Podcast

Transcript

Hernan: Boom ladies and gentlemen we’re ready for another live episode of the business pros and if you’re worried about marketing because it’s something you got to do but maybe you’re not knowing where to do it, how to do it, or how much it’s going to cost. 

Let’s get this one on the road. Here we go. Before we start, I have one small favor to ask, please leave a comment it can be advice, critiques, tips, or feedback, or share this with someone because your engagement is the most valuable and most powerful form of social currency. So thank you and welcome to another episode.

I bet that most entrepreneurs out there have had this thought – marketing is too expensive and too time consuming. I mean we’ve all had that. Well, today we have a guest here to share some marketing tactics and techniques that are free and or low-cost ways to make your marketing much much easier. So if you’re looking for a way to jump-start your sales, you’re going to want to hear this Ready-Made Marketing strategy on today’s episode. Let’s welcome to the show from BersonDeanStevens, Miss Lori Berson – welcome to the program.

Lori: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on today.

Hernan: Marketing, oh it’s one of those things that I think a lot of businesses dread mainly because they’re really good at what they do. If they’re plumbers, they’re really good at doing that one thing. Construction workers are really good at doing that one thing. You know accountants and so forth, but marketing their business ah that might be a little tough. 

How did you get into this space and how are you making it easy for them?

Lori: I’ve been in the marketing realm for over 25 years creating revenue-generating strategies and concepts for clients in a myriad of industries. Everybody from financial services with Charles Schwab to Dole Food Company – you know selling pineapples, marketing for Hot Pockets, and also working in the entertainment industry. I did a lot of work with Seinfeld as well as motion picture studios, and things like that. 

My co-author, Evon Rosen, and I at the start of Covid noticed that there was a definite need to help small businesses and independent contractors to market themselves, as you mentioned you know their focus is on their business and marketing can sometimes take a back seat, which of course affects sales. We wanted to help out and help them jump-start sales sod we wrote the book Ready-Made Marketing. It’s full of tactics and customizable templates as well as over 400 technology resources – most of them free because the other problem is everybody’s got budgets, even the Fortune 500 companies – they all have budgets too. But the smaller businesses have even tighter budgets of course. With Covid and the downturn, and now with a recession coming for some, it’s a way that they could get marketing advice easily and without having to hire a marketing firm. 

Hernan: It gets ridiculously expensive. So you’ve been in this thing for 25 years which is amazing and you learned how to market a show about nothing. So if you’re talking to the show about nothing that develops some amazing skills, by the way that’s Seinfeld for all you younger people right.

Let’s talk about that entrepreneur that’s getting started, they’re in the space they know they’ve got to go out and get more clients and the problem is once you get into this space you realize that everybody is offering you some sort of solution. Look over here lead generation, look over here conversion, look over here you’re bombarded with marketing language. First of all, you need to learn, and then second who’s doing a good job at what they’re doing? I mean everybody can say they’re doing some marketing but what does that actually mean, what is marketing? 

Lori: It’s basically selling – one-to-many. Where sales is more one-to-one selling. And now with account based marketing, you have the opportunity to go to one-to-few so you can more finely target your audience. But basically, it’s one-to-many using various channels. Nowadays, we have way more channels than we used to and we employ a lot of them. Of course social media, video messaging, and video marketing. We train our clients on these platforms.

We’re doing another webinar next week on social selling and how to use it because some of the channels have gotten really tired and with people still working from home or even people in the office, they don’t pick up their phone so cold calls are less and less effective. The recipients are getting bombarded. Different avenues are needed to get around some of the stuff that doesn’t work. There are so many things out there and so we help people figure out what tools to use and how to approach their target audience.

Hernan: Let’s talk about the different channels that are out there because there are different opportunities, plus we’ve got Evon here on our chat giving us some heads up on what we should be talking about. Let’s talk about the channels because I know for example when I first got into the real estate space, direct mail was huge. This is what everybody was doing when I had my very first computer repair company, we were sending flyers every Tuesday. You’d get all that junk mail well we were part of that junk mail right and then email started to come out and you started switching over to email campaigns and drip campaigns. But I’m finding that direct mail has almost found its way back. It’s almost like we’ve forgotten about it so much that it becomes one of those channels that all of a sudden if you use it correctly, could be something that really works out. What are some of the channels that you’re using today that are maybe dated and some that are really working well?

Lori: You bring up a great point because direct mail years ago was used a lot and one of the difficult things is direct mail is way more expensive than email. Because email is super cheap, you know pennies, and the return on investment with emails is still really high. What’s really nice these days with direct mail is there are new technologies that integrate direct mail with your CRM – like Salesforce, your customer relationship management platform. So it makes it much easier. Direct mail is still kind of expensive but if done right and done with an ABM process it’s really effective.

Hernan: That one you mentioned made a resurgence. But now with these new tools, it’s much easier. 

Lori: Social selling is huge and in terms of engaging with people on social it’s not about just doing the direct message, for example: here’s my stuff buy from me. The hard pitches don’t work because no one really wants to be sold to, but doing engaging types of comments as well as doing a consistent cadence of posts is effective. What we found is using a multi-channel strategy is the best because you’re always going to have some people who like the phone, some people who like email, some people who like social, etc. One of the things I’ll just touch on with direct mail is these days you may not have home addresses so one of the platforms we use is Sendoso and it’s combined with email so you can actually get an address confirmation through their platform and then make sure you’re sending your package to the right person. 

Hernan: These are tools that we can use and that’s one of the things that I liked about when I read about what you guys are doing. You guys have a book out and most marketing books are all about strategy whereas yours is more about tactics, things that we can actually implement versus theoretical stuff. I can read this and put this into action right now and start seeing results. Tell me about the book.

Lori: I’ll do a little show and tell. Ready-Made Marketing has two main sections. In the first one, we give you everything from outreach best practices and templates, all customizable templates, everything from cold emails to warm emails, follow-up, re-engagement, and goodbye emails. We’ve got video messaging, how to conduct panels, to get on a panel, how to do podcasts, and webinars. Then we’ve got LinkedIn best practices because most of it is B2B so we do focus on LinkedIn in the book. The bottom line is, it’s a little disconcerting when you go and you see a blank computer screen or a blank page and you have to write an email or you’ve got to come up with a video script or something. We give you everything to get going so it’s super simple to just plug in your stuff and you’ll be done in seconds. The other part of the book includes over 400 technology resources. The goal was to provide resources that are free or very low cost because obviously, budgets are a concern for everybody. On the technology resources, we’ve got everything from CRMs, customer relationship management like Salesforce, to content marketing resources and intent data. Nowadays, you can get intent data to learn who is actually looking for what you do. You can receive weekly emails for free that tell you what companies are looking for your services and it’s super cool. We’ve also got email marketing platforms and we’ve designated two of the technologies in each category that we recommend. All of the technology resources have been vetted. I could go on and on with all the technology. I get all excited. 

Hernan: We got a user question here and I’m sure this comes from Senator Porter because he’s the one who always comments from this group. He asked about what is an ABM process.

Lori: It has to do with pulling together the sales team and the marketing team and having them work hand in hand to put together a highly targeted list and then focusing efforts and resources on that list. You do it in a tiered process, at least that’s what I do, where you’ve got your super high-value targets as well as the next group, etc. It’s a very targeted method to go after accounts vs individuals. And it brings marketing sand sales together with an approach to your marketing. 

Hernan: Direct mail for example, rather than just straight coding an entire zip code you’re focusing your attention on people who actually have either communicated or showed some sort of intent in your sales process so that it’s something they’re expecting versus something that randomly shows up in their mail. Do thorough research on your targets so you want to make sure their firmographic, demographic, and psychographic information all matches up to your ideal customer profile. In terms of what’s their dollar amount you know their gross income and putting that all together and targeting those people.

So let’s go back to being omnipresent right because this is one of those things that any marketer can really do. It’s something that we preach on our show all the time. If you’re in business, you should have a podcast, you should be creating content at scale to show up on all these platforms, mainly because you know you don’t know where your customer is actually spending their time, whether they’re on a desktop, whether they’re on a laptop, whether they’re on TikTok, Facebook, whatever. Being accessible in all these different places is important now. You mentioned that in your book you have templates which is super fantastic because I don’t know about you guys, I’m a math guy. I suck at writing. So if you can provide me with a template where I just fill in the blanks, then I can go ahead and record stuff that makes it so much easier. Tell me about recording videos because I get a lot of people all the time they’re like I would like to do that but I’m kind of shy, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to do, I don’t like the way I look, I don’t like the way I sound. What do you tell those people?

Lori: We’ve got production tips on how to look your best on camera, how to position yourself for the camera, what to wear, etc. You’ll get a whole list of production tips to start with and then we’ve got as we mentioned, video scripts based on what you want to achieve and what your goals are. There are a couple of different platforms we use –  free ones like Vidyard and Loom, where you can actually record your videos and do some minor editing so you don’t have to be a super video editing wizard because that could get into a whole other thing. But if you are more comfortable with that you can get into Final Cut Pro to edit your videos or you can do a screen share. One of the cool things about Vidyard and Loom is you can actually use them for cold or warm calls or whatever you want to do. If you want to create a video message for someone, you can put the recipient’s website behind you or their LinkedIn profile behind you and then you show up in a bubble at the bottom of the screen or you can expand it. The bottom line, it’s about the recipient. The video shouldn’t be about you when you do your outreach. We give all those tips on what to say in the videos, how to produce them, and what platforms are best. So it makes it much much easier. Plus, the more you do it the easier it gets. A lot of us are shy on camera and a little bit awkward at first, but the more you do it it becomes a no-brainer. 

Hernan: James mentioned about the ABM it’s like social media targeting tools but for direct mail. That’s cool, didn’t even know that was available. I mean that’s really what it comes down to, how do I find these tools and how do I make them available. You have so many different things in this book, practical tactical things that people can use. All the different tactics are in there. Which one would you say is your favorite that you just kind of like and tend to gravitate to when people ask you what should I do in my business, you’re like here’s the one. 

Lori: That’s a great question. I wish there was just one. The research part of it is really important before you actually use some of these tactics.

I personally love the intent data because you’re getting to know what people are researching for before they talk to anybody or you know to reach out to someone because they are researching what they want to buy or what they want to do online.

Let’s say you’re a small business looking for a marketing agency, most likely you’ll go online and look at what marketing agencies are there, what marketing should I do, how do I market my business. With intent data, as a marketing agency, you’ll get surge alerts that will tell you who’s looking and it gives you their website. Then you go and research who’s at that company – their buyers/buying committee. I just love that for being super targeted and more relevant in terms of who you’re hitting up. With these intent data platforms, you put in your keywords so it’s not just going to give you hundreds of companies that have nothing to do with you your business.

One intent data provider is Bombora. They offer a free service and they give you a weekly list of 12 companies searching for your topics. Clearbit is another one that has a free service as well and they’ll show you who’s visiting your website. So it comes from a little different angle. What’s great about that is if you’re putting social posts up and running some email campaigns, you can see who’s going from that and visiting your website and it gives a full background on them. Those are also free weekly reports. 

Hernan: That’s amazing. Think about that for a second ladies and gentlemen. I mean you’re literally not even really having to market to these people. You’re getting almost a closed deal a hot lead coming in and it’s not even anything that you’re doing for the outbound stuff right? This is stuff that’s coming into you. It’s all coming in and the best is it’s free. 

Lori: They have other plans – like Bombora’s starter plan for $25 000. But you’re getting this for free. People in market looking for what you do so, of course, they’re going to be more interested when you reach out to them and then with our templates, it is so much easier. You’re all set. 

Hernan: What’s the biggest feedback you get from people who take a look at your book? Maybe starting off in business and they’re afraid of the marketing side. They’ve never done it. Maybe they’re not great at sales, maybe they’re just worried about how to create something that looks cool. Put my picture on there and add some photos – not very tech-savvy. How do you approach someone like that to get them comfortable with the ability of yes you can do this on your own? 

Lori: The people that have purchased the book, most of them wish they had this book years ago because it’s really abbreviated the whole process and most of them use it as a reference book. It’s not really like a novel where you read cover to cover and you have to learn all this stuff. The best part about it is you just go in get what you need and you’re ready to roll. It’s thousands of dollars of marketing expertise for less than the cost of a week’s worth of Starbucks which is the cool part. I think people have been so surprised because they haven’t found this type of resource that doesn’t only focus on strategy. We believe in strategy as well, but we also want to give businesses a jump-start and really get them going. 

Hernan: Is there an order that you would place for somebody who’s going to start marketing their business like what’s the first thing you do, what’s the next thing you do, what’s that process like or do we just kind of go through the book and pick and choose some and decide from there? 

Lori: You could do either. But I would always say the first thing you want to do is look at what resources you have. If it’s just you as a business owner and you’re going to be doing it, how much time do you want to devote to it? What money do you have and what time do you have, who do you want to target, and what are your goals? Those are the things to really look at and once you determine that then you just dive in and use our templates and you’re all set.

Hernan: Where are you guys today and where do you envision this company going? 

Lori: The company has been around for over 25 years. We have been super fortunate and we’re extremely busy. Most of the industries that we work with right now are financial services and health insurance, and we’re kind of staying in that space, although you know we’ve done a lot of work with consumer package goods companies like Dole, Driscoll’s Berries, and Hot Pockets. We do everything from packaging to website revitalization. The bottom line is whatever will help a company sell its products and services that’s what we help them with. The book was basically an adjunct to help smaller entities do it on their own and we are available if they’re ready for the next step and they want to go for a full program we’re definitely available.

Hernan: You’ve kind of alluded to it there what your ideal client is but I’m assuming the book that you have in place is to get people into a position where they’re ready to work with you. How will a client know that they’re ready to move up to that next level?

Lori: Mostly because they’re going to see a return on what they’re doing, return on investment and it’ll be super high because the investment is so little. The book is $27.95. When they’ve gotten beyond what’s available in the book, that’s when they’ll be ready for us. And when they want to take it to the next level in terms of developing larger and more involved programs. As you mentioned, with drip programs and lead nurturing, they’ll need to implement marketing automation. Some of it they can do on their own, but it is much easier, faster, and more efficient to have people that do automation, like us, day in and day out come in set them up, and get them going. 

Hernan: There have been some major technology changes, especially since Covid hit, but some of those marketing fundamentals still ring true. What are some of the major changes that you’ve seen that have drastically modified how companies are marketing and what are some of those core fundamentals that we should stick to?

Lori: I think the major change came from no in-person meetings or events. It made it really hard for salespeople to connect. As everyone knows the change to video and online meetings and digitizing business. What’s really nice is all these technologies make it so easy.

What was the other end of the question?

Hernan: What were some of those core fundamental things that we do in marketing that have lasted time over time?

Lori: I would say obviously the strategy is core. Knowing what your goals are, what you have to work with, and where you want to be. Core fundamentals – I always think creative is super important. I get excited about technology but my background is on the creative side. I think we all forget how important the creative is in differentiating your products and services because nowadays a lot of people are doing similar stuff. It’s more and more difficult to differentiate and that’s where creative and working with a creative agency like ours is really really helpful and beneficial I think those are the core and the other thing too is the analytics and measuring. Data is critical as well. You want to keep track of your data – who’s responding and what’s your return on investment and then testing and tweaking and enhancing and optimizing. 

Hernan: Evon says marketing is getting the right message, to the right people, and I 100% agree. In today’s world, I feel like everybody’s starting to build their own brand. How important is having a brand or having a core message that you can get out to your public?

Lori: I think it’s critical and it really comes down to what I just mentioned in terms of differentiation because that’s what the branding helps you do both visually and with the copy. I think branding is important but I’d say awareness. Beyond that is getting the word out as well as getting your message out the best you possibly can. 

Hernan: I always wonder when I talk to marketers especially when you’re talking to professionals like attorneys, CPAs, real estate brokers, and those types of people. They’re building their brand, they’re building their name, and I always get mixed messages to keep it 100% professional, mix in some of your personal life, etc. What do you think? What’s the strategy that you’ve seen with your clients? Is it a mix of the two? Is it strictly professional and have your personal separate? What do you think?

Lori: That’s a great question because I’ve seen more lately people interjecting some of their personal stuff. Some of it goes into politics or things like that. I also have clients that don’t want to go anywhere near that, they don’t want to have any photos, they don’t want any personal info, and some are for privacy and safety reasons. I think if you do interject personal info, it’s nice to kind of have a business slant and not go too far, but again it’s a nice way to let people get to know you versus getting you mixed up with someone else. It can be a really good thing in a tasteful way. 

Hernan: It gives you a little bit of identity to stand out amongst the crowd a little bit exactly. I’ve got an attorney right here the Bulldog in San Diego, Dan Fulkerson, and the battle focusing group. They’re big, they’re always giving back to the community every Christmas they do all the radio drives, they donate diapers or toys, they’re always out there doing events for food banks and just getting their brand out there. I like how Evon says here your brand is the promise you make to your clients and prospects. You promise to deliver what you say you will every time and I think that’s really what it comes down to, your customer service, your dedication to your community, or your tribe. Just being able to be a part of them on a regular basis. 

Before we head out I want to make sure people can get the book. How can they get a hold of you?

Lori: They can get it on amazon.com and if they just in the search bar just type in Ready-Made Marketing it’ll go right to the page on Amazon. Or they can go to BersonDeanStevens.com and find it on the website. 

Hernan: Perfect. All right ladies and gents, really what it comes down to is you gotta get in front of people and tell them what it is you do, somehow some way and there are a number of different ways that you can do that now if you have no clue where to start it’d probably be a good idea to go to bersondeanstevens.com and check out what they’re already doing. You’ll get a number of different practical tactical ways that you can get started in marketing for free or at a very low cost. Make sure you guys go check it out at BersonDeanStevens.com. It’s scrolling across the bottom of the page. Go check it out or look for the book on Amazon Ready-Made Marketing. Download it. Do you guys have it on audio by the way?

Lori: It’s not but it’s on Kindle

Hernan: Perfect, grab a copy. Start putting some tactics into play. Look at the end of the day, if you just learn some stuff that’s great, but it’s not until you take action until you start to implement the things that you learn that you’re going to see a difference. So here’s my cue to you, take some action go to bersondeanstevens.com or go to Amazon and just get the book right there Ready-Made Marketing. Lori thank you very much for coming on. I’m so sad we didn’t have Evon on. There were some tech issues but she was here in spirit and literally in the chat guiding our discussion. That was awesome Lori. I got one more question for you. You help people create podcasts all the time, and create different types of shows and marketing campaigns what was your experience like with the business Bros?

Lori: Loved it! Absolutely was a great experience. I love your energy and I had a great time. Thank you so much for having me and almost Evon on.

Hernan: Thank you of course. All right ladies and gents make sure you guys check it out on BersonDeanStevens.com. The book is called Ready-Made Marketing. It’s got over 400 different technology resources to bring your tactics to life. You’re out of excuses. It’s done, it’s over. The knowledge is there. The practical tactical things are ready for you to take into action, so make it happen. We’ll catch you guys on the next episode. Until then peace and we’re out. 

Check out all the 5-Star Reviews on Amazon and get your copy today!