cure the marketing mismatch and get more leads!

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Cure the Great Marketing Mismatch

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Kim Albee: Welcome everybody to our webinar, "Cure the Great Marketing Mismatch and Get More Leads. My name is Kim Albee, I'm the president of Genoo. It's my pleasure today to introduce Margaret Johnson. Margaret is our VP of Sales and Marketing at Genoo. Prior to joining Genoo, she helped quintuple revenue and team size for organizations, so she has not only a wealth of knowledge about marketing, but also a wealth of knowledge about sales.

She has trained sales teams in the past. We are blessed to have her on our team now. What I want to let you know is that Genoo offers online marketing tools and marketing automation to small and midsized businesses, and that's at www.genoo.com. We also work with businesses to supercharge your online marketing, and build, and augment your marketing teams, and that's at contentzap.com.

Without any further ado, I am pleased to introduce Margaret. Margaret, take it away.

Margaret Johnson: Well hi everybody, and thanks for being with us today. I'm really happy to be doing this for you, and I hope you get a lot out of it. It certainly is a lot of information to get through, and we're going to jump right in. We're going to cover what is a mismatch, three places where mismatches fester, and will ultimately fail you, and I've got all little bonus pet peeve in there that I'm going to share with you.

How your mismatches could be torpedoing your marketing efforts. How to diagnose your own organizations mismatch challenges, and then what you can do today to start curing your mismatches. This is categorized as a discussion. This isn't an agenda. We're not going through things in this particular order.

Each piece of this is going to have a lot of information in it. Again, glad you're with me, and let's jump right in.

What is a Mismatch? Let's first talk about, "What is a mismatch?" A mismatch is the fundamental disconnect between what your audience is saying and how you're responding, or even worse, what you're saying to things that they're not even asking about.

What happens is, we see a lot of folks who talk "vanilla, vanilla, vanilla," even when their audience keep saying, "rainbow sherbet, rainbow sherbet, rainbow sherbet," and that's really hard to say three times fast, but I hope you get my point. What we're going to talk

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about is how to adapt to the rainbow sherbet questions when you're accustomed to talking vanilla. The first place that we see these mismatches fester is on the website.

Where Mismatches Fester The Website What does your website say about your organization? What does it say about the services you offer, the product you sell, the years you've been in business, the experience and credentials of your team, your opinions about your topic, and your ideas about how to solve problems? You might be sitting there and thinking, "Well, our website handles all of that. We're in great shape."

Well, no, you probably have a site mismatch, and it will torpedo you. Here's why. If people can't see themselves in what you're saying, then they're not going to pay attention. It's like when I go to a website and I see, "Here at company name..." Whatever that company is, "Here at company XYZ, we understand the needs of our customers."

That third person remote voice is not engaging, and it's not pulling people in, and that's a huge problem. Let's help you diagnose that.

Diagnose the Website Mismatch Open your website home page, count the number of times you use "we," "our," and "us," and your company name, and then count the number of times you use "you," and "your," and if A plus B is greater than C...In other words, if you're talking more about "We, our, us," and "our company," more than you're talking about your audience directly, you've got a mismatch.

The little cartoon might help you put this into perspective, "That's enough about me, what do you think about me?" Well, what happens is, your audience goes away, and you're like, "Wait, I want you to contact us, contact us. Darn it, I had a visitor, but I didn't capture them." Well, that's a problem.

Cure the Website Mismatch Do the counts, see what you've got, and then let's figure out what it takes to change it. Change the voice. Make your website about your audience. Create an emotional connection. We've just posted something on our blog about creating that emotional connection. It's an interview that Kim did with a fellow named Dan Hill a while back who wrote a book called, "Emotionomics."

That emotional connection is important. You can't capture that when you're talking on your website in the third person. "We understand you, your needs are what we're focused on," that's what you've got to get across. You've got to engage and invite them in, and invite them to learn more about you, and you need to be real.

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The standoffish brochure kind of website is simply not getting the job done any longer. I tossed this in here, "Sell to your customer's customer." In some schools, that's called selling to the fourth level. If you're in a service business, and you're selling a service to another service business, think about how your service benefits their customers.

I was working recently with a company that cleans kitchens, they clean commercial kitchens, and when I suggested that they might want to say that, "A clean commercial kitchen is the first step of protecting the health and welfare of your customers," they suddenly had a light bulb turn on and say, "Wow, yeah, we could make that connection all the way to their customers. We're showing that we understand their world, and that their best interests are what is in our best interest," and that's really important.

That again is part of that emotional connection, right? Provide options, don't just provide one way for people to engage. Provide a couple of different ways for people to engage with your site. Finally, deemphasize the obligatory "about us." I see that emblazoned in the top navigation, "about our company, about us, about our services, about this."

That "about us" page is nowadays coming across as fairly egotistical, and it communicates that the website's all about us, and it's not all about you. Drop that "about us" into the footer navigation, for example, or put it on the far right side of the navigation. It shouldn't be navigation item one or two.

Where Mismatches Fester Calls-to-Action What you want to create is an environment where your audience thinks, "These people get me." When these people get me, I'm going to read more. The next place where mismatches fester is in calls to action, or CTA's. Think about your website, and think about your emails, and the calls to action that you put out there.

What are they? Are they contact us, request a quote, get an estimate, order now, buy now, call us? This is a problem, and here's why. This is a CTA mismatch, and the torpedo effect of this CTA mismatch is that every one of those call to action that I just mentioned are for people who are ready to buy.

Well, guess what? If you didn't know this already, I'm surprised, but I'm sure you know this. The buyer journey has changed, and people are going to your website to try to find out more about the problems that they have. They're not ready to engage with sales at this time. They're not ready to get a free estimate.

They're just trying to figure out if you might be the right fit for whatever problem, issue, challenge, or opportunity they have. It's important that you have calls to action that match that buyer journey. Down at the bottom here, I also had "subscribe," and "sign up for news," and I put those in there because as calls to action, they're the lowest performing calls to action they are, because they're so nebulous.



When you see a "subscribe to our newsletter," how often do you click it? Think about that, and why would you expect that people are going to click that on your website? They don't want to get inundated with emails. It's kind of opening the world, and they have no idea if that subscription's going to bring value to them over time.

Having calls to action that are more specific, and mapped out to where they are in their journey, is much more relevant to them. Let's diagnose the CTA problem.

Diagnose the CTA Mismatch First, look at your site analytics. How many visitors do you have hitting your site, and how much time are they spending there? Are they going to multiple pages, or are they going to one page and then jumping right back off again? That's your abandonment rate.

How many real form fills did you receive during that same time period? I underscored real because we all get form fills of people who are trying to sell us new Gucci shoes, or designer pharmaceuticals. Those form fills don't count. The spammers don't count. How many real, actual, form fills did you get?

It's probably something in the area of half of a percent, and that is not a good conversion rate. Are you getting phone calls from your website? I was working with a company last week who said, "We've invested in search engine optimization, and we've got all this great stuff going, and we don't understand why our phone isn't ringing off the hook."

I went to their website, and it was all about them, and all about the service that they provide, and absolutely nothing that engaged their prospective customer in conversation, so nothing was happening. Oh, by the way, they had no calls to action on the website beyond a single contact us form, and all it said was "contact us." Very bad.

Diagnose whether you have a CTA mismatch, and then let's cure it, because the biggest problem is your audience says, "I'm not ready to buy yet. I don't want to be bothered by salespeople. I'm not filling out this form." Or worse, "I'm filling out this form, but no way I'm going to give correct information," and more on that in a minute.

Cure the CTA Mismatch How do you cure this CTA mismatch? First of all, create attractors that will guide leads in their quest for information and great resources. Attractor can be a little e-book. It could be something that they can download. It could be a video. It could be a list. It can be anything that will engage, and help them understand more about how you can help them with the problem, issue, opportunity that they have.



Gate some of your content while leaving other content free. Gating means that there's a form they need to fill out before they can actually get the download, or the video view. Then link to compelling landing pages that will encourage people that the decision that they're making to download this is a good decision, and provide a thank you page upon completion of the form.

Your thank you page could even entice them to go download another piece. What happens when you do that? Your audience says, "I need to know these things. These folks really know their stuff." The most important thing, "Here's my email address." As you all know, the email address is the Holy Grail.

Once you have that email address, you can engage people in conversation, and help them work their way down your sales funnel, while you're helping them work their way through their problem-solving, and that's absolutely critical. I promised you that I was going to give you a little bonus failure here, my personal pet peeve. Here is my personal pet peeve, CTA forms.

Where They Fester CTA Forms In fact, I wrote a blog post about this. You can find it at contentzap.com/blog, and oh, these forms, oh please. I could go on for an hour, but I'm not going to, but this particular form that's on the screen is an actual form from a website which I had to fill out not once, but twice, because they actually had two pieces of attractive content. This is a huge mismatch.

All I wanted was to download a paper, and look at the size of this form, and the information that they're asking me for. If you can see it here, every one of these fields has an asterisk, every one of them is required, "What's my job title? What's my primary position? Company? Address? City? State? Zip? Country? Email? Phone? Website URL? What e-commerce...?"

This is funny, "What email e-commerce platform do you use?" and, "What email marketing platform do you use?" All of that to download a paper. Well folks, your forms need to match the level of investment that is required by your audience.

You may have seen a recent email from us suggesting that you download one of our papers. Our form asks for your first name and your email address, and that's it. That's all you need when somebody's downloading a paper. Here's what people try to do, and this form here is a little better, but they're still asking a lot of information, and oh by the way, "What's your quarterly advertising budget?"

Really? Forms are not meant to qualify sales opportunities. Let me say that again, forms are not meant to qualify sales opportunities. When people are downloading a paper, you don't need this much information from them. As you walk them down the path, and

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you offer them more content, you can gradually over time ask for more information if you don't know who they are.

But based on their email address, you may well be able to find out who they are, and if they start racking up lead score points, if they start downloading a lot of stuff, and exhibiting significant interest, you'll figure out a way to get in touch with them without knowing their address, their city, state, zip, and their quarterly marketing budget. This is a pet peeve. Make those forms -- you need more than one form -- and the forms need to agree with the level of investment required.

Download a paper, minimal fields. Get a free trial, you can ask for more information. Think very clearly about that, and don't have a CTA mismatch, or a form mismatch, because that form mismatch coupled with the CTA mismatch is terrible, and your abandonment rate is going to go up, and you're going to get torpedoed by getting lots of information that isn't even real. That is a huge problem.

Pet peeve side note number two here is, I once filled out one of these forms, and I put in my phone number as a fake phone number because it was a required field, but I didn't want anyone to call me, and at the time I had my phone number was sitting on a website, and somebody went and researched it, and found it, got my phone number, and called me, and said, "Hey, I noticed you downloaded my paper." "How did you get this number?" "Well, I went to your website, and I found the website."

I'm like, "If I'd wanted to talk to you, I would have given you my actual phone number." [laughs] Anyway, my pet peeve rant on these forms is over, but I hope you see the point. These forms are intrusive, and they're huge barriers to getting the information that matters to you as a marketer. What matters to you is that people are engaging, and people are downloading your content.

Where Mismatches Fester - Emails Let's talk about the third area where mismatches fester, and they fester in your emails. What do your emails say? "Here's our latest news, get a discount on our product or service, buy our stuff, sale, sale, sale, when can we meet, when can we meet, when can we meet." Oh, you might be wondering why that's on there three times.

Well, has this ever happened to you where you have downloaded a paper, or you've downloaded a piece of content from a site, and suddenly you're getting bombarded with sales people emails that say, "I noticed you downloaded a paper, let's get together so I can learn all about your stuff, and then tell you how great I am"? Well that's crazy, and it's the absolute wrong thing to do. Downloading a paper does not mean that someone is sales ready.

We not only have a funnel mismatch, now let me explain. At the top of the sales funnel, people are in the curiosity stage. They're researching stuff. They are by no means a



prospect, or a qualified prospect at this point in time. One paper download does not a prospect make, and bombarding them with sales calls means that you're going after a bottom of the funnel activity when they're still swimming around in the top of the funnel, and they're going to shut you down.

9 times out of 10, 99 times out of 100, they're going to shut you down, and not only will you be shut down, they may opt out of your emails, they will turn themselves off from being contacted. Had those emails been more productive, that might not have happened. Similarly, we have a content mismatch.

When we're talking, again, about, "Buy our stuff, we're on sale, get a discount," that content is again geared toward the people who are ready to buy, and not to the people who are just doing research, who are just investigating, and who are merely curious at this point. You have to be careful about what your emails say, and how you engage through email, so that people will actually see the benefit from engaging without feeling like they're going to get bombarded by salespeople.

That is the torpedoed impact. They're going to opt out. They're going to shut you down. They're going to stop opening your emails, and oh by the way, when they stop opening your emails, all kinds of other things happen. Let's figure out if this is happening with you.

Diagnose the Email Mismatch Are your open rates trending downward? Is your click through rate low? If people are clicking through, are they looking at multiple pages on your website, or are they just looking at the page you sent them to, and jumping right back off? What happened after they clicked?

We have a whole session that we've done on, "Don't celebrate your open rates just yet, because open rates are not necessarily as real as we would like them to be." But if they're trending downward, it's an indicator. Click through rates are really important, but what's most important is, "What are they doing after the click?"

Then, if they're clicking, are you engaging with those people who clicked differently from the people who didn't click? This is important. If someone clicks through your email, and especially if they go look at multiple pages on your website, they're raising their hand, and they're saying, "I'm out here, I'm looking, I'm researching, I'm engaging."

If you just send them the same vanilla email that you send to everybody else, you're wasting that intelligence. You're not taking advantage of the indicators that your audience is giving you, and that is a shame. Do your emails cause what you want them to cause?

We have a lot on this, and I encourage you to read our latest scoop, "Email marketing, list or listening," and I'll provide a link to that here in just a moment. But there's a lot of



interesting information in there, and a nice lady named Betty that you'll really want to meet. Let's cure those emails.

Cure the Email Mismatch First of all, your emails really need to convey a sincerity. A sincerity in your efforts, and your desire, to really be helpful to your audience. Somebody said to me two or three years ago, "Education is the new marketing." Well, guess what folks? That's really true. Education is the new marketing, when it's educating people about them.

Not educating them about how awesome you are, educating them about how awesome they can be with your help. When I talk about changing voice, like back on the website, sometimes it's only a few words you need to change to totally change the voice of a website or an email. Note what I said, it's not how awesome you are, it's how awesome they can be with your help.

That sincerity needs to come through. Start with a single engagement strategy on a single topic, and oh by the way, this can become your first nurturing sequence, and it makes it very easy to create nurturing sequences when you're focused on, "Let's just build out one topic at a time." Tie emails to your attractors, those pieces of content that you've created, that people will exchange their email address for, and let people engage with those attractors in a way that has very low barrier, not a big complicated form, and very low risk, not getting to sales-y.

Clearly identify what you want people to do. Really focus your emails on how it's going to benefit them, and the action that they need to take next. Don't include too many options. Statistically, when there's lots of options, people will take none. When there's one or two options, people will take one. When there's three to four options, people will take one, so don't include too many options in your emails.

Make your emails very collaborative with your audience. Don't get too sales-y too soon. One paper download, remember, does not a prospect make, and hammering them with, "Let me meet with you, let me meet with you, let me meet with you," is crazy, and it's going to disengage them. What we want is, we want your audience to think that you care about their success, and that's cool, "More please, I want more." That's the audience you want, that's the audience that you focus on.

The Bottom Line The bottom line is this. Lots of consultants are sitting out there in the universe ready to take your money "to create stellar content for you," or, "improve your SEO, and get you found, and we'll get you on page one of search engines," or, "make you of force in social media."



Well here's what I want to tell you, don't spend that money yet. You might want to spend it at some point, that's OK, but if you don't have your mismatches diagnosed and cured, you're not going to see gains from those efforts, because you're going to lose people. If you're not listening to what they're telling you, and answering the questions that they really have, they're not going to stick around for more marketing, and guess what?

If they're not sticking around for more marketing, they're not available for you to sell, and that is the bottom line. Improving your SEO to a site that talks only about you, and nothing about them, is just going to increase your visitor rate, and your abandonment rate, but it's not necessarily going to increase your conversion rate. See what I mean?

What we're after, mismatches no more. I say vanilla, you say rainbow sherbet, I'm going to go, "OK, rainbow sherbet, let's talk about that," and then my audience says, "Awesome, let's talk about that. I'm so excited you're listening to me." That's what we want. When we eradicate the mismatches, that's what we get.

Resources For You to Consider A couple of resources for you to consider, our past webinars and posts that tie into this topic are on our contentzap.com blog site. The latest scoop, "Email marketing, list or listening," is available at the link on the screen, which is contentzap.com/lpscoop2. We will send you that link via email by the way.

Upcoming events, always free to attend, contentzap.com/events. I do want to mention that next week we've got a phenomenal webinar with Adele Revella, whose the number one authority in the universe on buyer personas, and we're doing a session with her on buyer personas, and the cow is on the ice. If you're not familiar with that phrase, you'll have to tune in to the webinar...Well, it means we're in trouble here.

Buyer personas are a big, hairy, sticky ball of goo. Adele can help you get through the goo in a way that works for small, medium, and large businesses. Finally, email me with any questions you have. I'm at [email protected]. In case you forgot what I look like, there's a picture of me again.

Feel free to email your questions. If you'd like to have a conversation about anything we talked about today, or any of the services and products that we offer at Genoo and Contentzap, I'm very happy to have that conversation with you.

Kim: All right, thank you.

Margaret: Thank you so much for being with us, and Kim, do we have any questions?

Kim: Yeah, we have just a couple questions, not a ton. If you guys have any questions, you should ask them. Type them in here, because we have time for maybe a couple of

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questions, but here's one. You talk about calls to action, and give me an example of a call to action for a B2B services company...Give me an example of a call to action.

We had a question, "What's an example of a good attractor?" I think the attractor and the call to action go hand-in-hand, so I'm sort of modifying the question a bit.

Margaret: A B2B services company might be...Of course, everybody loves lists, so I kind of think in terms of the top 10 things that your customers care about. Let me give you a different example. We had a question on a prior webinar about a furniture store who's saying, "I keep putting emails out saying we're 20 percent off," and we talked about, "Well, why don't you put an email out that says, 'download the top 10 weirdest things we found in our sofa cushions.'"

I was talking with someone the other day, and we talked about being more human in some of this stuff. He was a banker, and looking to improve his list of customers, and we talked about the top 10 wildest things someone has done when they've refinance their home. You can have fun attractors. You can have serious attractors.

It could be white papers. It could be a video view. It could be original content. It could be content that you've curated from a number of other sources, but the important thing is, it needs to have sufficient value that someone will exchange their email address for it.

Kim: Very good. I am going to...It's now 10:30. I don't want to go over our time. We do have a couple of more questions, but we will answer those to each one of you that asked off-line. What I do want is, I do want to invite you to attend our webinar on the 26th, which is all about buyer personas, and again, Adele Revella is the leading expert on buyer personas, and interestingly enough, she has come up with a process that really is where you can roll your sleeves up and know what you're going to get out of it is going to help you tremendously, like making a huge amount of difference, to the kind of content, and your strategy going forward.

I invite you all to attend that. You're not going to want to miss it. Thank you so much. If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. We're here to help you be successful with your marketing, and that really is what we love to do. All right, thank you so much, and with that I thank you Margaret, and thank you all for attending, and thank you for your listening.

Margaret: Thanks everyone.



About ContentZAP ContentZAP! Is a professional services digital marketing agency. We understand marketing technology and how to leverage it to help grow your business. We work with companies of all sizes to develop and implement content strategies, plan nurturing and follow-up sequences, or to augment content development.

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