437: 5 Brain Dead Strategies To Boost Your Content Marketing Sales With Marcus Sheridan

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now it’s the holiday season and I’m currently on break. And can you believe that there are over 400 plus episodes on the podcast? Now there’s no way that you’d listen to them all, so I picked a couple of classics for you to review. Enjoy.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Marcus Sheridan on the show. Now, if you don’t know who he is, Marcus runs the sales lion where he consults and teaches companies how to do inbound content marketing. And today he’s known as one of the premier thought leaders in the digital sales and marketing space. Now I actually started my blog in 2009 and kind of in my periphery, I’ve been following Marcus for years. So it’s really cool that we got to finally connect at social media marketing world for just a couple of minutes, but that was enough.

00:52
And that’s how we ended up here on today’s podcast. with that, welcome to show Marcus, how are you doing today, Steve, so great to be here, man. Excited to speak with you and hopefully I’ll say something that your audience says, you know what, that was worth the listen right there. You know, I’ve seen this man speak. He is excellent. So I got the date. I got the date. Correct. We both started blogging like 2009. Yep. Yep. Glorious time, man. That’s an internet years.

01:21
That’s about three decades ago. We are like dinosaurs, I should say. That was actually back when people used to comment on blogs. Yes, those are the good old days. That’s a good old inside blog joke there. I love it. Times have changed, man.

01:40
I remember at the time you created the leading swimming pool website on the internet Can you kind of talk about how you got started with that and how that? Transitioned over to the sales line like what’s your story just for the benefit of readers who don’t know who you are? Yeah, you know I’ll try to give the the very you know short version here I started swimming pool company out of college with two friends 2001 things were going okay for us up until the market crashed in 2008 and by the 2009 I thought we’re gonna go out of business and

02:10
I was getting ready to file for bankruptcy. But that’s when I started to read all these fancy phrases like inbound, content marketing, social media, blogging, all that stuff. And really what I heard in my simple pool guy mind was, Marcus, if you just obsess over your customers’ questions and you’re willing to address them honestly and transparently through text and video on your website, you just might save your business, right? So I embraced this philosophy that we call, they ask, you answer, which basically said, hey, we’re going to be the best teachers in the world when it comes to, in our case, fiberglass pools.

02:40
And so, like I said to make a long story short, that’s what we did. We became essentially the WebMD of pools and it became the most traffic swimming pool website in the world, save the business. And last year we were the largest installer of fiberglass pools in the US. Now, I’m not a pool guy anymore. I still own a third of the company, but in this process I started to just to write about what I was doing, which as you mentioned, Steve, came at the end of 2009. And so I’m like, you know what, I’m just gonna write.

03:09
The stuff that we’re doing this whole day, ask you answer, it’s working. And I believe in this. And so I was just writing about it. And then all of sudden, company said, hey, Marcus, can you teach us how to do that? And some conferences said, hey, Marcus, can you come share that story about what you do with your pool company and our event? And it just started to snowball from there. so I was getting so many requests. I’m like, there is a business model here. And so I transitioned slowly out of River Pools. And by 2012,

03:38
I was essentially full on with speaking and consulting and my agency, The Sales Lion, which is what it was called, is now a part of Impact. I’m one of the owners of Impact and we’ve got about 65 employees. And I give about 70 keynotes a year around the globe on sales marketing, business, communication. It is a dream, my friend, and it’s all because the economy crashed. Like if the economy hadn’t crashed, it wouldn’t have happened, which is amazing how that works. By the time I thought it was

04:07
most stressful period of my life. is crazy. That’s more than one talk a week. Yes. Yeah. I often, I mean, I’ll generally give about 1.5 talks a week. That’s correct. Yeah, that’s crazy. It’s moving. Yeah, moving along. So Marcus, the reason I wanted to have you on today is to kind of talk about content marketing and how to use it to promote your business. A lot of my listeners are e-commerce sellers, but we don’t have to talk about that per se. But if you can kind of tailor your answers towards an e-commerce biz, that would be pretty cool.

04:37
Yeah. first off, like if you were running your own e-commerce business, I want to know like what content works well, how to get results, how would you approach that problem? Yeah. So when we start the process of the Ask, Answer, within about six months, I could see there’s clear patterns of content that works, content that doesn’t work in terms of really moving the needle from a sales perspective, from a search SEO perspective, a whole nine.

05:06
Today I call that the big five. There’s essentially five subjects that before somebody goes to buy something, they want to understand these five things. It’s the psychological need that we have to feel at ease and to feel informed. And fundamentally today in today’s economy, we don’t want to make a mistake. And we know that we don’t have to make a mistake, but we want to know these five things. So here are the big five.

05:34
The big five are as buyers, we are obsessed with how much something costs. Now, we’ll talk more about that Steve, but that doesn’t mean we just put a price that doesn’t count, because every e-commerce person puts a price that doesn’t count as talking about costs. So we’re obsessed with talking about costs and learning about costs as buyers. We’re obsessed with understanding the negatives, the problems, the issues. How could this blow up in my face if I purchase it, if I buy it, whatever it is, service product doesn’t matter. So that’s number two, problems.

06:04
Number three, we’re obsessed with comparisons. In other words, generally, we don’t just look at one thing, we’re looking at two or more of a similar thing. Product, service, again, doesn’t matter. So we love to compare. Number four, we’re obsessed with what other people say about it, of course, reviews. And then number five, we’re obsessed with the best. So generally speaking, we don’t search for the worst, we search for the best, right? These are the big five. And here’s what’s fascinating, okay?

06:34
this again and again and again. When companies obsess over these big five and they make that they’re just clear clear directive, their compass if you will, that’s what’s going to move the needle because these five subjects are at the bottom of the funnel and whenever you’re selling a product or service especially in the e-commerce space you want to start at the bottom not the top of the funnel. The mistake that a lot of people make if they are producing content it’s really really fluffy. All right so let me give you an example if that’s okay Steve. Yeah absolutely. These are going to be pool examples but

07:04
I don’t want anybody to think because right now if I turned on our e-commerce to our site, we would do, I’m sure we’d do at least a million dollars a year revenue just on e-commerce alone because of the traffic that we have. mean, you some months we’re getting close to million visitors. I mean, we’re doing really, really well. And so there’s a reason for this, right? We would kill in this space. But because I’m a manufacturer and an installer, I don’t elect to go down that road. So this is an example of how we did it with fiberglass pools.

07:33
You know when I saw the process of they ask you answer one of the first questions that people used to ask me all the time as A poke guy was so Marcus I’m not gonna hold you to it But give me a feel how much is this going to cost? Of course in they might have been talking about a fiberglass swimming pool or an in-ground swimming pool. Whatever. What’s crazy is when we start this process Nobody in the world had addressed how much does an in-ground swimming pool cost on their website? The reason for this Steve is because businesses don’t they’re afraid

08:02
generally speaking, they’re afraid to talk about, like, I’m gonna give it away to my competitors or I might scare them away. I mean, there’s all these different things. And so we openly talked about it and we said, here’s all the factors that are gonna drive it up. Here’s what could keep it down. Here’s the different packages that you can expect. Here’s why some companies are expensive and why some companies are cheap. Now that was critical and fundamental, Steve. And this is the part that most e-commerce companies do not do, is whenever you sell a product,

08:30
especially if it’s a significant major product within your SKU set. You always want to make sure that you have definitive articles and videos just on how much does that particular type of product or service cost. If you don’t do that, you ain’t never going to play in the search space and you’re going to devalue and potentially commoditize the thing that you’re selling, which is a problem. So to make a long story short, Steve,

08:57
That one article has generated over six million dollars in sales. How much does a fiberglass pool cost? So if you search anything today about how much is an ingrown pool cost? How much is the cost to install fiberglass pool? I mean anything like that if you’re in the United States We’re the first ones you’re gonna see to this day. It’s a cash cow. Okay, that’s number one number two Hold on one sec. Let’s elaborate on some of the things you just said about cost I heard you say that you you outline what companies do and what they don’t do and what factors into the cost

09:25
I was thinking when you said that, that psychologically, customers are going to now ask the competitors whether they do that certain thing and compare that to you. That’s correct. That’s That’s correct, which is what you want them to do. Let’s say you have an e-commerce platform, but you also have a great blog and they mutually feed each other. Your blog feeds e-commerce, but your e-commerce should be feeding the blog. People are like, what do you mean by that?

09:54
If they’re on the platform, why would the platform feed the blog? Well, if it’s a good platform, you can do things like this. Like hypothetically, you could set it up and I guarantee you 99 % of your listeners have never done this before. So let’s say that on your e-commerce platform, you have underneath the price, a little arrow with a link that says, see why it costs this much. Now,

10:24
If a buyer sees a price and then sees a little arrow pointing to the link says, see why it costs this much and it’s a clickable link that takes them to an article and video that definitively explains why it costs that much, have you commoditized or decommoditized that thing that you sell? Of course you’ve now decommoditized it and now you’ve done a major, major value add to that particular visitor. But the problem is, more often than not, in the e-commerce space, it’s just cut and dry. They got reviews.

10:53
Oftentimes they do have reviews now on most of these platforms, but they don’t talk about the good, they don’t talk about the bad, they don’t talk about the ugly. Well, they might talk about the good, but they don’t talk about the bad the ugly enough. And they don’t really explain it well enough. And so I’m constantly dealing with this. Most of the research I do, especially when I’m shopping e-commerce situations, I have to go and find the prices on the e-commerce platforms. Then I have to research on another site that has nothing to do with that particular site.

11:19
to really understand the cost factors. Why is this thing costing as much as it is? And then I’ll go back to the e-commerce site. That’s dumb. It doesn’t make sense. Of course, there’s conversion loss at that point anyway. And so this is why, if you really, really do this well, and again, if you’re selling a ton of stuff, choose the 20 % that are generating 80 % of your sales. You focus on that and it’s magical. This is a service product. It doesn’t matter. And I’m telling you, for 90 % of my clients around the world, and I’ve done this with big companies, small companies,

11:49
90 % of number of traffic-leading sales generating content has to do with cost and price. This is very interesting. I’m just thinking in my mind this would be a great place to point out your unique value proposition for each product as well, Of course. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And this is where you can really blow away transparency because you’re able to say things like, hey, look, this isn’t the most expensive one and it shouldn’t be. This is for the person that is looking for the middle of the road.

12:16
but they’re looking for this, this, and this, but they’re okay not getting this, this, and that. And if you feel like you’re that person, well then this might be a great fit for you and it’s certainly a great value for that buyer. Most people don’t communicate like that, right? Do you see what I’m saying? It’s just like, just flat out, here’s what it is, and it’s not this is for you if, this is not for you if. It’s unfortunate, most companies don’t think like that. I guess my biggest concern here is you’re actually taking them off of the commerce site

12:45
to a different article and then they have to make their way back, right? Yeah, you open it up in a separate window and if most of us are paying attention to our conversion rates of those shopping cart pages anyway, it would make us vomit to see how much we lost, right? And so all you have to do is you split test this out, right? And you can definitively see it. Now, if you have a chance to have it on the actual page, great, have it on the actual page. But the thing is, you

13:15
It’s difficult to do that because most platforms aren’t built that way. And you can’t really build out a beautifully robust article slash video interactive format if you do it that way. I guess now that I’m just thinking about it right now as we’re talking, you could just have a button and it could be like a pop-up that is nicely formatted that you can just easily close and still remain on the product page. Yeah, so you could do the pop-up.

13:43
in the pop-up should have read the full article here if the summation isn’t enough. you can’t, here’s my philosophy on this Steve, and this is why this is such a big deal to me. We can’t treat people like they’re dumb, right? We have to treat them like informed humans that are smart shoppers. And so it’s my strong belief that if we have a choice between let’s

14:13
not inform them well, allow them to be ignorant and hope that that will increase conversion, or let’s allow them to learn more in the moment if they’re still not psychologically satisfied with the value prop of that particular product or service, knowing that if they do see it upon reading it, it means they’re more serious anyway, and the ones that do say,

14:41
That’s for me are gonna come back and buy I just refuse to believe That the majority of cases the person’s gonna say wow my gracious that was helpful. Okay. Let me go find it on some other place now Yeah, I think I tend to agree with you. That’s very interesting Okay, do we have anything more to add on cost before we move on to the next one not so much on cost Yeah, I mean I think that I think that hits the mark on cost and again I want to stress this as article in video at this point. We got to be doing it that way. Okay, okay, cool So let’s talk about problems for a second

15:11
Yep. Problems is prolific. once we feel like, all right, I think I want to go down this road. Then our natural question is, but how could it blow up in my face? And this is oftentimes why we seek out reviews. But the problem is if we’re review dependent as an e-commerce shop or as a business, that’s flawed. We need to beat the punch with these. In other words, get in front of it.

15:41
yourself. Let me give you an example. Again, we’ll go to pools. This applies to everybody. So don’t think you’re different if you’re listening to this because I’m telling you, I’ve done this with too many services and products. I know that nobody’s the exception to this. And so what happens is in my case with pools, people used to ask me all the time, for example, so Marcus, what are the problems with fiberglass pools? Very, very common question. And once again, Steve, nobody in the world, I’m not exaggerating at the time, had addressed that singular question on their site.

16:11
Why? They were afraid to address the elephants, right? The smartest companies, they know that the greatest way in life to resolve concern is to address it before it even becomes a concern. And so I openly talked about the problems of fiberglass pools on our website. And because we talked about it, you know, it’s wild. Every year, the number one, the number one keyword phrase that generates the most traffic to the site is fiberglass pools problems. Oh, excuse me, leads to the site.

16:40
fiberglass pool problems. So that article has made a couple million dollars in sales at this point, right? And it’s not just there, like when somebody says, hey Marcus, do fiberglass pools pop out of the ground? Okay, I’ll write about that. Are fiberglass pools cheap? Okay, I’ll write about that. These are consistent questions that we would get. So I’m not going to bury my head in the sand, I’m going to openly address them, I’m going get in front of them, and then I can own the conversation instead of one of my competitors. So that’s what you want to do. You want to look at your different products and services that you offer. You want to say,

17:10
on all the times that you’ve been asked, so I heard that or is it true that or somebody told me that or I was reading. When anybody says anything like that, that denotes that something negative is coming. And now, if you get on the front end of addressing it, you have a significant chance of earning the person’s trust and respect. But the key is you can’t be biased. Too many people, especially in the e-commerce space, are just biased.

17:40
which loses that trust factor. You can’t become the trust agent and at the same time be extremely biased. an example of how you might phrase this, again, I’ll just go back to the simple pool example. So we might say something like this, fiberglass pools aren’t for everybody. They don’t get wider than 16 feet, longer than 40 feet, deeper than eight feet. You can’t customize them any way you want. And so if you’re looking for a pool that is wider than 16 or longer than 40 or deeper than eight or super customized, it’s probably not a good fit for you.

18:09
But if you’re looking for a low-maintenance pool that’s going to last you a lifetime, that’s less than 60 by 40, less than eight feet deep, and you can find a shape that does fit your needs, well then this might be the perfect fit for you. But you notice here, we present the ugly first, and then we come back, just psychology, with, but this is how it could be a great fit for you, if you fit these classifications. And so the idea is when somebody’s going through the process of buying something, the whole time they’re nodding their head saying,

18:39
Yep, yep, yep. Or they’re shaking their head saying, no, not me, which is fine because we don’t want people buying our products anyway that they’re not a good fit for. Not if we have integrity. If we sell from a place of integrity, we want people to be very informed about said product or service so that they don’t make a mistake, so that it doesn’t come back on us or our shop or our product and that they say, these guys never leave me astray. That’s the whole idea. That’s the essence behind problems. I love it. I love it.

19:09
There’s this leather store that does the exact same thing. They point out the flaws in leather, they basically educate you on the different types of leather. And then they show you a demo of their leather. It’s called Saddleback leather. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. But then they show that their leather is basically indestructible. And it’s incredible. Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right. So what’s funny is there’s other good leather out there, but

19:39
They actually understand that unless we show it, doesn’t exist. mean, in 2018 and beyond, the idea that we would sell anything and just say it and not show it, it’s almost laughable. We have to be in the mindset of unless we show it, it doesn’t exist. They show it really well. It really sticks. And, you know, it’s crazy. So many other companies could do that, but they don’t. So that’s the essence of problems. You got to get in front of it. Again, the moral of story is

20:09
As a business you have a choice. You can allow your competitors to own those negative conversations or You can own them. That is your call, but Clearly one is better than the other. I love it also because it’s counterintuitive Exactly a lot of stuff is counterintuitive, you know, and that’s why that’s why I’ve given over, you know 200 workshops to different companies around the globe I’m in New York City right now to give a workshop to sales and marketing team tomorrow basically helping them understand

20:38
Why talking about these things is good instead of burying their head in the sand like most of their competitors and not addressing them. The problem is you don’t see many sites doing this well unless it’s like a review site or a third party site. But the actual businesses, they don’t generally do it well. Right. And to find out the problems, just use any keyword tool or do a survey? How do you find out what these problems are? Yeah.

21:08
you’re in tuned to what the marketplace is saying. The best keyword tool in the world is just listening really well. But beyond that, yes, I would use a keyword tool and search for them. in that case, I would search for negative reviews, things like that of the particular product just to see what people are saying. then you can really run with them.

21:37
Depending on the type of product too, you can just You can there’s some standard ones out there like is XYZ product cheap I mean, that’s like a very legitimate question that a lot of people ask right? That’s a common one that people ask right? You know, how long does XYZ last an honest review? Right. That’s another example of a really good Double up right there. We doubled up on How long does it last which is a problem statement?

22:05
and then an honest review is a review statement. So we double them up together and now it’s even more effective. So that’s just way to do it. Cool. Let’s move on to number three. And number three, Versus. Versus has picked up finally a lot more. I mean, I was talking about it long before a lot of companies were doing it. It’s still incredibly prolific and important. And as I’m talking about these things, some people are going to listen to this and say, well, I’m just afraid that all my

22:34
you the marketplace flooded with all these already and it’s too saturated for me. That’s a very very scarce mentality. Not healthy. For a couple of reasons.

22:48
By you answering these, it forces you to be a dramatically better communicator, teacher, force you to know your products better. Also, be, when people come to your site, they’re gonna be way, way more informed, and they’re gonna get your opinion now instead of everybody else’s. I mean, it just goes on and on for the reasons why we should do it, right? So with Verses, every product and service generally means that somebody’s looking for a comparative item.

23:17
Right? For me, pool guys, were looking for fiberglass versus concrete pools, fiberglass versus vinyl pools. And in the swimming pool space, what was funny about that one, Steve, is like no fiberglass pool guy in the world was addressing fiberglass versus concrete pools. Of course, the reason was because they were saying, well, our biggest competitor is concrete pools. So this is what we’re going to do. We’re not even going talk about them on our website. And if we don’t talk about them, well, then nobody will know they exist.

23:45
which is about the stupidest mindset ever, but that’s literally, that’s like how so many pool guys thought. So my mindset was, I’m getting asked this question every day. So heck yeah, I’m gonna address it. So I openly talked about them. I compared them very honestly. Didn’t say one was better than the other, because that would be a lie. And again, it was a matter of, hopefully this article is gonna help you decide which is the best choice for you, and then gave pros and cons to each, right?

24:14
So that’s what we did. Now, what you want to do is you want to think of every comparison based question that you’ve ever been asked. And if you talk with your customers, oftentimes you’re saying things like, if you were me, which would you choose? Or in the commerce space, is people that both have also looked at or also searched for. But the easiest way to do this one is I do like to go to Google and just, I always just put the product plus the word versus or compare to, and then you get a slew of potential results that you should be talking about.

24:44
you should be showing and this still works extremely well to this day. But again the key that most companies screw up man is they just come across as one-sided and it just doesn’t work that way. can’t come out and say, so in this video we’re going explain why fiberglass is really your only choice and concrete frankly is a poor option to consider. That’s dumb! Why in the world would people do that?

25:10
often times the language of companies. That’s not going to induce trust. You’ve got to be real. This is, I’m just thinking about my own products right now in the digital space. I run a class, which is a pretty high ticket item. It actually actually makes sense for me to create my own review versus some of the other competitors I have out there and just point out both my strengths and the weaknesses. I think that would actually help. Because I know for a fact that a lot of people search for reviews of my class. So that’s number four.

25:39
Perfect transition there, Steve. So oftentimes we leave reviews up to everybody else. I don’t think we should. I think we should also include ourselves in that conversation. Now there’s different ways that you can do this. You can gather up a lot of the reviews from people that have used it, but you should clearly target that keyword phrase. But here’s where we’re to go even further than that, We should target our competitors’ reviews too.

26:07
And let me give an example of how I did this incredibly successfully. I’ve made a few million dollars off this. So I was the first person in the swimming pool industry that, in fact, in pretty much probably any home improvement industry, because I was teaching this people were like, you’re crazy. In 2009 and 2010, I guess I started teaching this to people like, you’re nuts. So let me give you an example. Because my philosophy was they ask, answer.

26:36
I was obsessive with listening and one night, was probably around 2010 or 11, I giving this, this was at the end of me being a pool guy and I gave this couple of quote for a pool. And they said, Marcus, we like you, we think we wanna do business with you, but if we don’t get this pool from you, is there anybody else that you might recommend? And I thought to myself, that’s gone it. I hate this question.

27:01
And of course, when most companies get asked that question, they’re like, oh, there’s nobody quite like us. I mean, the way we do what we do, right? And so, it’s, know, yeah, yeah, that was a question. And so the person’s just like, whatever. So I went home that night, I said, dag on it. They asked a question. So I’m going to answer this. And so I wrote an article and anybody that’s, that’s listening to this, should look it up. And it was, who are the best pool builders in Richmond, Virginia review slash ratings.

27:29
and I came up with a list of five of the best pool builders in Richmond, Virginia. Now, I’m come right out and say I didn’t even put myself on the list of five. You might say, well, why did you not? Well, first off, if they’re reading the article, they’re on my website. they’re already looking around. They’re already thinking I’m pretty cool guy. Second reason is if you’re gonna create a best of list and then you put yourself on said list, well then that denotes bias. And again,

27:59
Every business should be built on trust. And so I’m not going to do something that is going to make me look biased and it’s going to cause me to lose credibility. But the other factor is this. If you go to that, if you just typed in like best pool builders, Richmond, Virginia, right now, I you would find it immediately in search results. And you’ll see exactly how I wrote it. But, you know, I talked about each one of my competitors. Now here’s what I would suggest on this. You don’t inject opinion.

28:29
you stick to the facts and you just make clear comparisons, right? So I could clearly compare my competitors. And in the sense of this is where like this, the swimming pool company has been around since, you know, 1972 and they’re located in, you know, the mechanics of the area of Virginia. They specialize in in-ground vinyl liner swimming pools and have a heavy emphasis on automatic swimming pool covers. They also install fiberglass pools and have a full service department, right? Now,

28:58
All that information I got directly from their website. Basically using their words, right? So I don’t express any negatives. If a company ever does express a negative, it should be sourced from an outside article and even still I’d be very, very careful, right? I tend not to mix with any of that. I only stick to the facts and I try not to inject opinions when it comes to other people’s stuff. But because of that, today, if you went online and you search for things like reviews,

29:26
Play More Pools, Richmond, Virginia, which is a very major competitor of mine in Richmond, Virginia. Play More Pools is spelled P-L-A-M-O-R. So if you search for reviews, Play More Pools, Richmond, Virginia, which is a very common search, that article is one of the first ones you’re gonna see. It’s always one or two in search results. And you know, it’s crazy, Steve. A few years back, I had this lady come to me and she said, Marcus, craziest thing happened. was…

29:51
was so close to signing a contract with Playmore Pools, but before I signed that contract, I decided to go online and research their company. And as I was researching their company, I stumbled across this article that you guys had written. said, my goodness, these guys are honest, so honest, I should probably call them too. And of course, Steve, you don’t happen, you know, because otherwise I wouldn’t be sharing this story, right? That article generated just that year alone $150,000 in sales. Now sometimes people say to me, why aren’t you afraid you’ve now introduced them to the competition, which is silly because

30:21
it takes them about 0.48 seconds to know who your competitors are. And so you know and I know that consumer ignorance is no longer a viable sales and marketing strategy, right? Not with the digital age. They’re going to find out. And so if we automatically say to ourselves, look, they’re going to be informed. They’re going to be intelligent. I’m not going to treat them dumb. I’m going to treat them like intelligent human beings with the capacity to learn and understand and make smart decisions. When we do that, it gives us the ability to be way more honest, to say way more

30:50
Give way more information. mean it just The possibilities are endless because now there’s no there’s there’s nothing handcuffing us. There’s nothing holding us back It’s very very exciting and it’s very very fun So I just combined the final two reviews and best into one there But that’s an example of of how we did that and I’m telling you I’ve done that with so many companies to this day It just wins and it continues to win So my only concern with what you said was that you don’t include your own company

31:20
in the top five, for example. The problem is when people do searches, they might not even recognize that they’re on your site, right? And they just look through the straight five and then pick one among your top five and avoid your company altogether. Does that ever happen? Yeah, that could absolutely happen. And so if I was selling an item with e-commerce, right? An item on e-commerce, I would include in that list. Okay. But I would come out. Now it’s different with a swimming pool company, right? And you have to read the article to understand why it’s different.

31:51
It just doesn’t sound the same. I would come out and say though, now listen, we sell, we’ve, you know, it sounds something like this. Let’s just, I’m gonna choose a dumb one, toothbrushes, okay? I would say something like this, you know, here at Marxist Toothbrushes, we get asked all the time about other brands that we believe are good. And because we believe so much in educating our customers over just

32:19
having them buy from us, we’ve created this article, this video today, that’s going to give you an honest assessment of the top 10 brands that we’ve seen in the marketplace for soft bristle toothbrushes. Now keep in mind as you read this, two of these we sell. But of course we sell them because we believe in them so very much. although we include them in the top 10, we also include eight others that we don’t sell. And hopefully,

32:48
this is going to give you a great sense as to what is available in the marketplace and why we chose what we chose. Interesting. I suppose that if it’s something that you don’t sell, you might even be able to establish some sort of affiliate arrangement also in Stillmake. You can clearly do this with affiliates. And the other way that you do it, Steve, is with indirect industries, right? So in other words, let me give you an example. if I’m selling swimming pools, might

33:18
do something on swimming pool heaters. And the reason why I would want to do that is because if they’re looking for a heater, they might also be in the process of buying an in-ground swimming pool. They’re just looking for the heater for a set pool. You see what I’m saying? so it’s a smart play to indirectly do this. mean, there’s just lots of ways to do this. I mean, I’ve done this with, give me an example, let’s say, and this doesn’t necessarily apply to e-commerce, but it’s the same principle.

33:48
So let’s say you’re a pet sitter. And so you would want to do articles on or videos in both. It’s really always both, but on the best veterinarians in your area, right? Because now you’re giving, it’s great cred for them. You’re getting on their radar and people are searching for that. And if they’re looking for a veterinarian, there’s a good chance they need a pet sitter as well. You see what I’m saying? Yeah, absolutely.

34:14
So that cross pollination is really really effective with best stuff stuff and it’s still you know to this day man It’s just so effective obviously with any of those Preferably you want to put the year if you can because it definitely makes a difference in search engine results Okay, and then just adjust the year accordingly obviously right as the year as time passes Yeah, yeah, I mean just means I mean, you know because we’re in a what have you done like for me lately world? We just got to keep producing new content. Yeah, it’s necessarily a bad thing

34:44
Well let me ask you this. So we’re putting out all this content, but it might not necessarily rank anywhere and people might not necessarily be able to find it. And so what is your, how do you attack the problem of actually ranking and getting people to read these articles? Well everything we just talked about was a straight SEO play. I mean, it’s very bottom of the funnel based, major search, everybody that’s, every single client that I’ve had, we’ve

35:11
in the first year we never get less than 10x growth in terms of traffic. And I don’t even call it SEO, even though that’s essentially what you’re doing, because obviously Google’s obsession is that you specifically and relevantly answer the question better than anybody else. And so the thing about a lot of e-commerce shops is they don’t produce super quality content oftentimes. For example, I know you know this,

35:40
the number one, the average number one ranked page and SERPs is above a thousand words, right? And so whenever we have a client producing a piece of content and we’re vetting it out, unless it’s above 750 or more, that’s the, 750 words is a bare minimum acceptable number for any piece of content any of our clients produce, because we help train clients with content marketing, okay? So any lesson there, preferably we like the bar to start at a thousand words.

36:10
Now a lot of are like, holy freak, are you serious? Yes, that’s the marketplace. That’s the game we’re in because meat is good. This is what search engines want. You get all this stuff that everybody wants short, bite-sized. Not search, sorry, that ain’t how it works. We want meat and potatoes, And that’s why bigger, beefier is better. Not wasteful, not wasteful, but bigger, better, and beefier is better.

36:39
Yeah, I I would argue that it should be 1500 or even 2000 words plus, at least in my industry. You’re exactly right. You’re exactly right. And you know, I say 750, that’s the low bar of the low bars. Yeah. What is your take on the site design?

37:00
as opposed to just the straight content. Like does the site have to be beautiful? I mean what is your experience on that? Because a lot of people spend a lot of time and money designing a beautiful site. Yeah and then conversions are less. In ecommerce space for sure that’s the case. Yeah. Yeah it’s very very common. You know and this is because a lot of website designers are artsy fartsy and they’re not conversion based. And anybody that’s gone through a website redesign has probably seen that and experienced that.

37:29
you which is why we’ve got to be obsessive testers i mean all of us do and we never never sacrifice uh… come you know i’m gonna i’m gonna put conversions in u x together here because i think done right

37:44
great UX leads to conversions. It doesn’t hurt it, right? Because to your point earlier, your question about, if you have that Marcus, is it gonna potentially hurt conversions? I think incredible education increases conversions, right? It’s always been my experience. And so my point is, I think that always needs to be our primary focus and secondary focus is the visual side. That being said, I do think we have to be outrageously obsessive of this point about video.

38:14
I think most people should see themselves as media companies, pretty much everybody. if you’re, especially on your major products and services, if you don’t have a really robust video that truly says who it’s for and who it’s not for, that’s actually more important. Well then you’re missing the mark in terms of psychology. So Marcus, we covered a lot of stuff today and what I want to do is I kind of want to summarize it and kind of put it in a cohesive

38:43
content plan, so to speak, so that the listeners can come away with something that’s actionable. So if you wanted to just give a few actionable tips on how to just get started with what we talked about today, that’d be great. So one of the things that we do that’s been incredibly successful is we have what’s called a content matrix, right? So the content matrix is what you do. Let’s say you’ve got, I don’t know, 20 major products that you sell online or services. So with those 20, let’s create a chart or graph, if you will.

39:13
And at the top of the chart, you have each one of the major products that you sell. Now, that’s the top of the chart. Now, on the left side of the chart, the graph you’d see, put the big five. Put best, cost, problems, versus reviews and best. And then take each one of those and fill in all the cost questions that are involved with that particular product. Fill in all of

39:39
the comparison based questions, all the negative based questions, all those things that we’ve talked about. If you do this, and let’s say that you have 10 products that you sell, let’s just use 10. Well, it’s not just that you’re gonna have 50 pieces of content, you’re probably gonna have a couple hundred pieces of content that come out of it if you’re doing this the right way. Because just some versus alone, there’s probably a bunch of versus that you might do. And there’s a bunch of cost ones potentially that you might do. It just depends on how it’s said.

40:09
The content matrix works and within a couple hours of just really focus, you’re going to have 12 to 24 months potentially it could be of content to produce through text, through video. That’s very exciting. That’s very, very helpful. I think that’s one of the majors. I’d also urge anybody that’s

40:37
And this is not a straight e-commerce plate, but it does matter. In conjunction with video, which is such a big deal, I’ve been doing so much with this, clients and experimenting and just crazy stuff. We’ve consistently seen over and over again that putting a video next to a forum that people have to fill out a form on your site, like on a landing page, on average increases conversions around 80 to 90%.

41:04
But here’s the thing that a lot of companies will mess up is they won’t title the video. So let’s slap a video next to a form. That’s not good enough. What you want to do is the video has a title and the title should be something like this. Literally, should you fill out this form or see exactly what will happen if you fill out this form. Now, it’s really powerful when you have that titled. So the person comes on that landing page or whatever it is and

41:32
They’re trying to get their information for whatever reason. And they have a form. There’s four major fears that people have when they fill out forms. Number one, are you going to call me to death if you’re asking for my number? Number two, are you going to spam me to death if you’re asking for my email? Number three, what are you going to do with my information, privacy? And then number four, exactly what is this process going to look like if I fill out this form? So you want to address all four of those fears in this video. And you do it nice and easy and relaxed, right? So it would literally be something like this. I might say,

42:00
Okay, so you’re sitting there right now and you’re saying to yourself, should I fill out this form really? Are you guys gonna spam me? Are you gonna like email me and call me to death? All right, let’s talk about exactly what this is gonna look like. So then you explain it at the end of the video. It doesn’t have be long at all. At the end of the video you say, so hopefully that addresses your concerns. If you any questions, let us know. Otherwise, fill out the form. We can’t wait to talk with you soon. Unbelievable results. Generally, like I said, 80 to 90%, I’ve seen a bunch that were.

42:28
between 150, 200 % lift to conversions. So those are magical. You see very, very few companies doing that right now. It’s a major opportunity, Would you suggest doing this on like an e-commerce checkout page though? Absolutely. Absolutely. All stinking day long. And again, the beauty behind this guys is we can split test this stuff. So you don’t have to take my word for it. If you doubt it, split it. And then you’re like, oh yeah, dude, pool guy was right.

42:58
Test it because I’m happy to you know to there might be situations where it’s more effective 90 % of time But 10 % of time that’s okay. Let’s use it for the 90 So just to kind of reiterate what you said so in the checkout process you want to just kind of outline the forms that you will experience what the outcome is going to be and Reassure them that you’re not going to sell their information and that sort of thing. That’s right overcome those four major fears major conversion lifts, buddy Interesting. Okay. I’ve never thought to do that

43:28
at all. That’s why we’re talking bud. I know. Seriously, what else you got Marcus? I got lots of stuff. We got five minutes left or whatever. If got anything else, that’d be great. These have been awesome nuggets. Yeah, well and hopefully, everybody’s listening to this. Look, if you get the book they ask you answer, it’s on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all the stuff. It was rated the number one marketing book in 2017 by Mashable and it really breaks all the big five down. It talks about this really, really well. All the principles

43:57
definitively apply to e-commerce. mean, it really, really does. know, one thing that I would suggest to people too to consider doing, if you are not using some of these simple personalized email video marketing tools by now, you are behind the eight ball for customer service and e-commerce. They are unfreaking believable. So an example of these tools would be GoVideo by Vidyard.

44:25
or Soapbox by Wistia, or there’s some others out there. as, you know, many people, when a purchase is made, they’ll send some automated, thank you. But even better, especially if it’s a, if they spend a bunch of money with you, if you create a quick personalized video that says, you know, hey Steve, you just went on the site and you purchased this, man, I’m so excited for you. I just want to thank you, but.

44:55
If you do that and they see the thumbnail of you holding up a car that says, thank you Steve for your purchase, and it comes to them the same day, they’re gonna be blown away. This is stuff that Amazon isn’t doing yet, right? And that is the power of personalized video. It’s free. If you go video right now by Vidyard is the company that makes it. It’s a free Chrome extension. And anybody that is not technical can learn how to do it in about 60 seconds. Everybody that’s listening is right now.

45:25
for that ultra-powerful customer service experience should be sending out personalized email videos. And it makes all the difference. And so just to be clear, this service, so I’m not familiar with the service, you can actually personalize a video and generate it on the fly? Yeah. Yeah. For your customer. OK. Yeah. Super, super fast. So it’s like, if I wanted to, and I might even do it after we’ve

45:52
we get off this, I might just send it to you directly, just because it is amazing. There’s two major problems with emails that we have. Number one, do they open it? Number two, do they consume it after it’s been opened? So those are the two major problems. So how do you do it? You got a subject line that says something like this, hey Steve, I made this video for you. Now, as soon as you see that, you have to open it. Psychologically, you don’t have a choice. You don’t have a choice.

46:22
Then when you see a thumbnail of a video and on that video I’ve got this little whiteboard or note that’s saying, hey Steve, I just wanted to thank you or whatever. Hey Steve, or whatever it says, or just Steve exclamation point. Once again, you can’t help but to click on the video and watch it. And the whole thing oftentimes will take me less time than actually writing out an email. And it’s so outrageously personalized and it’s just.

46:51
Different than what anybody else is doing again go video by video artists free Chrome extension guys get it right now unless you’re using some other type of personalized video Program I love it Marcus. Hey, I want to give you a chance to talk about your services and your books and all the other services that you have to offer Yeah, well, I’ve got an agency. It’s called impact brand and design impact BND Bravo Nancy David impact BND comm

47:19
is my agency but my personal site is marcusheridan.com and I speak all over the world and if you’ve got I know there’s a lot of soul-prenees here that don’t necessarily need a workshop but if you know it’s like if you’re thinking about somebody for a conference or whatever recommend me because this is what I do and I have a lot of fun with it and my obsession is the audience and their takeaways and hopefully that’s what

47:47
This audience has gotten today Steve. They’re like man, that’s a clear nugget. That’s a clear nugget. That’s a clear nugget. Not a bunch of fluff, not a bunch of hypothetical jargon. They’re like man, this is actionable and I can take it and apply it to my business tomorrow. That’s always my goal. Absolutely. And in fact, Marcus, I may not publish this episode and keep all these nuggets to myself. That’s awesome. But thanks a lot for coming on show, Marcus. Really appreciate your time. My pleasure. All right. Take care.