A couple of weeks ago, Marcus Sheridan hosted his second webinar for Spin Sucks Pro. It was a follow-up to his first webinar on creating content for pull PR and marketing.
As is typical of anything Marcus does, the webinar was really good. He talked about how to force feed prospects your content so, by the time you meet with them, they’re ready to buy from you.
For instance, when a new business prospect calls us, we now send them three or four links to this blog or our website. The links include our pricing page (under development), boutique vs. large agency, and then content specific to their business needs (i.e. blogger relations, inbound marketing, planning, etc.).
If then, they’re still interested in working with us, we know they’re qualified. We know they can afford us, they understand what it’ll be like to work with us, and they have a good idea of our style and culture.
All of this happens BEFORE we take a meeting. It saves an inordinate amount of time. You can download and watch Marcus’s webinar here ($50) for more ideas like this.
But it all brought up an interesting conversation that Erica Allison and I had after the webinar. She mentioned that the examples Marcus used were great if you have a product to sell, but wondered if it worked the same for a service business.
I think it does.
You see, I’m of the same mind as Marcus: It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, using the web works for all of us…and none of us are so unique that the ideas and philosophies won’t work.
While Marcus talked a lot about using the Hubspot system to track your prospects, the same works for Google analytics, with a few additions, such as Clicky. The only issue I have with Hubspot is you have to use their content management system. I think they’re worth every penny they charge if it’s not a big deal for them to host your site.
But, for instance, we’ve spent a crazy amount of time and money on the content management system for Spin Sucks Pro so we can’t just move it over to Hubspot. It was important for us to find something else that worked just as well.
So we’ve been testing Google analytics, Clicky, and PostRank to track our leads.
This is what we’ve found in the past month:
- Most prospects want to know the difference between PR and marketing…and that’s our highest viewed blog post.
- The prospects who are reading that particular blog post are also spending nearly 10 minutes on the site.
- They’re reading an average of four additional blog posts.
- The bounce rate, for them, is less than five percent (our average is 10-12 percent).
- Ninety percent of them read the comments.
- Two percent of them bought Marcus’s first webinar (it was linked in the second paragraph).
- Because of Clicky, I know who everyone is that is visiting: Competition, friends, Spin Sucks community, or prospects (either for Arment Dietrich or Spin Sucks Pro).
Now what I can do is track those people. If they bought the webinar, I add them to our passive income dashboard. There isn’t anything we had to do except blog and track.
If they’re spending a lot of time on the site, but haven’t bought one of our products, I can make a pretty big assumption they’re interested in hiring us, on the service side. And that’s where Marcus’s recommendations come into play.
We send those people an email, with additional links we know they haven’t already read, and an introduction to the service side of the business.
Because we’ve only been doing this for a little more than a month, I can’t tell you what our close rate is (yet), but I can tell you it’s getting us qualified meetings.
I’ll track through the end of the year and then tell you what our close rate is after the beginning of the year. If things go according to plan, it’s going to be higher than 85 percent, which is pretty significant.
So what do you think? Can this work for both products and services?