HOW TO GAIN ATTENTION AND INCREASE SALES
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Tips on how to gain attention and increase sales with Tyler Basu
- We help people create content to gain attention and then we make sure that we bridge the gap to actually getting some leads and some appointments.
- I’ll start at the bottom of the funnel process. I like to focus on things that are the closest to the money.
- It’s not about the time, it’s about the resources that are poured into it. You can really speed up building your audience if you’re a bit more generous with the money you spend on doing that.
- If you’re not spending money on ads, there is a cost to creating content too and that cost is your time. And every entrepreneur should know what the value of their time is.
- Just focus on the fundamentals. Do the things that make you the most money and then later when you have a bigger team, more resources, then you can add all more layers of complexity.
- I learned about pre-selling. Building up a list or doing some outreach and talking to people and seeing if you can sell them your thing before you actually create it.
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HOW TO GAIN ATTENTION AND INCREASE SALES
We help people create content to gain attention and then we make sure that we bridge the gap to actually getting some leads and appointments.
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Doug: So kind of where do you start? Tyler: I start closest to the money. So if somebody has got an offer I say, “Okay, great. What’s the step that comes right before somebody buys from you?”
Doug: Well, welcome back listeners, another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. I think you’re going to really enjoy our episode today. We’re going to talk about creating content, but more importantly, we’re going to talk about how to take the content that you’re already creating if you are creating content and how to make it convert. So how to use your content strategy to generate leads and sales. And then if you’re not generating the content, our guest is going to help cover off some tips and techniques on how to create content. So our guest today is Tyler Basu. I met Tyler in San Diego. We’re both icons of influence at the New Media Summit a few years ago and we just really connected and really hit it off and I’ve got a lot of respect for Tyler and what he does. Tyler is a Content Marketing Strategist and what he does is he specializes in helping startups and entrepreneurs create content that drives qualified traffic and leads to their business.
He’s the co-founder of a company called Influencer Studio. It’s a content marketing agency that offers content creation, publishing and promotional service to entrepreneurs. He’s also a publisher of a lifestyle business magazine and podcast and an online publication dedicated to helping entrepreneurs help to build a life and business on their own terms. So I’d like to welcome Tyler Basu to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast. Well, Hey Tyler, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today.
Tyler: Doug, it’s a pleasure to be here man. I’m really grateful to be on your show.
Doug: Yeah, it was great. I mean we connected a couple of years ago at the New Media Summit because you are an Icon of Influence and we kind of stayed in touch so we both drove or flew down from the same neighborhood to down in San Diego and enjoy some sunshine and some great conversations.
Tyler: I remember that. I remember being at the restaurant table with you and we were laughing about all my rejection I faced doing door to door sales. They were good times. Yeah.
Doug: Well I mean you come from a sales background and it’s interesting because now you’re helping businesses with their marketing, marketing funnels, and content. So it’s always great to have someone who’s worked on both sides of the ledger, where often sales and marketing are arm wrestling each other.
Tyler: Yeah. I think that’s what gave me my appreciation for marketing really. Because when you knock on like a hundred doors a day and you face rejection all day long, it’s… I’m just dropped into a neighborhood where they don’t know I’m coming. I don’t know who I’m talking to. I’m just told to go knock on the doors and see who answers and pitch everyone and see who’s interested. And so you… Because there’s no marketing done before you get there, you face the highest amount of rejection. Because you’re just filtering through people at that point. And you’re lucky if you find a couple of people per day that are interested. So I appreciate [crosstalk 00:02:33] up.
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HOW TO GAIN ATTENTION AND INCREASE SALES
We help people create content to gain attention and then we make sure that we bridge the gap to actually getting some leads and appointments.
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Doug: How long was that?
Tyler: So that was, well 2010 to 11. I did it for about 18 months.
Doug: Well, it’s funny is nothing’s changed. So I opened my LinkedIn today and obviously nobody’s knocking on my door because I don’t give out my address. But on my LinkedIn, there is “Hey, you’ve never met me and I just connected with you yesterday and here’s… I’ve cut and pasted this five-page document and that wants to tell you how I can serve your business.” So guess what? Just like cold calling. It goes, “Oh, guess what?” I don’t even respond. I just… I unconnected with them, “Goodbye.”
Tyler: Oh, for sure.
Doug: Yeah.
Tyler: People have kind of a pretty high guard on LinkedIn. I tried just as an experiment doing an outreach campaign. I sent out about a thousand contact requests and I tried my best to make the campaign as customized and nonsalesy and targeted as possible. People were sent, I think it was five messages over a month, 90% of them never even replied. And these weren’t straight pitches. This was like, “Hey, are you open to connecting? I see we’re both entrepreneurs.”
Doug: No, no. I’m on LinkedIn and I don’t want anyone to connect with me. Leave me alone.
Tyler: So yeah. I guess people are just tired of that stuff. Whether it happens online or in real life nobody likes it, right?
Doug: So then taking your experience with marketing, how do you start that conversation? I mean we talked and I was connected as at your workshop. I really enjoyed the workshop that you guys put on in Vancouver.
Tyler: Thanks.
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HOW TO GAIN ATTENTION AND INCREASE SALES
We help people create content to gain attention and then we make sure that we bridge the gap to actually getting some leads and appointments.
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Doug: I’m learning a ton of stuff. It kind of made me scratch my head really hard. So, man, I hadn’t thought about that in a while. So how do you start that conversation?
Tyler: With somebody that’s say new to marketing or just getting into it or?
Doug: About your company. I mean you guys create content and people say, “Hey, you should create content.” Well, I look at content as a way to start a conversation with somebody who might be interested in you helping them with a problem, but you need to start the conversation someplace.
Tyler: Yeah. Well, so the problem that we solve is helping businesses that are… They’re doing things to generate attention online and that attention is often not converting into actual leads and clients for them. And I’ve been on the other end of this problem. I spent years creating content, published. I think it was like a hundred podcast episodes and 50 to a hundred blog posts before I ever got a client. Because the only thing I was doing was generating attention. How was it converting that attention into appointments in my calendar or making anybody an offer of any kind? I was just hitting publish and looking at the wrong metrics, looking at, “Hey did people listen to this or watch it?” But there was never a next step for them to take. So it’s no wonder that for a couple of years creating content, it was really just a hobby for me. It never turned into a business.
Doug: That’s a hobby?
Tyler: Right. And an inexpensive one too and a time consuming one as well. So now the problem that we solve is we help entrepreneurs that have a great offer. They had… They know who their ideal client is. They have a sales process. They have the expertise, they have a track record, they have testimonials like all that foundational stuff is there. There’s a real business in place. They just have trouble getting the word out to more people in a way that fills their calendar with sales appointments or get people to their signup page or their free trial page, whatever the case is. So we help people create the content that gets the attention of their target market and we make sure that we bridge the gap between them getting some views or some visitors to their website and actually getting some leads and some appointments in their calendar.
Doug: So what does that process look like for people that are listening? So there’s… I know and talking to our listeners and subscribers on my email list, people are creating video content and they’re creating all sorts of content for their social media and they’re sending out newsletters and they’re writing blog posts. And to your point, unless you’re converting that into a lead and ultimately a sale, it’s a hobby. So kind of where do you start?
Tyler: I start closest to the money. So if somebody has got an offer I say, “Okay, great. What’s the step that comes right before somebody buys from you?” And in many cases if you’re selling high ticket services like coaching or consulting or agency type stuff, there’s a proposal process or a sales call process, right? “Okay, great. That’s the beginning of your sales process. How do we get somebody to your sales process?” Well, they got to request an appointment. “Okay, awesome. How do you get somebody to request an appointment?” “Well, you got to get them as a lead first and then invite them to schedule a call with you, right? And give them a filter of some kind of form to fill out so you can qualify them.” “Okay, great. So how do you get the lead now?” “Oh, well we got to get people to our website or we got to give away some free resources.”
And so I’ll start at the bottom of that process. The steps that are the closest to the money because I want to make sure there’s not a leaky bucket before we go out and create attention or create kind of top of funnel awareness type content for that business. So I got to make sure the bottom of that funnel is tightened up. There’s not a leaky bucket. So half the clients that we’ve worked with so far, they came to us without having some kind of a funnel or process for converting attention into clients. So we went in and based on their business figured out what kind of free resource would help them build their lead list and what’s the natural next step after they get a lead? What do they want that lead to doing? Is it sign up for a free trial? Is it book a call? Has it come to a workshop? There’s no one size fits all. It varies for every business.
But we want to make sure that we know what the steps are. We establish a benchmark for what percentage of people that made it this far are going to get… Move forward in that process all the way through to becoming a client. And then that guides like where we go to get them attention. Once that stuff’s in place and we know what they can afford to spend to acquire a client that dictates which platforms they should publish content on or run their ads on or if they should do videos or if they should do articles. And there’s no one size fits all, a marketing strategy or content strategy for every business. So we want to make sure… To make sure that we can help them win, we customize that strategy based on where we think we can reach their audience in a way that they are not losing money when they go to do them… Create their content and run their ads and stuff. There’s got to be the… We got to bring in customers for them at the price that works for them. Otherwise the whole thing kind of falls apart.
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HOW TO GAIN ATTENTION AND INCREASE SALES
We help people create content to gain attention and then we make sure that we bridge the gap to actually getting some leads and appointments.
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Doug: Well, and I like what you said they’re just for our listeners, just to repeat, is that there’s no one size that fits all. So depending on who you talk to, I used to have a saying, I’d tell people that your only tool in your toolbox is a hammer and you approach every problem like a nail.
Tyler: Right.
Doug: So if I’m in the business of selling websites and you come to me and say, “What do I need to market my business?” What am I going to sell to you? A website. So I think often we overlook that, we get super excited, we go to a webinar, we listen to the latest Gary Vee video. We close all our social media accounts and open up tech talk and find out, “Guess what, our customers aren’t there.”
Tyler: Yeah.
Doug: Or whatever the case may be. So yeah, I like that. So like you said, find out where your customers are. I do the customer avatar worksheet and then look at the platform, pick a platform and then go forward from there.
Tyler: Yeah, for sure. So we’re not married to anyone platform. We’re married to data. We like to see the data.
Doug: Results.
Tyler: And I get proven wrong all the time. I get my assumptions proven wrong all the time. I believe it’s proven wrong all the time. So I’m super flexible and if I see numbers that look good, okay, that’s where I’ll give some more focus to that. And if something’s clearly not working, just because so-and-so said that it should, if it does not… Just because something worked for somebody else doesn’t mean that it works for you. So you always got to get in there, try it, look at the numbers, and then base your decisions on that data. So I don’t go around saying, “Oh, you have to do a webinar or you have to do Facebook ads or you have to create videos, so you have to start a podcast. I’ll never say that because every entrepreneur’s situation is unique.
Doug: Well, I think there are two sides to that. One is, what are the gifts and strengths? So if they’re not comfortable on camera and they’ll never going to want to be comfortable on camera, then obviously video’s not a good choice for them unless they have a spokesperson.
Tyler: Right.
Doug: Which is obvious… It might not seem obvious to others. So when you’re working with clients to roll out a strategy, how long does it normally take you to get them from, “Okay, I’ve got this… I’ve got some content, I’m publishing it, so now I need to have an organized approach and some sort of plan to actually be intentional and then start driving traffic by buying advertising.”
Tyler: So if there’s no funnel at all like if they don’t have a way that they’re capturing leads and then converting leads into a client or into an appointment for their first salesperson, we’ll start there. And in my experience, I can usually get somebody from no funnel to complete funnel, all the free resource, they’re going to give away all the pages, all the automated emails, all the tracking, all that stuff ready to go. Usually in about two to three months and that’s if we’re talking every week and we’re getting a lot of stuff done. And then once that stuff’s in place, if it’s time to just start creating content and driving awareness, we can get that whole thing up and running in less than a month. We’ll plan some topics, we’ll create some content, we hit publish on that content.
We’ve got different ways that we can repurpose and distribute it across several platforms and we can take an ad budget and use that to speed up how many people see any particular piece of content. We had one, there was one client where they wanted to be really conservative with their promotion budget. So we said, “Okay, what does conservative mean?” It’s like, “Okay, five, 10 bucks a day.” All right, we’ll start there and we’ll see what happens. And so we were spending five or $10. I think it was five at first, and then we upped it to 10 a couple of weeks later, just promoting their videos. And on Facebook you can get people to watch a video, costs you about five or 10 cents for them to watch past a certain point in your video, but at five bucks a day, that doesn’t get you super far.
So a month goes by and we’re looking at the number of people that watched this person’s videos and it’s like a few hundred, I think it was. So the question is, do you want to take, a month? Do you want to take a year to get maybe 10,000 really targeted people to watch your stuff? Or do you want it to happen in a month? Because it’s not about the time, it’s about the resources that were poured into it. You can really speed up building your audience if you’re a bit more generous with the money you spend on doing that. So yeah, it just really depends on how big of an audience somebody needs and then do they have the money to build that audience quickly.
And not everyone does. We’ve got clients where their goal is just to get like 10 people into a workshop each month. So they don’t actually need a huge audience. They can spend a few hundred bucks a month targeting, promoting their videos to a very specific city and then filling their workshop and that’s good. That’ll work for them. But then there are other people where they’re trying to sell courses or info products and acquire a thousand customers in a year. They’ve got to reach a lot more people. So they need a bigger budget.
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We help people create content to gain attention and then we make sure that we bridge the gap to actually getting some leads and appointments.
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Doug: Well, I was going to ask you what your take was on paid ads versus free, but it sounds like you’re not afraid to spend money obviously on paid advertising.
Tyler: Yeah. No, I’m definitely not afraid if it’s working like as it’s working. So as long as-
Doug: Fair enough.
Tyler: -all the tracking is there and we’re watching the numbers and we know going into it. Before we touch ads for anybody, we create the benchmarks of, “Okay, what’s the most they can spend to create the sale? Before that what can they actually spend to create the appointment? Before that what can they spend to create the lead?” So that guides which ads are actually working and which platforms we can run their ads on. And so if a particular ad is bringing in leads that are just, it’s too expensive, it’s not going to work, we turn that one-off. And so there’s this constant tinkering between moving money to the ones that work and taking it away from the ones that don’t work. There’s this tinkering that’s like never-ending. But I’m not afraid of paid advertising and… Because it’s controlling, you can… I was… I learned content marketing by not relying on advertising. I spent three years creating content for a software company. I never had an ad budget to promote my content.
I had to do all organic stuff, outreach, link, building, sharing on social, guest posting, all kinds of stuff. And I was able to grow there. I was able to bring in millions of visitors and viewers, tens of thousands of leads, a few thousand customers, all from the content without relying on ads. But sometimes it would take like, I’d write this nice big guide and I do all the things that I need to do to help guide get that guy to rank in search engines and they would happen six months later. Well, it’s like, “Well what if you want the leads today?” And then you can’t hundred percent control the organic stuff. You can control the process, but you can’t really control the outcome as well as you can with advertising. So I like to bring those worlds together of, “Hey, let’s create content.”
And if it’s great content and if it’s long-form content, we can do some things to make sure that in the long run, this is an evergreen asset that brings you some traffic to your business. But in the short run, let’s take control of promoting it, using paid advertising and then have the ads in place that are going to turn people who engage with content into a lead and then the people you’ve got as leads, you can do another set of ads to turn those leads into clients.
Doug: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I liked the paid side because like you said, what you really need is data. And so the question is you want to take six months to figure out what your customers like or don’t like or do you want to spend some money on advertising and figured out in a week. And then you know where to focus on leverage moving forward. And I’ve never figured out how to scale organic because the whole idea of making something go viral is just against the whole principle of what viral is, so… And the other reason I like paid is that fewer people are there. I don’t have a problem spending my money and my client’s money on advertising to generate sales. So I find the people who are complaining looking for free or sitting in the corner, second of thumb complaining that Facebook’s charging them and I’m going, “That’s fine. There’s less of you on our platform and we can make more money and there’s more opportunity.”
Tyler: Well and think of it this way too, because even if you’re trading time to create content, promote content, and you’re really hustling to promote your stuff, right? And you’re not spending money on ads, there is a cost to that, that costs is your time. And every entrepreneur should know what the value of their time is. And I know a lot of people that based the value of their hour on what they want to earn. So that helps guide what they focus on. So for example, if you want to take home 20K a month, let’s say and you’re working 40 hours a week, well let me pull out a quick calculator here, Doug. That’s let’s say $20,000 bucks is your goal for personal profit and then you’ve got… If you work 40 hours a week for four weeks, how many hours is that? Four, eight, twelve, sixteen, so 160.
Doug: 160 a year?
Tyler: You got to be worth $125 bucks an hour with your time, right? Or you’re just not going to hit… You’re not going to… You’re going to spend your time on things that don’t produce the income that’s going to get your-
Doug: No revenue. That’s right.
Tyler: – revenue in the first place. So if you’re spending your… Let’s say you spend a day writing a blog post or writing a blog post as an activity that’s worth maybe 20, 30 bucks an hour, like 40 bucks an hour, if you’re a really good writer. That’s not even close to your 125 an hour. So by spending your time on something that you could have very well paid somebody else to do, you’re shooting yourself in the foot here because you think you’re saving money. But actually, you do a $20 an hour thing and when you’re supposed to be worth $125 so you’re losing a hundred bucks an hour every hour writing down blog posts.
Doug: Yeah. Or, “Hey, I’m going to learn how to run Facebook ads.” Which I’m not opposed to people learning. And it’s like, I would rather find someone who’s an expert who’s up to date and knows everything that’s happening right today. Not…
Tyler: Oh man, I have given up on trying to be an expert at all things. I’ve realized that I’m good at strategy, I’m good at creating content, I’m good at building relationships, networking, speaking, selling, that sort of stuff. But no way am I about to try to master being in the trenches for every one of these tactical things. There are people where it’s their full-time career and that’s all they do. If you need Facebook ads, there are Facebook ad people where that’s all they do and that’s all they’ve been doing for years. Same thing for Google, the same thing for Twitter, LinkedIn, every single platform. There’s no general internet marketing expert anymore. Those days are gone. It’s an industry full of specialists now and you can get into trouble trying to hire the person that says they know how to do everything.
Doug: Yeah, I can’t imagine that. I mean I [inaudible 00:19:39] to my space and I’m kind of looking at everything else and going, “This is what I do every day.” I can’t imagine, a VP of marketing of a company trying to keep up to date on all the latest tactics that are out there.
Tyler: Yeah, no, no way. That’s just, there’s not enough time.
Doug: So is there an example you want to share of a client of yours that, like specifically the process that you went through and kind of what their outcome was?
Tyler: Yeah, for sure. So the majority of our clients are creating video content. I’ve got a couple that they only want to do articles because it’s not a personal brand thing. As you said, they don’t care to be the face of their company. There’s a tech company in San Francisco I’ve been helping for I think over six months now and we’re just strictly doing blog posts. I have… We pick the topic writers and there’s no face of the company. It’s not a personal brand thing. But the ones that they are the face of their company and they’re selling their expertise. I’ll give you one example, this guy name Anthony Taylor if you’re in Vancouver and he’s a strategic meeting planning facilitator. So I’m totally botching what he does. But he-
Doug: He’s getting [inaudible 00:20:47] it’s okay, he’ll forgive you.
Tyler: – He facilitates these strategic planning meetings inside of other companies.
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HOW TO GAIN ATTENTION AND INCREASE SALES
We help people create content to gain attention and then we make sure that we bridge the gap to actually getting some leads and appointments.
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Doug: Okay.
Tyler: So this guy’s like… He’s got all this expertise about strategic planning, no shortage of content. He just wasn’t really promoting it super effectively. It wasn’t getting seen. So with him, we arranged a couple of recording sessions with him. He did a bunch of short videos. We took those videos and we published them across his social media, his Facebook, his LinkedIn his Instagram and repurpose them into multiple formats. And then we took an ad budget and he told us who he’s targeting, what cities he wants to target, the kind of the demographics of his target audience. So we just took the ad budget, applied it to his videos and built up this retargeting list of video viewers now.
And he’s got two ways that he can help somebody. He can sell them a course or he can facilitate the meetings from consulting. So it’s the course or consulting. And so those are the retargeting campaigns that we have going from now. Some to get people in his calendar and some to… He’s got a webinar that sells this course. And so we’ve compared the numbers of when we do, when we promote somebody’s funnel, whatever their funnel is, if it’s webinar or book a call, running those types of ads to people that don’t know who you are. It’s gotten quite expensive, especially on Facebook.
Doug: Yeah.
Tyler: And so now rather than targeting cold audiences that don’t know who you are with a lead generation type or a sales-oriented type of an offer, we started by promoting the content. And then so that’s either let’s get them to watch a video or let’s get them to your website because in both cases we can retarget them. And then so the ads that are making people an offer are only actually seen to people that consumed your content. So that becomes a bit of a filter. So it’s a two-step. It’s a two-step campaign. It’s not as simple as just running one offer to a cold audience. There are the two steps in there, but when we compare the numbers, what we’ve seen so far is that they end up acquiring customers at a lower price when they’re playing that long game of let’s build our audience with our content first, but then let’s go in and let’s retarget our audience with our specific offers.
Doug: That’s a great point. I just had that conversation with someone today in a second looked at me funny. I went, “Well, for example, if you’re trying to reach people in this audience…” Which they have a particular audience. I said, “If we put together an educational video for them and they watch over half of it, they’re either totally bored, don’t have a life, or they’re interested in the content.” So we’re going to assume that they’re interested in that content. And so then we’ll show them an ad. Don’t show up with an ad in their face when they don’t know who you are saying, “Hey, buy my stuff.”
Tyler: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And those types of ads have their place. So I’ve got this other client Squadcast, I think we were just chatting about them before we hit record because I know you’re using one of their competitors [inaudible 00:23:47] to record this, but anyway…
Doug: Well Squadcast gets their video [inaudible 00:23:51].
Tyler: I know-
Doug: We’ll be moving from the competitor that we’re not going to mention today.
Tyler: Yeah. Exactly. So anyway, for those who don’t know Squadcast, it’s a podcast recording software and they’ve just… I’ve been working with them for the past year or so. And we were really scrappy for most of that time because I mean they’re like a bootstrap, they’re not funded or anything. And a small team of guys that a lot of them had been working full-time jobs while they get this thing going. But so for the first year, we were a bit scrappy, there was no money for advertising. Now that there is, the first place we’re going to is Google ads because there are people searching for podcast recording software, podcast interview software. They don’t know SquadCast by brand name yet, but they know that that’s the thing that they need. So that’s like the low hanging fruit.
This goes back to me saying I like to start closest to the money. So are these guys doing some content? Yeah, they got their own podcast, they got a blog, they put some content out there, but that’s not the closest thing to the money for them right now. The closest thing to the money for them in their market is there are thousands of people every month searching for podcast recording software. So let’s get in front of the first and foremost. That’s priority number one, is those people are looking for you now, just send them straight to your free trial. There’s no need to get them to watch a webinar or try to give them a checklist or get them to read a blog post.
Doug: Yep, they’re looking for an answer today. They don’t want to wait two weeks.
Tyler: Yeah, they need something right now. So we’re getting that part covered. Now they got Google ad words up and running now. That part’s covered now. So the next step is, okay, now let’s reach the market where they don’t need you right this second. But they are podcasters, they are your target audience. They just haven’t seen your stuff before. So let’s add some value to that. Let’s give them some educational content. Let’s put some videos in front of them, some blog posts in front of them, stuff like that. But again, we started close to the money, right? So it just depends on somebody’s objectives. If their objective is like, “Hey, we’re not actually too worried about money. We’ve got revenue, we’re good there. We just want to grow our audience and build authority and be seen as experts in an industry.” Okay, great. We can jump straight to content marketing. But if the goal is like, “We need money now.” Okay, let’s start at the bottom of the funnel and get in front of the people that need you now.
Doug: Totally makes sense. I told people before, so who are your clients? I said, “Well I try to get as close to money as I can.” So who makes the ultimate decision? So when you’re in a traditional sales role, I really don’t want to start with the receptionist and try to figure out who’s going to write the cheque, I’d rather just go to the person’s going to write the cheque and eliminate everything in between because it saves a bunch of time. So moving forward and looking kind of at what you guys are doing and all the changes in the marketing world. I mean we’ve got everything happening in terms of automation then, AI and machine learning. What are you most excited about in the next six months? 12 months?
Tyler: I think I’m most excited about simplifying. I went down a rabbit hole of learning about every single type of funnel and creating tripwires and looked at, “Hey, should we sell an ebook and then try to upsell a course and then from a course upsell with so-and-so.” And it just seems the way that… Do you ever buy something from Vista Print?
Doug: Yep.
Tyler: And go through their checkout process? Somebody… So works great for Vista Print and you go in there and you think you’re just going to order it, spend 20 bucks on some business cards and then you spend 200 bucks on all this other stuff too, that whole upsell kind of funnel works great for E-com, right?
Doug: Yeah.
Tyler: But in the expertise space industry, the coaches, the consultants, the service providers don’t complicate it, man. I’ve talked to so many entrepreneurs that they’re like, well I got like eight things and I want to be advertising over here and over here and over here and I want my content over here and over in a year and over here and I was told I need to be everywhere. And it’s like they’re barely even making any money yet. And they’ve got all this pressure to do the things that they… Like eight-figure businesses doing.
Doug: Yeah, they’re not Coca-Cola, so I mean. So start where you are.
Tyler: Yeah. So I’m just excited to simplify… I have to resist the temptation to overcomplicate things and I’m just trying to stay in that lane of let’s get… Let’s know who we really enjoy working with. Let’s charge premium prices to get them a win. And let’s just talk to people. Let’s just make sure we’re talking to people. So what puts people in our calendar, that just keep it simple. Our funnel is pretty simple too. We got a webinar that people can watch and it puts a call on our calendar and we’ve just started doing workshops locally and that puts people in our calendar as well. And I’m not trying to get too complicated here and I tell the same thing to a lot of the entrepreneurs that we work with is like, “Let’s keep it simple. We don’t have to go down crazy rabbit holes of automation or…” Let’s just focus on the fundamentals, do the thing that makes you the most money and then later when you have a bigger team, more resources, then you can add all these more layers of complexity.
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Doug: What if you need them. Like you said, keep it simple. I look at the number of websites I’ve visited where I’ve signed up for a SAS product, so I signed up for a demo. So I’m going, “Okay, I’m looking… As an agency, I’m looking for some new tools to build out systems. And I end up on a call and it’s a 15-minute qualification call. It’s like, “Well, you said demo, I’m expecting a demo. I put it in my calendar. I blocked off an hour and now you want me to schedule another meeting?” I mean it would have been a lot easier if you just did the demo I probably would have bought from you today. Now I’m like pissed off, you wasted my time. I wouldn’t have filled out the form if it wasn’t interesting. So there’s complicated, don’t put me in a sales funnel. I’ve said I want to demo, my [inaudible 00:29:47], I want to look at your software.
Tyler: I was talking to… Yesterday, I spoke to Russ Ruffino, I don’t know if you know him. He’s the founder of Clients on Demand.
Doug: Yep.
Tyler: And he was telling me how he went to… He bought a Bentley a few years back and he walked into the dealership and he said, “I want to buy a Bentley.” And surprise, surprise, they freaking sold them a Bentley. They didn’t try to sell them a key chain first or get them to go look at this other thing.
Doug: Wait, you didn’t go through our sales funnel? You can’t just walk in the front door, you have to go set an appointment and [inaudible 00:30:18] you have your cell phone.
Tyler: Give the people a direct path to work with you. I was interviewing a friend from my podcast and at the end of the interview I said, “Hey if people want to learn more about what you do or get in touch with you, where can they go?” He’s like, “Hey if anyone wants to learn about our staff, book a call, here’s the link.” Simple.
Doug: So what’s the bad advice you hear out there? I mean, this is one of my favorite questions to ask guests because you know, we all hear stuff, for me when I’m speaking and I’m focused on email. I mean the bad advice that I hear as well if you’re sending… You’re renting email lists of spam, it’s like, “No it’s not spam. It’s against the law. We don’t do things I guess was good for us, for our clients. So get educated.” But so what’s the thing that really kind of bugs you?
Tyler: There’s a couple that come to mind right away. One is, “Hey, you need a bigger audience. Just keep growing your audience.”
Doug: Sure. More is better. More of the wrong audience is going to move the sales [inaudible 00:31:13].
Tyler: So whenever I’m trying to shed light on that advice, I just pull up a screenshot of this Instagrammer. The way that had a couple million followers and they couldn’t sell t-shirts.
Doug: Yeah.
Tyler: And that proves my point that the size of your audience is a vanity metric if it’s not your target audience if they don’t… If they have no buying intent at all and especially if you don’t even have something to sell them. I met a podcaster at an event one time, and I asked “How long have you been podcasting?” “So a couple of years now.” “So that’s awesome. How’s it going?” He’s like, “Great. I got over a million listeners to my show.” I said, “That’s freaking amazing.” It’s hard to get a million people to [crosstalk 00:31:54] you.
Doug: Yeah. It is.
Tyler: That’s really hard. What’s your business model? And he’s like, “Oh, I don’t have one. I don’t have… I’m not making any money yet.” Like, “Well, what are you waiting for man?” He’s like, “Well, I just want to keep adding value to my audience and keep growing my audience.” [inaudible 00:32:05] Like, ‘Well, how big of a freaking audience do you need before you sell them a product or service and make this a real business.”
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Doug: Yeah.
Tyler: So that’s one that grinds my gears is people saying, “Okay, no, we…” people telling you just to focus on growing your audience, ignoring all the other pieces that would… First of all, make sure that is the right audience and give them a path to buy something from you. Then you’ve got a real business. Another one that comes to mind is the whole you’re one funnel away advice.
Doug: I heard some famous guy say that someplace.
Tyler: Dude, a few hundred thousand people, a few hundred thousand entrepreneurs have been given that advice that they’re just one funnel away. And-
Doug: [inaudible 00:32:46] isn’t that true?
Tyler: No, because I’ve spoken to-
Doug: So you heard it here first. It’s not true.
Tyler: You heard it here first. It’s not true. It is an important piece. We’ve touched on it today that there needs to be a path for somebody who’s just become aware of who you are to becoming a client. Give them a path, that’s a funnel. It could be one of those complicated online funnels with a bunch of tripwires and upsells and this and that. You can’t get through the checkout page without buying five things. Or it could be a webinar or it could just be, “Hey, apply for a call on my calendar.” And we’ll talk whatever. But whatever that funnel ends up being, it’s not going to save you if you don’t have a good offer to present that person in the first place or you’re presenting it to the wrong person, you don’t know who your market is and you don’t have a way to get them to the funnel in the first place.
What’s your plan to actually get a drive that attention and drive that traffic into that funnel. So if those other pieces are missing, then you end up with this asset that you get no value from, because it’s not… It’s just one piece of your business and you need all the other pieces as well. And we’re just talking about marketing. Even if you got all the marketing stuff right, sales still need to be in place and effective.
Doug: Sure.
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Tyler: You need to be… You need people to turn the leads into clients. You need to keep the clients’ retention and other one fulfillments and other one operations and finances and another one, if any one of those pieces are broken, then, no, the funnel is not going to save you. Sorry.
Doug: Well that’s funny, I mean. But you’re still right. I mean it really comes down to talking to your audience. And I’ve often when I used to teach at one of the colleges, I used to volunteer for the entrepreneur program and asked people, “So what’s your marketing plan?” They had this big grand list of all these startups, what they’re going to do for advertising.
Tyler: Yeah.
Doug: And say, “So where are your customers?”
Tyler: Yep.
Doug: “Why do you have an ad in the local paper? Why are your customers going to go, if they’re going to buy from you, are they going to look in the local paper to find out about your business?” We’ll know, well, I’m going to join this association. Well, are your customers at the association? Well, notice everybody join? It’s like, “Yeah. Well, lots of people join that but are your customers there?”
Tyler: I did a Marketing Diploma and it was like a split between marketing and real estate. And everybody has to go through the same marketing courses and they teach this thing called an Integrated Marketing Campaign. And we have to create our project based on, what we do to help get customers to promote something. But it’s all through the lens of if you work for a big brand.
Doug: Yep.
Tyler: And they’re just kind of training you to work in the marketing department at a big company. They’re not training you to start your own thing and get your first customers. So they’re kind of dropping you into this world where the assumption is that you have every and all available marketing channel available to you and you can do it all and-
Doug: Not just phone your PR person, you need a press release done and go talk to your email marketing person when you want something emailed out and you’ve got all these huge staffs.
Tyler: Yeah. So then you get to, then you get these young grads coming out of marketing school and thinking like, I guess perhaps a marketing manager of a big brand is supposed to think, but if you’re trying to start something or you’re working for a startup or you want to be an entrepreneur or you got to be scrappy at first and you’ve never even heard the words like customer acquisition plan or client acquisition plan, or how are you going to go get your first customers? And you’ve never even been taught to think that way, then yeah, I think you’re going to put together some big fancy plan that has not a lot of practicality in it.
Doug: Yeah, it’s funny. I think if people saw the marketing plans they put together, they’d be a little bit surprised because they’re not big glossy covers and they don’t have a ring binder and they’re not 25 pages. This like, “Yep, there’s one page and then there’s an Excel sheet.” So here’s what we’re going to do is just keep it, as you said, keep it simple, don’t overcomplicate it.
Tyler: Well, and here’s the thing, you don’t have to do everything to get customers. You just got to get one right? Get one acquisition channel down, just get it down. Now milk it for like a year until you even tap it out if you even can. And then add a second one and then a third and then a fourth, as you tap out the ones that you’re already doing. But most businesses, especially startups, they can just pick one platform that they’re going to get their attention from. One way, one mechanism for converting that attention into a lead and one mechanism for converting the lead into a sale. And you can probably get past six figures probably get past seven figures.
Russ Ruffino got to eight figures off of… He’s… I’m like, “Are you doing other stuff? Are you advertising on YouTube? Are you sponsoring things? What are you doing?” He’s like, “No, for five years straight, I’ve just been doing ads to a webinar to the calendar. That’s it. Adds, webinar, calendar.” Call him [inaudible 00:37:57].
Doug: Yep. Find what works and leverage it. So I want to change directions briefly. And I’m going to ask you a question. I don’t know if you’ll answer it, but I’ll ask anyhow. Do you want to share or would you share with our audience how you test what your potential customer is looking for? You shared with us in the webinar. I don’t know if that’s giving away your secret sauce.
Tyler: Oh, great in the workshop?
Doug: Yeah.
Tyler: Yeah. So I’ve become pretty risk-averse as an entrepreneur because this is my… I’m running an agency with a partner now, but four years ago I tried, when I left real estate, I tried jumping into doing my own thing and I burned through all my savings, starting a digital magazine, couldn’t get customers fast enough. And then I ended up going and getting a job working for a startup to kind of recover from that, but also prepare more efficiently for being an entrepreneur again. And so… And one of the things that I learned while working for that startup, because their customers who are entrepreneurs, these are people creating online courses and selling courses, was that a lot of people created courses that they couldn’t sell because they just assumed people would like the course, or it would be a good course and they went and created it and locked themselves in their basement or their home office for six months and then produce this thing and then found out the hard way that nobody wanted.
I said, “Man, that sucks if that happens.” So I learned about the word pre-selling about building up a list or even just doing some outreach and getting on the phone, talking to people and seeing if you can sell them your thing before you actually create it. That’s how I started this agency is I got on the phone with like 20 or 30 entrepreneurs who said, “Hey, I’m thinking of providing a service somewhere along the lines of content marketing or funnels or… Is that something you’re interested in? Is this something you need help with? Where are you struggling with your content creation? What would solve a problem for you?” Asking that question to enough people is how I develop my offer. So I presell the things that I charge for, I pre-sell.
But what you’re getting at is in the workshop I shared that I basically presale the things I give away for free as well because again, there’s a value-
Doug: On your time.
Tyler: -on my time and if I’m going to create these free resources and use them in marketing, give away these free things and I want to know for sure that that’s something people actually care about. So my particular strategy for testing lead magnets and free resources is I’ll post on social media that, “Hey, I just created this thing and if you’re interested, leave a comment below and I’ll send it to you.” And 90% of the time I didn’t actually create that thing yet. And I’m just making sure that people actually want it. And if enough people comment on it, then the next day I’ll go over, jump on a Google doc, make the first version of it.
If it’s a checklist or a worksheet or a template of some kind, make version one, give it to all those people that said they want it. But then I’ve proved that that’s the thing that I can use. I can give that… I can advertise that thing and it’ll get me leads because that’s something people actually want. So then I’ll go and create a version to give it to a designer, make it a little bit nicer, set up a landing page for it, set up an automated email for it and then go create some ads for it. But I’m not going to do all that stuff, which is… That’s quite a bit of time to do all that stuff for something that I don’t know for sure people even care about.
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Doug: Well thanks for sharing that. I mean I think there are a couple of things. One is, I think this is smart and the other… The reason I think a lot of people create all this stuff is, at the risk of offending a whole bunch of people, is I think they’re pretending that they’re working. So they really don’t want to have a sales conversation with a client or they don’t want to do the hard thing.
Tyler: Right.
Doug: So it’s easier to say, “Oh, I’m building this course, it’s going to take me six months.” Well, what are you going to do for revenue during those six months?
Tyler: Right.
Doug: Opposed to seeing, like you said during a red herrings, putting it out there, some people might pick up some sales, gives you some money while you’re building the course, or at least justifying that yes, if I build it, they will come because people have already given me their credit card number.
Tyler: Yep. Yep. For sure. We got our first couple of clients before we even set up the website and the website is super basic, not expensive.
Doug: That’s cool. I did that when I set up my U.S. company. I wanted to do an experiment so I didn’t tell anybody. And I was down working in an event in Los Angeles and I secured two clients. And so then I got back to my home office. I thought, “Oh man, crap. I got to register a domain name.” So I picked a name registered domain name.
Tyler: Yep.
Doug: And then I incorporated a company and then they mailed me the check to my mailbox and then I went and I opened up my new bank account for my new business with the cheques. But I didn’t have a website yet. I just registered the domain so I could send them an invoice with my business email.
Tyler: Cool.
Doug: So yeah, the idea of, “Hey, I got to create all this stuff.” So I ran the business for a year to seven figures with no website, no business cards, no advertising. Just because, well that seemed like it was a waste of time.
Tyler: Yeah, there’s a friend of mine, John Dennis, who he’s got a seven-figure agency. His website is one page. It’s like there’s nothing there. And funny enough, some of the things he does for clients is website design and how can you be out there selling website design and advertising and not doing it for yourself. Hey, welcome to the real world. We don’t always have to do the thing that we sell. If you walk into the Ferrari dealership, the guy selling you the Ferrari could very well not own a Ferrari. We don’t always need the thing for our own bait.
Doug: It could have been driving in this test or…
Tyler: Oh, right. Maybe, yeah. Maybe. Yeah.
Doug: And maybe. So two questions, I’ll let you go back to helping your clients make buckets of money. One question is who’s one guest I absolutely have to have on my podcast?
Tyler: Oh you got to talk to Taylor Welch. I’ll make an intro for you. He’s somebody that’s helped me when I was getting ready to leave my job at Thinkific.
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Doug: Yep.
Tyler: I did not want to learn from trial and error again and screw that up. So the first thing I did was I found one person, one company to learn from, bought all their stuff.
Doug: There you go.
Tyler: Bought their [inaudible 00:43:57], bought their mastermind. I spend as much money as I could with them. And within three months they showed me exactly how to structure my staff, price my stuff, set up my sales and my sales process and boom, within three months I replaced my salary. Within six months I doubled it and then now I’m not too worried. Now I don’t have to worry about providing for my family. I’m just focused on growing our team and getting more clients and growing the agency. Wouldn’t have happened without him. A super-smart guy doing very well. So I’ll make the intro to him.
Doug: That’d be great. And the most important question is, hey, how can people connect with you? They resonate with what you’ve said and they’ve got some questions. Want to learn more?
Tyler: Yeah, you can. If you search for my name, you can find me on social media pretty easily. I’m the only guy named Tyler Basu. And if you’re interested in learning about content marketing, I’ve got some free resources, templates, training, our Facebook group, all that stuff. That’s all listed on one page at influenceandscale.com/gifts. So if you go there, you can grab any of that free stuff and learn about content marketing.
Doug: Well, awesome. We’ll make sure we get that link on the show notes. We’ll get it transcribed. So I want to say, hey, thanks Tyler for just taking some time and just sharing with our group.
Tyler: This was fun, Doug. I know it was a little bit of a rant at times, but I hope your listeners enjoyed it as much as I did.
Doug: Well, it’s… I mean, I’m just here to have fun, right?
Tyler: Yeah.
Doug: So thanks again. So thanks listeners for tuning in. Tyler is a really bright guy. Don’t be scared by his picture. He looks like he’s 16 but he’s really… He’s got a family and he’s doing great business. I love what he’s doing. He’s got a big heart, and I love his content. He does a really good job serving people and giving content away. So if you listen to any of Garry Vee’s rants about giving, give, give. Here’s the guy who gives a lot. And he invited me to his webinar or a seminar rather in Vancouver and we went down to the boardroom and just spent half a day with him at his partner and got a lot of value of it. So make sure you check out Tyler on social and head over to his website and take a look at the free roosters [inaudible 00:46:02] he got. So thanks for tuning in. We look forward to serving you in our next episode.
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