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Final Thoughts and Next Steps

All right, so some final thoughts and next steps, some things that I would like for you to keep in mind. One, there is no B2B or B2C, there is only H2H. Remember that. I don't care who you're selling to it's always a person. That person is always a human and that human always has a very human need. Humans are relational beings, we want to talk to people, but we want to do it on our terms. We want to talk to people but we wanna do it on our terms. Marketers built funnels, humans generally don't like them. Don't force people through a funnel. Don't force them and say like, "well, we really can't let you talk to a salesperson until you've, like, opted in for all these things." So if somebody raises their hand and say, "hey I got a question, can I talk to somebody." Talk to them. Why wouldn't you do that? And the better experience always wins. Never forget that. If you wanna know why is Amazon winning, they offer the better experience. The better experience always wins. And so while automa...

tion is great, automation has brought tremendous costs in the dehumanization of sales and marketing. If you want to win, re-humanize sales and marketing. Be willing to actually talk to people. Be willing to endure the cost, but also be willing to receive and be excited to receive the much, much, much higher conversion rates that come from that actual digital face to face conversation. Final thought that I'll give you, and I said this before, I believe the future belongs to the companies who are willing to invest in real live, one-to-one, human-to-human interactions. Spend some time figuring out what is your opening binary question. What is that opening binary question? Create high intent gated content that is gonna not just get a lead, but get a lead that informs an intent and the next conversation starter. Right? Create that concept. If you haven't, great, you might have pulled it down, you may have stopped marketing to it because it didn't have a high enough conversion rate. It doesn't matter if it's getting you the right types of conversations. And then map out your flow and once you've done it in real life, once you've actually gone in there and had some real life conversations, then and only then do you introduce a bot. Prove then automate. Do not ever, ever, ever, create a bot until you yourself have pretended to be the bot. That's the best advice that I can give you. Be the bot. Allow them to respond and respond as if you are a bot. If somebody says, "is this a bot?" Say, "yes." Pretend to be the bot, learn how the conversation flow goes, then you can actually turn it into a bot, into a robot and get some filtering going. All right? If nothing else, just send a, 'hey, are you still interested in this?' email out to your list. And see what happens. If that's the one thing that you do then I guarantee you're gonna be doin a heck of a lot more conversational marketing than anyone of your competitors and I believe you're gonna benefit from it tremendously. Thank you so much for your time. Again, my name's Ryan Deiss, that's me, that's where I am. I would love to follow up with you, chat with you, about some of this stuff. If you have any ideas that you wanna run by me, I geek out and I do like talking about this stuff and if ever we can help you at Digital Marketer, please let us know. Thanks so much. (audience clapping) I'm never gonna look at a chat bot the same or a chat function again on a website. We have got just maybe a few minutes to get some questions in from the audience if anybody in house has anything they would like to ask. I'm in an industry where people don't buy for a very long time, so keeping them engaged for a long time, but during that process that they're not buying, or they're not selling, then at that point I'm getting referrals, so how do I keep in front of them during that long period of time where they're not actually using my service but they're also referring me? Content is the ultimate way to stay in front of somebody without doing the how bout now, how bout now, how bout now, how bout now, how but now. Do you know what I'm sayin? Like, that's how a lot of follow up goes. Hey, are you interested in it yet? Are you interested yet? I apply a lot of this to dating in relationships. And not necessarily being the best lookin guy, or havin the highest, like, best stature, I had to really practice good follow up when I was dating in college. And if somebody's like, "hey, can I get you a drink," if they're like, "no," and I went like, all right, "how bout now?" (audience laughing) That's frickin weird, right? So it's like, "oh, okay, do you wanna dance." Although I never said do you wanna dance, that'd be terrible. (audience laughing) But, you know, "oh, cool, can I tell you a funny story?" You gotta go back with something new. And you're doing the right thing, right. Often times marketers and salespeople assume that because they didn't buy now they don't want it. It may mean that they're not ready yet. Correct. So following up with content, but also you can follow up with some of the same content. So we'll run the same automated webinars every month, and we know through tracking that people will sometimes attend the exact same webinar three times before they buy. And they will tell us, "I don't know what you said differently this time, but you really, you know, brought it home and I'm ready to sign up." Well, I know for a fact I didn't say anything different cause that's called recording. (audience laughing) So, we didn't change, the content didn't change, they changed. So, continue to follow up with your best content. Ya, mix it up, but then also mix in at least once a month that kind of are you still? Another variation of that is the have you yet? So are you still interested in this? Have you done this action yet? Same effect, two different variations so that you can really send in the same month fundamentally the same email without it feeling like the same email. So with content, a regular are you still and a regular have you yet, I think you can stay in front of them for an extended period of time. Should I be asking about referrals all the time? I believe that you ask for a referral, that's kind of towards the tail end. I know that people will give referrals ahead of time, but I don't feel like you've earned the right to ask for one until you've delivered true value. That's just my own personal feeling on it. So what you could maybe say is, do it in a really subtle way, and invite a conversation about it. Or maybe, like, "hey, do you know anybody who's interested in this? Let me know." And so now you're inviting a conversation, you're not saying will you forward this on to somebody or will you refer them directly. So I think you could not ask for a referral, but I think you could invite a conversation about referrals. Does that make sense? Sure. Okay. Okay, thank you. Ya, you're welcome. Great question. Hi. You talked a little bit earlier about blogging. How important would you say that businesses, especially small businesses, should have a blog? I see that it's becoming more and more popular, but, I don't know if you touched too much on the importance of a blog. I don't believe that blogging the way that a lot of people think about blogging is that important at all. Now let me clarify, and qualify that. Having a blog, meaning a content management system and a place where you can put content, I think for a small business is great. But to say that every business essentially needs to become a media company, which a lot of folks have said, I think is an overstatement. I believe that what you need to start off is, like, one really awesome amazing piece of content. And you would do far better, I know for example, at Digital Marketer we're actually producing less content but spending way more time on it. So we just produce like a 30, 40,000 word blog post. It's basically a book, you know, that we put out there. So, I think it's less about blogging, meaning I'm gonna post on these regular intervals. If you're a content company, and the stuff you're putting out is really, really, really great and people like it and that's almost your product, then absolutely blog. Ya, we're a video production company so it's been teetering on, like, do we start a blog on our website and then we can kind of share that content, like the list that you talked about. I think having a blog, meaning a word press installation, where you post content is fine. I do not think you need to make a commitment to blogging weekly or twice a week. I think you need to make a commitment. Like, what I tell people, and where we started Digital Marketer, was I just want 10 amazing pieces of content. I know that you only need one to get started, but as opposed to blogging, I would say let's brainstorm what are 10 outstanding, amazing pieces of content that we know that if somebody read this and was interested in this they would be interested in our services. What are those kind of questions, you know, that they're asking. What are those triggering events that would have them go. Don't feel like you have to commit to blogging as a verb. Have a blog that's a noun. Don't think you have to commit to blogging which is when people say that, like, I need to do it. It's simply not necessary. And in fact, it can distract from other efforts. I would much rather see you produce an amazing piece of content and then have a team that is more actively engaging with people who go to that content than have a team that's producing way more content that's kind of like that but not as good but it's Thursday and Thursday's when you push out a new piece of content. See what I'm sayin? Right. It's great, do it, if you've got unlimited resources but I'm assuming that most of the people in this room, you know, you're working from constraints. There's just better ways to leverage your human capital than to have a blogging commitment. I'd much rather see you be hyper active on social, have people who are responding like we talked about, talking to people from a chat. Get people doin that. Get way more people doin that but brainstorm. Think about what are those 10 amazing pieces of high intent content that will start more conversations. If those are working, it's working great, then add some more. But don't feel like you've gotta commit to blogging for it to work. Awesome. Thank you. You're welcome.