You're Ready to Start Marketing. Now What? (Series: Digital Marketing Tips for the New (Or Old!) Business Owner 2020)

2
Practical and entertaining education for
attorneys, accountants, business owners and
executives, and investors.

Disclaimer
The material in this webinar is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered
legal, financial or other professional advice. You should consult with an attorney or other
appropriate professional to determine what may be best for your individual needs. While
Financial Poise™ takes reasonable steps to ensure that information it publishes is accurate,
Financial Poise™ makes no guaranty in this regard.
5

Meet the Faculty
MODERATOR:
Joshua Lyons - Owner of Joshua Lyons Marketing, LLC; Co-Founder of CRE Marketing Group
PANELISTS:
Linda Zappulla - KU/UMKC
Bill Schick - Mesh Interactive Agency
Chris Fritsch - CLIENTSFirst Consulting
6

About This Webinar -
You're Ready to Start Marketing. Now What?
Business owners should certainly have a clear plan for their marketing and should understand
which channels are the best fit for their marketing mix. However, there are a few more things
that should be done, once it’s time to start marketing. As an example, it’s important to have
Google Analytics setup on the company’s website. This will be incredibly beneficial for
tracking success. It’s a free tool from Google, but it won’t work until it’s been added to the
website’s coding. Upon completion of this episode, the business owner will discover a variety
of marketing tips which will increase their online exposure and improve their ability to refine
their marketing plan for greater results.
7

About This Series - Digital Marketing Tips for the
New (Or Old) Business Owner 2020
Approximately 83,300 small businesses in the United States are closed every year because
of ineffective marketing. This indicates many business owners are unknowledgeable of how to
leverage the power of marketing. While this is unfortunate, it is not surprising. There are
countless marketing companies trying to sell their services, and these services range from
billboards, to social media marketing, to telemarketing and more. Though these marketing
tactics can be very effective, improper planning can lead to failure. As such, this webinar
series is designed to educated business owners on how to prepare, execute and refine their
own customized marketing initiatives. After finishing this webinar series, the business owner
should have a much clearer and strategic plan for their own marketing.
Each Financial Poise Webinar is delivered in Plain English, understandable to investors, business owners, and
executives without much background in these areas, yet is of primary value to attorneys, accountants, and other
seasoned professionals. Each episode brings you into engaging, sometimes humorous, conversations designed to
entertain as it teaches. Each episode in the series is designed to be viewed independently of the other episodes so that
participants will enhance their knowledge of this area whether they attend one, some, or all episodes.
8

Episodes in this Series
#1: Marketing First Steps: Planning, Budgeting & Hiring
Premiere date: 1/22/20
#2: Which Marketing Channels Should You Use, And Why?
#3: You're Ready to Start Marketing. Now What?
9

Episode #3
You're Ready to Start Marketing. Now What?
10

Have a Sales Process
• The idea of marketing is to ultimately move people into a sales process, so they can
purchase products or services. But what exactly does that sales process look like? If this
isn’t planned out before the marketing plan is launched, there will likely be many missed
opportunities. So, before marketing is started, decide on the sales process and how to do
this. In the next several slides, we present a general outline on how to prepare.
11
 Acquire Leads
 Qualify Your Leads
 Refine Your Pitch
 Prepare for Objections
 Convert the Lead

Acquire Leads
• Naturally, this is part of the marketing function, since marketing is the means through
which leads should be generated. However, make sure the sales team isn’t missing these
leads. For example, what if someone sends a direct message on Facebook? They could
give you their phone number and ask you to call them with information about your product
or service. Will you see this message, or will the lead not be noticed for weeks? Make sure
your social media is being monitored for leads. The same goes with leads acquired
through your website. Are contact forms sending emails to your inbox or are they getting
lost somewhere else? Make sure leads are properly handed off from the marketing side of
your business to the sales side.
12

Qualify Your Leads
• We would define a lead as anyone who seeks to learn more about your products or
services. This doesn’t mean every lead is going to be an ideal lead. For example, let’s say
you work in corporate law and you’re promoting your services. Then, someone reaches out
to you and inquires about your services. While they have an interest in discovering how
you can help them, it turns out they need someone who deals with bankruptcy law, which
is something you don’t handle. In this situation, they aren’t a qualified lead.
• It’s important to have a process to quickly, and politely, remove unqualified leads from your
sales funnel. You don’t want to spend countless hours working with a prospective client or
customer, only to find out later that they aren’t a good fit. Take the time to figure out the
questions that need to be asked to qualify your leads.
13

Refine Your Pitch
• Once you start speaking with a qualified lead, what will you say to them? Do you need to
give them a short elevator pitch? Should you move them into a 30-minute online demo of
your product? The exact process you have for pitching your product or services should be
planned out. In fact, many companies will create a specific script for their sales team to
use.
• As you have more conversations with prospective customers or clients, you should make
a point to tweak and improve your sales pitch. But not everyone you speak with will
respond the same way to your pitch, and you’ll need to learn how to read the situation and
give the best pitch possible.
14

Prepare for Objections
• Not everyone will respond the same way to your pitch, you should anticipate objections.
Some common objections might include the following:
 I don’t have time right now.
 The cost is too high.
 The cost is suspiciously low.
 I think I can get better value elsewhere.
 I’m looking for someone more experienced/established.
Think about the most popular objections in your industry and decide on the best way to
respond to each. Having a strategic plan to deal with objections will make you more
effective at guiding your lead through the sales process.
15

Convert the Lead
• Once you’ve answered all the lead’s questions, you’ve pitched your product or service, and
you’ve addressed each objection, you should move into the conversion stage of the funnel.
They know everything they need to know, so the question is, will they take the action you
want them to take? There are various ways you can proceed at this point. You could give a
limited time discount if they choose to become a client or customer within 24 hours. You
might give them a trial period or a free gift. You might just straight up ask them if they’re
ready to move forward with you. But in this stage, see what you can do to move them from
a qualified lead, into a customer or client.
• Even after this stage is complete, many businesses will make a point to further nurture the
relationship. This will help with branding, customer satisfaction, word-of-mouth marketing,
and even future sales from the same individual.
16

Creating Your Sales Funnel
• The primary focus of this webinar episode is to prepare you for what comes next, after
you’ve launched your marketing plan. The sales funnel is definitely something you should
be ready for, since you will acquire leads and should know how to handle them. Having
said that, there are many theories and approaches to the sales funnel process and how to
go about creating the most effective funnel possible. What has been presented in these
slides is only an introduction and general overview of the topic. We advise any business
owner do their own additional research on sales funnels, or hire a consultant who
specializes in this, to prepare for converting leads into sales.
17

Be Prepared to Track Results
18
• Aside from having a solid sales process, it’s also important to have everything in place for
tracking your marketing efforts. As Rita Mae Brown said, ―Insanity is doing the same thing
over and over again, but expecting different results.‖ While marketing is a smart thing to
do, it’s wise to refine your marketing process. Whatever isn’t working as well as it should,
needs to be improved. And to improve, your marketing efforts, you should have systems in
place to track the performance in a systematic way. In the next slides we will take a look at
how to track your results.

Be Prepared to Track Results: Websites
• There are a variety of tools that enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of your website.
Perhaps the most popular tool is Google Analytics. This is a free analytical resource that
gives incredible information about the performance of your website. Be sure to get it added
to the backend of your website as quickly as possible. While Google Analytics can provide
excellent information, it can’t retroactively tell you how your website performed, prior to
when it was installed on your site.
• Also, Google Analytics can typically be installed without the use of a technical website
developer. If you own your website and happen to have a developer on hand, they should
be able to add this tracking software in about 5-15 minutes. If you have a WordPress
website and access to add new plugins, you can probably get Google Analytics up and
operational in about 20-45 minutes, assuming you’ve never done it in the past.
19

• Acquisition: One of the most beneficial features in Google Analytics is the acquisition
feature. In this portion of the tool, you’ll be able to identify where exactly your website
traffic came from. Specifically, you can see the following:
 Organic Traffic: This shows you how many site visitors came to your website from search
engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. These visits are not including those who came to
your website because of paid ads. That can be reported in a different portion of Google
Analytics.
 Direct Traffic: How many people came to your website because they actually typed in your
domain (www.example.com) into the browser? This type of information will be classified as
―Direct Traffic.‖
20

 Social Media Traffic: Companies that actively use social media marketing can see how
many people actually came to their website because of this type of marketing. This
information can be broken down even further to show specific information about each
social media platform. So, how many people came from LinkedIn, versus Twitter, versus
Facebook, etc.
 Referral Traffic: In this area of the reporting, you will be able to see how much traffic came
from third-party websites. For example, if your website is listed in the local chamber of
commerce, it’s possible someone will find your link and click it. If they do, you’ll be able to
see this.
 Ads: There are multiple types of ads that can be run through Google and there are a
variety of ad related reports you can find in Google Analytics. If you’re running Google ads
for your website, you will be able to see how many people visited your website, because of
those ads.
21

• Audience: The audience section of Google Analytics will give you excellent information
about the actual website traffic you get. Here are some of the most frequently viewed
metrics for this portion of the report:
 Users (Number of individuals who visited the website)
 New Users (Number of first-time website visitors)
 Sessions (Total number of times the website was visited by both new users and returning
visitors)
 Pageviews (The number of times a page on the website was opened)
 Pages / Session (The average number of pages viewed during each visit to the website.)
 Avg. Session Duration (The average amount of time spent on the website)
 Bounce Rate (A percentage representing how often a person visited the website and left
without going to another page on the same website. )
22

• Other Interesting information that can be found in Google Analytics includes:
 Geographic location of your website traffic
 The types of devices used by your website traffic
 The number of people who completed a contact form, or took some other action on your
website that you wish to track
 Most frequently visited pages on your website
 Much More!
23

Be Prepared to Track Results: PPC
• While there are various PPC advertising options available to you, many platforms share
similar metrics for showing success. Here are some of those metrics:
 Clicks: How many times your ad was clicked?
 Quality Score (By Google):This indicates how relevant your ad is to what the person was
looking for when they clicked it. There are a number of factors that can impact your quality
score. Also, your quality score can impact how much you pay when the ad is clicked.
 Cost per Click (CPC):This is how much you pay every time the ad is clicked. Similar to the
quality score, there are a variety of factors that can impact the CPC for each ad or keyword
in your PPC campaign.
24

Be Prepared to Track Results: PPC
 Cost per Acquisition – How much does it cost to acquire a new customer or client through
your paid ads? This is an excellent metric to track when trying to determine the actual ROI
for your PPC activity.
 Conversion Rate – This is shown as a percentage and is a calculation of how many clicks
it takes to generate one conversion. For example, if there are 10 clicks and five
conversions, your PPC activity would have a conversion rate of 50%.
There are other metrics that can be considered when evaluating performance of your PPC,
but the metrics above are among the most common.
25

Be Prepared to Track Results: Call Tracking
• One of the most frequently overlooked forms of tracking is through the phone. While many
businesses make a point to specifically ask someone who calls them, how they heard
about the business, that’s not the most efficient way to track this type of information. A
Google search will introduce you to a variety of companies that provide call tracking. One
of the most established options is CallRail. Using them as an example, at the time of this
webinar episode, you can purchase a monthly subscription for $45. Once you do this, you
will be given 10 different phone numbers and you can configure these numbers to forward
to any phone number you wish, including a cell phone.
• In the next slides we present recommendations on how you can specifically use call
tracking with your marketing campaigns.
26

• For the sake of illustration, let’s assume you just started a business and your personal cell
phone is the only phone number you intend to use for your business, at this time. In this
situation, before starting your business and putting your number on promotional materials,
business cards, company signage, etc. it’s an extremely good idea to first setup your
phone tracking. Create a unique phone number for each marketing channel or platform.
For example, you could have one number for each of the following:
 Email Marketing
 Billboards
 Website
 Social Media
 Postcard Mailers
 Radio Ads
 Etc.
27

• You can purchase additional numbers if needed, beyond the initial 10 that are provided
through a subscription.
• Once these numbers are created and forwarding to your phone, you can set it up so your
caller ID will tell you exactly which number is being called. For example, if someone sees a
billboard and calls that number, when your phone rings, you will see ―Billboard‖ displayed
on the caller ID. This will often help you glean a little context as to who is calling and why
they are calling. Here are some other examples of how this might work:
• If someone calls your email signature, you’ve probably already spoken with them and they
need some type of support or additional information.
• If someone calls a radio or television number, it’s probably in regards to whatever your
advertisement was talking about. The same is true with someone who calls an email
marketing or billboard phone number.
28

• You can create a phone number for PPC advertising. In that case, you will know someone
called you because of the ads you’re running.
• If you have an ad placement in a magazine, you’ll know the caller wants to know more
about that particular ad.
• The last example, about a magazine ad, leads us to another great benefit of call tracking.
It’s often said ―there’s no reliable way to track sales from print ads, because they aren’t like
digital marketing where you can track everything,‖ or something along those lines. In
reality, that’s not completely true. As long as you attach a dedicated number to your printed
ads, you can very accurately track how many calls are generated. And if done well, you
can even track sales and revenue. This will tie in nicely when reviewing the return on
investment for your various marketing expenses, including print ads.
29

• There are other features that can be found through call tracking, such as reporting, call
recording, verbal messages given to the caller before they are connected to your phone,
text messaging options and more. Research your call tracking options and see what
company provides the best solution for you and your business needs.
30

Be Prepared to Track Results: Social Media
• As talked about in the second episode of this series, there are many social media
platforms available for promoting a business. The well established platforms will typically
provide their own analytical data. For example, if you use Facebook, you’ll be able to go
into the Facebook insights to learn specifics about your posts. The same thing is true for
Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites.
• If you choose to run social media marketing on a variety of platforms, and track results
through each one, this can become a bit tedious and time consuming. It can be more
efficient to use a single platform, like Hootsuite or Buffer, to schedule all your posts and
also to analyze the results in one central location.
31

• Here are some of the more specific details on what to look at when reviewing your social
media marketing performance:
 Engagement: This metric shows how interested your audience is, in your content, based
on various interactions such as likes, comments, shares etc. As a general rule, the more
engaging your content is, the more quickly your social media presence will grow. If your
social media isn’t producing a good amount of engagement, you may wish to adjust your
content strategy.
 Clicks: Like PPC advertising, you will likely want as many qualified leads to click your links
on social media as possible. Through Google Analytics, and the analytics provided with
some social platforms, you can see how often someone clicks over to your website.
32

 Likes: Are people literally ―liking‖ the content you share? If so, how much? You can
measure this by checking the number of social media ―likes‖ your content has received.
You can also take a look and see which types of content get the most likes. This can be a
useful strategy as you’re trying to decide what content your audience most wants to see.
 Comments: One element of tracking engagement and social media success is to look at
the number of comments. Not only will it help to look at the number of comments, but it’s
also important to see what the comments are. Consider comments to be a type of
personalized feedback. While getting ―likes‖ will give you an indication of the number of
people who like your content, ―comments‖ will give you a greater level of insight as to what
your audience is thinking.
33

 Shares – Is your content interesting enough to be shared? This is another metric to
consider looking at.
 Fans – Are you getting more fans across your various social media platforms? This can be
an excellent way to gauge the power of your social media marketing. If more people wish
to follow you and keep track of what you have to share, then you are likely doing an
excellent job with your content creation and engagement.
34

Be Prepared to Track Results: SEO
• There are plenty of platforms that provide ways to track search engine optimization (SEO)
performance. While many of them are limited, you can find some free options. If you want
something a bit more robust, two of the leading tools are SEMRush and MOZ. They both
have their pros and cons, but much of the functionality is the same. Here are some key
features you might want to consider looking at while tracking your SEO results.
 Backlinks
1. Number of backlinks
2. Quality of backlinks
3. Backlinks that should be removed
35

 Keywords
1. Identify keywords for which you should rank well on Google.
2. Identify current keyword rankings.
3. Track to see how your rankings improve over time, as your SEO activity progresses.
 Website Audit
1. Identify actual errors on your website, such as broken links.
2. Identify issues with SEO elements that are missing from specific pages, or across the
entire website.
3. Identify more structural related problems, such as Google not being able to index specific
pages on your site, or problems with your URL structure and security.
36

 Competitor Tracking
1. Keep track of how your marketing efforts compare to that of your competition.
2. Identify areas in which your competition is out-performing you.
 Social Media Tracking
• While social analytics and scheduling can be done through programs like Hootsuite and
Buffer, some of the more robust SEO tools can offer this same type of functionality. They
can also compare your social media performance against that of your competition.
37

 Website Traffic
• These types of tools can often integrate with Google Analytics, pulling in information that
was previously mentioned in this presentation. It makes sense to be able to view Google
Analytics when tracking SEO. This is because you should expect to see an increase in
organic website traffic when you actively work on your SEO marketing. Look at the website
analytics to see which of the optimized pages have seen the most organic traffic through
Google and other search engines.
38

Track Your Competition
• It’s an excellent idea to activity market your business and keep track of how effectively this
is accomplished, as talked about throughout the previous slides. However, looking at your
own digital marketing results isn’t typically enough. Rather, make a point to evaluate
results, as compared to that of your competition. Here’s are some general tips on how to
do this:
1. Decide what to track and the process for doing this, as previously talked about.
2. Select your competitors and track the exact same metrics for them.
3. Choosing your competition: [next slide]
39

• When you pick out the competitors to track, try to find the following:
i. One competitor who is very similar to you, in terms of their own marketing and online
exposure.
ii. Select one that’s a bit beyond you, but you suspect you could outperform in the relatively
near future.
iii. Choose one competitor that is doing an amazing job with their online marketing, and they
would be very challenging to catch up with, though it could maybe be done in a year or
two.
40

• Tracking your success, as compared to your competition, can be a great way to gauge
progress. This can also help you identify how best to reallocate your marketing budget and
efforts in the future. For example, if you discover you outrank all your competition on
Google in one year, you may not need to spend as much of your budget on SEO marketing
the following year. This is especially true if it looks like your competition hasn’t improved at
all with their own Google rankings. However, if you’re in the lead on Google, but you can
see multiple competitors rapidly improving through their own SEO, you will probably want
to keep the same level of investment [or more], so as to stay in the lead.
41

Analyze and Refine Your Marketing Strategy
42
• After investing your marketing budget, and giving a reasonable amount of time to each
type of marketing initiative, you will likely discover some marketing channels deliver better
results than others. With this being the case, it might make sense to shift some or all of
your budget away from the less effective channels and into other channels.
• Adjust how much each channel should get of your marketing budget. But also consider the
budget itself. If you start your business with a budget based on 10% of estimated gross
revenue, and your estimated gross revenue increases the next year, then your marketing
budget should probably increase as well. The percentage might stay the same, but the
actual dollar amount will likely increase.

Analyze and Refine Your Marketing Strategy
43
• Many businesses come up with a marketing plan, and then implement that plan. This is
good. But the business will often stop there. When this happens, they fail to evolve, fail to
improve and waste money in efforts that aren’t yielding ideal results. There are various
reason a business might be forced to try something new, and when this happens, they can
see tremendous improvement. However, a better approach is not to wait for change to be
forced upon you. Rather, make a point to consistently look for opportunities to improve,
and test those opportunities. Be proactive with your marketing; not reactive.

Closing Thoughts
44
• Throughout this series we have covered an array of topics. At this point, the business
owner should have a solid understanding of the following:
1. How to create a digital marketing plan
2. How to staff and budget for marketing activities
3. How to select the most relevant marketing channels to be used
4. How to measure and monitor success
5. The importance of reevaluating and refining the marketing plan to get improved results
• While this series is a rather thorough overview on digital marketing, there is much more
that can be researched and learned, specifically in terms of execution and best practices.
But, we are confident you will be off to a good start, if you follow the advice presented in
this series.

About The Faculty
Joshua Lyons - josh@jjlyonsmarketing.com
Joshua Lyons, Co-Founder of CRE Marketing Group, has been part of the marketing world since 2009.
He began his marketing career upon graduation from the University of West Florida, with an education in
public relations and marketing. Joshua worked for several companies, developing and implementing
proven online marketing strategies and boosting their exposure and revenue. After many years of
marketing, in commercial real estate, hospitality and other industries, Joshua began his own marketing
company, Joshua Lyons Marketing, LLC. He launched his business in 2015 and continues to provide
marketing services for clients around the United States. Joshua works with new businesses,
entrepreneurs, larger established companies and organizations that are internationally recognized.
Additionally, his clients range in industry from banking, home repair, medical, professional coaching and
more. His companies provide a variety of marketing services, but the core services offered include
website development, content writing and search engine optimization. Those who wish to learn about
marketing can read his company blog, which is designed to help individuals and marketing teams as they
develop their own online marketing strategies.
45

About The Faculty
Linda Zappulla - linda.zappulla@gmail.com
Linda Zappulla, Founder and Senior Consultant, Workshops and the Work. Linda has more than 25 years
of marketing experience, working in and leading every marketing discipline for highly regarded consumer
brands as well as start-up ventures. As founder and senior consultant with Workshops and the Work, she
provides solutions to marketing needs of business, while teaching and mentoring their employees to
enhance their marketing capabilities, and increase their engagement and retention. As Director of Brand
Marketing at Payless ShoeSource, she provided cross-functional leadership, helping Payless deliver its
new strategy to transition from a private label purveyor to become a House of Brands. Prior to joining
Payless, Linda was Vice President of Marketing for Birch Telecom, a Kansas City based local telephone
company. Prior to that she served in a number of strategic marketing and brand management functions
for consumer products companies such as Revlon, Lenox China and Corning Glass. Linda received her
MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, and her undergraduate degree from
Barnard College. She is a Certified Mentor at SCORE, Kauffman FastTrac Alumna, volunteer with foreign
exchange students, and President-elect at Congregation Beth Torah.
46

About The Faculty
Chris Fritsch - cf@clientsfirstconsulting.com
As a Client Success Consultant and the Founder of CLIENTSFirst Consulting, Chris Fritsch works
together with leading professional services firms across the country to help them select and implement
marketing and business development technology to enhance value and maximize return on investment.
Chris writes and speaks nationally on topics including CRM and related and integrated technology, data
quality, digital marketing, client and competitive intelligence, and she was recognized as a Top 10
Marketing and Business Development thought leader by JD Supra in their Readers Choice Awards. For
her contributions to the business and practice of law, Chris has been inducted as a Fellow of the College
of Law Practice Management.
Chris earned her law degree at Emory University School of Law, where she served as managing editor of
the Emory International Law Review, as well as student and faculty technology consultant.
Chris is based in Atlanta, Georgia, when she is not traveling on Delta Airlines to spend time with clients.
47

About The Faculty
Bill Schick - billschick@meshagency.com
Over the last 20 years, Bill has developed a unique approach to helping his clients develop
unique and effective approaches to solving complex and lengthy sales and marketing
challenges. He couples traditional business and marketing theories, strategies, and tactics
with current/leading tools, technologies, and creative trends to help businesses develop
and deliver true value to prospects, customers, and their communities. He finds the most
effective approach to business and marketing to be through altruism—help your communities
and in turn they will help you.
48

Questions or Comments?
If you have any questions about this webinar that you did not get to ask during the live
premiere, or if you are watching this webinar On Demand, please do not hesitate to email us
at info@financialpoise.com with any questions or comments you may have. Please include
the name of the webinar in your email and we will do our best to provide a timely response.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The material in this presentation is for general educational purposes
only. It has been prepared primarily for attorneys and accountants for use in the pursuit of
their continuing legal education and continuing professional education.
49

About Financial Poise
50
DailyDAC LLC, d/b/a Financial Poise™ provides
continuing education to attorneys, accountants,
business owners and executives, and investors. It’s
websites, webinars, and books provide Plain English,
entertaining, explanations about legal, financial, and
other subjects of interest to these audiences.
Visit us at www.financialpoise.com
Our free weekly newsletter, Financial Poise
Weekly, updates you on new articles published
on our website and Upcoming Webinars you
may be interested in.
To join our email list, please visit:
https://www.financialpoise.com/subscribe/

You're Ready to Start Marketing. Now What? (Series: Digital Marketing Tips for the New (Or Old!) Business Owner 2020)

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (20)

Similaire à You're Ready to Start Marketing. Now What? (Series: Digital Marketing Tips for the New (Or Old!) Business Owner 2020)

Similaire à You're Ready to Start Marketing. Now What? (Series: Digital Marketing Tips for the New (Or Old!) Business Owner 2020) (20)

Plus de Financial Poise

Plus de Financial Poise (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

You're Ready to Start Marketing. Now What? (Series: Digital Marketing Tips for the New (Or Old!) Business Owner 2020)