The Digital Utopia Podcast Episode #10

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About the podcast

The Digital Utopia Podcast is for SMB Marketers and Business Leaders looking to align their Marketing, Sales, and Service departments so they’re part of one powerhouse growth team.

Each episode will dive into the strategies, philosophies, and tools that will change your approach to organizational growth, give you renewed focus and clarity, and allow you to build a brand that not only helps you stand out—but win.

The Digital Utopia Podcast is produced by Digitopia and hosted by Frank Cowell and Joseph Freeman.

Episode transcription

Frank
The way you build brand today is by getting hyper specific audiences getting hyper specific about their pain point, and giving them value above and beyond what your competitors or anyone else is doing and you're changing their lives in ways that your competitors can't. That's how you build brand today.

Joe
You're listening to the digital utopia podcast, a resource dedicated to helping b2b leadership and executives gain clarity and focus in chaotic marketplace. Hey, gang,

Frank
welcome to the digital utopia podcast episode 10. I'm your host, Frank Cowell joined by my co host,

Joe
Joseph Freeman.

Frank
Yes, sir. Let's get into this. I'm excited. Last night, we were preparing for this over cocktails and pancakes. So true story. That's how we prepare.

Joe
So we'll test and we'll see if that actually makes a difference.

Frank
Yeah, we'll see what kind of comments we get on this episode.

Joe
Alright, so if you've been listening to the previous episodes with us here, going through the the digital utopia methodology with us, then you know a few things. So far, we've gone over the five philosophies, those will help you accelerate growth. We've talked about why a hyper specific buyer persona is critical for success, and how to start building a strong content strategy. What you don't know yet is how to bring all of those elements to life. So I think what we've been talking about is somewhat theoretical. And I don't think we're gonna get too deep into the weeds as far as the mechanics go here. But we do need to talk about how do we start to bring all of this into existence. So that's what we're doing here. Today, we're gonna show you how to implement the strategies we've been discussing to build one cohesive brand experience that will convert strangers into the ultimate brand, fans,

Frank
fans

Joe
sound good Frankie

Frank
fans, we're after fans.

Joe
And let's dive into it. So to help us work through the topic, we're just going to go over a few things here. So we're going to walk through the digital utopia blueprint to help orient, everybody. And that is a tool that we use here. Again, we'll dive dive deeper into it in a minute. We're going to talk about the seven relationship levels, which have been mentioned ad nauseum in previous episodes. But we're gonna use those to illustrate all of the activities that need to be done all of the content that needs to be created at each level. And we will briefly talk about the different content and offers that have been working at each level for you know, a lot of lot of the people we consult on this. So to start us out, let's talk about the digital utopia blueprint. I think we've mentioned it several times. Some of our listeners may have already gone and downloaded it may have already cracked it open to to see what it's all about. But Frankie, why don't you give us an overview of what this is,

Frank
or the blueprint is where you can document in one two sided document, the buyer persona that you're going to hyper focus in on and the key things about that person that are important to identify. So you know, who you're connecting with, and why you're connecting with them and how you want to change their life. You can certainly expand upon that. And by no means is that buyer persona, the be all end all. But it highlights and illustrates the important aspects that you need to understand and define about the buyer persona, such as you know, live, how much income Do they have, and, you know, what, what part of company they're with, and, you know, where or excuse me What kind of company they're with, and then some of their top objections and you know, who influences them in their industry. And ultimately, you're trying to get to this place called a focus pain point, which we've talked about in previous episodes, that's really important. And then you want to also define how you change their lives, you know, statement of transformation, statement of value kind of thing. We also identify what we call business math, which is to understand, okay, what's this buyer persona worth your organization? On the flip side, we now that we know who we're trying to engage with, and we're trying to bring value to, we have a bloop Well, the whole thing is the blueprint, but we have a side where we can architect an experience for that person. Okay. And that experience helps you identify the kind of content and offers as that person progresses their relationship with your brand. It's all centered around that person. And so once you define that, that experience, then you can define surrounding that how you're going to use engagement and re engagement activities like social advertising, and SEO and social media and email marketing, how are you going to use those things to then bring that person into this, you know, these relationship levels and progress them along these relationship levels. And so the totality of that we call the experience, right? So you kind of have a funnel and then around that you have your engagement and reengagement activities. And so it's not meant to be a document that is all the way down to the tactical details. what it's meant to do is get everyone together in a room. Marketing sales service the executive team, and understand the kind of experience you're going to create for this person. And the kinds of engagement and reengagement activities and how you're going to use them at a high level. And this is important, because if you can't get everyone on the same page, quite literally, then you're not going to be able to align your teams that easily. And so this is a strategic document that helps define directionally what you're going to be doing with this person.

Joe
Yeah, so you mentioned a buyer persona, you mentioned some business math, which essentially gets you to a cost of customer acquisition. You mentioned that experience, which really, just to kind of tie that to, you know, nomenclature that's used often. It's really kind of a funnel, right? It's more than that. But it's well, the those this aligned to what people would call a funnel,

Frank
yes and no. So the funnel part is the middle part, which is that all the content offers that facilitate the ascension of the relationship, all the engagement and reengagement activities around it are what help move that along. Right? the totality of that is what I would call an experience. But in the middle, yeah, it's it's an it's a funnel or an ascension ladder in the middle. But that whole experience then is inclusive of what are the engagement reengagement activities, we're going to use right? To then help facilitate this?

Joe
So then maybe talk a little bit about why you created it, and why you bundled these tools together to create this blueprint? Because people have been making buyer personas forever, people have been doing business math forever, people have been creating funnels and the experience around them forever. Why was there a need to create this?

Frank
Honestly, I created this for executives. Because the the digital industry has done an excellent job at confusing and frustrating executives. And they, you know, our industry largely has gone the way of the quote unquote, used car sales, in terms of reputation with most executives. And so by putting all this in an easy to understand, tool, your buyer persona, the business math, which very much speaks to an executive, and it speaks to their frustration, because most of these digital companies don't even do the business math analysis. And so they just fly blind. And

Joe
what's funny is actually really easy math to do it,

Frank
we call it basic businessman,

Joe
I think my nine year old could probably do it.

Frank
It's super simple. But it's shocking how many organizations that engage in digital activities, and don't even do this exercise, right? It's criminal. And so then when you pair that with the funnel, and the engagement ring gauge activities, in one view, you will have executives say, Wow, for the first time I understand digital and how it's supposed to work. That's critical. Because if you can't get everybody looking at the same strategy, and understand it quickly, then you're going to have a hard time getting people aligned and bought in. And so this is really a tool to drive strategy. When you go to execute, you're going to need some other exercises and some other documentation and some other things. But if you can't get on the same page strategically, you're gonna have a hard time getting out the gate.

Joe
Yeah. So I want to throw in real quick here a buzzword that I think has been coming up quite a bit lately. And that's revenue operations.

Frank
Yeah. rev ops,

Joe
rev ops. When we talk about the blueprint, I think a lot of times, it most aligns with a marketer's dream, right? It really, it really talks about a lot of the activities that a marketer should be doing, and it helps them It helps facilitate kind of a method to get them, you know, putting in place all of the different content and all of the different activities that need to be there. But really, it transcends the lead and the prospecting journey, you know, it kind of goes past that. And what it does is it creates alignment across all the relationship levels, all the way through service. And that really is what people are calling rev rev ops these days, right?

Frank
Yeah. Because if you just take the lens of marketing, then all you're ever going to do is be obsessed with the new, the new lead the new visitor, the new, you know, MQL. And if you're going to operationalize a culture of revenue, then you have to think in terms of the total buyers journey. And that's really important to note is, most organizations still even when they're it, this is what this is going to happen. I can guarantee you they're going to talk about DevOps, it's going to come to the lens of the company, right? It's going to be like our marketing, our sales or our service. Instead, what we've been talking about in what, in my opinion, revenue operations really means is how do you operationalize across this journey. So that way, you're looking at the revenue opportunities all along the way and how it's a maturation Again, if you think in terms of marketing, you're just going to really think about the very bottom of the ascension, which is just how many visitors? Can we get turned into leads? And how many of those can we get to the sales team? Like, that's it. But if you think about the entire journey, and you follow what we talked about, which is top down optimization, you're going to start with your existing customers, how do we operationalize a culture of revenue around our existing customers? And that's really what we're saying. In fact, I would encourage people to, you know, as they start to hear this word, revenue operations, rev Ops, is it's think about it in terms of operationalizing, a culture of revenue. That's important, because if not, it's just going to be another buzzword, where people think, Oh, this is just a better approach, we can extract dollars, yes, we're trying to do that. But we have to understand it has to be aligned around culture, it has to be aligned with your buyer, right, it's really has less to do with you and more to do with your buyer.

Joe
Right. And so I think the reason that we often first engage with a marketing team is because they already have experience and or the desire to create delightful interactions with with prospects, right? And so who better to lead the charge through all of the different departments through sales and through service, then the marketing has already been attempting to do this for years, someone kind of has to own this initiative,

Frank
right? Well, yes, and two things need to happen. So in terms of ownership, this needs to be at the highest levels of the company. This idea that we're trying to create a culture of operationalizing revenue. And looking at the entire journey of our buyers, we certainly need buy in at the highest level, by in commitment and participation, participation and minimum, if you don't have that, and this is just, you know, the executive team, relegating it as a rock or an initiative to someone else within the organization, that's not going to cut it. So we have to have buy in and participation at the highest levels within the company. Number two, in terms of who should own it within the company, I think marketing is probably best equipped. Due to the skill sets required to execute this, you're talking about in a analytics, talking about automation, you're talking about content development, you're talking about analysis, you know, a lot of those skill sets already exist in marketing. So what that means is marketing has to be willing to take, take the charge, and look at the entire journey, not just their addiction to MQLs. So that's one thing that marketing is going to have to do if they're going

Joe
MQL be in a marketing,

Frank
marketing qualified lead, right. So marketing has to commit to being focused on the entire journey and operationalizing revenue across the entire organization help creating that culture. But at the same time, the executive team needs to give that authority. Because the problem we have in most organizations, is marketing has little to no authority, and are

Joe
the first to go when craft starts tanking. Right.

Frank
I mean, just look, you just all you can do is just go into an organization and look and say, who has a company credit card sales team has them and you know, all over the place. And then the marketing teams got it, you know, request to go get a $50 piece of software. This is just common, this happens all the time. So marketers you have to be willing to take the charge be data driven, you have to look at the entire buyers journey, you have to be willing to look at things like coca, right do the basic business math, which you're not doing right now. And executive team, you have to be willing to authorize that you have to be willing to give them that kind of authority to to get everyone following this playbook and jumping on board. So that way we can create this alignment. If those two things don't happen, is not going to go very far. If if the executive team just thinks this is the latest approach to just getting more leads, this isn't going to go very far.

Joe
Right. So we have seven relationship levels. We're taking people from strangers to visitors to your website, those visitors turn into leads, some of those leads will turn into qualified so whether that's marketing qualified or sales qualified, we call them qualified in one bucket. Some of those qualifiers will turn into actual opportunities, that could be conversations for the sales team, some of those opportunities will turn into customers. And then if you're doing your service job, right and delighting them, they will turn into fans that will go and promote you all over the place without you even asking. So that is the set of relationship levels that you will find in the blueprint. But within each of those levels, there are a lot of moving parts. So what I'd like to do next is kind of break down one single level and talk about all of the different And assets that go into it. And we don't have to get super detailed on how to create those assets. That's really kind of the marketing team's job to do. But right, but what goes into creating a full fully fleshed out level?

Frank
Yeah, let's talk about it.

Joe
Okay, so there's actually maybe two different approaches we take to the level. So why don't we start at the bottom of our Ascension path. And let's talk about what we would create for a visitor to fill up that level.

Frank
Yes, we call that Cornerstone content, right? And Cornerstone content is where you apply the lens of that hyper focused buyer persona with that hyper focus pain point. And what you do is you develop Cornerstone content that educates this person, on their pain point. And you do so in a way that highlights the approach of your brand, the approach of your offering that is unique and differentiated in the marketplace. So unlike a brochure or promotional piece, this is an educational piece, meaning you're going to teach this person how to address their pain point. Okay, that word education is really important. Your mission at this level is just purely educate. So that's the key word, educate them. And beyond an article like, you know, the top 5x to avoid why like you can do that. But that's not good enough, if you truly want it to be Cornerstone content. Again, Cornerstone content is where you're going to showcase how you do what you do. But through the lens of teaching, literally as if you don't sell that thing. Your only job is to teach people how to do that thing. Right. So that's the education level,

Joe
one way we've talked about it is if you were to create a playbook on how to solve a big problem, and that playbook were to be, you know, several or many pages long. If you were to take that and just create one big long article out of that. It's not gated, it's just an article. It's it's akin to a blog article, right. But it's just a very intentional, long form sort of blog article with the right keywords and with all of the right steps to solving a problem. That's what we're talking about, right? That is the cornerstone content,

Frank
correct. It can be multiple pages, it could be in video format, the key thing is, you're giving a massive piece of education of value to this person, and you're not pitching in this isn't ready, it's almost as if you could say you're going to give away your secret sauce. Like that's what you aim to do is you want to teach your secret sauce. In this piece, again, whether it's written whether it's video, what have you.

Joe
So is there any danger in giving away your secret sauce? Are people going to take it and never buy from you?

Frank
No, because look at it this way, the people that have the ability to self execute, and those aren't your clients anyway.

Joe
Right? Right, they won't be the long lasting customers that turn into fans, even if

Frank
they're likely to small or they're likely not going to defer to you as the expert.

Joe
Right.

Frank
So no, you don't have any worry there. And as far as your competitors, your competitors, you know, have their own challenges, and they have their own points of differentiation. And so if you dominate your approach, if you are obsessed about your approach, and you're all in on how you do it, that's unique. Let me competitor can try to copy you with that. But you know, they don't have the the internal training, they don't have the internal culture of moving that approach forward and getting behind that differentiation. Right?

Joe
Okay, so that's going to bring people to the site, because now you have a really good piece of educational content that you can distribute on any channel, right, you can distribute that

Frank
out too. And we should be clear as we talk about this in in no way shape, or form, am I suggesting that you put up this Cornerstone piece of content, all of a sudden, all this organic traffic is just going to flood and they're going to climb up this Ascension path in a beautiful, perfect way. Sometimes that does happen. But more importantly, these pieces help facilitate the relationship based on where people are at on their own. So sometimes people come to you. And they're like hot and heavy and ready to go. In which case, you're going to have a different kind of content or offer to facilitate where they're at in their relationship with your brand.

Joe
And we'll get to that because that is in our Ascension path as well.

Frank
I just want to be clear like that when people preach funnel methodologies, especially in b2b and think that, you know, you're going to drop people into one end, and they're just going to magically flow through in a matter of seven days and you've got clients flowing out the other end, but it's not how it works, right. These pieces serve different purposes. And yes, in theory, someone could go through in a very perfect linear path, but it doesn't usually happen that way or need These pieces to facilitate the people for where they're at in their journey. And you're going to come across people who are further along in their journey. So that's one. And then two, if you do this right, and you do what we talked about in a past episode, which is top down optimization, then what you're going to do is you're going to kind of create a reverse snowball effect, which we can get into in another episode. But the idea is that we're talking about this in a linear path, but just know you're going to have entry into your experience at a lot of different points, right.

Joe
So we create a cornerstone piece of content. And, you know, we can drive more traffic to that Cornerstone through other smaller blog articles that are topically related. So we can create this cluster of sorts where the corner stands in the middle, it's got all these little branches off of it, that have internal hyperlinks back to it from all of these different little sub topics that all of this can be distributed on any channel, you can get people engaging with this content finding their way to your website through all this.

Frank
And that's important because and we call that feeder content

Joe
feeder content.

Frank
Okay. And that's important, because one, not only will it facilitate somebody who's actually interested on a micro topic, like a subtopic of the bigger Cornerstone, not only could they click over and then again, be in that on all are in that Ascension path. But it also is a great indicator to the Google, right that, hey, this Cornerstone piece, or this topic, is something that's very central to, you know, our domain,

Joe
right? So this is going to be what helps guide your SEO, your search engine optimization, absolutely. approach, right? Yep. Okay, so now we've got people to the site, they're visiting the cornerstone content, some of them are gonna love it, some of them are not going to get it, they're gonna take off, but the ones that love it, the ones that engage with it, we now want to get them to the lead level, which is the next relationship level up? How do we do that.

Frank
So you offer what's called a lead magnet, I didn't make this up. This is an industry standard term that's been around for a very long time. Here's where most people go wrong with lead magnet. By the way, if you're listening, you don't know what a lead magnet is, let me not be too assumptive. A lead magnet is a an asset that you offer to visitors that they will receive in exchange for some level of information, whether it's a name and an email, a name, email, and answer a couple of questions, but they have some sort of information they share. Now, that isn't always a form. Right, you can facilitate this through a number of different ways. You could be at a trade show, and someone could fill out a card. Okay, and they'll get this information sent to them, you could be on a website, and there's a chat bot there to greet you, and ask in your kind of in a conversation and exchanging this information, you could do it with live chat, into Facebook Messenger messenger on Facebook. So there's a lot of ways to facilitate this, you don't we'll use a webform as an example. But if you're listening today, you don't we're not suggesting that is the only way to facilitate that. But you have something that facilitates an exchange of information in order to receive this asset. And this asset can be can be something that is like a PDF, it could be a template, it can be a piece of software, you know, it's some sort of asset, but the critical thing is that asset is supposed to empower them. where most people go wrong with a lead magnet is the asset they give is just more information to read or consume or watch. And that doesn't help because your job is to educate at that Cornerstone level. And you should have multiple pieces of Cornerstone content. So if you feel like there's more to educate people on, then produce those in additional pieces. But when they're ready to take this relationship to the next level, the key word is empower, you have to empower them to take action. So that asset that you give them should allow them to now physically start doing something. So for example, you might give them a template to start physically filling out and now taking action based on the education you gave them. And it's critical that these two are hyper connected. Because what you want to be able to say is, now that you have this education, you should take action, and here's a template to help you do it. Now that you know how to accomplish x, here's a piece of software that's going to help you take action on what you just learned. Now that you have this you can do that.

Joe
So let's bring this to life. Let's paint a real picture here. Okay, so let's talk about a buyer persona let's make one up. Let's talk about somebody at in it maybe like a managed services sort of it. Okay firm

Frank
IT firm got it. Okay.

Joe
And let's say that the target buyer persona even though there are several probably let's say that it is an overwhelmed office manager who's kind of answering the or kind of filling the it gap. They don't really have an in house IT person or maybe they have one but this person is really fielding a lot of The frustrations of it, it's not their main job, but they are definitely tasked with it. Let's start talking about what the right content at the cornerstone level at the lead magnet, let's talk about that. So as we break apart what the assets are, we can actually visualize this.

Frank
So what I would do is I would say, okay, what's your biggest pain point, and her biggest pain point it sounds like is, you know, she's having to check up on things, and follow up on things and find things when really, she just wishes, someone else would bring that to her attention, right? Or she wishes these things didn't become fires and emergencies. Okay, so if that's the biggest pain point that she's dealing with these fires and emergencies, when that's not her primary job, and she wants to figure out how to eliminate or mitigate that. So if we start there, then I would educate her in my Cornerstone piece on a proactive approach she could be taking to then ensure that the the fires in emergencies are dramatically reduced. Okay. And so I would educate her on the things to look at the terminology, why, you know, she's looking at these things. And once I do that, then what I would empower her with to take action is probably at the lead magnet level is probably some sort of checklist. So okay, now, I just told you what you need to be looking for, and why here are the indicators? And by the way, you should you should do these things monthly. So then what I would give her is that, hey, why don't you get our monthly checklist. And this way, you can just go through it every month, just go through this checklist. You could also have a small piece of software facilitates that and ask her a few questions. And maybe the checklist that's produced is customized. So now she has a checklist that's based on her office environment, that would be really cool. Now you're empowering her to take action.

Joe
And this is what you're talking about, where she fills out a form or she fills out a chatbot or a mailer card, or I guess in this case, it wouldn't be a mailer card, because it's digital, but this is where she's exchanging her information to unlock the the missing link,

Frank
correct. But what makes that more effective from conversion performance standpoint, is when you give her value first, and you educate her. And then what makes that even more effective is when they're hyper connected. So we educated her about the things that she needs to be looking at proactively, that caused fires and emergencies eventually, if they're not, you know, tended to. So we've educated her. And now we can say, by the way, get a customized checklist based on your office. So that way, you can just go through this every single month and really minimize these fires, right and emergencies that you're experiencing. Wow, that's super valuable. I just was educated on, you know, the things that I need to be aware of that caused the emergencies and the fires. And if I just fill out just a few pieces of information about my office environment, I'm going to get a customized checklist, right to just, you know, based on my office, you know, maybe there's, maybe there's no voice, right? And so they're all that section about what you would look into for voice is gone. Because, you know, the way she answered that, maybe there's no void. And so you can create a customized, you know, monthly checklist. Hmm. Okay, so now they're connected.

Joe
So she she requests this checklist, she downloads it, or she gets it sent to her email inbox by filling out a form. What happens next.

Frank
So next, you need to if you want to progress that relationship level, you need to get her primed for a sales conversation.

Joe
And actually, let me interject here and say that in our system, that would be the point where we would actually switch her in our CRM or marketing automation system, or both to a lifecycle stage of what we would call a lead, right, we're gonna actually marked that she took a step and that she has progressed through her buyers journey correct? Or keep track of that.

Frank
Yeah. So as they go through these relationship levels, that is important. You've got to make sure you're in your software, you're progressing that lifecycle stage so that you can communicate with this person and give them value that's relevant to where they're at in their journey.

Joe
And this will also give us the data over time to understand our conversion rates from one lifecycle stage to the next so that we can see where our bottlenecks are, where we have to revise our content strategy. Correct. Okay, so now we've toggled this person to a lead in our systems, they have now received that piece and how do we get them to keep going,

Frank
so they're in your database, your next job if you want to progress the relationship to a sales conversation, because that's ultimately what you know, the company needs to do, right? We need to create sales conversations. The way you prime that though, is you need to make sure that person has as much inspiring content and information as possible. So the key word here your job now switches Right, your job first was to educate, then your job was to empower. Now your job, once they're in your database is to inspire. That's your only job. Okay. And the way you inspire them is with two kinds of content, social proof, and how it works deeper dive, how it works content, I want to really make a point about this particular relationship level. Because this is the level at which people will camp out for months, and just hang out in your database. In seemingly, it will seem like, we got all the wrong leads, they come in, and they don't do anything. The reason they don't do anything is because you have to think of your leads, like people on the couch in their underwear with the remote in hand and a bag of Cheetos at their side. Right?

Joe
I can't wait to see this is

Frank
super slothy, and lazy and comfortable. And so if you want to get people off the couch, you it has to be something really compelling. There has to be something more inspiring than the comfortable position they're in does something doing nothing better

Joe
than the remote control in the Cheetos.

Frank
Correct? Exactly. Okay, right. So picture your database, they're just there in their underwear remote in hand, comfortable. You know, Frank Kern talks about this a lot for anybody who's followed or heard have heard of this guy, he's a well known internet marketer, talks about the fact that that's the normal default in your database, that's normal for people to not convert to the next stage. So if we understand that, then the biggest place where we need to be placing our effort in terms of content for new opportunities, we're not talking about content you should be producing for your existing clients and the kinds of offers and engagement. There should be on happening there. But just for new opportunities, if we're thinking about bringing new opportunities to your sales team, the biggest area of content is this inspire level with deep dive content, again, social proof and how it works. So social proof are things like a case studies, right? Things like testimonials, things like, you know, videos that showcase one of your clients.

Joe
Okay, so for our it friend here for office manager, and they've now got the checklist that you know, they read about how to do it, they've got a checklist, and what would be a really good example of a deep dive level offer for this person.

Frank
So what I would do in this scenario, I probably wouldn't do. Right, the first thing wouldn't be a case study, although you should have those this level. And again, you can't, you can never have enough, inspiring deep dive content like that, again, that is the biggest job and you can never have enough. But what I would probably produce for this person is I would probably do a three video series, call it like a mini course or like a training series on how to how office managers can manage it when it is not their job. And that would title it something like that, because that's going to speak to this frustration that this person has, right, she's like, managing the office, like I don't want to miss it like it is not my job. That's not how she views it, even though it's probably was in there in the job description as a portion. Nobody, you know, when it's only like 5% 10% of your job, it just becomes that annoying five to 10%, that disrupts the 90. Okay, and so I would really tap into that emotion. And I would say, you know, it training for office managers who hate IT. Like that would be the title right there. And it's a three, three video training, maybe have a little test at the end, but something to now inspire her to dive deeper on this subject.

Joe
So this is going to do a couple things, obviously, it's going to serve this person, well, it's going to educate them, actually is going to do a few things, it's going to push on the pain point even more and bring it to light because this is one of those pain points that only surfaces once in a while. And unless they're ready to take action, when it surfaces, it's going to subside again. And they're going to forget to follow up on it. So this helps keep the pain ever present for them. But then for us, it actually gives us a mechanical way to understand whether or not this this lead is warming up. And whether or not they're becoming qualified, right. Because to unlock this video, maybe they give us more information. Or maybe they don't give us any more information. But we can get the implicit data just by knowing that they clicked through and watched it. And we can you know, with modern technology, we can see how far they watched it. We can see how many times they went back to watch it. And this can bump up a lead score that helps you understand whether this person is qualifying themselves or not

Frank
correct. And that includes you and as to whether the sales team should reach out and say hello,

Joe
because they might meet the demographic data for our ideal customer. Right, but not the behavioral but they're not showing the behavior. So this helps give a way to let them show those behaviors.

Frank
Yeah, absolutely.

Joe
Yeah.

Frank
And so I would do something like that. I would say Start with that and, and help them inspire them that they can tackle this problem. Right, right. I can do it. Yes, I can. I mean, that's, that's kind of the effect of what you're trying to do. You're trying to get this person to say, Yes, I can do this, yes, we can tackle this. Yes, we need to finally take action on this, right. And so that's why you need lots and lots of inspiration there. And so if you have a piece like that, then the way I would turn them into an opportunity, which here is the next level, right, we call this a foot in the door, the foot in the door I would offer is, it's just real simple here is just like to get a quote on, you know, what it would take to actually take this off of your hands once and for all. And so you need to like, the reason this is important to string it together this way is because so that way, when you make a sales conversation offer, it's contextually connected to what they've already been doing and the information they've already been consuming and the action they've already been taking.

Joe
So let's pause there for a second because I think that is a key point to make. Most people already have a quote, request, or they have a contact form, or they have something on their site. So most people already have the equivalent of a foot in the door offer. Now often when we get in and help audit this, this stage for people, what they're doing is just putting up a contact form and saying, hey, contact us about anything. And there's a better way to guide that conversation through the copy and through the imagery and through the story you tell. But most people already have this. The problem is they're expecting people to come for the first time to the website, check out the services page, which by the way, oftentimes are not telling the right story or not robust enough, don't allow for a deep enough dive for somebody looking for your services. But assuming that you have that dialed in, and we pause there for a second. Sure.

Frank
So if you bring up a good point about services, pages, services pages are also deep dive content. And most people are not addressing their service pages as deep dive. Right. So your deep dive should be inspiring people,

Joe
right?

Frank
So what about your service pages are inspiring people? What about your deep dive service pages, truly give people a peek into how it works, how it works, content should be done such that the person envisions themselves in the process, right in the engagement using the product. Back when I worked retail many, many, many, many years ago, we employed a psychological hack, if you will, called transfer of ownership, right? It's a psychological thing that happens. And so what we would do is we would have our customers draw their living room. And we would ask them, okay, if you were going to get this TV, where in this living room would it go. So we can help you figure out where the speakers go and buy them drawing their living room and then then placing now this TV that they don't yet have in their living room. And then oh, by the way, when we showed them the features on the TV, we didn't click through it, we put the remote in their hand and told them what to click through. That created psychological transfer of ownership. That's what you're trying to create when you do deep dive, how it works content. So when you look at your service pages, do they do a great job of showing how it works, and allow your visitor to see themselves in it?

Joe
Okay, so you've got all your deep dive content. And by the way, the point I was trying to make is rather than just assuming they come to your website and fill out a contact form, we are now saying they come to your website, they have a full experience. And yes, the end result is filling out the equivalent of a contact form. Right? Correct. So we're just we're creating a better story kind of Disneyland does.

Frank
Well look, if the people that come to your site and are ready to fill out the quote, request form, remember, they're already further along in their buyers journey. And that's fine, and they're ready. That's not the most, that's not the bulk of your visitors. And so for the bulk of your visitors that aren't quite there yet, you have to tee that up. And the way you tee that up is with your deep dive where inspiration. So if you inspire them, then making the offer to get a quote request just becomes that much more natural. So that way you can say, Hey, now that you know how to handle this on your own, if you truly just don't have time, would you like to see what it would take for us to handle this for you get it off your plate once and for all. And by the way, if you just fill out a few of these questions, we can get that quote back to you in less than 24 hours and you won't even have to talk to anybody. Right?

Joe
Right. So other examples of deep dive level content. Well, we talked about a webinar or video that's kind of pitched as a training or short course. You need to have your reviews in place and you need to be able to push those out via email or via social to the These prospects need to have your services and solution pages totally dialed in telling the right story, you need to have your case studies, you've got to have product demo videos, you've got to have downloadable brochures and, you know, maybe product specifications or service methodology sort of white papers. So that's, there's a lot of stuff that can be created there at the deep dive level, that then takes them to the customer, I think we could talk about what takes them from a customer to a fan. In terms of the types of offers, however, that is oftentimes very specific to the service or the product that's being sold

Frank
In this particular case, right, so the job of your you know, once they become a customer, the job of your product is to transform them, meaning, you need to take them from the before state they had to the after state that they ultimately were buying from you. That's the transformation. And your product should facilitate that at its core, like whatever they pay for should fill it facilitate that transformation, you need to take a hard look at your offerings to make sure that you are in fact, facilitating that transformation. But if you want to elevate them, to fans, that's the key word is to elevate them, your goal is to take them to places that they didn't even think were possible. And so you do that by doing things that are outside the invoice, there could be things you charge for, and there are other things that they pay for. But oftentimes, it's a combination of additional things that they might buy to take their transformation further and to elevate them. Or it could be things that you're doing that are just value add for doing business. So in the case of the office manager, I would create a private online group for all your office manager clients, where they can gather, and they can share tips and information about how they're doing their jobs, they can gather and share information about different softwares. They're using different vendors, they're hiring, and you're creating a place where they can gather and they can become better at their job, I might also participate in bringing them continuing education for office managers. Right and because your your job here is to elevate them, not just Trent make the transformation that they wanted when they made the purchase purchase. But now if you want to truly turn them into a fan, you elevate them to another level. That's how you're going to create raving fans. That's how you're going to generate and turn on your referral machine.

Joe
Okay, so we've spent time talking about the center of our blueprint, if you download the blueprint, you'll see in the middle, this is all the content we're talking about. You'll also see on either side, there is a column to work through the types of engagement, how you're going to promote this content. And then on the other side of it, there is another column that is about all of the nurturing activities that need to happen once they're in your database.

Frank
All of that is engagement, and reengagement. All of it.

Joe
Yeah. So we're not going to spend too much time diving into the tactics in each of those columns, because that's actually very big conversations to have. But let's talk about how this all wraps up, you've now got all of these, you got all of these pieces of content, one or more that aligns with each of the levels at a very high level, what happens to get this out there into the world? What do you got to do?

Frank
You know, to start promoting this at a very high level, the most basic thing, if you don't do any of the other engagement activities that you have to pay for or do extra, a lot of extra things, the bare minimum is to ensure any of the content that's open and public facing if any of your deep dives open and public facing for sure your Cornerstone content or your feeder content. At minimum, it has to be search engine optimized, at minimum it has to be in so then what will happen is you'll start to see an increase in visitors engaging with this content and essentially ending up in your Ascension path. Right. So at minimum, that's what you're going to do to start a first level of engagement, then what you can do is you can start proactively driving content to this to this experience. And so one of the first things you're going to do is you need to look at your existing database. And you must leverage that, before you go and buy traffic from the Google and the Facebook, you absolutely must look at your current database, and figure out how you're going to alert them to the new information and the new value you have to offer. And you're going to get them re engaged. Okay, and so you're going to do that through one off emails. And you're also going to do that through automated emails that you'll set up so that way as people engage with one piece at one relationship level, you have automated emails that will feed them content that will take them to the next relationship level. So emails next,

Joe
if you have your technology properly in place, you should be able to turn off any sort of communication about the level they have already graduated from current now they're only receiving communication about the level they're currently sitting in. That's pushing them to the level above it correct.

Frank
It's relevant. And it's it's all information designed to take another relationship step. And, yes, so that's that. The next thing you want to do is you want to make sure that your entire company, as many people as possible in your company, are socializing this content on LinkedIn, in this example with the IT manager, right or the it firm, you want to make sure as many people as possible are socializing this content on LinkedIn, and Facebook to depending if your audience is there, you want to get all the content that you're producing, get everyone sharing it and talking about it and posting about it. There's not a lot of organic reach on a lot of these social platforms anymore. But on LinkedIn, there definitely is there's still definitely organic reach to be had on LinkedIn by organic reach. I mean reaching people that you don't have to pay to reach them.

Joe
This is essentially getting every one of your employees to just share each piece of content that comes out on their own personal network. At minimum,

Frank
they should be sharing it on their personal networks, whether they share it from your company page, they like reshare it or whatnot, then, then once you have those things going, right, if you want to step on the gas, and then you can pay for new traffic, meaning you can pay for Google to then send you people who have searched for relevant things related to your company related to this experience,

Joe
which you can target those people using the demographic criteria that you outlined in your buyer persona, correct.

Frank
And then you could also do that on platforms like Facebook, and LinkedIn, and many, many other platforms to bring new traffic. And what those platforms are going to do is they're going to proactively Place your content and offers and information in front of these people, unlike search, where it's reactive, people are proactively searching. And then you know, they see your ad, with paid social and other platforms like display, that content is placed in front of them proactively. It's not a reaction to a search in so those people then can be introduced and brought into this experience.

Joe
So that's developing a cold audience that's going out and putting it in front of them and hoping they click through. And if they do click through and they don't actually engage in a way we want them to, what can we do about that?

Frank
If they do click through and don't engage, then you have to retarget them. And so you have to make sure your retargeting set up so that way, as they travel around the internet, the ads they see for your brand aren't just for your brand, but it's for the next thing that they should be doing in the relationship level. So if they engaged on the cornerstone content, and actually didn't download the lead magnet, then you should the ad should be for that lead magnet, if they came in, and were you know, they've been gobbling up a bunch of deep dive content than it should be for your foot in the door. Right, you should be going for the offer, you should be going for the sale, so to speak and saying, hey, let's get you a quote in less than 24 hours. And you won't have to talk to anybody, no obligation, no sales pitch guaranteed.

Joe
And if we have our platform set up properly, our technology stack is in place properly. We're actually tracking these people as they come we know that they didn't download anything correct. And we know to tell Google or Facebook or LinkedIn, we know say, hey, they didn't download it, please show them this offer instead. Next time.

Frank
Yeah, setting up the tech on all of this is critical if you want to do this at scale. Now, if you if you don't need, you know, hundreds of new opportunities every month, you can do this stuff manually, it just takes a lot more work.

Joe
So we need to wrap this up. But I do want to not leave people with rose colored glasses here. This is no small effort. At each one of these levels. There's a whole bunch of assets and a whole bunch of technology that has to be put into place to make this happen, right, we have promotional emails that need to be made. We have workflows that need triggers in them so that we know whether or not somebody's engaged or how long they engaged for so that we know what to show them. Next, we have landing pages, we have thank you pages, we have calls to action that are needed to be created. We have banner ads that are needed to be created. We have keyword research that needs to be done at every single level. We have follow up emails to help deliver what they requested. And to help push them to the next offer. There's actually a lot of work that goes into every single one of these

Frank
things right here, then you talk about turning customers into fans. I mean, a lot of that work is not automated kind of stuff, right? It's it's get your hands dirty, talk to your clients, get to know them, create groups that need to be moderated, send out surveys that need to be analyzed, right, right, have the conversations over coffee, like that's the kind of work that you know, you have to do. And it's a ton of work. And it's important work. So,

Joe
so if you're listening to this, I hope you're super inspired, this can be done. This is being done by many companies. But this is not something you turn on overnight. This is a journey. And when we work with companies, we often consult them saying, Hey, we're going to get to a baseline where you have one of everything within a year. And from Paris, just a continuous journey of optimization

Frank
because what we're ultimately talking about in I'm careful when I say this, because I don't want to give people the wrong impression of essentially the kind of firm that we have. But ultimately, you're building brand. that's ultimately what you're doing. And the way you build brand today is not the way you built brand yesterday that we built brand yesterday was lots of like traditional "advertising and marketing". The way you build brand today is by getting hyper specific audiences and getting hyper specific about their pain point and giving them value above and beyond what your competitors or anyone else is doing and you're changing their lives in ways that your competitors that's how you build brand today. And so ultimately, that's what we're talking about, and building brand. You know, it's a journey as you mentioned, it takes time.

Joe
Awesome.

Frank
Are we good? I think we were I think we're good on this episode. I think we went over our normal time. So this is a long one. Hopefully you enjoyed this. To get the blueprint Joe has referenced numerous times today. Go to building your digital utopia.com you can download the blueprint for free. We have a number of other resources there that are also growing all the time. So go check it out buildingyourdigitalutopia.com let us know what you think. Thanks for joining us. Join us for the next episode. You have an awesome day.