Mark:
Hello and welcome to the Newfangled Marketing Podcast. I’m Mark O’Brien, the CEO of Newfangled.
Chris:
I’m Chris Butler. I’m the COO of Newfangled.
Mark:
What we’ve done here is we’ve put together a short, fifteen-minute podcast that focuses on different digital marketing topics. Today the topic is the morning after.
Chris:
Totally a safe for work topic, we promise.
Mark:
The idea is this, there are so many kinds of investments that you can make in your marketing. You’ve got lots of people marketing to you, asking you to invest in them. You could use Google AdWords, outbound sales services that try to generate leads for you. You’ve got also some marketing automation tools. You’ve got web development companies. You’ve got content strategy companies. You’ve got contact selling companies. All sorts of options that you can invest in. We do know that agencies typically are really hungry and looking for that single solution though. The one investment they can make that’s really just going to make everything better. Be that a ring maker sales person or the really beautiful automation platform that promises to just wave a magic wands over all your marketing and just improve it. We know that obviously there is no silver bullet. The real solution to agency marketing is typically quite comprehensive and complex combination of all those tools that we just mentioned in some part or form.
What we want to talk about today is we’re going to look at three different investments you can make. We’re going to look at specifically the return on the investment after the service is done. That’s what the morning after is about. After you’re done with the contract that vendor, the day after that contracts up, what do you have leftover? What do you have to show for it?
Chris:
Right. Mark, you mentioned AdWords. AdWords is a great example because it’s a really small consolidated thing that you might buy. It is so much more than just a line item. Even if you say, “Okay, we need to get in front of searches on these topics. We’re willing to spend X amount of dollars on it.” You would still need somebody else to do keyword analysis because that’s a constantly ebbing and flowing market, to evaluate the success of it, etc. Let’s say you had that person, you’re shelling out money every month to have a certain sense of ownership over some targets. As soon as you stop paying, that goes away. You don’t have it anymore. You’re relying completely on Google, on the technology, on their sort of blessing that you have coverage on a certain term. You stop paying, it goes away. It doesn’t matter if you have that expert in house to evaluate the AdWords, they’re not in control of it, Google is.
Mark:
Yeah. The morning after, there is no peripheral ongoing benefit.
Chris:
No. I mean someone might have learned about the fickleness of search terms and how that works. If you open up the Google trend analysis of search terms, it’s all over the place. Someone would have learned that and learned to become frustrated and jaded with it. They wouldn’t have learned any new skill that would reproduce without Google.
Mark:
Right. Google isn’t giving you any gifts after you stop paying them money.
Chris:
Nope, they don’t care about you.
Mark:
The money you spend on AdWords has nothing to do with your organic ranking or anything like that. There’s no outlying …
Chris:
Not at all. I notice in this one area too, I find myself and I know almost at everyone at Newfangled tends to downplay expectations on AdWords anyway. Most of the time when someone wants to use it, it’s in a market where the level of competition is so extraordinary for general terms, especially something like hospitality. Any client that we or our agency is going to work with are not going to compete on that level. They have to approach it with some other tactic and strategy. Which we’ll probably touch on quite a bit later.
Mark:
Right. Yeah, one trend that we’ve seen that’s just a clear market trend is that the AdWords investment has continued to increase. Meaning you need to spend much more today than you did five years ago for the same volume, and you’re getting much less return on that as well.
Chris:
Yeah. Absolutely inflationary just like anything else. If you tried to put a billboard up this year as opposed to ten years ago, you’re going to spend more per inch that you had. That’s just the way this goes. There’s more people trying to get at the same space.
Mark:
Right. There’s certainly a time and place for an investment in Google AdWords. All the different techniques and approaches that we’ve mentioned, they’re right reasons to use those things in different businesses at different times. I think considering this one aspect of it, what’s left over for you? What continual benefit do you get from it? It’s an interesting way of considering the investment. I think that most people don’t really consider that. Especially most marketers don’t consider that. They think about what the term with the tools are going look like, not so much the term after using the tool. Yeah, Chris, that makes a lot of sense, the outline there of Google AdWords.
What other element that we wanted to look at would be a lead generation service? Somebody says to you, “Hey, we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to basically be your sales team. We’re going to make all the calls. We’re going to scour all the lists. We’re just really going to work the market for you and then just really bring leads to you.” Again, there are lots of good reasons to use services like that. There are lots of great services out there specifically tailored to the agency industry. A lot of agencies have a lot of success there. When you look at it from this one perspective, the morning after, the day that contract’s up and the day after it’s up, what do you have? You’ve got the leads that were created but there’s really no ongoing benefit after that initial, say that one year contract is up. The year might have been very successful but there’s nothing really left over after.
Chris:
Yeah. That’s absolutely right. Something that just occurred to me as you were talking about that, and I think will make a nice segway to where we want to go with this conversation, is I was remembering a time a bunch of years ago, where Mark and I were sitting in his office talking to a guy who who was trying to get us to buy a radio ads. His pitch to us was, “Okay, let me scour your website and look at it. I’ll get a sense of who you are and what you do, and I’m going to write these radio ads for you. We’re going to put them on local stations that people in the community might hear it. You’ll get some clients out of this.” It seemed like such an obvious hail Mary. It didn’t seem to make sense. I think the main doubt that we had was how could this person possibly represent us as well as we could ourselves.
I think the same thing is true for when you outsource a sales service. If you have a fairly general purpose service as an agency, or if you’re this full service agency that’s a little impositioned in some way, whether that’s industry or your actual specialty, then yeah, maybe someone might be able to sell that for you as accurately as you could. It seems to me as your specialty gets more and more focused, and is more and more on the forefront of your industry, where you’re actually redefining what it is you do, and re-educating your prospects, the idea of handing that over to somebody else seems less and less possible, less and less valid. Wouldn’t you agree?
Mark:
Absolutely, yeah. Blair Ends has a great quote and uses it often, which is professional services are bought not sold. That’s all about the expertise angle. The first person who’s in contact with the prospect, if they’re not exuding expertise and demonstrating it in a very subtle but clear way, that they just basically just have their entire market surrounded. They understand every aspect of that prospect’s issue in this regard, as it relates to the services they offer. If that doesn’t occur on that first call, there’s no credibility.
Chris:
Right. He also talks about challenging. When you’re in the sales conversation, challenging the assumptions and expectations of the buyer, and redefining them for them. That is such a much more compelling and convincing approach to quote/unquote, selling your services, then just trying to find a fit among what they’re asking for from what you do. If you can turn the tables on it, say, “No, this is prescribing a certain-ness in the solution as opposed to just saying just let’s see what we have and see if it matches.”
Mark:
Right, absolutely. Back to your radio ad example, that’s another scenario like the morning after. After that radio stops running because you’re not paying for it, what’s left over?
Chris:
Right.
Mark:
Nothing. Let’s look at an example where there is quite a bit leftover. That’s content marketing. Content marketing, again the basic idea of generating unique, expert, indexable, content. Content that you’re writing, that your firm is creating that reflects the expertise of your firm, that’s solely focused on the overlap between that expertise and your prospect’s pain points. Generating that kind of content and hiring a firm to help with, not to generate the content, but to give you the right plan, and the right support, and coaching, and consulting, and metric oversight, to ensure that you’re creating the right content, that the right people are receiving it, and that is performing in the right ways. That’s another investment.
Cash wise, very, very similar to the investments when you take Google AdWords, or one of these outbound sales services, or even different media purchase investments within investment content marketing. Whereby you’re adding this content to your site, where you’re learning how to add it. Which content is resonating with prospects, which individuals inside the firm are best suited to help you in that effort. Learning how much time that takes, really overall developing the habit of content marketing. When you look at what’s left over the morning after there, there’s quite a bit.
Chris:
Yeah. Its’ interesting, the word habit, there’s so much thought about how long it takes to learn a new habit, to integrate it into your life. I honestly think that this habit takes longer. Let’s say as an individual you’re saying, “I want to make a habit to run every morning.” I think, what is it something like nine weeks or … “
Mark:
Twenty-one days.
Chris:
Twenty-one.
Mark:
Before it’s something you subscribe to.
Chris:
Yeah, who know what it is? In this case, I would venture to guess and we’re in the process of discovering this, that looking at probably a year to get up to speed on this. A year to work with somebody to really get to know how your firm operates. Who needs to contribute? How they think? How they express themselves? Integrating that over the course of everything else that has to happen day to day. All the other business, you know the actual work, I think it takes awhile. Then that morning after is such a deeper slower transition, that just sort of an abrupt you pull the plug, and you lose everything. At that point you’ve learned so much, then you’re probably ready to take it another step into something deeper.
Mark:
Yeah. In terms of the year, I agree. In that year, I’d say the first few months are built just putting together the right plan. How are you positioned? Who is that? To borrow a term from Strategic Coach, who is that “right fit client”? Who should you be working with? Who’s the person who’s going to provide the most value from your expertise? Who desires it the most? Who’s willing to pay for it? Is happy to pay for it because they understand how badly they need it? Who’s happy to refer you to other clients like themselves, once they realize the benefit of what you do? Who is that right fit client for you? Who are you trying to attract through this content marketing? That’s the first thing to figure out. That takes some time to figure out.
Then as a matter of figuring out, well what content types? Is it a blog, a podcast, a webinar, whitepapers, case studies, videos? There’s so many different options. The real answer is that is likely to be a combination of options. Having a single sign up option, like a blog where you sign up for it once, and then you just get it. Then a multi-sign-up, where for example, a webinar. Where you sign up for a webinar, but then the next time there’s a webinar, you resign up for that one. There are lots of very important reasons to have a combination of single sign ups and multi sign up content types. Also the kind of types that are varied across different media, such as audio, video, written, that sort of thing. We have to figure that out.
Then you have to figure out well, who internally is going to be creating this content? Who to put at task with this? That takes some figuring out. One or two months just figuring out the plan. There are many other things beyond the things that I just mentioned that factor into the plan. Then you’re going to be executing against that plan for the remainder of that year, anywhere from nine to ten months. There too, it’s a matter of looking and having brainstorm meetings. Figuring out, well, what should we talk about? Understanding this plan, understanding our prospects, these right fit clients. What are they struggling with? What do we know that we can share on our site that’s going to bring them in and really resonate with them? You take guesses. You take guesses and you publish content. You watch how people react to it, through email and through your site. Then you refine it. You sharpen it based on what is resonating, and you keep on applying and reapplying, and observing.
That process takes some time. All the while, you’re also trying to figure out how you do this. The one person who thought that might have been a great fit for the content team, really isn’t as invested as you thought they would be. Someone else can’t wait to be part of the content team. It takes about a year to get all the mechanics right. Again, as Chris you mentioned that building the actual habit.
Chris:
There’s also seasons. I think something that we’ve discovered first hand is that there are seasons of relevance in term of topics, and things that you do within your firm. I think that any professional service is for the profile of services evolves over time. You watch the market, you see what people need. You start to see where your expertise is starting to head. You’re constantly rediscovering, and redefining, and focusing. To that means, even if you go through this cycle of figuring how to articulate your expertise in the most effective and efficient way, you have redefine that when you realize that oh, what we do now is different. The way we think about this is different. The way our customers think about the problem is different. There’s a new technology out there that completely changes everything.
Mark:
Yes.
Chris:
You go through the cycles over and over again, so there are seasons in the market, there are seasons in the firm, and there are seasons for people. As you were saying, there might have been somebody who was the rock star writer for awhile, but then all of the sudden it looks like maybe they are better speaking about this stuff. You figure out how to capture that. You record it. You do transcripts. You do interviews. All of a sudden, video might be jelling. Maybe there’s a new person who’s really come into their own. They are actually a better fit to write about it than the veteran. I think what it really requires is that the team and whoever’s shepherding that team, be vigilant and honest about all of those factors and willing to do what is right for the system, for the person.
Mark:
Right. I love, love that concept of the seasonality of things. Marketing firms, agencies, they are entrepreneurial organizations. One of the most fundamental tendencies of an entrepreneurial organization is change, growth and change for all the reasons that you just mentioned. That’s why your marketing will always be in place. There’s always a new story to tell. There’s always a new breakthrough to share. If that’s not the case, your business is stagnant and you’re in trouble. There has to be that. Let’s think about the morning after. You hire a firm to help you with this for a year. What’s leftover on day three hundred and sixty-six?
Chris:
Well seems to me what’s left over is all the content that was created, which is significant.
Mark:
It’s their property.
Chris:
Right. Everything both belongs to them. It keeps working. As a case in point, we have content on our site that’s been there for almost ten years, that is continually accessed. Most of that isn’t that relevant anymore but people are still looking for it. That just shows that stuff never dies. The other thing that’s left over is the experience and expertise. You’ve learned habits, learned behaviors, that’s huge. What’s interesting in my opinion, is that when you look at everything that’s left over and how all that starts to settle into habit and routine, and standard practice, something that people can sort of embody, moving forward doesn’t feel like their inhabiting someone else’s skin or someone else’s role. That paves the way.
That opens up perception for so many other things that you can go deeper on. For example, measuring and the effectiveness of that. That word alone represents a huge amount of knowledge, and learned skill, and behavior. I know that our strategists spend time with clients for years on, because what you use to measure effectiveness is constantly changing, along with all the other seasonality. You’re left with all that, but the compelling this to me is that you’re left with new opportunity as well. Once that’s become integrated, then what do you do? What’s the next step?
Mark:
Right. Well you mentioned expertise and you talked about the expertise of having the habit, the expertise of doing it. There’s also, what happens in content marketing, as you go through this process you learn so much more about what you actually know. Those bonds are formed in your brain and you develop a small layer there of confidence, where you realize that you are an expert. Just virtually by the effect of sharing that expertise, you develop a stronger command of that topic, into a cycle that builds on itself. You write an article, you feel good about it. It resonates with somebody. You say, “Okay, I’m kind of good at this.” Then you do the next one and that has a bigger effect, and then the next one, and the next one. Once you catch that, once you get that hit of confidence from the resolve of your content marketing, that’s when the habit really jells. That’s another reason why year one is so important to develop those habits and actually see the returns. That’s the greatest thing. Maybe perhaps the greatest benefit that you’re left with on day three sixty-six, is confidence.
Chris:
Yeah. It’s been amazing to see the clients that we’ve worked with for years, when the light comes on is so inspiring. Then when you see that the confidence has really set in. When the light comes on that exciting. There’s so much to do. There’s so much hunger. There’s so much inspiration, but when the confidence sets in, it’s like you’re talking to a new person. The other component of that, that speaks to a big seasonal shift that’s happened, is when marketing and sales have been siloed for so long, now this concept forces them to become essentially one. I mean there’s two streams of mechanisms, and behaviors, steps, and expertise in both. It’s not that they’re the same thing. They need to be so much more integrated now.
It reminds me of something you and I were talking about just last week, when we were reflecting on a piece of content that we put out. I said, “You know, one of the reasons I felt so urgent about everyone at Newfangled making sure that they read it, was it was the first piece of content that I’d felt was one of the best manifestations of the sales experience.” Not only did it properly articulate a concept and idea in an area of expertise, that’s really important to us and our customers right now, but it did it in a way that was perfectly in sync with the sales experience. If someone was actually speaking to you, or to someone else who was handling a sales engagement, their experience of that material would be pretty much exactly the same.
Mark:
Right.
Chris:
If not a little more in depth because you’re having a conversation. That overlap, that cross pollination is something that’s the reward or sort of the manifestation of the confidence.
Mark:
Right.
Chris:
It takes so much time for that to set in.
Mark:
Absolutely. Yeah, so this is our very first podcast and greatly encourage, speaking of that confidence, we obviously take a lot of our own medicine here. Just I think maybe through different topics for different podcasts jumped into my head as we were talking about these topics here. This is a fun little adventure into one, quite small aspect but an important aspect of buying marketing services, and really considering the long term investment return on it. This is really enjoyable. We tried our best to keep to the fifteen minutes. We’re looking forward to the next one. Thanks for listening to this inaugural New Newfangled Marketing Podcast.
Chris:
Absolutely. We’ll see you next time.