How To Develop A Holistic Marketing Blueprint That Is Guaranteed To Get Result

Hello everyone. Welcome to Ecoffee with Experts. I’m your host, Matt Fraser. And on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about how to develop a holistic marketing blueprint that is guaranteed to get results with Scott Kindred. Scott is the founder and president of SafeHouse Web, a full-service digital marketing and Web design agency headquartered in Hollister, California, with a new office just recently in Las Vegas. He provides consulting to business executives and leaders of organizations who want a holistic strategy for the success of their online presence. When not working on marketing campaigns for clients, Scott enjoys travel, dining, and the occasional cigar. It also enjoys exploring the mystique of the Mojave Desert, its towns and its history are one of his past times. Scott, thank you so much for being here. A pleasure to have you on the show.

Matt. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the invitation.

No problem. You’ve had an interesting journey so far. How would you describe yourself as a child?

Really sort of adventurous following my parent’s lead. Yeah. You know, it’s just that’s how I came up. That’s how I learned most of the things about how to be a good person, and how to interact with people outside of relationships. So that’s really at the core of everything.

Right. So your parents vastly impacted who you are today?

They did. My father was a schoolteacher. And so I feel like I have a little bit of that discipline or that bookwormish or focused on studies that are part of who I am, still today. And my mother is much more social and outgoing. So I got a little bit of that, too. So it’s a nice combination.

How do you think that has impacted who you are today in regard to your career in digital marketing?

Good question, to me people know me, my colleagues and our clients know me as a person who is easy to get along with, and pretty easy-going. And I like to keep things professional and productive. I think the most common comment that we get, not just about me, but about the business, is because, you know, birds of a feather attract one another. We have a team full of people who have a lot of integrity that’s going to want to do good things for the community or social good sort of things. And so that really helps my relationships with the executives and other people that we do business with.

Well, that’s awesome. Hey, what was your experience like working as the director of Digital Solutions at Kinetic Search?

That was a great experience. Kinetic Search at the time was a boutique recruiting firm in Silicon Valley. And they had some very smart people. It was a women-owned business. And the woman who owned it hired a lot of like-minded people, very smart people. Their entire executive staff was women who brought experience from big tech, from human resources, from health care, and a little bit from marketing like PR agencies and stuff. So it was a really great team to be a part of. We were able to grow their followings on LinkedIn and I think the other one was Facebook at the time was a number of years ago, substantially by simply putting a strategy in place about what are we posting, what are we doing to social media channels more than just posting jobs every day, which is what their core business was? Or are we trying to tell the story of who we are as a woman-owned business? Who are we as the type of people that we’re trying to recruit for talent and to supply it to the big tech companies in Silicon Valley?

Wow. So your focus is on different aspects of those things in regards to the projects such as, you telling the story of there being a women-owned business and developing a strategy, to develop content to publish on the networks at that time to inform your audience that you were trying to reach?

What we did, we kind of had a two-pronged approach at the time, two prongs that were public facing. One was on the website and the other on social media. So with the website, we did a complete redesign of their corporate website. It transitioned basically from a very plain-looking job listing sort of website to something that showed actual faces, people, stories of what was going on with executives in the company, and success stories about people that they were hiring and placing with their clients. So that was a major push for the website and the other part was social media sort of touched on a minute ago. Where we were able to do a lot. We planned out and strategized. I call them snackable bite-sized pieces of content for social media, particularly LinkedIn, because that’s the native nature of it for job searching, especially for young professionals. And so we created an entire strategy that had bite-sized content imagery that was about people rather than job descriptions. A lot of that has really turned it around.

What was the impact of that, you mentioned turning it around, so did like was there a percent of the increase in revenue or in leads or in website traffic or whatever?

I recall off the top of my head as we doubled the following on LinkedIn. So it was something around 1500 or 2000 people when we first came in and when we left as it was all around 4400-4500, and that’s the start that I can remember in my head. I just in general, about the website with every project we do, of course, we use Google Analytics, reinstall that and use that to track visitor activity. And I know that when we first started, they were coming in with like a couple of hundred visitors per day for the website, and when we left, it was a couple of thousand per day. Those are kind of good impacts.

Absolutely. I mean, how would you say that experiences impacted your career today?

I took that as a really good experience working with an executive team that was really well seasoned and so well. That was a newer and very motivating experience for me. And to take away from that and what it impacts our business today is that we’re more I wouldn’t say we are more aware of the mindset that comes along with doing business in Silicon Valley. We’re not just in there, of course, Silicon Valley. We’ve got a new office in Las Vegas, too, and we’ve got clients across the country remotely, thanks to the technology of today. But that particular experience really honed my ability to work more closely and more effectively with Silicon Valley stakeholders.

Cool, I imagine it gave you more confidence as a marketer as well.

It did, that’s a good point. It did a little bit. It just validated that for me in my particular role, not what our team was doing, but for me personally, in that it’s all about the relationship. You know, a person like me can have all kinds of book knowledge and education, formal education, but if a person like me is not good at relationships, then most of that other stuff is not going to work too well. So that was a big takeaway.

Yeah, that’s a big key. What was the turning point, Scott, that made you want to become an entrepreneur and start your own digital marketing agency? I believe you did that in 27, so we’re going back a little bit.

We are. I think you just flipped the switch to the Wayback Machine. So way back I had started on my own dabbling in HTML, self-taught HTML, and CSS and it was just kind of interesting. It’s a building process, it’s a learning process, and the longer the shorter version of that long story is that eventually, a friend of a friend of mine who owns a local bar and grill said that they needed a new website for their bar grill. And I thought, well, I’ve learned enough, I can do that. And it was my first time doing something commercial, and when she saw it, she loved it and she said, How much is this going to cost me? And really I had never thought of that. I was just doing this as a learning exercise. Like, Wow, somebody actually asked that I build their website for them. Yeah. And, and so that’s when the light bulb went off about an entrepreneurial opportunity. It’s like people want to pay me for this. So that kind of led quickly into other, a bunch of other small jobs from their mom-and-pop shops and small, small things. But it really built up my character, built up my skills, and eventually came to the point where I was making enough per month or as much per month as I was in a regular go-to the time clock and punch in punch out job, and a 9 to 5, we had a discussion with their family. It’s like, what do I do? I keep doing the 9 to 5 or do I do my own business? And so here we are today.

All right, on. Did you just take the full leap, like some people just jump in? They got no savings. I mean, I’m not trying to pry too much personally, but like, did you have an emergency fund saved up just in case, like a certain amount of money in the bank to cover things? I know people have started with nothing. And their wife was in the hospital with bills piling up and they started a YouTube channel. And now they’re seven-figure entrepreneurs like there are those stories, but what was it like for you? Was it just to fit in and no looking back? Just burn the bridge and go.

The answer is yes to that, it was truly a leap of faith. I talked about it with my family. I prayed about it. I let it sit for a little bit. And it really was there were no savings. There was not anything. There was no safety net. It was simply like, let’s do this. You’re feeling prompted to do this, do it and it’s worked out really.

Well, it worked out pretty good. So you have a talent for helping businesses with a holistic approach to marketing. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Sure. The holistic approach came to me when I had enough clients saying that they needed a website and we would build the website and turn it over to them most of the time, or we’d continue helping manage it. But they became disillusioned and disappointed after about six months because they had in their mind that this new website was the silver bullet that was going to make them rich. It was going to build their business to skyrocket. And so it only took a couple of those for me to realize that I needed to do, a better job of setting expectations. Building a new website is not the answer. It’s not a solo single-channel thing.

It’s a foundation.

Exactly, and today, I like to call it the hub. It is the foundation, the holistic approach that we talk about is that if your website is the hub of everything you’re doing digital marketing-wise, everything else from that is like I spoke at spins off of that. It could be social media, it could be a newsletter, it could be white papers, it could be Google ads, it could be any other thing that you’re doing as a digital marketing effort. But it should all be based on where at home that website is. So the website in itself is not a holistic approach. It’s all those folks that we talk about. How businesses need to have their eyes open to the whole thing to get better results.

How do you educate business owners, there are so many of them out there that think that you just need a Facebook page, what the heck with the website, who needs a website today? I know some marketers, they even talk about why you need a website. You just need a Google Business Profile. They, you, and I both know over the last 15 years they’ve changed names so many times. It’s ridiculous. But anyway. Google business profile or you just need a Google site or you don’t really need a website. So what are your thoughts on that? I mean, do you immediately eliminate those people as prospects or do you try to educate them?

These days, we try to do a little bit of education because first of all, it’s the right thing to do. My own opinion is that if somebody has the opinion that they don’t need a website or that Facebook is enough or that the Google business profile is enough, then I want to try and help them. I want to try and give them some information, additional information to consider, because for the most part, that’s not going to get them where they want to be. And we also don’t immediately decline those kinds of opportunities to work with people, because there are some people that will sort of listen if they’re eager to listen to what more is there. And so we get into the whole thing about, well, if you have your own website, you can do A, B, and C. Actually, you can do A through Z depending on your business needs.

Yeah. What are some of those things? What are some of those ABCs, those are the benefits of having your own website, that you’ve shared with a client, maybe a particular story.

Sure. So storytelling is at the core of my ancillary, just because you cannot on Google business profile just know for example tell an adequate story about your business knowledge or its successes. You can use it as a wall to post up your success stories or your five-star reviews. And those are important, but they don’t tell the whole story about you. And I would say the same thing to a lesser degree with Facebook. You can do a lot with Facebook these days, about kind of as a container for your business. And again, we want I don’t discount those as places to start as long as the person or the business realizes that there’s a place to start.

Yeah. Because you could start with a Google business profile, as you said or a Facebook page and get some revenue going to be able to fund the website. Well, always have the website as the hub, the central hub in mind.

I think you’re right on. And the Google business profile, while we say that’s not a good standalone option. We do say that is central to your holistic marketing plan. So there are some corporates that really don’t care too much about Google business profile because they’re not trying to get the local person or even the regional person. So it’s not as important to them for lead generation, for example it’s more important to them for brand awareness.

Yes, and authority and trust.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So when you Google the name of this big corporate, they may not care that they’re on Google Maps or not, but they need to have the entire first page of Google occupied by nothing but their brand. So that’s one of the things.

Absolutely. Whereas local they just want to target specific, that’s for sure. What tips would you give or advice would you give to a business wanting to start using a holistic marketing strategy, wanting to grow into the hub and marketing model?

It always starts with a strategy for me, and that’s where we start all of our conversations. So if somebody comes to us and says, Hey, can you give us some tips on what to do or can you help us with what we need to do for our website or our online presence in general, strategy is always square one, and if they’ve already got that in place, then we can start talking about, how do you want to execute that strategy? If they’re an e-commerce business or if they’re a service provider or anything that needs lead generation, that’s one path, another path is they don’t need any of that stuff. They just want brand awareness or they don’t want any of that stuff either and they just want to get donations. You know, we work with a lot of nonprofits also. So there are different paths. And we listen to that strategy and try to come up with tactics in the case that they don’t have a strategy, we kind of just say, okay, let’s stop. We need to camp out here for a little bit and we need to help you get that strategy in place.

Do you think all businesses can benefit from taking a holistic approach to Marketing campaigns? Just thinking maybe there are some businesses out there that I mean like you said, some there are some enterprise companies only care about branding and maybe a holistic approach isn’t something they’re all too concerned about? I don’t know. I’m surprised by the things I learned from business.

I think, again, you hit the nail on the head that there are especially at that corporate level. We get this a lot that they want to focus on brand awareness. They want to focus on a little bit of outbound communication, they want to be authorities in their space, they want to see thought leadership, and they want to back up what they’re doing at tradeshows, for example, or conferences. Maybe they’re maybe their CEO speaking at a big conference and they need everything with their online presence to back up what that CEO was doing that particular week or that month. So those things are very focused. They have nothing generally to do with lead generation or any of the other spokes unless that’s part of their strategy again. So we talked a few minutes ago about strategies. Everything sort of goes back to that for us.

Try to think about how lead generation could be important for them. Because even if they’re, the brand awareness thing, it’s like, well, that’s how you get leads. Like at the end of the day, you need to have your phone ringing or your web forms being submitted or your chat sessions being opened, or whatever the case may be. So it just surprises me. Though that isn’t a relevant factor for some of the bigger companies to think about. I mean, so here’s a for instance, like, you know, I guess a hold, but you know, like the company Coke, I’m sure they have a holistic marketing strategy. Maybe some people don’t think that they would think about that because I mean, they’re not looking to get leads for buying a can of coke. They’re just looking to sell more soft drinks or whatever they are. Right. So I don’t know what they would use to measure their engagement. Different companies have a strategy, like a strategy for a Coke company would for a soft drink company be totally different from a plumber. So I guess it’s like you said, you have to analyze what the end goal is in mind of what you need to be done. And what is a value to the business in order to do that? In regards to budget, what advice would you give to someone for a budget? Let’s say, for instance, there’s a difference between a plumber and a software company, and what I mean by budget. If I could clarify, Scott, for instance, every people who listen to this know that I worked as the marketing director of a car dealership. I had the budget segmented by percentage, a certain percentage for Facebook, a certain percentage for Google ads, a certain percentage to display and retargeting, a certain percentage for SEO, and a certain percentage for whatever. And in divided but as you and I both know, if a plumber only has 300 bucks, you’re going to be dividing that budget into those kinds of numbers because you’ll never get any reach. What is the best way from when budgeting for these marketing issues and for a holistic approach? What is the best way to take a big picture view of to do of budgeting?

Sure. Big picture. I like to start there because we can say big picture to the plumber who’s got $300 or we can send the big picture to the bank that’s got, $3,000, 3 million, whatever it might be. And that big picture for us boils down to a combination of two things: what is your budget and who is your audience? It’s not so much what you want to get done. Some people will say, well, it depends on how you want to convert them. For the plumber, he wants his phone to ring so he can go, you know, provide plumbing service at somebody’s home or business. For a corporate they may not want the phone to ring. So for us, it’s about the budget and about their audience, who they’re trying to reach. And for I want to say, for small, medium businesses, getting into a percentage allocation, like you just mentioned, is something that we will help with. But really, it’s a case by case because we do that whether or not they have the internal infrastructure to do that. They may be established enough or they have an accounting department, and they have a budget. You know, they already have the line items for the website, SEO, and social, email marketing. They may have all that in place. And so then we’ll all kind of switch gears and say,” All right, since you have those in place, let’s talk about your audience. Who do you want to reach? What’s the most effective channel?” And usually, those discussions reveal where the percentages should be allocated. Now, in the case where a business doesn’t have that infrastructure, we usually don’t get into that discussion of percentages. We keep it a little more eye level again about who you want to reach. And then we talk about the how, because if they’ve got a limited budget, we’re going to talk about who they want to reach and how, because that will determine how much money is available. For example, we have an oxygen therapy clinic as a client. Well, hyperbaric oxygen, that’s neat. And they want to reach people with sports injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and non-healing wounds from diseases like diabetes. They have a wide range of people within hyperbaric oxygen and oxygen therapy. But from a marketing standpoint, we can pick some of those. We can pick. “Oh, so you want to get to the athletes, right?” They happen to be located in a professional sports-rich environment geographically. And so they have a lot of football players, they have a lot of baseball players, hockey players get injuries. That’s a question as part of the discussion about how, you plan the budget, do you want to target the professional sports suites, or do you want to target instead those with traumatic brain injuries? You know, they were helping the veterans coming back from the Gulf War from Afghanistan. So you want to target that because that means we’re going to be talking to a different group of people. We talked to veterans and health care service providers. So all those things really, depending on what the business wants and who their audiences define. How do we talk about the budget?

Yeah. What about helping businesses like this, I tried to do this at the dealership. The lifetime value of a customer. It just blows my mind away. I’m going to be upfront with you, to this day they didn’t have any idea what the lifetime value of customized. They’ve been in business for ten years and it’s like, okay this was what really frustrated me, to be frank with you, was all they were thinking about was the sales, the amount of margin and profit on the initial sale of the car. To me, which was ridiculous because I’m like. That person, if you treat them right, is going to come here for service. If we sold the right customer in the right geographical area, whatever, they’re not coming from the other side of the city to get a deal and then go to the local dealership close to them. If they do that, they’re going to a crappy service any way I know from experience. But the point being is that the average person owns their car now for 5 to 7 years. Finance terms have vastly changed for cars from I mean, there was the four-year itch, but I’m just saying people usually keep it from 5 to 7, then they switch. They switch it for there’s a lot of money you’re making in service. And if you give them a really good experience, they’re going to refer other customers to you. They maybe have people in their family, like calculating all that, looking at all that data and seeing and even looking at just one person and using that as an example foundation, it’s more money than the first point I’m trying to make. It’s more money than just the first margin on the first sale. The car is in order to determine how much money you spend on a vehicle. So how much the lifetime value of the customer is. But anyway, we finally got it down and I also knew what the industry average was in the automotive industry. It’s worth 350 bucks a car. So we use that projection based on how many vehicles we wanted to sell. We wanted to sell 200 cars in one month and time’s up by 350, and that was our budget. But I told that whole story just because, sometimes it’s hard to get that information out of people or even to get businesses to think that way. But what are your thoughts and your experiences in that regard?

Your lifetime value for us has been very difficult to manage or to even get from a business. Everything that you just said mad about it may not be a reluctance to see things in that bigger picture, lifetime value versus the immediate margin. We’ve found that the ability to do, I want to say the research or the accounting to actually come up with a higher number for the value. That’s the challenge for most businesses because for us if we’re going to leverage that with and for our client, they would need to have done the work, the footwork to identify what that lifetime value is. It’s not something that we’re going to go in and necessarily help them with because it gets too deep into accounting and so forth.

Well, it is more of a CFOs job, right? CFO even if they have a fractional CFO. That would be beneficial if more businesses focused on that. Now, the theory is good, but I guess people just are doing it, I’m pretty sure McDonald’s knows the average lifetime value or the average transaction. I shop at my grocery store, the loyalty card, I guarantee you they’re collecting that data of how often I shop, what my average purchase transaction is every time I go there and how long I’ve been a customer. That’s one way to do it when I have a loyalty program.

Yeah.

You talk about audiences, what are some other methods besides which you’ve mentioned, What are some methods for conducting market research to better understand an audience? Like how did you get that? I mean, that’s some pretty interesting information that you shared about the Oxygen Chamber Company, and they know that, okay, these are the types of people they want to target. Sports athletes are obvious. But what about some strategies when it’s not so obvious to be able to identify who the customer is? And again, coming back to the car industry, I asked for that information about the audience to who we were trying to sell the entry-level sedan, and they didn’t have that and even the head office did not have any information. For me, this is a very large company, as a manufacturing sector. They are. But anyway, so I’ve thrown on that robust. But, I’m trying to make, as you know, and figure out who the audience is. What’s been in your experience strategies to figure that out?

Sure. But every single time that we’ve done business, whether it’s a similar business or it’s corporate, it all starts out with the anecdotal. Okay, so who’s your market? Who are you selling to or who do you want to reach again? The goal-oriented, audience oriented. But it’s always based on anecdotal information from our client. And the next drill down on that is who’s giving us that anecdotal information? Because it makes a huge difference if we’re getting anecdotal information from the CEO or vice president or an operations manager or a salesperson. And the data, the anecdotal from all those people that we find valuable. But we know from experience that without fail, they differ widely. There’s a wide range between who the CEO says they’re selling to versus now they’re down at the end of the chain. The salesperson says, no, this is who we’re selling to and why. So we take a lot of time talking. We take a lot of talking to everybody. But it’s generally that salesperson or one level above that gets us the most relevant information.

Real, accurate, actual. That so amazing to me, Scott, that there is such a disconnect between the CEO and the top-level executives and the person who is on the boots because he’s running the company like you’d think he would know or should know.

Yeah. And it’s not that they don’t know. I don’t mean to imply that they don’t know. It’s that their vision is different. I’ll use an example, one of our clients is in the defense industry, and so they supply equipment to the Department of Defense and some commercial and some research and development uses. But at the top of that organization, the anecdotal information that we get, which is eventually backed up by data, is we’re selling X million X number, X million dollars to the United States government, and X million to such and such research labs. So that’s our audience and that’s kind of where it stops. And then you go down one level and the next level, the VPs will say what the CEO said. and we’re also selling, we’re providing our equipment and our research and development, and our expertise to law enforcement agencies. Okay, well, that makes sense. If you’ve got military-grade equipment, then you probably have a customer base in law enforcement as well. Yeah. Then you get down a couple of levels more to the salesperson who’s actually going to trade shows, who’s actually following up on sales calls, who is probably the brain behind the brochures or the marketing and you get to that person and you learn what the CEO said is true, what he’s said is true. And what I’m doing today is I’m talking to the Tactical Officers Association at the such and such police department. That’s really granular. Right. So we went from the CEO saying that we’re selling X million dollars to the government, to the salesperson saying, yes, yes, yes. But we’re also selling to the SWAT team. Yeah. And so and so the police department. So that kind of research, if you will, is critical to what we do. And we’re developing a plan for the client’s content and SEO.

Absolutely. Because you got to know who you’re speaking to and who your audience is. So what about the next step of developing a message that resonates? You know, tactics are strategies that you take for developing the right messaging for one of those audiences that you just mentioned.

Sure. We always value what the CEO says, higher than what the salesperson says. So if we’re talking strategy, messaging, branding, that’s always going to come from the top. And that’s the guiding principle for whatever messaging we might be doing, could be on social, the website, newsletters, whatever it might be. But we need to have a very clear message from the CEO in the form of a mission or a vision or a set of principles, guiding principles, whatever they may have to call it. But what that CEO says is at the core of the strategy for developing messaging.

What about, for instance, developing different campaigns around those different segmented audiences and coming up with those kinds of things to develop messaging? Like, do you use the problem, agitate? I can’t recall what it’s called, but there’s the AIDA formula, for writing ads, for coming up with that. It’s just attention, interests, desire, and action sort of deal with evolving for developing ads. But it can also be a type of messaging or else the problem and, there’s a problem solution style of messaging in regards to speaking to your audience.

Absolutely. I would say at the corporate level where brand awareness and messaging are more important, there’s just going to take a softer approach to the problem solution. In that kind of situation, we usually focus on authority and storytelling. There’s a problem solution. However, what you brought up about problem solution and that formula that I can remember the acronym either, but so is very effective for copywriting and our copywriters do follow that formula or a similar one for I want to say not necessarily smaller businesses, but businesses that have a more lead generation, a more sales focused goal for their messaging.

Otherwise, you’re using stories to tell the story, like how the defense company got started and the story around. I suppose you could tell the story of the brand around. But in order to make money, you need to solve a problem. And the bigger problem you solve, the more money you make. Like Elon Musk has solved a lot of problems that are really big or is working on solving a lot of problems that really make people. He saw the huge problem with online payments. I mean, a Tesla, he’s solving a huge problem with the environment. He’s not exactly building cars for profits, he’s got another alternative motive. But the point I’m trying to make is that this defense company, they’re obviously solving a problem for the US government. And what I’m assuming from hearing what you’re saying is instead of taking that approach, as I talked about, you can also take the approach of using stories to tell. The story of the brand and to get the interest of maybe the targeted demographics since they’re targeting the Department of Defense, maybe they have a persona and I guess maybe talk with, I like to ask what personas they’re developing, the persona who is the head of that the purchaser in government is the person who’s the final decision maker. Like, is it important to get to that level of developing that kind of persona of that kind of person? Who is it and what they are? What’s going to move the needle for them and include that in the storytelling on that level?

Yeah. Wonderful thinking and question. And the answer is yes. And I can only use our experience as an example. I don’t want to say this is the blanket for, but the head of purchasing for example, The head of purchasing in a government agency is not the persona and it’s really not the person we’re trying to tell the story to. We’re really trying to tell the story, too, and develop a persona around the influencers on the decision-making. So the person that is purchasing is probably more of a cog in the wheel like they see the paperwork come across because there’s somebody higher up who’s already made the decision. So the higher-ups, that’s who we want to get to. We have found that in this particular situation, talking about who the equipment helps is very effective. And you boil that down or to boil it down real quick. Who does that equipment help? It helps the soldier. Is that not the most important thing?

Absolutely.

Yes. So if we take that approach, that message, what’s being said, the stories being told are all about helping that soldier. Then the decision maker is usually in line with that. And of course, they got a whole bunch of other factors floating around about budget politics and all that stuff. But the nuts and bolts of it, if we stick with telling the story of who the end user is, how does this help the end user? Even if it’s a Defense Department thing or not, that’s good that if we tell that story in any industry, it’s the way to go.

Wow. There is a golden nugget right there. You know, a book for who the end person is. The end user is is benefiting. And in this case, it’s the soldier that is just that just awesome. You know, what do you think in regards to how important you think it is for businesses of any kind, that they develop a marketing funnel? Because the website’s the hub. So should there be a marketing funnel, like, for instance, all these different channels, these different touchpoints? And what I mean by marketing funnel, I’m talking about from the top of the funnel or you want to call a customer journey now call it that. But you know the different content pieces for the beginning, end and beginning, middle and end of the journey of the customer or client or whatever the case may be, or top, middle and bottom, whatever how you see it, and developing key pieces of content and knowing, where’s the conversion going to happen or where do we want the conversion to happen? How important is that, do you think for businesses to develop and plan out as a part of a holistic strategy?

Sure.I think it’s critical for all of the businesses we serve. It’s a critical component of the plan of the strategy is what your funnel looks like. And at the end of it, and again, going right to the end of it, the end user at the end of the funnel, what do we want to happen in fans, what we do on all the wider parts of that? So the very end in for how we develop the top.

Start with the end in mind.

Exactly. So far and I keep using these examples that are not hard lead generation examples.

No, but I’m glad because it’s interesting.

Sure. And, you know, I think everybody that we are is in our spheres now in marketing, digital marketing. They know what a funnel is. They know how to use it. They know how to implement it. And so do we but this thing of having like a, I want to say a more vague funnel, if you will, like for these corporates that are not lead generation based. What’s at the end of the funnel? Is it, that you got them to go to an event? Is it that they downloaded a white paper but you didn’t collect their information because you really don’t care about their information because you don’t have.

Right. I’ve seen that.

And we actually have a client where that’s a valid move for them is to have no collection. No, no lead collection at the end of the funnel because that’s not their intent. They want they’ve seen proven success from what I call the billboard fact. You know, you’re driving by the billboard on a freeway. You have no idea what that generated. And so there are some of our clients who have that luxury, of spending money on the billboards and not being able to measure what that does or does not do. So in those cases, the funnel is okay. if you’re using the billboard fact that the funnel is at the top of the billboard and what you’re doing in the middle of it is, you know, people are listening or watching, but you’re just not able to measure it. So you’re still putting out content. You’re still putting out the thought leadership or the white paper or the guide. You’re just not able to measure anything. And to me, that’s a rarity. Everybody else needs to have a funnel that has very specific, intentional, and measurable. I’ll go back to the oxygen clinic or we have another client that’s in oil and gas, and their focus is on incubating smaller ventures that are within their sphere. So they’ll run an incubator and at the end of their funnel is to get new innovative companies into their incubator. So for them, the funnel is at the top. If you’re doing innovative things in oil and gas or solar or wind or ocean. That’s the collection point and when you get into the refinement of the funnel as well, which of those areas are you working in? And the next refinement is what have you done? Do you have any proof of concept? Do you have anything that’s out on the market? Or at what level is your R&D? And then down at the end of the funnel you give us your name and contact information and let’s have a conversation. Yeah. So even in those situations, the more specific an intentional funnel that’s critical.

It could be the contact form, I’m assuming. And them having fields of what. You mentioned those four different things whether it’s solar or oil and gas or water or I can’t remember, though, when you mentioned it, it could just be a contact form of inquiry for more information, which could be the final stage of doing that. So yeah, I personally think it’s important, but I just don’t see businesses in my experience estimation even today. I think people are just starting to realize this. The value of doing that and maybe correct me if I’m wrong, maybe it’s because technology has now made it more possible. This brings me to my next point. Are there any specific platforms that you would or tools that you suggest or that you use? For instance, you know, everybody knows Infusionsoft and it changed a name to keep and people still keep calling it confusionsoft and there’s you know active campaign those are obvious ones. But is there another salesforce let’s just be frank Salesforce is dominating the market in that regard is as to get to the point of what I’m talking about as an example. But from your experience, do you have a go favorite or something that you recommend or use?

We use HubSpot.

Oh, yeah. How could I not mention HubSpot?

They’re great. And they say they’re great because it’s easy for entry-level or mid-level and even experienced users. And what we do when we’re talking about a CRM for any of our clients is first thing is to engage savvy within that organization. My Salesforce experience is a little bit limited, but the experience I do have has informed me that it’s a very robust, very complex if you let it be, and it becomes almost useless if you have a part-time user or a part-time administrator doing that for a company because it’s so robust that the person who’s managing it or administering it needs to be using it every day, at least every week.

Be an expert.

Otherwise, there’s so much to it that you forget. But it is without question, the most powerful CRM out there. And that’s why most enterprise companies use them. But HubSpot for me is a really good option when you don’t have that kind of need or you don’t have that kind of human resource to dedicate to managing your CRM. So that’s a good one that we use. And below that, if a company is not ready for or doesn’t have a need for a certain platform we’ll go into, we can help recommend a tech stack for them. Oh yeah. Maybe, you know, maybe they just need, maybe all they need is email marketing. Yeah. So maybe all they need is Constantcontact or MailChimp or something like that.

Get a response or a Weber or yeah, hundreds of other ones. ConvertKit or 100 other ones that are out there.

I was going to say there’s at least a score. So yeah, we will go in that direction based on what the clients need.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can relate. I’m very well aware of HubSpot and they’re the golden standard of using lead generation and content marketing and like funnels, because they just provide us such irresistible offers for lead magnets that are of value as a resource to get you to opt-in and get you into their funnel. It’s amazing to see what they’ve done and how they’ve taken inbound marketing to the next level. Now, what’s one big takeaway you want our listeners to get from this episode?

I think education and storytelling if you do that for yourself if you wrap your own head around education and I say that in the vein of being savvy about what you want to accomplish, what your tools are and what your budget is, if you’re educated about that, you’re already ten steps ahead of a lot of your competitors. The other part is storytelling and this is something that is probably one of the reasons why we’re in business and why we, in a lot of happy folks, is that we hold the storytelling. Not everybody is a storyteller. And you could you know, you could have a CMO, you could have a marketing director, you could have whoever that lead person is is really good at leading the department, but they’re not great at storytelling. So they need to have either they need to realize that and then hire somebody that can help, whether it’s an internal staff or outsource it. But having that mindset and being aware that we deal with this often so I use it as a takeaway. The CMO or the marketing director or marketing manager within the company that’s got a lot of moving pieces going on and the recommendation is they never lose sight of what the company is doing, what the company is producing, what the company is communicating so that they can mold that, what the company is doing into marketing communication. And there’s the storytelling. They may not be able to spice it up or make it sound articulate. But if they know what that is, they can feed it to somebody like our agency or to an in-house person who knows how to articulate it.

I would say having knowledge of copywriting would come in there in order to be able to do that. Would you not?

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. We get that a lot. You know, we’ll get people to say, well, I don’t know how I don’t know what storytelling means. I’ll say ” just say what’s happening and involve the people with that happening. Have a goal, have an outcome.” So we go through that exercise with them but if they don’t have a copywriter, they’re not at ease with writing themselves. Then there’s the record, the education part coming and they need to recognize higher up for that.

Absolutely. Hey, I want to thank you so much for coming to the show. How can our listeners connect with you online if they choose to do so?

They can go to safehouseweb.com our website. They can also find us on Facebook and LinkedIn. And I’ll be happy to help, happy to talk.

Right on. And you personally are on LinkedIn as well?

That’s right, You can go on LinkedIn/Scott Kindred.

I’ll make sure we put that in the show notes as well. Again, Scott, I want to thank you so much for being here. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Likewise. Thank you very much.