Digital Marketing Unveiled: An Interview With Allie Bloyd [Episode 110]

Digital Marketing Unveiled: An Interview With Allie Bloyd

I am excited to bring you this episode with Allie Bloyd. Allie owns a company called AllieBloydMedia.com. We are going to demystify digital marketing. What do I mean by that? Digital marketing has, like anything, a success path to be achieved. It has stages and steps. The challenge is most people never explain the challenges that are within but they only explain what their secret sauce is and how that solves the problem. They’re missing stages and steps. If you’re missing stages and steps, it’s like having 26 letters in the alphabet and missing out on a few letters.

Let’s say you’re missing T and C, and we go to spell cat. It’s going to sound like A. You get a word out there but it’s not hitting your audience in the way you want them to. We want to understand the stages and the steps within the stages. Allie and I are going to lay these out in this episode so that you will understand 1 of 2 things that you can do at the end. A) You want to learn more and train on this. You now know the stages and steps. You’re going to know what to train on. It’s not learning a little secret sauce, trying to put that in play, and finding out you don’t have the foundation. B) You’re going to learn and say, “I know these stages and steps. I want to outsource this.”

That second part is important. The reason it’s so important is you can be in a $15,000 to $40,000 mistake before you even know what happens when you’re outsourcing this to people who frankly tell you they know what they’re doing but they do not in the capacity of what you need. Without further ado, let’s go talk to Allie. Before we do, I want to reframe this and say that this is going to be a long episode. It’s purposely long because I wanted to make sure that you got all the content. Allie was so gracious to give her time and bring her A-game to the interview. Without further ado, let’s speak with Allie Bloyd.

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Allie, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

I’m super excited to be here with you.

I’m super excited for you. You have a new addition to your family. Congratulations.

Thank you so much.

For someone who had a child, you look wide awake. I’m very happy for you and appreciative of you being here.

Thank you. It’s all a ruse.

Some people do it on five-hour energy. You do it with pure excitement. You’re an expert at demystifying digital marketing for people. There are so many people out there trying to figure out, “How do I do digital marketing? What do I do? What do I not do?” They’re spending tons of money on things frankly that they shouldn’t, or don’t work. I hear it all the time. They’re frustrated. The first question is this. What’s the difference between marketing in general and digital marketing?

Truthfully, there isn’t a tremendous difference. Ultimately, I like to teach marketing from an approach that if you do it the right way, you should be able to use this with offline and online marketing strategies because, at the end of the day, all we’re trying to do is show someone why they might need our product or service and convince them to buy our product and service. We want to reach them where they are. If they are watching TV, we might want to be there. If they’re online, which so many people are these days, we want to meet them there.

It could even relate to direct-mail strategies. The core of marketing isn’t that different but the beauty of digital marketing compared to more traditional marketing approaches is the ability to track on a much more granular level. We’re able to see which specific ads drove someone to action. We’re able to see their customer journey in a way that we were never able to before.

Even if we were asking people how they heard about us, maybe they would mark off a TV commercial but they got a direct mail piece, saw an ad online, and then saw the TV commercial but we’re only able to track that one thing based on what they said. With the correct approach to digital marketing, you should be able to see every step that someone takes to enter your ecosystem, the steps that they take to establish that trust with your business, and then, ultimately, the steps that they’re taking to finally convert to either purchase that product or service.

If I understand correctly, I’m able to pinpoint where they’re coming from and the activity or behavior that’s happening. It’s not subjective, “I came from a direct mail piece. Somebody told me about you.” You’re able to say, “This ad is producing this many people. This is where this person came from. Here’s the activity they went through. They clicked on this link, went to this webpage, filled in this form, and did X, Y, and Z.” We’re able to track all those metrics. Please correct me if I’m wrong but if we track these metrics, we can with predictability say, “If we’re doing this, we should be converting at X because we have had a consistent flow of this over time.”

With a service-based business primarily, there are going to be other factors in the mix and things that you are extremely familiar with, such as sales. There is that human component happening to get someone to buy most of the time in a service-based business, whereas if you’re looking strictly at an eCommerce store, for example, that’s going to be a lot more cut-and-dry. You are able to see every single metric on those platforms and identify which pages need to be tweaked or optimized, the cart checkout process, and all of those things.

When it comes to service-based business, we’re going to be able to see all of the digital metrics but there has to be the human tracking element of the actual sales conversion rates. If you can do that, which everyone should be doing, you will have this predictable selling system, which is how I like to refer to it. That’s what most businesses are looking for. They want to know, “If I invest this much into advertising, what is my expected return?” That has traditionally been a very difficult thing for someone to say, “You can expect to receive exactly this much.”

While it is difficult to tell someone exactly how much they’re going to see in terms of ROI before their campaigns begin, once you have the data on the ad side and the sales side, you should be able to pinpoint with mere accuracy what type of revenue a certain ad spend is going to be able to bring in. It illuminates things that most business owners have been somewhat oblivious to in the past. It also shows them exactly where their efforts need to be focused to get the results that they’re looking for.

Many people are confused about this subject. I agree with you 100%. On the sales side, we have to be tracking our metrics too. That’s where I specialize. We’re constantly tracking those because we can say, “This person has been contacted 3 to 4 times. This person has not been contacted. This person downloaded this report or got this report. They’re buying 23% more than these people.” That’s what it is on the sales side. You’re doing the same on the marketing side.

You and I had a conversation. What I loved about our conversation was testing whether that offline play works or not is so much more costly than it is on an online play. You and I were talking about a potential of a $2,000 test budget. I know from even running focus groups that you could spend $15,000 easily on one focus group. From what I can see, it’s so much more costly to get the test done versus online. Why is that so?

There are a couple of different things. The first thing to point out is that you can very easily blow a lot of money testing on digital campaigns in the same way that you would on offline campaigns if you don’t know what you’re doing and if you don’t have previous data to pull from and previous experience in terms of what type of campaigns you should be running, what type of copy, creative, or audience you should be using, what type of objectives, and where to send people. Having that knowledge beforehand is critical in setting up campaigns the right way so that you can avoid wasted ad spend.

The goal is to stop taking money and throwing it in the trashcan. We do want to be willing to spend whatever is necessary to get the data that we need to grow our business. Most people are still spending a significant amount of money on these campaigns but they’re not generating much data from them because they don’t know what they’re looking for. The campaigns were never structured the right way, to begin with. They’re also not closing the loop on the marketing and the sales side.

On your end, you’re tracking these sales metrics religiously. We have to do that on the marketing side but we have to connect the dots on both of them. Otherwise, you’re always missing a huge piece of the picture. The reason that it historically has been so difficult to test on offline campaigns is the tracking was never good. You might test five different TV commercials. Maybe those five different TV commercials are running at different times of the day on different stations. Maybe some of those stations are running at a higher frequency.

You had no way of knowing which of those commercials and stations are driving the business. You might be able to say, “They came from TV,” but where in TV did they come from? It made it incredibly difficult to take your dollars and focus them on the areas that were producing the greatest return. There are ways to track those types of campaigns using digital.

This is something I do love to help business owners with. It’s taking those campaigns that can still work very well if done correctly and saying, “How can we approach this from square one where testing and tracking is our primary goal?” That’s using specific offers and media buying strategies even if you are on TV or radio, buying the programming in a certain way. Also, using certain calls to action and destinations that you’re sending them to and then having the right digital in place on the back end to track those things because virtually, everything is interconnected.

It is common for people to see you in 3 or 4 different places before they convert. We don’t want to rely on the last attribution or the last step that somebody is going to take before they either convert to a sales call or a customer. We want to pay close attention to the first attribution as well and then all of those steps in between. I do think that it’s so easy to say, “We can get a lot more out of our testing budget on digital.” It is true. You can but most people still fail to do that because they don’t know what they’re even testing in the first place and how to even analyze the metrics.

That’s a big challenge for people. They look at an ads manager dashboard and say, “What am I even looking at here? What do these numbers mean? What is a baseline or a benchmark for these numbers? If one number is high or low, what does that tell me about how this ad could have performed or why it performed the way that it did?” Ultimately, being data-focused no matter what type of marketing you’re doing is always going to help you make more of your testing budget and your budget long-term because everything we need to know is very clear in the numbers if you only know what you’re looking for.

That’s what your company helps people with as well. I remember Jay Conrad Levinson. When he was alive, he wrote a book series called the Guerilla Marketing book series. I asked Jay, “What’s marketing about?” He said, “It’s about two things, data focus or tracking the data and being patient. Those are the two things that most people don’t do in marketing. Therefore, they don’t succeed the way they want in marketing. You can make mistakes even when you know what you’re doing but when you’re tracking the data, it’s far less. Before, we were tracking the data.”

He gave me an example he worked on. There was a commercial called the Marlboro Man in the ’70s when it was there. Jay told me that they spent $5 million before they started looking at how to make the Marlboro Man work. I remember when I used to buy radios for Chet Holmes and Tony Robbins. We would sometimes test a radio ad but that radio ad would cost us anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000 to test it.

I’m hearing numbers, “You can test on $1,000 or $2,000.” That is so much more economical. You can pinpoint because, in radio, you can look at the numbers but it’s like, “Did it work or didn’t?” It was a campaign. You don’t have the granularity that I can see what you’re talking about on the tracking on the online side. I wanted to ask a question about this because I don’t know. Can we run an online ad, get the data, and then say, “This is possible that it might also work offline as well.” If I took my online statistics and said, “These are all working online,” would that give me more viability to test something like a radio ad and do that more effectively?

Yes and no. The truth is that the things that work on radio and TV are often very different compared to what works on something like a social platform or a search ad. I can explain the reasoning behind that but they’re different insights that you can gain from a digital campaign that can 100% help you on a radio or TV ad. The first thing is always the offer. If an offer is solid, you should be able to use that offer anywhere. It does not matter what the platform is. The offer should still be viable.

In marketing, the things that work on radio and TV are often very different from what works on a search ad or a social platform. Click To Tweet

What I mean is the front-end offer typically. Most businesses are going to have a front-end offer, and then likely, they’re going to have a back-end offer as well. What is the offer that we’re presenting to the general public to get them in the door to start that conversation for the very first time? If an offer works on social where people are not out there searching for you and they’re not looking for this solution, which is similar to what you would find on TV and radio, then you can take that information and put it into a campaign such as that.

Some of the other things that you can benefit from is learning more about your customer avatar. Most business owners that are putting together radio or TV commercials are typically not that avatar-focused. They may not even know what a customer avatar is half of the time but what you’re able to do on social is so much more in terms of audience interests and behaviors. What are the other things that they like?

We have the ability to communicate two ways with our audience on online platforms whereas it is simply a one-way communication on TV and radio. We don’t get to see their comments and hear their thoughts on that in real time but we can see that from an ad. If you launch an ad, the most important thing is how it’s performing in terms of return on investment but you also want to pay attention to the questions that people are asking or the comments that they’re making about the ad itself.

If you can continue to look at that data and find ways to roll that into your messaging, you’re going to be a lot more successful. You’re also going to be able to find avatars through your digital that you probably weren’t even aware of. You could have specific campaigns that are offline that center around those. If you are focusing on a specific avatar, that likely is going to impact the creative of the ad, what stations you’re running that ad on, and maybe the times of day that those are running. Much about your audience can be learned from digital.

If you can continue to look at data and find ways to roll that into your messaging, you're going to be a lot more successful. Click To Tweet

I also think of the customer journey as a whole. A lot of times on TV and radio, most businesses are direct to offer core offers 100% of the time. A lot of times, it’s a pretty big ask. It’s only going to appeal to the smallest percentage of your market. That is usually about 3% of the population of people who could use what you have. There could be about 15% more people that need what you have but they don’t know it yet. Those people are likely not going to jump at the opportunity to take you up on this big ask even the first several times that they hear from you. What they might need is something more informational or educational, initially. It’s not something we see a ton on TV and radio.

Those strategies work very well on digital but you don’t see people using those in traditional marketing often. It’s mainly because, number one, they’re scared of wasting money. They think if they don’t go directly to the sale, they’re not going to make sales and throw their budget in the trash. They also don’t have the ability to track. They have never seen the customer journey up close and personal. They don’t understand how a content-focused piece or an educational-focused piece drives those ideal customers through their door or into their sales process as we’re able to see with digital.

One example of a local business that I work with a lot is kitchen and bath remodelers. There is a specific offer for kitchen and bath remodelers that I have used time and time again. Every single time, it is the best-performing offer. That’s something called Kitchen & Bath University. This is an educational seminar in-person where people who are thinking about remodeling can come and learn about kitchen and bath remodeling. This is a very large-scale project. It’s intimidating, confusing, and expensive.

People are scared to throw their money away, start on something that’s bigger than what they anticipate, or even give their money to the wrong person. By driving people to this event, you are able to build trust with them. You’re able to educate them and connect with them in a way that you are not able to do in any other sales scenario because you’re positioning yourself as the expert. You’re right there in front of them. You can answer those questions, and they don’t feel like they’re being sold.

By the time you get to that pitch at the end, they’re already sold. If they were sellable or if they were not quite ready to remodel anyway, then they’re still likely going to have you at the top of their list but they may be six months or a year down the road. That’s often how early people start investigating and gathering information about these projects.

Most contractors focus on the people who are in that final month before they get started. At that point, they might have 5 other contractors that they’re talking to or 5 other quotes that they’re getting. You’re just another person in the mix. You are not any different than those other companies. An offer like this sets you apart. You’re casting the widest possible net, which is what you want to do on something like TV or radio, and oftentimes what you might want to do on something like social.

Through that offer, you’re able to sell far more in a lot of times higher dollar amounts. We found that those leads converted easier and faster. They bought more at the end of the day. They were better customers to work with because they had been fully educated on the process before they ever got started. That is something that you might start by advertising on something like social. Once you see how well this works, you start promoting it in your TV commercials.

I’ve had clients that run this offer every single month. Every month, they have one of these events going on. That means you can continue to run your TV ads and radio ads focused not only on getting someone to buy from you but focused on getting them to a page that tells them when the event is taking place and allowing them to reserve their seat.

It might sound counterintuitive to a lot of people based on what they typically would do. If you can see the quality of leads and the excitement of the people who are either registering for that event or showing up to that event through a social campaign, you then can very easily say, “Why wouldn’t this work in our other forms of advertising, direct mail included?” I do think there’s so much crossover. At the end of the day, the data does give you the confidence to know what pieces can translate to other types of campaigns. That educational component is what’s missing from a lot of the more traditional marketing methods.

I was writing this down. Let’s say I don’t know what I’m doing. Should I start with a solid offer first or learn about the client avatar first or the customer journey first? What would be step one?

Typically, step one is going to be understanding your customer. The offer is probably the most critical component of any campaign but if you don’t understand your ideal customers, you’re going to have a hard time creating an offer that speaks to them. Let’s go back to the example I used of Kitchen & Bath University. If my primary avatar is a 50-year-old man, I may not create a campaign that’s focused on this educational seminar because 80% of the attendees were always female.

That’s because a lot of times, females are more inclined to do the research first. Maybe the man in the relationship might be handling it once it gets started but the female is the one that is pushing that project along up until the point where they start to meet with different companies and even sometimes after for design choices, budgeting, and things that a lot of times the female is focused on. If you don’t know that 35 to 55 suburban female with a high interest in value, design, and understanding of what she’s purchasing is whom you’re speaking to, you’re not going to create the offer that will best deliver to her.

We have to know who it is we’re talking to, what they want, and also what they might think they want that isn’t what they need. A lot of times, if you ask people directly, they might tell you something but it doesn’t mean that it’s the right offer to present to them. Sometimes people need a little taste before they’re ready for that bigger picture, similar to what we talked about at the event. That might mean you’re going for a more entry-point offer or a loss leader.

If you are somebody who doesn’t have the ability to do that, you might have to present your business services as a whole but the question is, “How do you frame that? What is the messaging around that?” It’s getting super detailed on who you’re serving. There are at least going to be two main groups that you’re focused on. It’s dialing that in as much as possible.

There’s always going to be testing that goes on involving your audiences and the people that you’re reaching but there are a lot of different audiences that could still produce the same type of avatar for you. We don’t want to waste time or money on channels or audiences that aren’t where your ideal customer is going to be hanging out. From there, it is all about the offer because if your offer stinks, it does not matter how good your ads are and how good your audiences are.

Don't waste time or money on channels or audiences that aren't where your ideal customers are. Click To Tweet

I like to use this analogy. It’s the old saying, “I can sell ice to an Eskimo.” Maybe the best salesperson could sell ice to an Eskimo but why are you trying to sell ice to an Eskimo? An Eskimo does not need ice. They have all the ice that they can handle. You are swimming upstream. This is an uphill battle for you. You should be selling ice to someone in the desert. Let’s get clear on who we’re talking to.

The offer becomes so much easier because we know what to present to them and sometimes in what order. It could be a difference in the level of knowledge of that avatar. Maybe it’s the same type of person but one person is far more educated on the subject than another. For example, I work with small business owners but I also work with marketers that serve small business owners.

That marketer is typically a little bit more knowledgeable on the digital side than that small business owner is. I need to talk to that group a little bit more about the technical nuts and bolts, whereas I need to talk to that small business owner about the outcome that they’re looking for or the challenges. They have that they might not even know there’s a solution for. Maybe they know solutions but they feel overwhelmed by the prospect.

If I start speaking to them in a lot of technical mumbo jumbo from the beginning, they are going to immediately put up a wall and say, “I can’t do this.” Sometimes it’s the messaging surrounding your offer. The offer might be the same for both groups but how you do it is significantly different. After we have our offer, at least pinpoint to the point of, “I’m ready to test this.” Before you test an offer, it’s just an idea. You need the data to validate if this offer is going to work. That becomes the biggest challenge.

Most people think, “If I try this platform and run these ads and they don’t produce a return, the platforms don’t work. They don’t work for a business like mine,” not realizing how many variables they have the ability to pull these levers on, the offer being the most significant. The technical implementation of the campaigns is important. I see so many people run what’s called a traffic campaign when they want leads and appointments. The traffic campaign is going to give you clicks but it is very rarely going to give you good leads and appointments.

If that’s the type of campaign you’re running, it’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter how good your offer is or how good your audience is. You might still see some results but they’re going to pale in comparison to what you would see if you would run that campaign correctly. We’ve got the audience aspect, the offer aspect, the campaign aspect, the follow-up, the nurture, and everything that’s happening after someone clicks on the ad.

There are four main groups. You have to get right all of those elements to have a winning campaign but every single dollar that you spend on these campaigns should get you one step closer to being able to have something that is producing day in and day out as long as you’re willing to pay attention to it and make the tweaks and adjustments that are necessary.

That’s where the patience that you mentioned earlier comes into play. It’s not always a snap of the finger. People are in this instant gratification mindset more so now than ever before. If you want to make something spectacular for your business, you’ve got to be willing to give it the time that it takes and be willing to spend the money that it takes before you have that optimal ROI.

I was writing down these things as you were speaking. I’m going to try to put them in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Correct me if I get the order wrong, please. The first is learning about your ideal client avatar. Step number two is creating a solid offer with messaging on the front-end sale. Three would be testing that front-end offer. Four, you’re going to look at the data, adjust, try again, and keep massaging that. As you’re doing that, four will be defining the client or the customer’s journey through the process. Five includes follow-up, nurturing, and all of that. Five would be you’re going to run to another back-end offer, which is ultimately where you want to get to in the first place. Did I miss anything?

That is the overall path that anybody wants to follow. When it comes to testing, I would lump in the setup of the campaign and understand the platforms you’re using. That is the gist of it.

I’m a good student then. Allie, thanks for bringing your A-game here. I have two more questions if you will indulge me for a little longer here. We were talking about when you were running a campaign or something. You were mentioning level 1, level 2, and level 3. Could you explain that please for myself and people?

As somebody who is focused on sales, this is something you’re going to be familiar with. It’s going to make a lot of sense to you because the way that we approach marketing and setting up our campaigns is very much the same way that you should approach sales. That is with the understanding that people typically do not convert the first time that you speak to them or the first time that they hear from you.

The way to approach marketing and setting up campaigns should be the same way that you approach sales – with the understanding that people typically do not convert the first time you speak to them or the first time they hear from you. Click To Tweet

The stat is there are anywhere between 8 and 32 touchpoints required before that typical conversion is going to take place. Those touchpoints could be ads. They could be manual follow-ups with a real human speaking to somebody or texting with somebody. It could be email drip campaigns. It could be different types of content. It could be getting on the phone with a salesperson. All of those touchpoints add up.

You might have that rare occurrence for someone who has never heard of you. They have never seen anything from you. They see your ad for the very first time, they click, they sign up, they buy, and they become the best customer but that is going to be the exception and not the rule. Going back to what we talked about with that Kitchen & Bath University example, in that type of business and every type of business, there is some form of knowledge that people need to know, either because they’re seeking it out and they’re researching and investigating these things, or maybe it’s something that they don’t even know they don’t know.

You want to start warming up that cold traffic audience by giving them great content and value or making them more familiar with you and your company as a whole. Doing that is most easily done through videos and video ad campaigns. You can say so much more. You can have someone feel like they know you through those videos. By the time they speak to you, you already have that connection formed. That’s something challenging to do in any other format.

Level one is education, engagement, and awareness. We’re here to build a warm audience, build trust, and build credibility. Educational videos are my favorite way to do it, or maybe sharing tips, insights, and things like that. You can also do it through storytelling. Maybe it’s through your founder’s story. There are probably a dozen founders’ stories that any one business could have about why you decided to get started, what your first month in business was like or your first year, how you hired your first team members, or how your business evolved. All of these things allow people to get to know you and your company a lot more.

We’re in an age where people don’t buy from businesses because they need something or because it’s the lowest price or the highest quality. They buy because they like the people behind the brand. Having your personality come through and your very unique knowledge and experience or whatever that may be is laying the foundation for the rest of your campaigns.

We're in an age where people don't buy from businesses because they need something or because it's the lowest price or the highest quality. They buy because they like the people behind the brand. Click To Tweet

Level one is getting people to engage with us, getting people familiar, and getting them to start to learn about us and like us but we also want to use that content to identify who is in our target market. I might be reaching an audience of all the right people. By all the right people, I mean marketers that all work with small business owners. That’s one of my avatars.

I could have an audience of 1 million small business marketers but not 1 million of those people are going to be interested in what I do or working with me because maybe some people are getting great results for their clients on their ads. They don’t feel like they need help. Everything is going well, and their business is growing. That is not necessarily my avatar for one of the offers that I would be focusing on. I would want to create a video ad that says something like, “If you’re struggling to get great results for your local ad clients, try this.”

If somebody is struggling to get great results for their local ad clients, they’re inclined to watch that video. The fact that they watched that video tells me you’re not just the right avatar. You have the intent, or the timing is right. You are going to be somebody I want to present my core offer to pretty quickly. That’s something difficult to do in other mediums and marketing formats. Being able to segment not only by avatar but by intent is an awesome way to use level-one ads.

We’ve got level two. Level two is all about the offer. The offer should also be tested to completely cold traffic because if you can crack the code on pure cold traffic, you’re at least getting them to convert on that front-end ad. It doesn’t mean they’re buying that core product and service yet but it is that front-end conversion. You’re going to be a lot more likely to be able to scale that.

However, your warm audience will typically convert on the front end anywhere between a third of the cost of the cold traffic leads or maybe half of the cost. They often convert in much higher percentages to the next step. Maybe it’s the purchase. Maybe it’s getting them to schedule that sales call. They also convert easier to the sale.

If you can build your warm audience, it will become the most reliable audience you can have. Let’s say you have to turn off some of your campaigns. You have a month where cashflow is limited but you can’t stop advertising. You should only be advertising to your warm traffic. You’re going to be able to get so much more bang for your buck from that audience. They are your best future customers and brand ambassadors.

Level three is retargeting. If we have social media campaigns running, we know that people are on social media while they could be doing anything else in the world. They could be at their kid’s soccer game. They could be at the doctor’s office. There are 1 million things that people could be doing while scrolling on social media. They may click on that ad. They may stop and watch that video but do they have the time to take the next step you’re asking them to take? Maybe not. If you’re asking them several questions, maybe they don’t have time to fill them out. If you’re asking them for an initial purchase or a booking, maybe they don’t have their calendar or credit card info handy.

If we say, “It looks like you weren’t interested,” we are missing out on a huge percentage of our customer base. That is where our retargeting ads come in. You’re giving people that second chance and giving people that reminder. Let’s say you came to my website maybe organically, maybe through search, or maybe through that TV commercial. If you didn’t take the action that I was wanting you to take, I want to make sure that you get that other chance immediately.

It’s not just for social ads. It’s for all other forms of traffic. If you set this up the right way, you can monetize anything else you’re doing on any other platform a lot more effectively by setting up these level-three ads. Each level has its ad type, ad objective, and the way that you would want to present the creative or different messaging and copy that’s going to work better.

They’re all standalone but they should be working together with all three campaigns set up all the time if you want this system to work as planned. You can think about level one. It’s the top of the funnel. Level two is the minimum of the funnel. Level three is the bottom of the funnel. You’re taking people from the top and filtering them down to the bottom, hoping that as many people as possible will enter your ecosystem on the back end so that you have a more direct way to communicate with them.

That’s when converting them can become even easier because you can rack up those touchpoints pretty quickly once you get them into your system. Whereas if you don’t get them into your system, you have to consistently keep paying to advertise to them instead of sending them an email every day, sending them a text, or giving them a call. Everything works in tandem with one another.

The biggest mistake that I typically see is that everyone is level-two ads direct offer to cold traffic 100% of the time. They don’t do level 1, they don’t do level 3, and they never focus on building a warm audience. They’re constantly marketing to people who have never heard of them. They’re also not gaining any insights about if this offer even works. They keep testing different audiences or maybe a new creative. They never do split testing even if they were going to cold traffic which is required to make that type of campaign work for them.

If they do that, even if they get high sales, they’re going to get low profitability.

Even if you make it work with cold traffic with level two, you’re leaving money on the table by not doing the rest. Your cost-per-lead could be half. Your conversion rate could be double. You could be getting so much more than what you’re getting now. To people who are doing that, if you’re like, “My ads to cold traffic work pretty well. I have never done any of this,” how much better could it work if you did try and implement this?

You’re one of those rare exceptions if that is you because typically, it’s not going to work that well but if you come across one of those campaigns or businesses where it can work, then you want to maximize that. That is your next step. Your next progression is saying, “How can I take what’s already working and make it even better?”

That makes so much sense. In the offline world, as a salesperson doing it, you made an initial cold call. You’re continuing to follow up. You’re making 8 to 12 touchpoints in the process. We know that only about 13% of the people selling ever even do. The worst yet is you’re prepping your competition to take the sale because you’re already educated them up to a certain point. The competition keeps going, and they end up with sales. That’s certainly sage advice.

Allie, here’s the last question. There’s a lot being talked about like self-service sales. Marketer Peter Drucker years ago said something to the effect of, “Marketing’s job is to make sales superfluous. Sales is obsolete.” I disagree with that statement personally but there is some truth to where marketing can set it up to go from a lead to a marketing-qualified lead to a sales-ready lead. This may not even be a fair question but where typically do you see that it’s ready to hand off to a sales team? Are there any indicators that somebody can say, “That makes sense. I should hand it off at that time. I should keep nurturing them in level 1, level 2, and level 3 until they get to the sales team?”

It does depend on what your sales process looks like. Are you trying to close sales without a human being speaking to someone on the phone? Are you trying to drive people to a phone call? Those two strategies are going to look a lot different. If you are trying to get someone to a sales call, and you want them to be a sales-ready lead, that education and that authority building on the front end are crucial. The leads that we get that are the easiest closes, once we get them on the phone, are people who have watched multiple videos from me.

Let’s say they stumble upon me on my YouTube channel. They watch a couple of videos. By the time they have watched those videos, they are likely going to know that I am the exact person that can help them with what they need help with. They feel confident in my abilities because I’ve already shown them, “Here’s how to do it. Here are what the results are, X, Y, and Z.” They feel good about the company, the person, the process, and the problem that they need to be solved. By the time they get to that sales call, they’re like, “Can I please give you my money?”

By far, the better job you do at level one, the easier the job of the salesperson will be. Does that mean that somebody would have taken a link, clicked on it, and checked out an $8,000 program without ever speaking to someone? Not typically. The trust still needs to be there. People typically still have questions. You want to make sure that they’re being taken care of and that they don’t slip through the cracks. Even if marketing can make sales extremely easy, it does not mean that it will ever be obsolete.

Something I’ve spoken about to my coaches is, “What about doing group sales calls?” You’re taking people who answer sales surveys in the perfect way. It’s not something you offer to everyone but if they answer everything the exact way that you want them to, why do we even need to do one-on-ones? Why don’t we do a group sales call where people can ask their questions, and we can enroll them at the same time? That might be an example of the next level of trying to make it easier for a salesperson.

That being said, most of your audience is going to feel much better speaking with someone if you sell anything high-ticket. If you’re not selling high-ticket, you probably shouldn’t even be directing them to a call. You should find the best way to sell it without a human being but if we’re talking high-ticket, you want to make it so that they already have that understanding before they get on the call. That salesperson does not need to convince them of anything. They’re there to make sure that they are a good fit for what you do, that the next steps are clearly understood, and that they feel welcome and excited to get started.

Level one is huge for sales. The other thing is making that pre-qualification process spot on. If you’re getting started in digital marketing, I typically do not encourage you to make it super difficult for somebody to book a call with you because you need that data. You want to have those conversations. Those conversations give you information on your avatar. They give you that information, “Is this offer correct? Did we message this properly? What can I do in my copy and creative to attract the right person better and repel the wrong person?”

I do think that having as many conversations as possible is the best way to go early on. Once you get that figured out, you may not want to spend all your time on the phone, or your sales team wants to make sure that they are only speaking with the best possible leads. In doing that, you have pre-qualification surveys that ask people the questions that would be a hard disqualifier, first and foremost. If there’s anything like, “We don’t work with you. That budget doesn’t work. That industry doesn’t work. That mindset doesn’t work,” we want to go ahead and get those people out of the way so that they never even make it to the calendar.

Typically, those pre-qualification surveys do not have to be very long or extensive. They just have to have the right questions and segment people in the appropriate way. It doesn’t even mean that person can’t buy from you but maybe they don’t need to talk to a salesperson. Maybe they need something like a do-it-yourself course or something that they can check out online on their own without ever having that sales conversation.

Another way that you can do it is to even sell through DMs. That’s still a real person on the other end. You don’t even have to get them on a sales call. If your lead is primed and prepped from all of the groundwork that we have already laid, that DM sales conversation can be easy even for very expensive products and services but most people never make it there. They never get to the stage where they can do that but that is what I would call an easy sale to make if you are somebody who’s got pre-qualified leads through your marketing.

To everybody’s knowledge, what is a DM?

It’s a Direct Message. This could be a Facebook message. This could be on Instagram or something like that.

Allie, thank you for being here on the show. Thank you for showing up and delivering your A-game. I’m grateful. I know people got a tremendous amount out of this. I’ve got three pages of notes myself. Thank you once again for being on the show.

Thank you for having me. It has been great. I hope everybody got a lot of value. If you do want to learn more, feel free to reach out to me. I’m on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. I would love to chat with you and see what I can do to answer your questions.

I highly recommend you check out what she does. She’s a professional. You could read it on this episode here. Allie, have a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks for being here.

Thanks.

—

At this point, I hope you have pages of notes. I’ve got three myself. Here’s the thing. When you understand the stages and steps, you will know what to do and where to put them in the right order. Like anything, if you don’t have it in the right order, you’re going to bump your head or hit your knee on something. Remember, she laid it out. You want to start with learning about your ideal client avatar. You want to get your offer and so on through the steps and stages of this process.

Do not do this in reverse. It doesn’t work. That’s like trying to say the alphabet backward versus forward. You can learn how to do that but it’s still not going to get you what you want. Everybody else is on the forward to the backward one. Start in the beginning. You don’t want to start with the end and go back to the beginning. This is different than what Stephen Covey says, “We will start with the end in mind.” You can start with, “I would like to have this for a sales plan or a plan out there,” but when you’re going to the marketing, follow the steps and stages that she has laid out in this particular aspect.

If you’re going to use salespeople, I want to give you a couple of nuggets on that. Please understand that part of your job is to transfer the authority of you or your company to the salesperson in the perception of the buyer. Let’s say that you’re a person who’s a star in the business. People identify with you as the owner and the trustworthy person in that business. You’ve got to transfer some of that trustworthiness, some of your reputation, and some of the rapport to your salespeople to edify them before you take that transfer off to your salespeople. You will get a higher conversion rate.

Make sure you’re having continuous touchpoints with your clientele. There’s study after study that shows that an incoming lead will close in time online if it’s targeted appropriately 62.5% of the time. However, in month one, only about 25% of that 62.5% closed. It takes up to ten months on average to close all 62.5%.

What does that mean? Follow-up, education, and nurturing. You want to continuously keep that path going because if you do not, you are only prepping your clientele, the potential buyers, or the buyers to buy from your competition because if you follow up with them 2 or 3 times, they’re like, “I’m here but I’m not ready yet.” Somebody else is following up with them. They’re going to take that sale. You’re doing all the hard work and spending the money. You’re losing the sale to the competitor. Your competitor is going to thank you but you’re not going to have it in your bank account.

If you want more on the subject matter, please go to AllieBloydMedia.com and check it out. If you have any questions for us, or if you love this episode, let us know. If you have some subject matter you want on a particular episode, let us know. Send an email to YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. If you want to get yourself or someone you know to the top 1% of sales earners, or you want to grow the revenue in your company, reach out to me directly at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com. My LinkedIn is DougBrown123.

We have an upcoming university that we’re going to be starting for teaching people to be in the top 1%. If you’re interested in that, reach out to YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. Let us know. We will get you on the waiting list, communicate in between, and show you what we have. If that’s for you, we will help you get there. As always, go out and sell something. Sell a lot of it. Play win-win. That means you win. They win. If it’s win-lose, walk away. As always, go out and sell more than you figured. Until next time, to your success.

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