The Expert Podcast

Running your business has certain priorities. I'll bet one of the highest priorities is business development, meaning that you want to grow your sales. You want to become a bigger company, sell more stuff, have more revenue, maybe more employees—however you want to look at it, business development and growing your business is a priority. Well, how do you do that? Obviously, the one measurable KPI or scoreboard is sales—how much do you sell? Obviously, you have to sell with the result of profitable sales, not just selling topline revenue that loses money. Although some companies do that to try to build market share, for most small and medium businesses, you want to grow profitably. So start with sales, but before you can have sales, you have to have a conversion rate. You have to close deals; you have to have a certain percentage of customers you talk to become transactions. So back up one level before that—before that, you have to have customers to talk to. You have to have clients coming into your store, calling you up on the phone, maybe going to your website. You have to have all of these things in order to have a conversion rate. If you have zero customers coming in, even 100% closing ratio—100% of zero is still zero. So you have to have customers. The larger the volume, the better, obviously. That's what most people refer to as marketing. Sometimes they call it advertising. In fact, many businesses talk about sales and marketing or your sales and marketing department. I will suggest that you talk about marketing before sales. Instead of saying sales and marketing, talk about marketing and sales. Sales attempts can only be portrayed upon inquiries, upon customers, upon visitors. And here's the problem: that inquiry volume needs to be very high.

Here's a pyramid of all the customers that maybe call you up. This many come in the door, this many ask questions, and you close one deal. That's a conversion rate, right? And this isn't too far off. If you look at this top line, this is nine people; this is one sale. Many companies, if you truly count all of your inquiries, you have about a 10% closing ratio or conversion rate. So if you want to have one sale, you’ve got to get 10 people coming to your door, calling you up, or going to your website. Your website actually even has to have a higher number of volume of customers. So how do you do that? First, refocus on the marketing part because that's the first chain in that domino line to fall. You can't have sales until you have a closing ratio. You can't have a closing ratio until you have marketing. So start with the marketing.

Well, how do you do that? It's many times thought of as like you want to put your head in the sand, block off your ears, because you've tried a lot of things. You've paid SEO marketers, you've paid Google ad type marketers, you've even probably paid social media gurus. So as good as your sales department is, as good as they are in closing deals, you have to have more clients for them to talk to, and that's what the sales department wants too. So how do you do marketing? What are the four types of marketing that most companies do? You can do content marketing, which is what we'll talk about in the rest of this video. It's the best way because you have control over your destiny. You're not throwing money out there that you have to have an urgent return on. Look, if you spend money on paid ads, like you jump down here to paid Google, we've all done it, right? You pay for Google ads. That actually has some merit, but you have to get a return on it. If you're spending $500,000, $2,000 a week on ads, if you're not getting the sales, that money is like burning through a hole in your pocket very quickly.

You can also do paid ads on Facebook and LinkedIn and do search engine optimization. You can pay these SEO companies big bucks to supposedly get you search rankings, but if you're paying money out of pocket, you've got to get a return on that pretty quickly. You can do event-based marketing, which is doing webinars, you can do conference presentations about your company, you can talk to industry trade groups of companies that buy from you, and you can also do offline ads, which is direct mail, display ads, which is billboards, radio, TV, electronics. But again, all those have money coming out of your pocket and have to have pretty immediate return on your investment. Otherwise, it’s not sustainable. Even if you pay a billboard $2,000 a month, if you go six to eight months and you're not getting sales off of it, it's going to be pretty quickly that that’s not going to last. So let's talk about content marketing, which is the focus of this presentation.

Content marketing has some advantages. First of all, you control it 100%. It really has no hard cost out of pocket. There are a few things that might have some expenses, but we'll talk about that. You're not at the mercy of Google. You're not at the mercy of SEO. You're not at risk of having the magic algorithm that ranks your site high or low one day versus another. You're not relying on that. You're not relying on people clicking on your ads and then buying or not buying. If you're paying Google for ad placement, you have to get people to buy from you. You can also adjust it as needed. If you need more traffic, you can adjust up the volume. You can also adjust the subject of the content. If one division of your company has more need for marketing—let’s say you're a car dealership and all of a sudden you have too many trucks—you can do content marketing about trucks. You can adjust on the fly, and again, you're in control of your destiny. You're not reliant on others to get you the results from that content.

Now, here's the bad news for any kind of marketing, whether it's content or anything else: you need huge numbers. We're going to look at some specific numbers of how many visitors you need to actually get the results you want. So if you take your closing ratio divided by how many sales you want, that's the number of inquiries you need first. For example, if you want three sales per week (and I don't know what kind of business you're in, but let’s say we’re talking about in this case an insurance agency that wants to sell insurance to people and you have a 10% closing ratio), right? So if you want three new sales of policies per week, that means you need 30 inquiries per week. 30 inquiries per week to close three deals. 10% of 30 is 3. Okay, 30 doesn't sound like a lot, but if you want 30 inquiries, meaning people that call you up on the phone, people walk into your agency, you have to calculate your action ratio. What percent of people who see your ad or see your visibility actually take action? What's the action ratio? And this is where the big numbers come in, because only 5% of people that see that are going to actually take that action. So if you divide that 30 by 5%, that means you need 600-100 visitor points per week to get that 30 sales. That's a lot. That's what an action ratio is. So before we talk about how we're going to get those kinds of numbers, why are content clients even better than regular clients?

First of all, we talked about the ROI burden. If you're getting customers through some other means that cost money, you have an ROI burden. If you spend $1,000 to get even 600 customers, you now have to sell enough—not just sell $1,000 worth of stuff to make $1,000 in profit. So if you sell something for $1,000 and maybe have a 20% profit margin, that means you only keep $200. That means you need to sell $5,000 worth of stuff, services, or whatever to get back your $1,000 expense just to break even, which means you really need to sell $6,000 to $7,000 to make a profit. So it's a lot of burden when you're paying money. Also, content clients are better repeat-volume clients because they're more likely to want information, not just look to buy from the lowest bidder. Right? They want to be more engaged with you. Also, it's not directly competitive. When you are doing Google ads, they're seeing your ad and all the other ones right next to it, so they're looking at competitors in most cases. Content ads are also going to get B2B customers, which are more likely to be easier to talk to, more understanding, and they’re going to be aware of the service you're offering.

Content clients are also higher retention. There's more opportunity to cross-sell other products. It's also not a commodity, meaning that you're not just a pig in a poke. You're a professional advisor for that client, and you can use your product knowledge differentiation when somebody's talking to you versus another provider. You already set yourself as the expert because of your content presentation.

So how do you start content? All you need to do first is to commit to spending 10 minutes a day talking. Period. You need to talk. That's it. You don’t need to do anything else besides talk. If you, even as a CEO, manager, anybody else can hear yourself talk, how dare coming out of your mouth for 10 minutes, which I’m sure if you’re like most of us—if you’re an executive or manager or leader—you love to hear yourself talk. You’ve got to talk. Here's an example: talk to a camera just like I am now. I got a camera in front of me, the microphone—that’s it. I don’t need any high-quality studio. Just press record and start talking. It could even be on a Zoom meeting or a Teams call, not doing it on the fly. If you do 10 minutes a day and talk about your business—what value you deliver, what lessons learned from customers—you can create all kinds of content.