom Martin: They’ll also be able to come into a private Facebook group where they can not only ask questions and meet with other people who are kind of going through the same thing they’re going through and struggling with the same thing they’re struggling with, and they can be a community, but also where we are going to do some live one-to-many coachings. Where they can explore further applications. You said this what you really and it will give me the opportunity to, you know… If you’ve got the questions, everybody else on the call has a question too, or at least a bunch of them. We can do that sort of coaching and everybody can learn.

Tom Martin: Then if they really want to go down the pipe, they can sign up for more individual coaching and smaller master class type programs that we’ll offer, but those will probably trail the initial launch of the course. In the Summer of 2019, we’ll launch the coursework, then the rest of the stuff will probably come in Fall 2019.

John Jantsch: Dependent upon when you’re listening to this show, Summer 2019 or Fall.

John Jantsch: Let me ask you one question that I’m sure you get. I don’t know if this is a great place for us to end or not, but there are people who just aren’t good at conversation. I’m not that great at it, quite frankly. I’m sure there are people that truly aren’t great or not practiced at it. How do you get better at that aspect, which is central to what you’re talking about?

Tom Martin: I’m really the worst networker in the world. I actually tell a story in my workshops that I was at a speaking gig and some people came over. They just wanted to meet me, and I actually stepped backwards and removed myself from the space so the circle of people standing next to me would close and shield me. It was completely subconscious to me, but the people next to me all noticed it. One of my colleagues I was traveling with was like, “Seriously? They wanted to talk to you. What’s wrong with you?”

Tom Martin: Basically, what I’ve had to do is, you just have to step up to the plate and do it. Just do it. And just keep doing it, and doing it. What I’m finding now is its getting easier to do it. I’m still not nearly as good at it as some people, but what happens is you end up having a good conversation. Not always a sales prospect, there’s plenty of people that you meet that there’s no opportunity for anything, but at least you have a nice conversation, and you did it. You broke the ice. That’s all you’ve got to do.

Tom Martin: I think it’s just like a hitter in baseball being in a slump. There’s no way to fix it except get back in the batter’s box and take another swing. That’s what you have to do here. Just make it a point at every event, or any place you’re at that you don’t know everybody, whether it’s a party or networking event or conference… make it a point to just say “Hey, I’m Tom Martin.” Get comfortable doing it with two people? Go for four.

John Jantsch: I know, especially for people it’s not natural, in fact maybe they’re even a bit uptight in that situation. I always find that having a plan, going in ahead of time thinking “This is what I’m going to do,” so that when the moment hits you, you’re not just flustered.

Tom Martin: If you’re going to, especially a conference, where you can see who attendees are, or at least speakers, go find all the speakers. Using social media, LinkedIn, and stuff to create a mini dossier that you can put in your phone, in your contacts or address book, take a picture from the web and put it in there so you have their face. On the airplane or car ride to the event, study it a little bit. Then when you’re there, you’ll see those people. Then go, okay, John wrote a book called Duct Tape selling, he likes this and that… Then you can go in and say, “Hi I’m Tom Martin,” and you’ll already feel like you know them a little bit.

Tom Martin: You already know some things that, even if they’re not a great conversationalist, you can find a way to work the conversation towards subject matter you’re pretty sure they’re interested in because you already read about them. That’ll get them more comfortable, they’ll start to talk a little more, and once they do you’ll feel more comfortable.

Tom Martin: I’ve used it really effectively at lots of conferences, and I’ve taught a lot of salespeople this trick. It works really well, especially if you’re going strategically to prospect and you do it to the people you plan to prospect. Even if you don’t know anybody, just do it to the speakers. Speakers are notoriously introverted, believe it or not.

Tom Martin: Especially if its a conference that is not really their core industry, like I recently went to a conference that was the sailing industry, I didn’t know any of the other speakers, I didn’t know anybody at all in the whole conference. If anybody came up to me, I thought “Oh thank God, somebody talked to me.” A lot of speakers still do it. It’s crazy. Then you get to meet the speakers, learn something, and it’s amazing how that can create a new conversation. Good, easy little trick to use, especially for conferences and stuff, but even networking events and parties.

John Jantsch: Speaking with Tom Martin, author of The Invisible Sale, and the course coming out Summer 2019, Turning Conversations Into Customers. Tom, thanks for joining us, and hopefully I’ll bump into you out there at one of those conferences.

Tom Martin: Thanks for having me, and I definitely hope we do.

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/transcript-sales-prospecting/

[timothyakoonce]

Making Sales Prospecting Fun and Easy

Making Sales Prospecting Fun and Easy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Tom Martin Podcast Transcript

On today’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I chat with Tom Martin. After 20 years in the advertising industry, he founded the digital strategy agency, Converse Digital.

Martin is also a speaker, blogger, and author of the book The Invisible Sale: How to Build a Digitally Powered Marketing and Sales System to Better Prospect, Qualify and Close Leads.

In this episode, Martin and I discuss the art of prospecting and his upcoming online course, Turning Conversations Into Customers, where he will share the secrets to creating meaningful connections and relationships to make prospecting easier and more enjoyable.

Questions I ask Tom Martin:

Why do people dislike prospecting so much?

What is propinquity and what does it have to do with prospecting?

How do you get better at conversation?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How being fully present can help you win business.

Why content should feel like it was written for an individual with the pain points your business addresses.

Why to see a sales prospect as a relationship rather than a deal.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Tom Martin:

Learn more about Tom Martin

Learn more about Converse Digital

Check out his Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode on The Invisible Sale

Connect on LinkedIn

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by AXA Equitable Life.

It’s time we start giving life insurance the credit it deserves. That’s because life insurance can be so much more than protection for you and your family. It can also help you live, keep, and potentially build more cash value over time. To learn how, go to www.AXA.com.

Disclosure: Life insurance is issued by AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company, New York, NY 10104 or MONY Life Insurance Company of America (MLOA), an Arizona Stock corporation with its main administration office in Jersey City, NJ and is distributed by AXA Distributors, LLC.

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/sales-prospecting/

[timothyakoonce]

5 Steps to Effective Keyword Research

5 Steps to Effective Keyword Research written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

If you want to rank well in search results, you have to undertake keyword research. This is the process of researching the search terms that users actually enter into search engines.

The way that you think about the solution your business offers might be different from the way a prospect thinks about their problem they’re looking to solve. This disconnect can lead you down the wrong keyword path and keep you from finding the most interested prospects.

That’s why keyword research is so critical. It gives you real-world knowledge, which empowers you to show up in the right searches. Not sure where to start? Here are my five steps to effective keyword research.

1. Brainstorm on Your Own

Any good research project grounded in the scientific method, begins with listing out your hypotheses. Brainstorm a list of the words, terms, and questions you think people are searching for when they’re looking for your business or the type of solution you offer.

These may be terms that are related to what you do or sell, they may be based on your location, or they may be questions people could have about your area of expertise.

Let’s say you’re an electrician in the New York metropolitan area. What are the kinds of things people who need an electrician might search for? They might have a question like, “How do I install a hanging light fixture?” They might also search for your services more directly, using the phrase, “electrician near me.” Or maybe it’s something more specific to the kind of service you offer, such as, “same day service electrician NYC.”

Once you’ve come up with your own list, ask your team to do some thinking, too. They might have a different perspective that opens you up to terms you wouldn’t have hit upon on your own.

2. Let the Googling Begin!

Next, you want to open things up to the broader world. You can start getting a sense of how people actually search by going to Google and seeing how it auto-completes your terms.

Sometimes you find something interesting or unexpected. Going back to the electrician example, say you type “lighting installation” into Google. What you find as you begin to type in the search term is that two of the suggestions are about lighting inside cabinets. Perhaps you were thinking of that as more of a niche request, but it actually seems like a pretty popular search term. If this is a service you offer, maybe you want to think more deeply about trying to rank for that term.

You should also check what search terms you already rank for using Google Search Console. This will help you identify the terms that are working for you and how you can improve them further.

3. Narrow it Down

Now that you have a healthy list of potential terms, you want to create your short list. Ideally, these are approximately five foundational phrases and eight to ten long-tail phrases.

The foundational phrases speak to the heart of what your business does. These are the keywords that you want associated with your home page and with specific landing pages related to your most popular offerings or areas of expertise.

How you select the foundational keywords should be strategic. They can’t be too narrow (that’s what the long-tail keywords are for), but going too general means that it will be harder to rank for that term. Returning to the electrician example, “electrician” is likely too broad, but “electrician with expertise in kitchen appliance installation in NYC with quick turnaround time” is likely too narrow. Aiming for something in between the two, like “same day NYC electrician,” is best.

Long-tail keywords are about intent. The person who Googles “NYC electrician” likely has a different intent than the person who Googles “how to install recessed lighting.” With long-tail keywords, you want to target the second type of search, one with a clear intent and specific problem. These keywords will link up to detailed, related content you have on your website. In the above example, that might be a blog post or explainer video about the work involved and costs associated with installing overhead lighting.

4. Use Google’s Keyword Planner

Now that you have a list of 15 or so search terms, you want to run them through the Google Keyword Planner. This is a free tool that allows you to check the popularity of the keywords on your list, find new keywords you hadn’t thought of, and get bid estimates.

At this point in your process, nothing should be set in stone. You might find that one of the keywords on your list is highly competitive (and therefore costly), so it might be back to the drawing board. Alternatively, you might happen upon a great keyword you hadn’t thought of on your own—don’t hesitate to throw that into the mix.

The thing about keyword research is that it’s an ever-evolving process. Once you do select your final keywords, you should revisit your Google Search Console once a month to see how things are going. If you find that one of your keywords remains unsuccessful month-over-month, replace it with something else.

5. Aligning Your Keywords with Content

As I said earlier, these keywords are page specific. While you want to use your broadest keywords on your homepage, you can get more granular on the other pages of your website.

That being said, you want to make sure that the content on the page aligns with the keywords you’ve selected. For example, if you’re that electrician and you have the long-tail keyword “how to install recessed lighting” for one of your web pages, you better be sure there’s detailed information about recessed lighting front-and-center on that page! If someone clicks through a search result and finds information about appliance installation crowding out the top of the page, they’re going to be confused and frustrated. That’s not what they were looking for, so they’ll bounce right back to the SERP.

More broadly, you want to ensure that this content is the voice of your strategy. Yes, the keywords and content should line up, but the content should also speak to your larger strategic goals. If your business doesn’t make much money on installing recessed lighting and you’re trying to get away from offering those services, don’t include those keywords and content as a focus on your site, even if it is a popular search term. Or, if it is a popular search term, perhaps there’s a way for you to restructure your pricing and offerings to make that service more profitable for you so that you can meet the demand in the market.

As with all things in marketing, keyword research really about something much bigger than just picking out some search terms. An effective approach to the process will take your larger strategic goals into account and will help you to reach your broader business objectives. By being systematic about your keyword research approach, you can find the terms that give you the best shot at ranking with those prospects who are most in need of the products or services your business provides.

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/effective-keyword-research/

[timothyakoonce]

How to Use the Facebook Pixel Event Setup Tool

Any business serious about conversion tracking and optimization needs the Facebook pixel installed on their website. But getting the pixel and events installed correctly has been a chore, particularly for those who are less technical or lack the staff and resources to handle some basic code.

That changes with the Facebook pixel Event Setup Tool. While you will still need to add the base pixel code to your website, the Event Setup Tool is a codeless, seamless method to integrate pixel events.

It’s really quite easy, no matter your technical expertise. Before we get to the juicy stuff of using this tool, we’ll need to take a couple of steps back.

In this post, you’ll learn:

How to install the base pixel code (if you haven’t already)

A refresher on pixel events

How to use the Event Setup Tool

[Learn more about how to master the Facebook pixel for 2019 in my upcoming training. SIGN UP HERE.]

Install the Pixel First

First, there’s no way around getting the base pixel code installed on your website. If you haven’t done that yet, you’ll need to before dealing with events.

The Facebook pixel is a unique piece of code that connects activity on your website to Facebook. It is the pixel that gives you access to all of the following, and more:

Retargeting with Website Custom Audiences

Attribute conversions to your advertising

Optimize advertising for Landing Page Views

Optimize advertising for conversions

Track marketing performance with Facebook Attribution

Track customer funnel with Facebook Analytics

If you haven’t yet installed the pixel, go here. Once you click to set up the pixel, you’ll see three options: 1. Connect a partner platform, 2. Manually install pixel code yourself, and 3. Email instructions to a developer.

If you utilize a Facebook partner (Google Tag Manager, Shopify, Squarespace, WooCommerce, WordPress, and more), Facebook has specific instructions for you to get the pixel installed.

You can otherwise install the code manually or have an email with instructions sent to your developer. If you’re curious, I use Pixel Caffeine (not an affiliate link), a free plugin by AdEspresso.

Here’s a blog post I wrote a couple of years ago that steps through some of the options to get the pixel installed:

6 Ways to Add the Facebook Pixel to Your Website

What Are Pixel Events?

Adding the base pixel code connects your website to Facebook. With your unique pixel on every page of your website, Facebook will be notified when a page of your site is loaded.

If you do nothing else, you’re limited in terms of how much you can get from the pixel. You can create Website Custom Audiences to retarget those who visit your website, which is amazing. But, you’ll need to add pixel events for better tracking and optimization.

A pixel event is a modifier that adds details to the information sent to Facebook. Events allow Facebook to be notified that not only was a page visited, but a purchase (or registration, lead, search, etc.) was completed.

Standard pixel events (expanded since first announced) include:

View Content

Search

Add to Wishlist

Add to Cart

Initiate Checkout

Add Payment Info

Purchase

Subscribe

Start Trial

Complete Registration

Contact

Find Location

Schedule

Events become particularly useful for conversion tracking and optimization. They allow you to connect your advertising efforts to a specific number of resulting conversions and, if applicable, the related revenue. Once Facebook collects this info, it also allows the advertiser to better optimize for a particular event.

Earlier, I described some of the tools that become available to you once you install the pixel. But, once you start using events, each of those tools becomes more powerful.

What is the Event Setup Tool?

Prior to the Event Setup Tool, advertisers needed to modify their pixel code on specific pages of their websites to collect anonymous event information. This was done manually, with the assistance of a plugin, or through partner integration.

First announced last June, a streamlined method is rolling out to advertisers (not all have it yet). The Event Setup Tool allows advertisers to add events based on page views or button clicks. Most importantly, no coding is required.

When in your Events Manager, click to Set Up New Events.

You will now see the option to use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool.

Before we move forward, determine on what page the pixel event will occur, whether by viewing a URL or clicking a button. Enter the URL for that page here…

After entering the URL for this page in the step above, click “Open Website.” That will open a new window for that particular page that includes a Facebook dialog at the top left.

If any events have already been created for this page, you’ll see them here.

Set Up an Event by URL

One option is to set up a pixel event by URL. In other words, if someone loads a particular URL, this is a sign that a conversion is complete. An example would be a thank-you page following registration for a webinar or purchasing a product. This should be a page that users will only visit once.

Click the “Track a URL” button. You’ll now see this…

You’ll want to choose an event that has occurred once a person visits this URL. Facebook provides several standard options…

I am going to choose “Complete Registration.”

You also have the option of tracking the entire URL or portion of the URL.

“URL Equals” would limit qualified URLs to a single URL whereas “URL Contains” could result in multiple qualified URLs.

Once you’re done, click “Confirm.”

You will now see that event listed.

Set Up an Event by Button Click

This is possibly the most valuable application of the Event Setup Tool. Updating button code to track conversions on click is very technical. I can tell you that I rarely got it to work properly on my website.

Click “Track New Button.”

Suddenly, the page grays out and highlights appear for links and buttons that would qualify.

By selecting a link or button here, Facebook will begin reporting on events whenever a visitor clicks it. Once you select your button or link, Facebook will ask you to connect that click to an event.

I am going to choose “Lead.” Then click “Confirm.” Once again, you’ll see that event listed under “Events on this Page.”

Since I previously created an event based on URL, I have two listed (you may have only one).

Test Your Event

From the image above, note that you can edit or delete an event before finishing. Once you’re finished, click “Finish Setup” at the top right.

Facebook now asks to review your events.

If it looks good, click “Finish.”

Back on your Events Manager screen in Facebook, you’ll get a notification that your event setup is complete.

Click the blue button to test your events. You’ll get a page that looks like this…

Note that while in test mode, Facebook will only track the events on that page that you trigger, not the events triggered by other website visitors. Assuming the link to that page you were just working on is in the text box (it should have prefilled), click “Open Website.”

If you created an event by URL, you have already triggered an event. Otherwise, click the link or button on that page that triggers your button event. Then go back to the testing page in Events Manager.

Here is what that page looks like now for me…

There are five events listed in all. Two “Page View” events and one “AdvancedEvents” event were created via partner integration (the WordPress plugin I use, in this case). Ignore these since they aren’t related to what we’re discussing today. But the two events I just created (Lead and Complete Registration) are also listed.

In the middle column, you’ll see those two events were created via Event Setup Tool. In the far right column, you’ll see the last time that event was triggered. In other words, these were set up properly!

What About Parameters?

This is all terrific. The Event Setup Tool is a very good option for non-technical advertisers and for anyone wanting a quicker and easier way to set up pixel events.

There is one thing missing, however, that makes pixel events so valuable: Parameters.

Parameters are additional details about the event that occurred. For example, the setup process above can allow you to create a “Purchase” event. This allows you to track purchases when someone views a specific page or clicks a button going forward.

But what exactly did they purchase? What is the value of what was purchased?

When setting up your pixel manually, you can include parameters that provide additional details to reporting.

It’s unfortunate that the ability to add parameters isn’t currently included in the Event Setup Tool. However, my educated guess is that this is just an early version. There is really no reason why the tool wouldn’t be able to include anything that you can do manually.

Hopefully, parameters are coming!

Your Turn

Have you tried out the Event Setup Tool? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Use the Facebook Pixel Event Setup Tool appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

from Jon Loomer Digital https://www.jonloomer.com/2019/04/22/facebook-pixel-event-setup-tool/

[timothyakoonce]

SEO Weekly News April 20, 2019

As an SEO agency in Fort Worth, we are constantly devouring the latest news in addition to being a member of several exclusive Mastermind groups. We even read the Google patents to keep you (and us) ahead of the curve. Here is this week’s search engine optimization news.

SEO Agency Versus In-House Team: What’s Better For You?

Forbes 3 days ago

To be successful online, companies need to take SEO seriously, and it must be a priority. As the founder of an SEO agency, I have dedicated the last 20 years to helping companies improve their …

Is link building dead? Depends on who you talk to – Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land|20 hours ago

Sure, link building used to be plagued by a morass of black-hat tactics like link farms, paid link schemes, hidden links and spammy content. Some SEOs argue any form of proactive link building …

Look Out for These 5 Signs of Black Hat SEO

Entrpreneur|2 days ago

Black hat SEO refers to unethical practices to help a website rank higher in Google. Often times, a website doesn’t even know it’s suffering from black hat search engine optimization — and being penalized for it.

Using Python to recover SEO site traffic (Part three)

Search Engine Watch|23 hours ago

When you incorporate machine learning techniques to speed up SEO recovery, the results can be amazing. This is the third and last installment from our series on using Python to speed SEO traffic …

7 Terrible, No-Good SEO Tactics to Abandon Forever

Search Engine Journal|5 days ago

Despite the evolution of Google and the internet, bad and outdated SEO tactics still proliferate. On April 10, I moderated an SEJ ThinkTank webinar presented by Julia McCoy, CEO of Express Writers …

Lounge Lizard, Top NYC Web Design Firm, shares Tips for Improving Internal Links for Better UX and SEO

Stamford Advocate|3 days ago

Internal links are important for both SEO and the user experience of a website, however, internal links are not always optimized to maximize their use due to a lack of understanding about the …

What These SEO Experts Want You to Know About Being Seen As the ‘Top Choice’ For Your Service

Stamford Advocate|4 days ago

To do that, and simplify the decision-making process overall, consumers are turning to the one place so many of us deem the most credible, trustworthy source in the world: Google. Your job is …

Navigation Removal Trick Impacting Google Rankings Algorithm?

Search Engine Roundtable|2 days ago

An SEO, I believe his name is Alexander, asked John Mueller of Google in this morning’s video hangout if Google is aware of a trick some sites are using to combat any negative impact from the …

8 Ways You’re Wasting Money on SEO Without Knowing It

Search Engine Journal|3 days ago

Because SEO is a longer-term investment than other digital marketing channels, it can have hidden challenges, issues, and costs. The rime and resources invested in SEO were wasted due to specific …

Yoast SEO Becomes First WordPress Plugin to Offer Proper Schema Implementation – Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal|4 days ago

Popular WordPress plugin Yoast is releasing an update which offers complete implementation of Schema.org markup. For example, if a page has five pieces of Schema markup its often unclear to …

5 SEO Skills That Give You a Huge Advantage on the Internet

WFMJ Youngstown|4 days ago

Originally posted on https://www.bwsocialmarketing.com/5-essential-seo-skillsLike everyone else in 2019, you have a website. Congratulations. You’re now one in 1.7 billion.

Seznam SEO: An Interview with Seznam’s Search Division Director

Search Engine Journal|3 days ago

There is however another search engine competing with Google – one that, for the most part, a lot of SEO professionals never encounter as it’s limited to the Czech market, Seznam. Seznam was …

Why accessibility works for SEO

The Drum|2 days ago

Website accessibility is about much more than due diligence and ‘doing the right thing’ – it can seriously boost your bottom line. Viewed from a cold hard business perspective it simply doesn …

Building and scaling global SEO Centers of Excellence

Search Engine Land|3 days ago

How can you ensure that your SEO is built to scale as you expand into new global markets? Instead, I’ve long been an advocate for the development of Centers of Excellence inside enterprise brands …

The Most Epic SEO Guide for Competitive Small Business Owners

WFMJ Youngstown|4 days ago

When Scott Paxton entered a competition to see who could get their new website to the front of Google the fastest, he decided to look at what his competitors were doing. What he learned can …

How to Set up Your Local Business Listing for Success

WFMJ Youngstown|2 days ago

A local business listing can be one of the best ways to gain authority in your area and get an influx of local clients, and the more listings you have the better for the SEO (search engine optimisation …

Boost Your Website’s Visibility With This SEO Course

The New Canaan News|5 days ago

Anyone who works in marketing knows: unless your website reaches the first page of the search results for your desired keywords, it’s highly unlikely you’ll get the traction you need to reach …

Why You Must Stop Obsessing About These 5 Things in SEO

Search Engine Journal|6 days ago

As SEO professionals, we tend to obsess over every detail. Really, though, not everything in SEO is worth our full time and attention. What follows is a list of trends that many in SEObelieve …

Responsive Web Design: What is it?

TG Daily|4 days ago

Responsive web design is a term that SEO experts use regularly. Responsive web design is directly responsible for resizing websites so that they fit in the display for viewing. Large desktop …

Fake Amazon reviews handing unknown brands an SEO bump, says Which?

The Drum|4 days ago

An investigation revealed tens of thousands of suspicious reviews appearing on the platform every day, handing unknown brands an unwarranted SEO bump in the process as consumers unwittingly …

The following article SEO Weekly News April 20, 2019 was first published on: Moon and Owl

[timothyakoonce]

Weekend Favs April 20

Weekend Favs April 20 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

YouTube to Instagram – Post YouTube videos quickly on Instagram.

Multiple Twitter Accounts – Toggle between multiple Twitter accounts.

Helpjuice – Make it easy for customers and employees to access important information about your company.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/youtube-to-instagram-multiple-twitter-accounts-helpjuice/

[timothyakoonce]

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach to Marketing

In this guide, I’ll go into detail about how artificial intelligence is impacting marketing right now and how it will continue to impact it in the future.

At the end of this post, you’ll be excited about the possibilities of AI and probably a little nervous about the implications!

And it’s alright to be nervous because the role of marketers in organizations will change but….

…you’ll still have an important role to play.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Chapter 2 – The elements of Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 3 – AI Applications in Marketing

AI and Content Marketing

AI and Analytics

AI and Marketing Automation

AI and Conversational Marketing

AI and Email Marketing

AI and SEO

AI and Social Media

AI and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

AI and Listening/Monitoring

AI and Image Recognition

AI and Influencer Marketing

Chapter 4 – Security Concerns about AI

Summary

Download a PDF of this Guide

Would you prefer to read this later? If so, download a PDF version of the AI Guide.

Download PDF of Guide

C H A P T E R – 1

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence in Marketing is real and now is the time to sit up and take notice.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating marketing toward a more intelligently automated future in which smarter (i.e. AI-powered) solutions enable marketers to solve problems and achieve goals more efficiently. You have a choice. You can sit back and wait for the marketing world to get smarter and change around you, or you can embrace AI now and be proactive in creating a competitive advantage for yourself and your company.

Paul Roetzer, Founder of Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute

However, not all software companies really have AI that say they do.

There’s just so much hype surrounding AI Tech companies want to capitalize on it by saying their software is powered by AI and investors will give higher valuations to them because of the AI in their software.

But there are many great software companies building true AI applications and this is set to grow massively over the next few years.

MRFR research predicted the AI market to be worth 25 billion by 2025.

If you’re a marketer, it’s time to get up to speed and understand the potential impact that AI will have on marketing. I’m pretty sure that this guide will help.

So, what is artificial intelligence?

We all know what human intelligence is…I hope so anyway!

Artificial intelligence is when a machine demonstrates some human-like intelligence.

For example:

A machine processes data and learns from it so it can make smarter decisions about the data it will process in the future.

Instead of just repeating the same instructions, the machine automatically learns new instructions based on experience.

Alpha Zero, the game playing AI developed by Deepmind, learned Chess in 4 hours and then was able to beat the best computer program available for playing chess.

Learning a new game is mimicking human intelligence, but the AI can learn in 4 hours what a human may take months doing.

Computer science describes the study of AI as the development of intelligent agents.

Look:

This is really about smart programming.

Our intelligence helps create artificial intelligence.

As some tasks become very routine they may not be considered artificial intelligence anymore.

Here’s an example:

Optical character recognition is often excluded because it’s a routine task expected from computers.

What is the difference between narrow and strong AI?

Narrow AI (also called weak AI) is artificial intelligence focused on one task.

Strong AI is everything else!

Strong AI has the ability to apply intelligence to any problem rather than a specific task.

For example:

A spam filtering tool performs one task well. A self-driving car is also described as narrow AI but I think this is a bit of a stretch!

Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Marketers?

Yes…. some!!!

Marketing is a time-intensive process with a lot of repetitive tasks which machines can help with…

…but there are certain tasks that machines will never be able to perform at the same level as human marketers.

I can imagine, in the future, sitting across from a robot discussing a business proposition but I can’t imagine I’d build the same relationship with a robot as with a real human.  It’s relatively easy to build software to beat someone at Chess and…

…the software gets better at beating people.

But…

Building relationships is the most important part of marketing and computers suck at it.

Also, who is going to build a strategy for a company?

An AI enabled machine can provide inputs into this strategy but strategists will still survive.

I watched a movie called ‘Her’ recently where the actor builds a relationship with an operating system.

Such a ridiculous movie!

Currently, though, there is a serious problem with implementing AI within organizations because of the lack of knowledge amongst marketers.

In a report done with CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) by Deloitte in 2018, the major factor that could slow down the organic growth in marketing is lack of talent.

And because AI is more technical than most other areas of marketing, this is going to be a major issue.

I wrote this guide because there is so much technical information on AI online that it’s quite difficult to understand.  I’m hoping this guide will help marketers understand what AI is really about.

Once you understand AI, then you can work out how to replace the systems you use internally with AI software. And if you decide it’s smart to replace the existing software solutions, you need to figure out what functionality will be gone and what new functionality will be added.

You’ll then need to educate your team about AI and train them on the new software.

Plus, the marketplace for AI solutions is growing so fast that, without understanding AI, you’ll have a hard time finding the right vendor.

C H A P T E R – 2

The elements of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a complex field that includes various elements.

It is focused on the following:

Learning – Acquiring information and rules for using that information.

Reasoning –  Thinking about something in a logical and sensible way.

Doing –  What’s the point in learning and thinking if you don’t do?

Self-correction – Understanding mistakes and correcting them.

Here’s a breakdown of the main areas that AI has been implemented in.

Note:  There are some overlaps in each of the areas. For example, a self-driving car uses a combination of machine learning, image recognition, and deep learning.

Neural Networks

A brain takes an input (external or internal), processes it and then produces a result.

A neuron is the basic unit of computation in the brain and it’s responsible for processing those inputs to produce the outputs.

Chemical signals are passed from neurons to neurons.

There are over 100 billion neurons, on average, in a human body and it’s an extremely complex web of interconnections between neurons. Some neurons can be connected to up 10,000 other neurons.

Imagine if someone was putting their hand near a hot stove. This is an input. The neurons would process this causing the hand to move from the stove.

Here’s how this would look internally:

The sensory neuron feels the heat, passing the information onto other internal neurons and eventually to a motor neuron which causes the reaction of moving away from the heat.

A single neuron doesn’t do much on its own, but using a complex web of neurons gives you amazing capabilities.

The neuron consists of input, output, and weight. Weight is really an indicator of importance in the overall scheme of things for this particular piece of information.

For example,  you want a machine to work out how valuable a car is.

You take in a range of inputs e.g. year, make, model, condition, mileage, etc. and these are passed through neurons. Each input is weighted.

The make and the model are weighted higher than the mileage or the year.

And then:

Through a series of complex calculations, the machine comes up with a result.

Here’s a simple example of a neural network.

The initial inputs are weighted (e.g. characteristics based on importance), they are then sent to the hidden layer for processing, and the result is the output.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is a branch of AI which enables computers to become progressively better at performing existing tasks or become able to do new tasks without any need for human intervention.

The computers are continuously analyzing data so they can produce better results in the future. Simply put, they’re becoming smarter.

Machine learning is typically broken down into 3 parts:

Deep learning

Earlier we talked about neural networks. Deep learning uses more advanced neural networks.

So instead of an input, hidden, and output layer, you may have many hidden layers.

Meaning there is a lot more processing done than with a basic neural network. The same system of weights is passed between the neurons.

Deep learning is typically categorized in the following way:

Supervised

Supervised learning is where you provide the computer with input data and then the output data (i.e. the results you’d expect). You then build an algorithm around this so you can start providing new input data and the computer will automatically create the output data.

For example, imagine if you had a spam filter. Instead of giving the computer a set of rules to determine whether an email is spam or not, you provide it with a set of emails and then tell it which of those emails is spam and why. The algorithm would then be used to work out a new set of emails.

Unsupervised

With unsupervised machine learning, you provide the input data but you don’t provide the output data. The input could be a batch of test data at first.

So, the computer doesn’t have any example data to help it generate the answers. It needs to do a bit more work.

Semi-supervised

This is a happy medium.  It’s not completely unsupervised but the output data is not enough to accurately predict all results.

So, the computer processes the data and uses the output data as a guideline that it improves over time as it processes more data.

You may want to use semi-supervised ML in cases when you have to manually classify the data but there’s so much to classify that you just classify a piece of it and leave the rest to the computer to deal with.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

This is what natural language processing is about…

Alexa is an Amazon device.

You ask questions in a conversational way and Alexa is able to process them and give a response.

Well, it usually is…..

Natural language processing (NLP) systems have become more advanced over the last few years but there are still many challenges.

For example, it wouldn’t be unusual to say the following:

Alexa – Who are Man U playing?

Manchester United supporters often abbreviate Manchester United to Man U or the Red Devils or just saying United. There’s a slim chance that Alexa would understand these abbreviations.

Here’s another challenging example for NLP:

“I was at a pub the other night with my mates and it was deadly.”

When we use the word ‘deadly’ in this context in Ireland we mean that it was great fun. NLP systems are still not good at detecting the sentiment of text or spoken word.

So NLP will continue to evolve but it will never be perfect because of:

Accents

So many languages, variations of languages and slang used

The tone of voice and body language

Evolutionary Computation

This is the definition of evolutionary computation from Wikipedia:

“In computer science, evolutionary computation is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution, and the sub-field of artificial intelligence and soft computing studying these algorithms.”

But what does this actually mean…

It was called evolutionary because it’s a continuous process of optimization of results which ‘evolves’ better solutions over time.

It was also called evolutionary from Darwin’s theory of evolution.

For example, one of Darwin’s theories was about survival of the fittest. The weakest members of a species will die over time.

With evolutionary computing, you come up with many potential solutions to a problem. Some may be good and some may be completely random.

With testing, over time, the best solutions evolve.

With deep learning, we are focusing on models we know already. Evolutionary computing is coming up with solutions to problems where we don’t have any sample results we could use to help.

Vision

We’re talking about the ability of computers/machines or robots to see, process, and act automatically based on images.

AI for vision it’s generally split into:

Computer vision –  A computer extracting information from an image to make sense of it.

Machine vision – Machines using visual methods to improve things in areas such as a production environment. They could be visually identifying faults, reviewing food labels, and/or detecting flaws in a product.

Robot vision –  This is where vision is used to identify something to be worked on and the robotic capabilities perform the necessary action.

Robotics

Robots are physical machines.

Robotics is the field of study of robots.

Sometimes you’ll hear people talking about robots automatically creating content for marketers but these are not actually robots. There’s no physical robot involved.

Most robots do not have AI but this is changing.

For example, I used to own a robotic lawnmower called ‘Robomow’. The tagline was ‘It mows you don’t’. I actually used to sell them but that’s a whole different story.

Robomow sits on a charging unit and every few days it would come out and cut the grass. There was an electrical cable around the edge of the garden and the mower would go back and forth at different angles to the edges.  It recorded where it had been so it knew when everywhere was cut.

It even had rain sensors so if it was raining it wouldn’t come out to cut the grass.

But it didn’t have artificial intelligence.

For example, it could have learned about obstacles in the garden and built different routes based on those obstacles.

Unfortunately, mine just kept getting stuck underneath the trampoline…

…every time…

Look:

I’m not saying these devices are not useful.

But…they could be a lot smarter.

Expert Systems

An expert system is a computer program that emulates the human ability to make decisions.

i.e. it replaces the need for or supports an existing expert.

It typically contains a knowledge base with a set of rules for applying the knowledge to each particular situation.

With machine learning capabilities, it’s building its knowledge base over time and adapting or creating new decisions based on its working knowledge.

Speech Interpretation

In the not too distant future, it will be unusual for someone not to have a device such as an Amazon Echo in their home so they can voice questions and instructions to this device and get immediate answers.

Voice interpretation is getting better all the time and some of these devices are leveraging artificial intelligence to learn over time and produce better responses.

Imagine if a speech recognition system was able to predict if a sale was going to be generated from a call center and then make suggestions to agents to improve the conversion rate?

And they did this by analyzing the conversation and the acoustics in this conversation.

A company called OTO systems studied 4,000 hours of inbound sales conversations with 50% conversion rates.

They trained their deep learning models to capture the ‘acoustic signature’ of a successful sale.

They managed to predict 94% of the call outcomes.

They then implemented this system in a call center and seen a 20% increase in engagement with a 5% increase in sales.

AI Planning

According to Wikipedia, these are strategies or sequences of actions automatically created for intelligent agents, robots or unmanned vehicles.

So, its all about analyzing a problem and producing a plan of action.

AI planning is taking into account things like:

Dependencies – does one task require another task to be completed

Milestones – specific dates that have to be met

Constraints – for example, if you only have 10 people available you can’t throw 20 people at the problem.

When the plan and the schedule are created, it is automatically adjusted based on results and changes to inputs.

For example, if a resource is not available any more then the plan has to be adjusted.

C H A P T E R – 3

AI Applications in Marketing

There are so many potential uses of AI in marketing that would make it more efficient and help deliver better results.

We have talked about 1 to 1 marketing for many years and, even with advanced marketing automation systems, this is still not a reality.

But…with artificial intelligence, we have a much better chance of delivering what feels more like a one-on-one customer communication.

Let’s take a look at some examples of how marketing can improve with AI.

AI and Content Marketing

To survive on the web we need to produce content.

Content attracts visitors, engages our audience, and gives them an incentive to come back.

Content comes in many forms:

Blog post

Testimonials

Factual data e.g. reports

Video content

Tweets

Company information

AI will never take over the full role of Content Marketer but it can certainly help.

Can computers automatically create content that doesn’t sound like it was created by a computer?

Yes!

A 2017 report by Statista found that over 90% of people surveyed said that getting personalized content was ‘very/somewhat’ appealing’.

Content personalization is on the rise

Its no surprise that people want to feel like you are providing information and content that is just relevant to them. They don’t care about anyone else!!!

Marketers don’t have the time to personalize all content but luckily AI can help.

Here’s how:

Content research

MarketMuse is a software platform that gives users guidance for creating the right content. It uses big data and AI to understand how search engines rank content.

It crunches all your data and compares with other companies’ ranking for similar content.

It then organizes your content into topic clusters, defining the topics that are easy to rank for and provides recommendations on how to improve your content.

Performing a content audit is a really time-consuming process and a software like this can save you massive amounts of time.

Here’s an example where MarketMuse analyzes the top search results for marketing tools. It extracts the most relevant terms within each of the top ranking content pieces and compares this with your content.

The tool displays the number of mentions of these keywords in competitor content compared to the number of mentions in your content. You get a content score that you can improve to rank higher.

By analyzing your content, MarketMuse determines your ‘topic authority.’ These are the topics you could easily rank for by creating more content around them.

Content creation

Neurolinguistic generation (NLG) is a technology that transforms data into human-sounding narratives.

Automated Insights is a company that does exactly what their name suggests.

They analyze the data and automatically produce text that describes the data.

Imagine if you were in a stockbroking firm and you had to create 1,000 different reports for customers. That’s a dreadful thought, isn’t it?

Now, imagine clicking on a button and generating those reports automatically.

AI may not write a book or replace me as a blogger but it can certainly help a lot with content creation.

Content amplification

Content amplification is the process of promoting and distributing content through paid and unpaid tactics to achieve greater reach.

With so much noise online, even the most epic content won’t perform well unless you promote it.

Content promotion used to take up a big chunk of content marketers’ time but now there are some really smart tools out there that can help automate this process.

Here’s one example.

Inpowered is a tool that lets you select the content you want to promote across many native advertising platforms and then automates the process of placing the promotion and getting the best pay per click rates.

It will cancel promotions on certain platforms, increase promotions on other platforms, and analyze what’s working and when.

All fully automated.

This platform is interesting because the technology is very good and you only pay for engaged users. If someone views your content and immediately bounces you won’t get charged.

Content optimization

How about optimizing content to drive more traffic from Google?

In the olden days, you could stuff the same keyword many times into your article to rank.

But now…Google does semantic analysis of your content to understand what the content is about.

It uses machine learning (Rankbrain) to understand the content you write.

Also, it’s not just looking at keywords it’s looking at topic authority.

Here’s an example of how to demonstrate topic authority on your site.

You create a pillar piece of content like this piece of content.

You then create related pieces of content which link to the pillar content (and the pillar links to the related).

You may even take one step further and create guest post content on other websites linking to the related or pillar content on your site .

This shows topic authority which is more important than one post targeting a specific keyword.

Google uses AI to figure out your topic authority so it makes sense that we need tools that leverage AI to figure out if we are providing the right signals to Google.

This is what MarketMuse and other tools in this area do.

Content curation

A content curation tool is great for finding relevant content you are interested in.

For example, you set up a set of keywords and it finds content that is popular related to those keywords.

But….

…the AI version of the content curation tool takes an extra step.

Take Frase.io as an example.

This finds content but then uses AI to summarize the content so you don’t have to read it all.

I don’t know about you but that sounds awesome to me!!!

In terms of content curation, AI should assist in the following workflows: – Making more targeted queries and removing noise when monitoring the media – Summarizing information to help knowledge workers consume content faster and only dig deeper when relevant – Identifying relationships between topics and drawing trends over time Improved content curation through AI should help marketers create better newsletters, incorporate more research on their original content, scale their social media posting and create richer internal microsites. Digital publishers may use AI-driven content curation to automatically generate reports and enrich their editorial workflow.

Tomas Ratia CEO Frase.io

AI and Analytics

We typically break analytics down into descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, but let’s add a fourth dimension:

Descriptive – Looking into the past to understand what has happened

Predictive –  Looking at the past and figuring out what could happen in the future

Prescriptive – Figuring out what we should do next

Action-oriented – Automatically implementing, testing, and adapting.

Descriptive analytics has been around for a long time.

An example of this would be seeing Google Analytics data but not knowing what to do with it.

Predictive analytics gives you ideas of what you might do and prescriptive tells you what you need to do.

Action-oriented analytics is where actions are automatically taken and tested based on what is prescribed.

Sometimes I log into my wife’s Netflix account by mistake and most of the recommendations are not the movies I would watch!

But when I log into my Netflix account it always shows something of interest to me.

Netflix automatically groups people into different categories and ratings are based on the feedback within the category you are placed in.

So, when I see a percentage rating indicating how likely I am to like a movie, this rating could be different for my wife as she’s in a different category.

Netflix continuously tries to provide better recommendations to market better movies to their users.

But they don’t just look at the movie/show you started watching. They will also look at:

Did you watch some of it and stopped watching

Did you watch it over a couple of nights

When you watched it i.e. a month ago, a year ago, etc.

And, of course, much more.

These are machine learning algorithms that are learning over time and automatically adjusting.

A UK company called Datalytyx have patented an AI solution which solves a major problem of analyzing large volumes of data, for example, analzying billions of records.

It’s AI software identifies the most relevant 1% of the data and you run reports based on this.

AI and Marketing Automation

A typical marketing automation task is sending a series of emails to users after they opted in to an email list.

And then, based on their interaction with emails, route people to a different path.

For example, the click on a link about a new product in the second email in a sequence triggers a different email.

This is smart email automation but it’s not AI.

AI adds a whole new layer of intelligence. Here are some examples:

Watson is an IBM platform that uses AI to learn more about your data.

‘Watson marketing‘ is a part of the Watson platform focused on…you guessed it…marketing.

One of its components is creating targeted email campaigns.

It uses AI to understand more about each individual in the campaign and tailors the communication based on this data.

For example, instead of just putting people into a bucket based on a form they fill out, it pulls the data from many sources and creates micro-segments based on lifestyle, social behavior, life stage, location, etc.

But it will also continuously evaluate this data and automatically move people between segments based on new data and performance analysis.

When you are working with large data sets you need AI to automate certain tasks and make sense of data.

For example:

Compile data from many sources and create micro-segments based on lifestyle, social behavior, life stage, location, etc.

Discover flaws in original campaigns and change segments and offers based on this.

AI and Conversational Marketing

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with another human.

There are many tools available (e.g. mobile monkey) which allow you to easily create a chatbot.

They have a builder program which allows you to automatically create actions based on inputs.

However, these chatbots are not AI-enabled. They are trained to recognize specific user intents and they tap into a knowledge base to retrieve answers (retrieval-based chatbots).

We’re still far from seeing chatbots that can provide users with an unlimited amount of answers that they can generate on the fly. This would be the true AI at work.

Most chatbots today operate in a specific niche and the amount of things that they know and can do is very limited. However, they still use NLP techniques to understand human language. The more sophisticated ones also use sentiment analysis to understand the emotion behind the user’s words.

Chatbots, as they are today, are still a very useful tool to help automate certain parts of the sales and marketing process.

For example, chatbots can:

increase engagement through personalized conversations with users

handle customer inquiries on your website

improve targeting by collecting useful insights about users

Now, for companies that already use chatbots on their website, there are tools that can help them understand how well they’re performing.

Liveperson.com analyzes chatbot conversations in real-time to assess when customers are having a poor customer experience. Companies can then take action based on this.

Not sure if we’ll use this…may come up with a new diagram.

AI and Email Marketing

Email marketing is one area that could benefit tremendously from AI.

Just think about it – an AI tool could help you determine which type of content you need to send and when you need to send it to increase your chances of converting an individual prospect.

Given the fact that AI can process enormous amounts of data in no time, you’d be running smarter and more efficient campaigns with a better ROI. Not the mention the time you’d save on A/B testing!

An email marketing tool powered by AI could also help with another challenging area for marketers – sending highly personalized emails at scale.

AI can take into account a customer’s history with your company and determine the type of messaging and offers that work best.

For example, Phrasee is an email marketing tool that uses AI to generate subject lines, body copy, and CTAs to encourage higher click-through rates and engagement on email marketing campaigns.

AI and SEO

Artificial intelligence has the potential to make search more human.

It means that search engines now look more at the meaning and the context of the searcher’s query to deliver more meaningful results.

The era of keyword stuffing is over. Search algorithms are now focusing on the user’s context and search intent.

And this is a good thing.

Marketers can also leverage AI tools to improve the ranking of their content.

Now you can use AI to improve your SEO efforts in a variety of ways, including:

Identifying content opportunities

Performing keyword research

Identifying opportunities for content optimization

Content personalization, and more.

AI and Social Media

Every time you log into Facebook and view the news feed you are seeing AI in action.

Facebook is continuously monitoring who you follow, what you interact with, how you consume content and more.

These algorithms learn over time to produce better news feed results.

Facebook is all about engagement.

If you spend more time on the platform they can show you more ads and they make more money.

It’s that simple!

It makes total sense to track what you interact and don’t interact with.

If you follow a Facebook page and never interact with the posts they publish, that is a sure sign that you have no interest in that page’s content.

Here’s another example of AI for social media.

Persado provides “machine-generated marketing copy to drive maximum performance in any channel.”

It picks out the best words, phrases, visuals and emotions to drive more engagement.

And social media is all about engagement.

With this social media module they will automatically create the text and find the best images that will drive the most engagement.

AI and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization is all about improving conversion.

For example, out of 100 visitors to your website you convert 2%, and then you make changes to your website and increase your conversion to 3%.

There are many ways to increase conversion:

Improve your ads so that you get a higher click-through rate and lower cost

Improve ads so you are sending a better audience to your offer

Build a different sales funnel, for example, add an up-sell option after someone buys

Change the pages that are part of the funnel e.g. colors, text, images, video, etc.

This is a very time consuming and manual process and this is where AI can help.

Unbounce is a landing page tool.

They recently built a pilot project around AI and included 34 customers over a 6 week period.

The AI analyzed the performance of the landing pages on real campaigns and instructed conversion specialists on what to change.

On average, the increase in conversion on the pages was 19.8% with one page achieving over 100%.

This is certainly a higher performance increase than you’d expect to get from working with a conversion specialist.

AI and Listening / Monitoring

Every company out there wants to be able to capture as much of the conversations around their brand as possible.

The goal is to understand not only what people are saying about their brand, products or services, but also how they feel about them.

This helps marketers to analyze their brand presence and use those insights to improve communication with their audience and target their campaigns better.

NLP and Sentiment Analysis can really help in this area.

Companies can use AI to understand conversations around their products so they can spot potential issues and act on them, as well as to uncover purchase intent.

AI and Image Recognition

We all know how important visual content is for marketing.

Now we can use AI and image recognition tools to analyze trends and uncover the type of visuals that would bring the best results on social media and other channels.

Image recognition allows marketers to ‘listen’ to what their audience is saying through images so they can deliver visual content that fits the interests of that audience.

AI can help analyze millions of social media posts and filter through the images that people share and engage with.

Without image recognition tools, it would be impossible for marketers to analyze this amount of visual material!

One example of this is the Image Insights platform from Brandwatch. This tool is focused on helping companies uncover how people are using images that contain their brand across social media.

It basically analyzes visual mentions of a brand’s logo across millions of social media posts.

AI and Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a very powerful form of marketing but brands find it difficult to identify the right influencers.

With AI technology there are now smarter ways of analyzing and finding influencers.

For example:

Image recognition – AI can analyze thousands of properties of an image to find out what the image is really about.

Content analysis – AI can analyze influencer content to find out what exactly the influencer is passionate about and gets engagement for.

Assess engagement – AI tools can distinguish between fake and real engagement and analyze this level of engagement.

Influencer – Through the analysis above and other analysis it can work out how influential someone is and in what areas.

Demand for useful content from trusted experts is taking the marketing world by storm in the form of influencer collaboration and AI is playing multiple roles.

From AI powered virtual influencers on Instagram like @lilmiquela with 1.5 million followers to sophisticated AI systems used in influencer marketing platforms, the impact and implications of artificial intelligence on influencer marketing are just beginning.

Future applications of AI and influencer marketing include the ability to predict potential impact of certain influencers, content types and channel combinations as well as more advanced filtering of influencers with fake followers.

Lee Odden – Founder Toprank Marketing

C H A P T E R – 4

Security Concerns about AI

In 2018, the EU brought in a regulation called GDPR (global data protection regulation).

Its goal is to regulate the collection, storage, and use of personal data by companies without permission.

As consumers get more and more concerned with the use their personal data, I expect that similar regulation will be implemented in other parts of the world.

As AI is all about collecting and processing data this has serious repercussions.

Let’s say you walked into a supermarket and the supermarket used facial recognition to identify you and then tailored your experience based on the available data. Do they have the permission to do this? Not in Europe.

So, although AI is extremely powerful, some of it’s use will need to be approved.

Summary

There is a bright future ahead of us for AI.

It will have a huge impact on marketing for many years to come.

It will change marketing roles, it will remove some of them entirely, and it will provide a whole new level of sophistication which was never possible before.

Should you be concerned as a Marketer?

Of course.

You need to stay on top of developments in AI and see how you can incorporate it into your marketing.

You need to think about your role as a Marketer and how your role will evolve or be replaced in the future.

The post Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach to Marketing appeared first on RazorSocial.

from Blog | RazorSocial https://www.razorsocial.com/artificial-intelligence-a-modern-approach-to-marketing/

[timothyakoonce]

How to Duplicate a Saved Audience in Facebook Ads Manager

When it comes to Saved Audiences, a question commonly repeats: How do I duplicate a saved audience in Ads Manager?

While there’s currently no direct way to duplicate a saved audience, there is manual process that allows you to do this. We’ll cover that here.

What Are Saved Audiences?

Facebook’s Saved Audiences feature allows advertisers to create audiences that can be re-used in multiple campaigns. This can be a serious time saver. The feature can also enable more detailed analysis, such as understanding audience overlaps.

To access Saved Audiences, you’ll first need to access Facebook Business Manager, or, if you’re not using Business Manager, go directly to the desired ad account. At the time of this writing, both paths have a standard URL convention, which I’ll share in case it helps.

As an initial step, be sure you are logged into your personal Facebook account. To access Business Manager, you can go to business.facebook.com. To access ad accounts that are not in Business Manager, you can go to www.facebook.com/manage. In either case, you should be sure to select the Ad Account for which you want to create the saved audience.

Once you’re viewing either Business Manager or Ads Manager, click on the drop-down from the top left of the page. Then, select “Audiences” from under the “Assets” section:

Duplicate a Saved Audience

Since there is not an automatic feature to duplicate an audience, here is how we can do it manually, with an easy, straightforward workaround.

First, confirm again that you are in the correct ad account by looking at the ad account name on the top left.

Now, select the saved audience you would like to duplicate by checking the box to the left of that audience’s name. Then, select the “Edit” button:

From here, the audience will open. To duplicate that audience, we can simply edit the name (I’ll add a “Copy1” tag to the current name). From here, we can make any changes we’d like to the existing audience.

For this example, I’ll add an interest of “Cars”. Since I want to tell by the name some of the information about the audience, I’ll go ahead and include a reference to Cars in the name as well.

Once you’ve made any changes you’d like, click the “Save as New” button. Be sure *not* to click the “Update” button, as that will simply rename the previous, existing audience vs. duplicating it as a newly-named option.

**If you accidentally click Update, you can re-open and change back to the original audience name, remove any changes you made (such as the adding of interests), and then click Update again to essentially undo the change you just made.

Once we click “Save As New,” a confirmation screen appears letting us know the audience is about to be copied. Notice here that Facebook automatically adds a ” – copy” tag at the end of the audience name. Since I already added “Copy1” in the name of my newly duplicated audience, I’m going to delete the additional tag before I click “Save”:

Once the change is saved, you should see the new, duplicated audience appear in the saved audience list:

**If the duplicated audience doesn’t appear, click to reload the page. Doing so normally causes it to populate the newest version.

There you have it! You’ve successfully duplicated one of your existing saved audiences.

This trick works especially well for audiences that have a large number of interests, or when there are other targeting components that you want to avoid rebuilding manually.

Your Turn

I love handy tricks to save time in Ads Manager. How have you used any workarounds?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Duplicate a Saved Audience in Facebook Ads Manager appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

from Jon Loomer Digital https://www.jonloomer.com/2019/04/17/duplicate-saved-audience-facebook/

[timothyakoonce]

Transcript of How to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers

Transcript of How to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Donna Cutting. She is the founder and CEO of Red Carpet Learning Systems and she’s also the author of a book we are going to talk about today called 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers. Donna, thanks for joining me.

Donna Cutting: Hey, John. It’s really great to be here. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: So, 501 ways. Don’t you think it would be great if you will just do one thing?

Donna Cutting: Oh, yeah, definitely for sure. It’s funny to me how people picked up on that 501 ways and find that amusing but what I’m trying to do is give people enough action ideas, tangible ideas that they can actually take right from the book and implement into their company or at least being inspired by some of these ideas so that they can raise the bar in the service in their organization.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think there are a lot of books that have a lot of theory in them and there’s certainly a place for theory and strategy. But I think there’s also a real need for these books that just … Give me a couple of ideas, give me a couple of things I can go out and do and see how I could do that in my business. And so that’s one of the things that really attracted me to want to have this conversation today.

Donna Cutting: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And you’ll know in the book there’s actually a chapter called Get Red Carpet Ready and that’s because that theory is important and it is really important to have a strong basis if you truly want to give consistently excellent service to your customers. You got to be looking at who you’re hiring and how you’re encouraging them and all of that. But today’s midlevel manager or entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily have time to be as creative as they want. So why not look at what other people are doing and go from there.

John Jantsch: Before we get too deep. You are in Asheville, North Carolina. Is that right?

Donna Cutting: Yeah.

John Jantsch: I just visited there with my wife and we canoed the north broad right through Biltmore and went up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a beautiful, beautiful country.

Donna Cutting: Yeah. The French Broad River, is that what you’re-

John Jantsch: Yes.

Donna Cutting: Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful area. Oh, I’m sorry I missed you but I’m glad you had a good time.

John Jantsch: A lot of companies think in terms of departments, marketing, sales and service. And I really think … It’s probably always been true but I really think today when there’s really nowhere to hide. If you have bad service, we’re probably going to see a YouTube channel dedicated to it at some point. I’ve come to believe that there really is no room for these departments anymore, that service quite frankly needs to run through the entire sort of outcome with the customer, doesn’t it?

Donna Cutting: Yeah. Customer service is so much more than a department. It really is the … Well, for one thing, there is a direct link between sales and marketing and service especially today because of the experience that you’re giving your customer, they have more choices and louder voices than ever before. Regardless of how great your sales and marketing is, you could lose that customer the minute they walk in the door if the experience they’re getting is not fantastic.

Donna Cutting: They have so many other places to go. And so customer experience is really part of that whole marketing and sales as well.

John Jantsch: Because you sell training that has a cost associated to it and certainly doing customer service well has a cost associated with it. How do you help people make the leap to being an investment rather than a cost, so to speak? What’s the value? How do you measure the value of good service. I think we all know a pissed off customer is a bad thing but how do you measure that doing the basics right?

Donna Cutting: Yeah. Well, I think it varies from the company. But it’s really understanding the lifetime value of your customer. And so understanding that we’re not just talking about one transaction here but how many transactions could they potentially do with you in a year’s time, in five years’ time, in the lifetime of that customer.

Donna Cutting: And I would even add to that how many new customers could they bring to you because they’re having such great experience. I don’t really see that in the typical measurements of lifetime value but I think that belongs there as well.

John Jantsch: Great point. I think that … We all know people that I’m sure you run into them and every company … Hopefully, every company has one or two of them. That person that is … They’re just nurturing. They’re just, “How can we serve you?” They’re just wired that way. But I suspect that you do a fair amount of teaching people that are not wired that way. Is it possible?

Donna Cutting: Well, first of all, you do have to have a heart to serve people to a certain extent. And I think when it comes to the customer experience, making sure that you have the right people in the right roles is very important because depending on the position, it is more important in some positions that you have the people who are the warm, fuzzy, going to make people feel good. And then in other positions, it may be more important that they have the technical piece that they know that job really, really well but they just have to have the ability to be friendly and caring to the customer.

Donna Cutting: Having said that, can you teach empathy? I don’t know that you can. I think that that comes with how they grew up and whether they have an empathetic heart. However, what I have noticed is that there are people out there in organizations that have empathy and they have a heart to serve but the leadership has not necessarily been really great about defining what the service experience looks like. And giving them the tools and the training that they need in order to deliver on that service experience.

Donna Cutting: A lot of times people said to me, “Oh, well, it’s just common sense.” Well, not necessarily. If you’ve got a young person who grew up in a home where they may have … In fact, I’ve met many, many people. They were warm, very warm caring heart but they didn’t grow up learning about the importance of eye contact and smiling and giving a good handshake and caring phrases and all of the things that you can teach if somebody has an open heart to receive it. Did that make sense?

John Jantsch: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that you kind of hammer home a belief that I have that is that service, good service, red carpet service is really kind of culture. And so, I think organizations that it seems to run throughout. They hire for it. That’s a qualification for the job is to maybe measure the idea of empathy but then they also empower folks.

John Jantsch: I was on a flight this week, Southwest Magazine always has stories about their people doing good and then we all know companies that really tend to empower their employees to do things. There was a layover that the person wasn’t changing planes but they’ve laid over ironically in my hometown, Kansas City, and the person was … Their son really wanted a Royals’ baseball hat but they just didn’t have time to get off the plane. And the flight attendant heard, went in, bought a Royals’ baseball hat at a shop, came back out, gave it to him.

John Jantsch: And of course, then the person wrote a letter talking about how great it was. I think that that flight attendant is empowered to make that kind of thing and rewarded for doing that kind of action. And I think that that has to run really deep, doesn’t it?

Donna Cutting: It definitely does. And it is. And getting back to that whole chapter in getting red carpet ready, that really is all about culture. The question that’s asked of me a lot is, “How do you get an hourly employee who maybe has never received the red carpet service to give that?” Yeah, you have to model it for them by the way you’re treating them and empowering them and encouraging that kind of behavior. So what a great story, I love that.

John Jantsch: One of the things that I think a lot of companies, they get it. Okay, customer service is great. We got to do something to really be over the top and it comes out sort of robotic. I think the best customer service is something like that story I told but it’s often very personalized and I think that’s even trickier, isn’t it?

Donna Cutting: Yeah, I think it is. And also, I wanted to say, I don’t necessarily think that it has to be over the top. To me, there are three areas of customer experience to pay attention to. One is that technical piece, so that is what the customer is buying for, the service or product that they’re purchasing that it works the way they expect it to work, all of the logistical things that go along with delivering that product and service. And you obviously want that to be proficient.

Donna Cutting: Then the next piece is warmth and hospitality, so how are you delivering it? Do you have a team of people who have that empathetic heart and are warm and hospitable. Really, if those two things are rock solid, people are going to feel like they have a great customer experience if it’s consistent, so meaning every employee is delivering that to every customer at every opportunity, every single time or close to it.

Donna Cutting: And then the third piece would be that wow or I call it movie moment, those moments you remember and want to repeat from the movies, making those kinds of moments for you customer. But to be honest, the first two have to be rock solid but before that over the top, wow, really makes a difference. And I think you’re right. That has to come authentic and that comes from just allowing your employees to come up with their own ideas about how to do that.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I’m not sure you’re really saying this but I think you make a good point. In some cases, the bar is not very high. Just getting the basics right. Returning phone calls, doing things that people expect or unfortunately have come not to expect. That kind of part the basics are so important and many companies miss that even.

Donna Cutting: That’s exactly right. It is surprising to me when I ask my audiences, “Tell me about the best service you’ve ever received?” How many times people will just tell me a story about how they walked into a hotel or a department store and everybody was friendly and smiling and they’re bending over backwards to do what they can for you. I think that’s just what customer service should be, never mind the over the top stuff but that’s what people are wowed by today because unfortunately, we’re not receiving that as often as we could be.

John Jantsch: One of my favorite and I’m not even sure this is customer service. This certainly is marketing in my mind, but one of my favorite things is when somebody surprises me, when they do something I didn’t expect. I ordered some shoes from a running store and got some powerbars and socks thrown in there. And that had me targeted. In fact, you’re probably about the 10th person on air that I’ve told this story to. And I think there’s almost a product roll for that type of thing.

Donna Cutting: Oh, definitely. And I love … That reminds me of … I’m trying to remember the name of that company. One of the examples in the book is Retrofit and they are a company that sells sportswear. I’m sorry, RecoFit compression gear. And they sell compression gear for cyclists and triathletes and runners. And one of the things that she does is she came up with the idea of just thinking about that crackerjack box and remembering how exciting it was as a child to get that crackerjack box and while the caramel corn were delicious, that’s not really what we’re excited about. What we’re excited about are the free stuff, the little prize.

Donna Cutting: And so she does exactly what you were just talking about. Susan Walton, the owner of the company, she’ll just put something, a free little gift that people aren’t expecting in every single box. And that’s what people get excited about. That’s the little extra. I love it.

John Jantsch: Seth Godin actually had a book, you probably remembered called Free Prize Inside that really kind of talked about that whole concept. To give you a moment to define your red carpet phrase, how do you go about making people feel like stars and should you be looking at it as that over the top, kind of roll out the red carpet approach?

Donna Cutting: Well, to me, ultimately red carpet service is about making that person in front of you right now, so whether they’re physically in front of you or on the other end of the phone or even the other end of an email, feel like the most important person in the room or the most important person in that transaction.

Donna Cutting: And so it really does just start with being 100% present fair for them, making people feel like you … Even if you’ve heard and this is the challenging part. Even if you’ve heard this question 15 million times from every customer, delivering service in a way that I would consider the illusion of that first time. So like in the theater, we have people do the same dance steps, the same speech, the same lines 20 million times depending on how long that show goes on. And yet for every audience, it’s a new show. And so really looking at it that way. It is finding the fun things that you can do to really make them say, “Wow, you know I didn’t expect that.”

John Jantsch: So, I warned you about this before we started with the book 501 Ways, I’m going to ask you to pick maybe four or five of your favorite ones that you can tell us a little vignette about just to give people a sense of the abstracts of each of these kind of ways.

Donna Cutting: Sure, absolutely. Well, I’ll start it with Ruby Receptionists. They’re a company I actually give business with for many, many years. And I’ll start with them because there’s such a great example of those three areas that I talked about. They are a voice answering service but so much more than that. We referred to them endearingly as Call Ruby.

Donna Cutting: When they would pick up my phone messages, technically, it went perfectly, 99.9% of the time. They would get my message. They do their transfer right to the person it needed to go to on my team or we would get a voicemail and a followup. And it just worked perfectly. If it didn’t work perfectly because they were having software issues or something, they were communicating with us every 10 minutes until it was back up and running was amazing.

Donna Cutting: That piece is really perfect and then the second piece is I never had to worry about the receptionist that was answering the phone. They had many, many people working for them but they were all upbeat, friendly. I certainly secret shopped myself. My customers would talk about what friendly people I had working for me. It was just amazing. They had those two pieces rock solid. But then, they would add the wow and this goes back, John, to your whole piece of empowering employees because every person that works for Ruby Receptionists is empowered to practice wowism is what they’d call it but make these surprising delight moments for their customers.

Donna Cutting: For instance, when I had my dog, Snowball, one time they sent me a little package of dog treats for Snowball in a little frame with a picture on it that looked kind of like Snowball. And they would just do little things like this on a regular basis. I know other people who use them as well and that we’re always comparing the little gifts that Ruby Receptionists send us out of the blue. So, there’s such a great example of those three areas of service.

Donna Cutting: And then one that I was thinking of when you were talking about your airplane, the Southwest Airlines example, is this gentleman who worked in Tampa airport. And I loved this. When this little boy left his beautiful Hobbes, his precious doll, if you remember the old Calvin and Hobbes. He had a little tiger and he named him Hobbes and he left it at the airport, and one of the employees picked it up. And of course, they let him know, “Absolutely, you can come pick it up. Hobbes is here. He’s fine.”

Donna Cutting: But in the meantime, they took all kinds of pictures of Hobbes doing things at the airport working in the control room, working in flying the plane, all of these things. And they put it together in a little album so that when the parents came and they actually picked up Hobbes, not only did they get the doll but they got this album of memories that Hobbes shared. That’s such a great example again of an employee just taking responsibility and wowing the customer.

John Jantsch: As I hear you say that and after reading many of the tips or the ways in your book, I think a lot of ways the underlying thread or theme is fun. I think a lot of the companies that do this stuff is because they’re having a good time and so they look for ways to bring a little bit of fun and joy into people’s lives regardless of what they’re selling. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that might be … If you’re going to nail sort of one emotion, that might be it.

Donna Cutting: No, I think you are … Absolutely, you just hit the nail on the head. I mean the next one I was going to share with you is the Village Coffee House in Boulder, Colorado. If you are there for the first time and somebody gets wind of it, you’ve been dubbed a village virgin and they announce that there’s a virgin in the house and everybody applauds and everyone’s kind of in on the fun even all the customers that have been there before. And then of course, there’s ways for you to earn prizes if you bring in new virgins to the coffeehouse. So, it’s definitely a marketing tool but it’s also just like you said, having a great time with your customers and for your customers.

John Jantsch: I’m visiting with Donna Cutting. She is the founder and CEO of Red Carpet Learning Systems. And she’s also the author of a book 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customer. Thanks for joining us and hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road somebody.

Donna Cutting: Thanks for having me.

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/transcript-rolling-out-the-red-carpet/

[timothyakoonce]

How to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers

How to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Marketing Podcast with Donna Cutting

Podcast Transcript

My guest on today’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Donna Cutting, CSP, Founder & CEO of Red Carpet Learning Systems. She is also the author of 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers.

Think about how much time you spend trying to get clicks, drive traffic, make the phone ring. Now, compare that to how much time you spend making sure your customers have an amazing experience every single time they interact with your company.

See any gaps? We’re all so busy trying to generate leads that we forget the most potent source of new business is a whole bunch of very happy customers.

Donna knows all about providing exceptional service. She leads a team of experts that train organizational leaders to turn prospects into delighted customers and delighted customers into raving fans. Today, Donna and I discuss what it means to give your customers the “red carpet” treatment.

Questions I ask Donna Cutting:

How do you measure the value of good service?

What are some ways that companies can go above and beyond to deliver a memorable experience?

With the title of your book starting with “501 ways,” can you pick a couple of your favorite ways to roll out the red carpet for customers?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

What actionable and tangible ideas you can use to raise the bar in service for your organization.

How the customer experience is directly related to your sales and marketing.

What the three components of great service are and why consistency is critical.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Donna Cutting:

Learn more about Donna Cutting

Order your copy of 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers

Follow on Twitter

Follow on Facebook

Connect on LinkedIn

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/rolling-out-the-red-carpet/

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How to Make Storytelling Work for Your Brand

How to Make Storytelling Work for Your Brand written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Kyle Gray Podcast Transcript

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Kyle Gray, founder of The Story Engine. He and I discuss insights from his book, The Story Engine: A Busy Entrepreneur’s Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling Without Spending All Day Writing.

Gray has helped dozens of startups and small businesses succeed in content marketing. He writes content that educates entrepreneurs on how to build their businesses with content marketing, manage remote teams, and scale up their businesses.

Gray got his start as the content manager for WP Curve and helped expand the blog from a single contributor to a multi-person team of guest writers with documented systems and strategies. He helped the startup grow to nearly 1 million in annual recurring revenue.

Questions I ask Kyle Gray:

How has your personal story influenced your approach to storytelling?

How important is visual storytelling?

What role does your audience play in your story?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

Why storytelling is a central part of marketing today.

What people misunderstand about storytelling.

How to do storytelling well.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Kyle Gray:

Learn more about The Story Engine

Buy The Story Engine: A Busy Entrepreneur’s Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling Without Spending All Day Writing

Access the infographic

Follow on Twitter

Connect on LinkedIn

Follow on Facebook

Follow on Instagram

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by AXA Equitable Life.

It’s time we start giving life insurance the credit it deserves. That’s because life insurance can be so much more than protection for you and your family. It can also help you live, keep, and potentially build more cash value over time. To learn how, go to www.AXA.com.

Disclosure: Life insurance is issued by AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company, New York, NY 10104 or MONY Life Insurance Company of America (MLOA), an Arizona Stock corporation with its main administration office in Jersey City, NJ and is distributed by AXA Distributors, LLC.

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/content-strategy-brand-storytelling/

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Why Being a Podcast Guest Is Your Secret SEO Weapon

Why Being a Podcast Guest Is Your Secret SEO Weapon written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

We all know that there’s a lot of SEO value in generating your own content. Blogs, videos, webinars, and podcasts are all great ways to build your brand’s online reputation, drive more traffic to your site, and boost your SERP standing.

But creating your own content takes a lot of time and effort. Fortunately, guest podcasting allows you to generate the SEO benefits that come from content creation without all of the legwork of building the content yourself from scratch.

Want to learn more about how being a podcast guest can supercharge your SEO? Read on!

Build Your Reputation

When you’re a guest on a podcast, you immediately gain trust and credibility. Someone who produces a show invited you on as an expert in your field; that means something!

Not only does this help you build trust with your audience, it gets your name out to their audience. People who are listening to this podcast are likely already loyal followers of the show and the host’s brand. They trust the host’s opinion, and the host’s endorsement of you is noteworthy for their audience.

Plus, appearing as a guest helps you gain credibility with other podcasters. With each guest appearance you do, you should turn around and pitch other podcasts hosts—those who have even bigger followings. As you continue to be a guest on more shows with a greater reach, your reputation will grow and you’ll attract more and more attention to your business’s online assets.

Collect More Backlinks

With each podcast you’re on, you’re generating more backlinks for your website. Podcast hosts often post show notes and transcripts on their website to accompany each episode. You and your business’s name will be tagged in all of the content for your episode, creating backlinks and driving more traffic to your website.

And again, this has a cumulative effect. For each podcast you are a guest host on, you generate more and more backlinks (with more and more reputable websites) which is an important ranking factor in SEO.

Increase Social Media Mentions

It’s not just about directing more attention to your website. Being a podcast guest also gives you the opportunity to generate more traffic and attention on your social media pages.

Podcast hosts are excited to promote each episode, and will tag you and your business in their posts. You want to get involved, too. Share the link on your own social media, tagging them back. Interact with fans who are responding on social media, either on your page or the host’s page.

Engagement on social platforms can help you generate more followers and increase the SEO rankings for your social pages as well.

Generate Additional Content for Your Website

The great thing about podcasts is that, like video, the audio can be a jumping off point for even more content. You can easily transform a podcast transcript into a blog post about the topic at hand. Or you can generate a series of tweets based on quotable content from your episode. You can even use the audio to put together a video with relevant infographics and slides.

The more meaningful content you can generate on your website, the better off you’ll do in SEO. And repurposing that podcast episode is an easy way to generate additional content with minimal effort.

Get Visitors to Stick Around Longer

Google likes to keep all the specifics on how they calculate SERP rankings under wraps, but there is a strong indication that dwell time—the amount of time visitors remain on a given page—influences SEO.

Embedding your podcast episode on your website is a great way to get someone to stick on that page for a long time. While they might skim a blog post or watch a quick explainer video within a few minutes’ time and then bounce away to another website, a podcast episode requires that they stick on the page for 20 or more minutes.

Reap All the SEO Rewards with a Fraction of the Work

The best part of all this is that guest podcasting allows you to get all the benefits of SEO with very little work. Producing your own podcast requires a lot of time and effort. You have to record, edit, create accompanying blog posts and transcripts, promote it with your audience, and worry about building a following for your show.

If you’re a guest on someone else’s podcast, they have to handle all of that. You simply show up, share your expertise, and use the results to generate more attention for your brand. Yes, there is work that goes into being a podcast guest, but it is a fraction of the work you’d put into creating your own show.

Being a podcast guest is a great way to increase your exposure with potential customers and to boost your SEO. From creating more content for your own website to generating backlinks and building your online reputation, the benefits are many.

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/how-guest-podcasting-improves-seo/

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Weekend Favs April 13

Weekend Favs April 13 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

HelloCast – Organize your podcast production workflow, all in one place.

Hyperlapse – Create time lapse videos for Instagram.

Twemoji – Access more than 3,000 open source emojis for Twitter.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/hellocast-hyperlapse-twemoji/

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Transcript of How Giving Back Can Create Business Success

Transcript of How Giving Back Can Create Business Success written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

This transcript is sponsored by our transcript partner – Rev – Get $10 off your first order

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Sam Ashdown. She’s a UK based property marketing coach to independent estate agents, we would call them in the US real estate agents. But I think it’s about the same thing. So, Sam, thanks for joining us.

Sam Ashdown: Hey John, it’s great to be here.

John Jantsch: So you and I have known each other for a long time because you were one of those people that got out there and said, “I need to go learn about this new marketing stuff” and so you went to conferences and came across the ocean a few times. We bumped into each other there, didn’t we?

Sam Ashdown: Oh we did, yeah. I was your first fan girl, John. Your first fan girl from the UK and my first ever marketing book and I’m sure you hear this all the time and I know you did because I even heard you say this to other people or people say it to you that Duct Tape Marketing was their first marketing book and it absolutely changed my life from that moment on. It was amazing really, so thank you for that.

John Jantsch: I need to have people like you follow me around and tell people all about me. So tell me a little about your journey then because you talk about my first fan girl, that was 2005-06, so you have been doing this a little while. Tell me a little about your journey, you started out as an independent agent, I’m guessing, and things have evolved haven’t they?

Sam Ashdown: You know, you’d think so, because that would be very sensible, but I didn’t. I started off developing houses, I flipped houses as you Americans call it. I bought them, I flipped them, I sold them. I was a single mom, with three kids under 10 and I had no other way to earn money. What happened is I started being asked by friends and family, that’s what happens isn’t it? Then you start to build the business that way.

Sam Ashdown: But you know what you wrote Duct Tape Marketing at the right time for me, because I started my business in 2004. I hit “go” on my website and expected the crowds to flock, and they didn’t. I thought “Oh, there must be something I’m missing.” Then I read Duct Tape Marketing and found out what it was I was missing so I literally followed your book to the letter. I built my business on a consultancy basis really, helping people sell what actually turned out to be high value homes for the most amount of money in the shortest time.

Sam Ashdown: So I became a consultant to homeowners then following the crash, our crash was just a little later than yours, so about 2008 the property crash I started being approached by real estate agents saying “Can you help us build our business?” And I’m thinking “I need to go and read Duct Tape Marketing again. So I did and I followed the principles again and helped them build their businesses. That was really, really enjoyable to me.

Sam Ashdown: There is a third element to this trilogy of property businesses, because I am collecting them I still have business one and two. Business two is coaching for real estate agents. Business three, two years ago, my son-in-law who is married to my daughter Molly, came to me and said “Why don’t we open up a real estate business?” And I said “Because they work really, really hard.” And he goes “Yeah, but we’d be great.” I go “Yeah, but it’s a lot of hard work.” So anyway, we started selling real estate from my dining room with two laptops and not much else and have built it into a really credible business. We’ve got 8 staff, a beautiful office in the English lake district, which is kind of like a mini Canada, full of lakes and mountains. Two years later we’ve just had our second anniversary last week and it has been an incredible journey and one I’ve been really proud to be part of.

Sam Ashdown: So that is kind of my trilogy of three real estate companies in various different ways. Two B2Bs and one B2C. No, two B2Cs and one B2B. That is really how we built it.

John Jantsch: I would have to think, maybe there are other people, I’m sure there are other people because it’s a big world out there. There is probably very few people in the real estate business that are coming at the customer and market from those three distinct positions. In some ways, your business where you are consulting with homeowners could be to send them to your real estate business, so they can sell their home.

Sam Ashdown: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

John Jantsch: Then you are coaching a real estate agent. It’s like you are going to corner the market at some point.

Sam Ashdown: It’s like I planned it that way. Actually, no I didn’t. I wish I could say I had, but each one has been accidental. Each one has a beautifully harmonious relationship with the other two. I have lots more planned as well, so maybe in a future broadcast episode I can tell you about the other plans. But so far, so good. They all work together in harmony and it has been fantastic.

John Jantsch: That is a principle a lot of people underestimate the power of. I mean when you say they work together in harmony, you also have leverage. You have multipliers with that. I think that is similar to my business. I teach small business owners, that’s grown. We consult and coach small business owners that’s grown to then coaching and consultants themselves. Everything we do for one business works for the other or supports the others. I think a lot of people have that opportunity to find those other leverage points. It’s not like going after a new market, per se, and it’s not the same as an expansion. It’s more of finding those leverage points in doing more with what you are already doing.

Sam Ashdown: Absolutely! Not only that, but you have such a deep insight into your clients minds and motivations. I can sit in front of a real estate agent and tell them exactly how their homeowner is feeling because I have sat in front of thousands of homeowners as a consultant that have told me A) why they chose that real estate agent, B) why they think the relationship has gone bad or well C) why they are moving in the first place and how that is going to effect their decision making process over the next weeks, months, and years. So all of those insights going toward a big jumbled strata of information allows me to be able to give the best advice to whoever my client is at that particular time knowing it is based on the best outcome for that client.

John Jantsch: I think it is interesting and probably a little backward, at least in the traditional sense, that you developed a knowledge for how the seller/homeowner feels and you turned that into coaching a real estate agent, although you have never been a real estate agent. Then you backed into being a real estate agent. I think it’s certainly not wrong, but not the path a lot of people take, is it?

Sam Ashdown: No. It’s kind of back to front. I think what it did give me was for years I’d be saying “Look, it doesn’t matter that I haven’t been where you are, because actually I can give you an outside perspective that you haven’t necessarily had before.” But actually now I have both sides of that. I have the consumer perspective and I’ve got running an agency and trying these ideas every single day. So I literally, as you do John, I try and I teach, and I try and I teach. It’s beautiful. It’s like a little dance.

John Jantsch: I’ve told people that all the time. All I do is I try stuff and I go tell people what worked.[inaudible 00:07:38] So one of the things that you did, and this maybe just supports the global picture I suppose, you created a pretty unique idea that you called the Success at Marketing Club. Those of you that are following along closely know that my guest’s name today is Sam and Success at Marketing spells SAM, a bit of brilliant branding there. Tell me about that. I mean obviously, we want to get in to what it is, but I’d like to hear your thinking on why you thought it was even a good idea.

Sam Ashdown: Absolutely. It started off purely selfishly, and has had two [inaudible 00:08:17]. The first time, I had just come out of a really difficult divorce. I had just moved with my three kids and everything was up in the air. I was moving to an area that although I’d lived in the past, I had only been around school gate moms. As much as I love school gate moms, I’m looking for entrepreneurial friendships and relationships to help me grow as a person, somebody that is not going to be bored to death as I tell them my hundredth story of my marketing successes that day.

Sam Ashdown: I wanted a place where I could come and meet other entrepreneurs and this very often happens, there is a gap for me therefore, there must be a gap for other people. Therefore, I create something to fill the gap. That is really what I did with the SAM club. It grew out of that and it grew very, very slowly for the first 2-3 years. It literally was me meeting up with entrepreneurial sort of solo preneurs once a month to talk about marketing. As my skills as a marketer grew, then so my teaching grew and I started being the teacher of the group.

John Jantsch: At that point it was no longer real estate, right? It was just anyone that had a business, right?

Sam Ashdown: No, it was nothing to do with real estate. Nobody there had anything to do with real estate at all which is why I learned what to cross with different businesses. I know you, John, have crossed all businesses, but I haven’t really done that before. I only really understood about property and marketing.

Sam Ashdown: So that was about six years ago, and I let it lag for a couple of years, much to my chagrin because I wish now I hadn’t. What happened when we decided, my co-director and I, to open up the estate agency, I said “I need some kind of networking system.” I had read your referral network, another plug for you. Referral Engine, sorry. I listened to it on Audible, which is even better and I thought “Well, what can I do to have a system? Not necessarily automated, I don’t mind doing it manually, but what is my system. What is my end result that I am looking to achieve?” I thought “I know, I’ll revive the SAM club, that will be a really good referral engine for me.”

Sam Ashdown: I launched it again, the first time we launched it was February two years ago, so two years and two months ago as we are recording this now. I had eight people then. I thought “Woo! That’s good. That’s exciting!” Then slowly, slowly it grew. We did a different topic every month and what was unique is that I let them choose the topic. I said “If there is ever a time that I don’t know enough about this topic to teach, go figure, I will bring in an expert.” A couple of times I’ve done that, but most of the time these are people running shops, restaurants, very small businesses that I am probably enough ahead of them to teach them. They are a bit of a workshop environment so as long as I do a bit of research I get to kind of be able to teach it.

Sam Ashdown: This is now two years later, so we’ve gone from eight people to the last time we met we had sixty-three people in the room, which just blew me away. We’ve got over two hundred and sixty people in the Facebook group. Every single one of them is a local business owner. Our referrals have gone through the roof. Just in the last one we had four people there that were either selling or had sold their house with us out of sixty-three people.

John Jantsch: Right, because every business owner owns a house, go figure, right?

Sam Ashdown: Every business owner owns a house. Every business owner has a great online profile and they are trying to make it better that is a win-win. So this builds. You are the master of the know, like, trust, try, repeat. That is exactly what this is. I think networking in somebody else’s group is never going to be as powerful as me standing in front of the SAM club as Sam and teaching them something I am passionate about. As I’m seen as a leader, seen as an influencer, and that then attracts other leaders and other influencers in my area. It becomes this self building entity that is bigger than me, which is fantastic.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and again another sort of leverage tool that is feeding, serving several purposes at once.

Sam Ashdown: Yes.

John Jantsch: So let’s get into the logistics.

Sam Ashdown: Sure.

John Jantsch: You mentioned that you come, and you have a topic. How often do you meet? How long is it? I’m assuming people pay a little money to be in it?

Sam Ashdown: No, absolutely. First the money that I charged was [inaudible 00:12:48]. I wanted just to meet as many entrepreneurs and local business owners as I could and I thought I’m going to lower the barrier so it’s so low they can’t say “no.” Five pounds, which is about seven dollars is what I charged at first. I just put the price up, only because we moved to a new venue. Venue is my most difficult challenge, only because we live in a tourist area and all the hotels that would let us have a room in the Winter would not let us have the same room in the summer because of weddings and tourists.

Sam Ashdown: We are actually in a golf club and that brings a whole[inaudible 00:13:18] benefits because of the type of people that play golf. So the referral network to high value homeowners is fantastic. I’m talking about high value homes with the owners, not high value homeowners. We meet every month on a Friday morning. Something I did accidentally and if anyone is listening to this and wants to [inaudible] this. I am very happy to have messages about this and help set these up, because I am amazed at how well this has done and I’m passionate about people doing this in their local communities.

John Jantsch: Before we give away your email address, which we will do in the show notes. I was going to ask you, so save this question. This seems like something maybe you could teach as an offering.

Sam Ashdown: If I wasn’t running three businesses, John.

John Jantsch: I’m going to steal the idea then and do it.

Sam Ashdown: Please have it! Call it the John Club.

John Jantsch: Alright, so Friday morning. And we will put your contact information in the show notes. What was the sort of stroke of luck thing that you said?

Sam Ashdown: Yeah, the stroke of luck was I did it in school mom friendly time. Bear with me here, I don’t know if you have BNI there, I’m sure you do. Six thirty, seven o’clock start, nine o’clock finish. You get a lot of people suited and booted so the professionals with the ties. Some of them, sorry about this guys, have egos to bring to the rooms. The ladies get a little pushed out if they are in softer kind of industries, sometimes that is what happens.

Sam Ashdown: What I found was that I started club at half past nine in the morning because that was what suited me. Our school drop off time is just before nine so I got loads and loads of school moms and it was just accidental. The best thing about school moms is they refer like crazy and they are all great on Facebook. You ask a question on Facebook and you get one hundred answers and they are all women. They just are, that is what the ladies in my group are like. So, we are probably about 9 to 10, sorry, one out of ten people will probably be a guy and the other nine will be women. I’ll give you a picture of our club last month if you want to put it on the show notes, because you’ve got to see the mixture.

Sam Ashdown: Two and a half hours in the morning, so the moms can do drop off. They get there, have a coffee, have a little chit chat, then they sit down learn about marketing for two and a half hours and they go and evangelize to everybody about how great the SAM club is. Obviously, by definition some of that spotlight falls on me, which is fantastic. I’m referring them, they’re referring me. A whole little referral engine.

Sam Ashdown: Something else that came out of it, just an accidental spark was we did a competition for AshdownJones on Facebook, just before Christmas 2018 to boost our likes a little. I needed twelve businesses to get to do a giveaway. Who am I going to approach? My SAM club members. So we do a little spotlight video every day for twelve days, they all get a big boost on their Facebook likes, we get a big boost on our Facebook likes. They love us, we love them, everybody loves each other. It’s just win-win-win. That group keeps getting bigger and bigger. I’ve gotten fantastic friendships out of it, fantastic referrals out of it. I couldn’t be more grateful for what I have received personally, but everybody seems to think that I’m giving to them.

John Jantsch: The beautiful thing is you have probably never asked once for a referral have you?

Sam Ashdown: No, never. Actually, when they bring referral to you, and I probably feel the same to them, they bring it like a gift. They are so excited. “Sam! Sam! I’ve got a referral for you!” It’s just lovely! I’m like “Oh, thank you! That’s so exciting!”

John Jantsch: Obviously, in the early days, like a lot of things, it was not paying off at all probably. You put in the effort, you went, you did your meeting for two and a half hours, and you went “Where did that day go?”

John Jantsch: Again, that’s like all things. That’s why it works, because that is the point where a lot of people give up. Like blogging, I wrote five blog posts and it’s not paying off so forget it.

John Jantsch: So today, other than the residual benefits that you have talked about, it’s pretty much self funding, even at seven pounds or whatever that pays for the coffee.

Sam Ashdown: Yeah! Well, now it’s ten pounds, about thirteen dollars, and it costs me about two thirds of that for the venue et cetera. I just give the rest to charity at the end of the year, that’s fine. To me as long as it’s cost neutral roughly either way then I am happy with that. After about a year Phil said to me, that’s my son-in-law, “Look, do you think this is worth it?” Friday morning two and a half hours, about four hours by the time I’ve chitchatted, had coffee et cetera. It’s only fifteen people, then seventeen people, then twenty people. It was painful.

Sam Ashdown: We reached about fourteen months and there was a tipping point and I actually suggested to everybody we had a bring a friend meeting. Because I thought every meeting is a bring a friend meeting I’m going to make it an official thing where they’re free and they’re friend is free and we swelled the numbers by about twenty percent on that day. It has never stopped since. It just keeps building momentum. We have a new member request every single day now.

John Jantsch: Talk a little about the topics you cover.

Sam Ashdown: They are just basic. Again, I just take a vote and I do it actually when we are in the club. That gets buy-in. I say “Okay, what do you want to know next time?” They just shout out all of these ideas. Then we take a vote and we go “Alright, next month we are going to do Facebook marketing.” Or Facebook Live, or Linked In, or blogging. This month, which is on Friday, we are doing one of your favorite topics, John. In fact, I need to get you to come over and speak if that’s okay, which is how to get Google to find your website in brackets SEO. Which they haven’t heard of.

John Jantsch: That’s great. I was doing a presentation one time to a group of business owners one time that probably should have known better and I was telling them “You need this element and this element. And SEO is so important because…” and about ten minutes in someone raised their hand and said “What is SEO?” Oops.

Sam Ashdown: Teaching really brings you down to Earth doesn’t it? It really does. When they say “Why’d you do it like that?” And you think “Why do we do it like that? That’s a really good question.” I really try to teach to the lowest in the room, but also give some really good tips for the highest in the room to go after. What I’ve also had to do is put together some advanced workshops for certain topics, Facebook ads for example. I’m pretty good at Facebook ads so I want to have a little advanced group. I charge separately for that, that’s fine. Mostly, it’s the main socials and content. All the stuff you and I talk about all day long. I do a bit of direct mail, because direct mail is one of my hot topics and I think it’s very underused. Content, I don’t really do website design, but I kind of do the customer journey. We did do campaign planning, that was a really good one because campaign planning can bring everything in.

John Jantsch: Yeah, absolutely. Have you ever considered or with all the technology we have now, brought anybody in via Skype or something like that?

Sam Ashdown: No. You know why, the wifi in the golf club is terrible. If you’re offering, John, I’ll see if I can get them to upgrade.

John Jantsch: No, no I want the first class plane ticket.

Sam Ashdown: I’m sure something can be arranged.

John Jantsch: What’s funny is, you are doing this for a specific purpose and it is serving its purpose, but I can envision somebody out there going “Okay, I’m going to do the seven pound one and the seventy pound one and then they’ll be a seven hundred dollar group.” It wouldn’t be that hard to do it would it?

Sam Ashdown: No, it wouldn’t. Actually, I think that is absolutely credible to build up a business like that based on a club, but I think if every single local business owner thinks about how they could use this, it doesn’t matter if you are a restaurateur, shop owners, any kind of services owner they could do this. They don’t have to call it a marketing club, it could be a business club, and it could bring an expert each time. They could top and tail it, do the intro and outro, and it would be their club. They’re bringing everybody together and it’s not a networking club, it’s a learning and discovery club.

John Jantsch: I think that is a real key. Like you mentioned BNI, BNI serves a purpose for a lot of people, but a lot of people also feel like I don’t want to go there and be beat to death if I didn’t bring referrals.

Sam Ashdown: I think you have to be a very outgoing person to make BNI work for you effectively. You don’t have to be a very outgoing person to come alone, sit at the back, be shy with a notebook, and not even raise your hand and learn about Facebook marketing for two and half hours. You get a huge amount of value after that.

John Jantsch: I will say, I know you better than my listeners do at this point, but you bring a couple attributes to make this work. You are terribly giving, you are a connector, you chitchat for an hour and a half after the thing with some people that want to and that is really what made it work. I think if someone is listening and thinking “This is brilliant. I’ll put together a club and just get a bunch of people together and make money for me.” You invested significantly before it ever made any money for you.

Sam Ashdown: I think even if somebody does want to make money out of this, it is possible. I think that they are going to have to put the leg work in it first and it will feel like it’s not working. Suddenly, as long as you give, give, give, give, it will just work. You’ll like this John, you are a very generous person. You give, give and you don’t ask for anything back, but those things come back to you anyway.

John Jantsch: I do think that it’s one of those sort of non intuitive facts of life that you are going to make a bunch of money if you don’t try to make a bunch of money off of this.

Sam Ashdown: I know. When will people realize this? I’m fifty it’s taken me till forty-nine and a half to realize this truth. The people that I really respect and listen to, like your podcast, the marketers that are really successful on lots of levels, they are all givers. It’s not coincidence.

John Jantsch: I bet you’re going to listen to this episode.

Sam Ashdown: Oh yeah.

John Jantsch: So Sam, tell us where people can find out more about you? As I said, we’ll put the contact info in the show notes because I do know that your offer to tell anybody about how to do this is genuine.

Sam Ashdown: Absolutely, thank you!

Sam Ashdown: If you are in the North of England and selling your house, please come to AshdownJones which is my little agency. Although, that seems probably a little bit unlikely. I suggest that if you are a real estate agent you follow me on Marketing Magic for estate agents, which is on Facebook.

Sam Ashdown: My main site is home-truths.co.uk, unlike your dot coms, I couldn’t get the dot com, and that is where you will find all manner of home selling advice. One of those three places is where you will catch me, but you’ll put the best email address in the show notes for people. I’d love to hear from people thinking about doing this in their area.

John Jantsch: AshdownJones sounds like a car that James Bond would drive.

Sam Ashdown: Well, it is. That is exactly what it should be. No, I’m the Ashdown and he’s the Jones. It’s a beautiful partnership.

John Jantsch: Sam, thanks so much for joining and sharing so willingly. Hopefully we’ll see you somewhere out on the road, or I’ll get to the UK, who knows.

Sam Ashdown: Oh I really hope so John. It’s been my pleasure, thank you so much!

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/transcript-giving-back-creates-success/

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How Giving Back Can Create Business Success

How Giving Back Can Create Business Success written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Sam Ashdown Podcast Transcript

Today on the podcast I speak with real estate and marketing expert Sam Ashdown. Ashdown has built three successful real estate businesses: as a consultant to real estate agents; a consultant to home sellers, called HomeTruths; and a real estate agent, with her company AshdownJones.

Beyond her passion for real estate is a deep knowledge of marketing strategy and tactics. She became an expert to promote her own businesses, but then expanded to start a club to help other small business owners with their marketing efforts.

Ashdown speaks about how she started her own businesses, how she became passionate about marketing, and how and why she runs the Success at Marketing Club.

Questions I ask Sam Ashdown:

How do you find leverage points within your existing business to develop other elements of your approach?

What is the Success at Marketing Club, and why did you start it?

How do you stick with an idea when you’re not seeing immediate results?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How to get creative about building your referral engine.

Why trying and teaching is a unique way to grow your business (and learn something yourself).

How a non-traditional path can actually lead you to a richer understanding of your industry and business.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Sam Ashdown:

Learn more about Sam Ashdown

Follow Marketing Magic on Facebook

Check out HomeTruths

Email Sam Ashdown directly

Follow on Twitter

Follow on Instagram

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Want to learn how to get the most from podcast advertising and sponsorship? Check out our ultimate guide on the process.

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/giving-back-creates-success/

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Transcript of Tapping Into Existing Connections to Network Smarter

Transcript of Tapping Into Existing Connections to Network Smarter written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

This transcript is sponsored by our transcript partner – Rev – Get $10 off your first order

John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by AXA Equitable Life. That’s axa.com. Advice, retirement and life insurance.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Burkus. He’s a bestselling author, speaker and associate professor of Leadership and Innovation at Oral Roberts University. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Friend of a Friend: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career. So David, thanks for joining me.

David Burkus: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch: So how’s that university gig workout? As an author-speaker, is that a good like little side gig?

David Burkus: Yeah funny you say side gig. That’s actually exactly how I described it to a student may be about two years ago. When my second book came out, I got sort of crazy-busy in that spring season and I think I went an entire week. I’m supposed to teach Monday, Wednesday, Friday class. I think I want an entire week without seeing them just because I was running all around. And then maybe a week and a half after, one of the students was sort of pushing back on why I had been gone for so long. And he goes, “Yeah, why are you even gone? What’s that side gig thing that you do?” And I looked at him dead in the face and I said this, “This is my side gig, right? What I’m doing out there is my full-time thing.” And that’s actually been the case so that that semester everything sort of came to a head.

David Burkus: So I came to them and asked about, I’m sort of on a semi-permanent sabbatical. I teach one class a semester. I still have my appointment in time and rank and all of that kind of stuff. But I mean I don’t get paid for full-time. I get paid for the one class a semester that I teach and so it feels much more like a side gig now. Now, it’s pretty much Monday afternoons. I know where I’m going to be. I have lunch on campus and then I’m there until I teach my class that I teach at 4:30 because it’s for the MBA students and that kind of stuff. And then that’s it. And then the rest of the week, including today, I barely think about it unless someone asks me what it’s like.

John Jantsch: So this has nothing to do with your book we’re going to talk about, but I’m curious.

David Burkus: That’s fine.

John Jantsch: You as a writer, speaker, do you find that world that you play in a lot brings information to the student group or do you sometimes find that interacting with students and what they’re thinking doing, feeling brings stuff to your writing?

David Burkus: It’s probably a little bit of both. The biggest benefit that I like about it is that I get the chance to test out ideas. My background’s in organizational behavior. All of my books are very sort of social-science based. And so the real challenge as a writer is pairing that with the right case study, the right example, the right what have you. So I’m doing all of that research for a book. But then if I’m lecturing on that exact same topic, I can throw that story in, see what the reaction is, does it make sense? Does it not? Those sort of things. So having that kind of built-in test market has been really cool.

David Burkus: The other way that it’s been helpful to go the other way, and this is less of the time, but this happens as well, is I run a daily little YouTube kind of a two to three-minute tip every single weekday and a good amount of the tips. Now, the goal is to do it every single day. Now, that we’re like nine months in, you get a little dry. So a lot of student questions follow-up questions, “Well wait a minute. Why does this have to be the case?” Et cetera, then provoke ideas for, “Oh, that would be a great clip.” So let me write that down real quick. I feel bad because I teach undergrads and MBA students and we’re very sort of no technology because we don’t want you texting in the middle of class what have you. But when moments like that happen, I literally take out my phone and open up little notes file and put it in. So I feel bad because I’m clearly not practicing what I preached there. But it works.

John Jantsch: So in the subtitle, understanding the hidden networks that can transform your life and your career. Let’s define what a hidden network is.

David Burkus: Yeah. So this is a term we kind of used to describe the people in your network that a lot of us overlook, right? So most of us, I mean even when I say the word networking, most of us think it’s about converting strangers into friends or into prospects or into however we’re using the term. And so we think about our close contacts, the people that we see every day or every week, the people that we’re regularly doing business with, our current clients, all of that sort of thing. And then we think networking, we think right to those strangers. What we ignore are the people that are, the term in social sciences is weak or dormant ties, and we ignore those people that are wonder two degrees of separation out. And if you look at where a lot of the new opportunity comes in, yes strangers are going to have new information, new ideas, new potential referrals, new needs themselves that you might be able to fit, but you’ve got to sort of warm up, build rapport with them.

David Burkus: It’s that middle network, that hidden network, hidden because a lot of us are overlooking it, where there is just as many new and different pieces of information, like a total stranger, unlike your close contacts. But there is either they already know you or they know someone who knows you. They’re that friend of a friend. And so building rapport with them is a whole lot easier. So we find in that network you get a whole lot more value and I usually define networking now is just paying attention to your close contacts and those people in that hidden network, dormant ties. And people that are one or maybe two degrees of separation out from you. And if you do that well enough, you never have to go to a networking mixer or something like that ever again.

John Jantsch: Well, I think one of the challenges some folks are having with that is because, I completely agree, but I was accepting some connection requests on LinkedIn today and I noticed I have 13,000 first tier connections, which means I must have what a million-second tier connections?

David Burkus: Yeah.

John Jantsch: It’s almost like the online world theoretically made that easier, but it really made it much harder.

David Burkus: Yeah. Well I mean it did. And one of the things that we talk about right in the very in the opening chapter of the book is I pushed back on my editor a lot for writing about any technology. And I openly say in the intro, like, “I can’t teach you how to use Twitter properly, and I can’t teach you what the perfect rules for LinkedIn are,” because I’m sure you’ve guessed this too. Everybody uses it a little bit differently, and everybody has a different definition of what they count as connection. So I often say that technology should be a supplement to not a replacement for your existing face-to-face network. So my definition of connection and the one that we use in a lot of network science studies is do you know them in real life, not just forum?

David Burkus: For example, John, unfortunately, you and I, we’re still friend of a friend connections because we haven’t had that in-person thing. Everybody uses tools like that a little bit differently. The irony though is even if you shrunk it down to your connections or people that you’ve met, or you’ve worked on a project with, people that you are part of that face-to-face network, that one or two degrees of separation is still, you’re still talking about millions of people. And so learning how to kind of navigate it and ask the right questions when you go out to that network becomes a really important thing as well.

John Jantsch: I was on in the early days of social media and I do think that the initial phase was, “Get lots of followers, get lots of friends, make lots of connections, isn’t this great?” And then I think people kind of looked up and went, “Oh, crap, I can’t manage this anymore.” I think a lot of people who have really turned to that idea of, “Okay, I’m going to use LinkedIn just as you said, to really have real connections, but then make sure that it’s manageable numbers rather than just big numbers.

David Burkus: Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think everybody has to set their own rules. Because of the work that I do kind of treat LinkedIn as a platform that people can consume content that I’m putting out on there. So we put the video on there, we do articles on there and what have you. So even my rules are a little bit different, but I did a very similar thing with Facebook. Similar basically now, actually they work really, really similar, except one’s full of puppy photos and political memes and the other is full of real business stuff.

David Burkus: But I went from probably 1,800 to 2,000 contacts or friends in Facebook to less than 150. And actually, every year it’s become a joke with 150 or so that are still around. Every year I do a Christmas purge, so the day after Christmas I sit down and go through, it takes me two or three days because I don’t want to spend six hours doing it. I do a little bit at a time. But my goal is by New Year’s to have looked at everyone’s profile and asked myself the question, “Do I still want to see them in my news feed and do I still want them to see my stuff in their newsfeed?” And so I go through kind of every year and do that to treat that network that way. Because otherwise, it’s sort of overwhelming, right?

John Jantsch: Absolutely. I actually heard somebody, I thought this was interesting advice. They said that their approach was that they … You know how Facebook tells you it’s David’s birthday today? Then you through, then you go, “If I don’t want to say happy birthday to that person necessarily in person, they’re gone.” And I thought well that’s interesting.

David Burkus: Oh, I go even deeper actually, because I’ll say happy birthday to lots of people. My question is actually, “Do I want you to see pictures of my kids?” Because what happens is my first book came out before we had children. I was building the whole platform and so I was connecting with everybody, whoever, just you never know where it’s going to go type of thing. And then it wasn’t actually my first born, I didn’t notice it too much. But when my second born candidly, we spent a long time in the NICU, and we’re posting these sort of updates that are actually fairly emotional. And then a random person that saw me speak in Cleveland is typing a message on there. And I’m just sort of like, “I know you mean well, but this makes me uncomfortable,” so I’m clearly going to have to do something about this.

David Burkus: That’s become my question. I’ve heard other people do similar questions. I’m forgetting who it is, but I was talking to somebody that chooses to prune LinkedIn on the basis of, “Would I give this person $20 knowing I’m never going to get paid back?” Right. And I mean, there’s a lot of people in my life that I would be like, “Yeah, I’ll lend you $20,” knowing that. I mean, John, I’d lend you $20 knowing I’m never going to get paid back. Right? But it’s not that big. There’re not that many people in the world that I would do that for.

John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by AXA Equitable Life. It’s time we started giving life insurance the credit it deserves. That’s because life insurance can be so much more than protection for you and your family. It also helps you live, keep and potentially build more cash value over time to learn more. Go to axa.com.

Let’s talk about another concept that I think is central to this, and others have, I mean I think this has become a common sort of term in networking circles, but this idea of superconnectors.

David Burkus: What I think is interesting is they play an interesting role, and they don’t play the role we expect. So from a strict network science side, and then I’ll flip over to kind of what this means, especially for entrepreneurs. From a strict network science side, we thought that superconnectors, the people who had a disproportionate number of connections, if you were to ask everybody in industry, for example, how many people they know and you graphed it, you wouldn’t get an inverted U, you’d get a power law, you’d get an 80/20 principle, right? So 20% of the people have 80% or at least are connected to 80% of the people in a network. And we call them superconnectors. And for the longest time we thought that superconnectors, we’re the people that that kept the network together, that the people that explained that everybody is only five or six introductions away from each other.

David Burkus: I mean, we thought Kevin Bacon was a superconnector, right? Because everybody in film can be connected to him. The interesting thing is, and that’s not the case, it’s actually, I mean, again, to go back to those weak and dormant ties, every one of us has those. We’ve all changed jobs or moved to cities or what have you. So there’s so much that super nerdy term is resiliency in the network that superconnectors don’t do that. What they do is when you investigate where they come from, you find this other really interesting principle, which is the principle of preferential attachment. And that’s this idea that over time, as you gain more connections, as you’re better known inside of the network, more organic connections come to you, right? The most connected people in a community are usually going to be the ones that are most likely to meet new members into that community. Which makes sense, right? If you’re the person everybody knows you have a better chance of getting those introductions.

David Burkus: Why I like this is for your average person, whether you’re sort of a newbie-entrepreneur, or you’re somebody looking for your career, whatever you’re looking for you. We all look to those people that just seem to know everybody that seemed to get business coming. We’re struggling to come to find new clients and they’re just getting natural organic leads coming in all of the time. That’s preferential attachment at work.

David Burkus: The difference is usually they’ve put in that work for a number of years ahead of time to build up all of those contexts. It kind of explains why networking appears to be so easy to some people and why we struggle. What it also says is that it holds out the promise that if you put in the work, and you put in the intention, you can build that same thing. You can roll that snowball down the hill and get to that point as well. I don’t know that everybody can be a super connector, but everybody can leverage preferential attachment. That the more you’re being intentional about your connections and your network, the more potential new connections come in.

John Jantsch: That ties back to our weak ties, right? I mean, because one of the things I’m envisioning people thinking is, “Oh, okay, you’re right. I’ve got all these weak ties out there. I should go start selling them something. And obviously, and we’ve all gotten that email, “I’m a friend of David.”

David Burkus: Oh, I’ve gotten that LinkedIn, yeah, exactly.

John Jantsch: So how do you actually, effectively, knowing they’re there and knowing that they’re powerful, how do you effectively approach and engage them?

David Burkus: So two strategies or maybe the same strategy in a twofold thing, but that everybody can put into place. The first is to have a system where weak ties are getting regularly checked in with, right? If you haven’t talked to somebody in 18 months, it is not the right time to try, and sell them something, right? But it is the right time to let them know that you remember them, and you still care about them. And so there’s a couple of different ways you can do this. My favorite is sort of social media arbitrage. We’ve been talking about it a little bit, but that is that everyone is so overwhelmed than what you can do is find a more valuable means of communication. So you see that somebody is posting this new thing. I have a good friend that just announced on Facebook that he and his wife are expecting, right? And the guy’s got 4,000 connections. And so if I just click like or comment, that’s going to get lost.

David Burkus: So the better way to do it is you find that information that a weak tie is broadcasting, and you send them a more private message. In this case, I sent him a text message, right? And what that does is it resets what I call the clock, the stopwatch of awkwardness, right? Because the longer a period of time you go between interacting with a weak tie, the more awkward it’ll get that next time. So it resets that clock, and if that’s all you do, now you’ve built a connection to where they don’t feel awkward reaching back out to you. If you need something, you don’t feel awkward reaching out to them. So that can be three months, six months, a year. It depends on the connection, but that sort of step one.

David Burkus: And then step two is I very rarely find situations where all of those weak ties that people have assembled are perfect clients. And so I usually find that you’ve got to go into that one degree of separation out of that friend of a friend network to find that. The most common questions I coach people to ask are, “Who do you know in blank?” With blank being that industry or that city or whatever it is you’re trying to find people in. Or a similar spin on that question is, “Who do you know that’s at blank?” Which is basically a stage of life. So for example, I mean, and this is a terrible example, but if you sold cars, right. The wrong question to ask is, “who do you know that’s looking for a car?” Because everybody’s going to feel weird. But if you ask, “Who do you know that is expecting a new child?” Because that means you’re going to have to rethink your car situation, right?

David Burkus: Or even in business, “Who do you know that is growing their business rapidly, and is at that point where there’re certain systems that they can’t really just do on pen and paper anymore?” “Oh, well, we sell this CRM system,” or whatever it is. You find a way to ask, “Who do you know in,” that is in a certain stage. And then if you’re the solution stage, that can be a potential referral. The reason I like, “Who do you know?” Is that it gives you usually a list of two or three names and this is really key. It gives you a list of two or three names that that person would be comfortable introducing you to. Because if they wouldn’t be comfortable introducing you to them, they’ll just not list them in those names. And that works a whole lot more effectively than sort of LinkedIn stalking a prospective client. And then trying to trace your way back to find the right introduction to them. That’s just an awkward mess.

John Jantsch: Well, and I actually think you do that person a favor too. I get these all the time, and I’m like, “I don’t know.” They’re like, “Let me know if there’s any way I can help you.” these requests on LinkedIn. And I was like, “Well, I don’t know what you do. I don’t know who you are. I have no way that I can tell you how you could help me.” And I think that’s a lot of times when people aren’t specific about a way in which they could do something or what they’re actually looking for. I think now the universe is potential and I think that makes it tough.

David Burkus: Yeah. Oh, I totally agree. And so when you cut it into, “Okay, this is the type of person I’m looking for, a prospective client, new hire.” I have a lot of people that do this with companies, “I’m looking to work at this company. Who do you know that that works there or works in that industry to at least get me closer?” It’s a good way to throw that question out, and it’s less vague. And I think it goes the other way too with us. Right? So the weirdest thing about that, “How can I help you question,” is like, “Whatever I say, the odds that you’re going to have that knowledge, skill or ability are really small,” but you might know somebody who does, right? I have a friend who was having a baby. I don’t know anything about having a baby, but I’ve got a friend who’s a prenatal doctor like, “If you need someone to talk to you about vitamins, I can connect to you.”

John Jantsch: One of the problems, of course, that I think we probably don’t recognize. And this isn’t just a network, I mean this happens in your community and that is the concept of homophily. Did I say that right?

David Burkus:  Yes. Yeah.

John Jantsch: And the idea that you tend to hang around with that are like you and think like you and look like you and that’s not always a good thing. And, in fact, used our last presidential election is kind of a way to illustrate that.

David Burkus: Yeah, people love to hate that part of the … Well, no, I mean really, regardless of how you feel. And I’ll put this out there and even this we’re going to get angry letters about, so I apologize, regardless of how you feel about any of the four candidates. Right. Well, I won’t even limit this to two the consensus by a lot of people now two years out looking at that election is that Hillary Clinton lost that election more than Donald Trump won it. Right. And there’s a lot of jokes about ignoring Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. Ironically, these are the Michael Moore states. These are the states that 12 months before the actual election, Michael Moore was warning people about saying that if you shifted too far to the coast in the big cities, and you’re ignoring that kind of rust belt union vote that normally goes blue, it’ll flip red.

David Burkus: And that’s kind of precisely what happened from the campaign headquarters in Brooklyn. The team had models that said we’re going to win Michigan … We don’t have to go to Wisconsin and we’re going to win Wisconsin. And that didn’t happen. And that’s one example and it was a salient example and it was me attempting to hit a nerve of emotions, so people talk about that example. But history is full of that. Business history is full of executives making terrible decisions because they had limited information. We go back into further presidential history, we have things like the Bay of Pigs and the entire sort of groupthink fiasco that came out of that. And the reason is quite simply that homophily idea. That it’s not just that we like people who are similar to us. In fact, that’s actually the smaller part of it.

David Burkus: The big part of it is those new connections. Most of us aren’t intentional. Most of us are just organic about how we make new connections and how we meet new people. And the problem is that those people are going to be really similar to the people we already know. So unless we’re intentionally looking for people that are different from us, the network is not going to serve them to us. We could be out there thinking, “I’m really connected, so I clearly have all of this information,” and not realize that we’re ignoring whole segments of our target population.

John Jantsch: I had a friend, or a connection request on LinkedIn the other day, and it said that we had 675 mutual connections. I had absolutely no idea who this person was. I mean, how is that possible?

David Burkus: Well, I mean again, if you look at the research. We like to joke about six degrees of separation, but it’s been proven multiple times. I’ve never seen a study done through LinkedIn, although ironically they should do this. In Facebook that the 2 billion people that are members of Facebook are connected by four. It’s 4.2 potential introductions on average. Right? So I actually think of that not as, because depending on your reaction to the story I just told you may or may not want to be six introductions away from the president. But I look at it is that idea that the network is so vast and interconnected that there are millions, tens of millions. Pretty much everyone that is in your professional network or that’s going to have an influence on your career these days is either a friend already, or they’re a friend of a friend and that’s good news if you can do it with some intentionality and authenticity. If you’re trying to be that kind of weirdo spammer, I think it’s actually bad news because people are going to get tired of your thing faster.

John Jantsch: So you’ve already kind of bashed the idea of networking mixers, and I’ve not played in that pool for a long, long time. And so I don’t even know if they’re that popular, but I really loved your, I don’t think it was a whole chapter, but this idea of a different way instead of just going and saying, “Hi, I’m David, nice to meet you.” This idea of sharing activities. I think that’s actually, to me probably my favorite part of the book about how to, and it wouldn’t even just be networking. I mean, I think that’s just a better way may be to meet friends?

David Burkus: Oh, well, I agree, but I’m also kind of the opinion now that everyone, even professional contacts we should put in the friend bucket anyway. Right. So yeah, shared activities, I mean the gist of it is that we know from research and human behavior that people don’t actually mix at these mixers, The networking hour at that conference, the meetup that you saw advertised. And so you showed up to it. I mean literally sort of speed networking things. People spend most of their time with people that they already know. And even when they’re meeting new people, they usually stick to a script of who are you and what do you do? And then immediately try, and figure out are your prospect or can I help you? Or that sort of thing. And because of that, we don’t really get to understand them multi-facets of people.

David Burkus: And so these shared activities, a shared activity is a term coined by Brian Uzzi and Sharon Dunlap that deals with specific activities that draw diverse sets of new people where there’re three components to it. Where there is an objective other than just knowing people. So in the book, we talk about dinner parties, and the idea that you can cook together. That’s one objective. I was just working with a group last week that really sees their charity work, so they have a Habitat for Humanity. They plan a 5K, all of that as shared activities that draw people from throughout the company. It can be anything where there is that objective.

David Burkus: That objective requires interdependence, so one person can’t do all of the work and then there are stakes to not achieving that objective. That gets people sort of emotionally involved. They have to be involved, they have to be interdependent in order to achieve that objective. And what we find is you build deeper relationships faster with someone. When you put all of that Who are you and what do you do perfect elevator’s pitch stuff to the side, and you focus in on that objective. You end up having different conversations. Conversations where you find the fancy term is uncommon commonalities with people. Stuff that you have in common with them that you never would have expected, and you end up meeting people that are more different than you. Then you would meet if you were just at this networking event, trusting your script to lead you to the right person.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I mean that can be Comic-Con.

David Burkus: Yeah.

John Jantsch: You know what I mean? You find these people that you never would meet anywhere else, but you have this shared connection. And I think there’s so much more potential in that going beyond the sort of, “I’ve got my armor up,” that happens at a networking event.

David Burkus: Oh, no, I mean, it’s not Comic-Con, but my weird esoteric fact is I’ve trained in Brazilian Jujitsu as a martial art for the last 14 years. And when you find someone, even if like you’re getting the weirdest vibe from them ever, and then you find out that you have that in common, suddenly you’re like, “Oh,” now you’re friends. Right? The only thing I can compare it to is if you’ve ever traveled to a foreign country, and you hear an American accent, even if they’re from Texas and you’re from New York, it’s suddenly like, “Oh, we have this thing in common,” and it only matters because it’s uncommon compared to the people around you.

John Jantsch: David, where can people find out more about Friend of a Friend and your work? I know you’ve got the book on your site.

David Burkus:  Yeah, well I have it on my site, but I’ll tell you if you listen to this show, the best place to find out more about it as the show notes for this episode. Because we’ll link to all that and John wants you to go to those anyway. My website’s davidburkus.com but the easiest thing to do is do want John wants and check out the show notes for this episode because he wants to know you care.

John Jantsch: Man, can you come in the last five minutes of every podcast episode that I [inaudible 00:24:50]? Can I do that because sometimes I even forget to ask? We will definitely have it in the show notes. We love those reviews. We want you to buy David’s book. How’s that?

David Burkus:  I love it. Love it. That’s perfect. You plug my book. I’ll plug your show notes and leave a rating and review. It helps them spread the word about the show, and it helps them know you’re listening.

John Jantsch: Yeah, absolutely. And I went to University of Kansas and did you go to Oral Roberts or is that?

David Burkus: I went as an undergrad at Robertson. I went to grad school at the University of Oklahoma. So we have seen each other on the field of play many times.

John Jantsch: Well, and I think our basketball coach did a stint at Oral Roberts. Didn’t Bill Self coach at Oral Roberts?

David Burkus: Yes, he did.

John Jantsch: It’s kind of where you got to start, I think, isn’t it?

David Burkus: Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch: And then he went back over at Oklahoma State, I think, where he was an undergrad.

David Burkus: Yep.

John Jantsch: Enough of that nonsense. David, was great catching up with you and hope to see you as soon out there on the road in real life so that I can actually be considered part of your network.

David Burkus: There you go. I love it. I love it. I hope that happens soon too. Will talk to you again soon.

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/transcript-smart-networking/

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Tapping Into Existing Connections to Network Smarter

Tapping Into Existing Connections to Network Smarter written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with David Burkus Podcast Transcript

Today’s podcast guest is best-selling author, speaker, and professor David Burkus.

Burkus is an expert on leadership; he teaches leadership and innovation at Oral Roberts University and has delivered keynote speeches and workshops for a variety of organizations, including Google, Microsoft, and the U.S. Naval Academy.

Burkus is the author of three books, and has contributed to the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

His latest book, Friend of a Friend: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career, is about the power of tapping into your real life connections to grow your network in a meaningful way. The art of smart networking is what we talk about on today’s episode.

Questions I ask David Burkus:

What is a hidden network?

Has the online world made networking easier or harder?

What role do “super connectors” play in this discussion?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How to set limits in your online communities, and reduce your connections to those who really matter to you.

How to get the attention of your weak ties by sharing information thoughtfully.

Why “Who do you know in…?” is the key question to ask when looking to expand your network.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about David Burkus:

Learn more about David Burkus

Learn more about Friend of a Friend

Connect on LinkedIn

Follow on Facebook

Follow on Twitter

Follow on Instagram

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Want to learn how to get the most from podcast advertising and sponsorship? Check out our ultimate guide on the process.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by AXA Equitable Life.

It’s time we start giving life insurance the credit it deserves. That’s because life insurance can be so much more than protection for you and your family. It can also help you live, keep, and potentially build more cash value over time. To learn how, go to www.AXA.com.

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from Duct Tape Marketing https://ducttapemarketing.com/smart-networking/