MBA2328 Guest Teacher - Steven Mark Kahan - How to set in motion a modern digital marketing strategy & increase revenue growth

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, giving you and your business a boost with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes, we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today, we have Wall Street Journal bestselling author, Stephen Mark Cahan. And he's going to show you how to set in motion a modern digital marketing strategy that will dramatically increase your sales growth.

0:43You are in for a huge treat. And what I love about his lesson today is that he focuses on the fundamentals that actually work. I can testify to this. So this lesson is going to clear your brain, give you focus and tell you exactly what you need to do. The more people you can attract, the more people you can convert into customers, the faster you can grow. You get this right in your business, you can pretty much get everything else wrong. I'm saying that a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but in reality, if you know how to bring in customers on a consistent basis with a strong digital marketing strategy, you are golden.

1:17Can't wait to get into this one, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's guest teacher, Stephen Mark Cahan, is not only a Wall Street Journal best-selling author, he walks the talk. He's helped seven startups grow from early stage to going public, resulting in over$5 billion in shareholder value. His latest book, High Velocity Digital Marketing, Silicon Valley's Secrets to Create Breakthrough Revenue in Record Time, will give you the fundamentals you need to implement his strategy that he's going to talk about in today's lesson. There's so much meat on the bone in today's lesson, you're going to want to take notes.

1:55So if you're listening right now and you're driving or commuting or walking and you can't write things down, give it a first listen right now. But you're going to want to re-listen and take down some notes so you can apply it to your own business immediately. I'm going to pass it on to Stephen now, but I'll be back to wrap up today's lesson and give my insights. But for now, take it away, Stephen. My name is Stephen Mark Cahan, and I have successfully helped grow seven startup companies from early stage to going public or being sold, resulting in$5 billion in shareholder value. I'm also author of a new book called High Velocity Digital Marketing.

2:33In a recent McKinsey survey, 83 % of CEOs said they expect marketing to drive most of their company's growth. Yet, I read a study that according to the Harvard Business Review, roughly 80 % of CEOs are dissatisfied with the return on their marketing investment. Now, many sales and marketing leaders feel overwhelmed by revenue expectations they simply cannot meet. And they're searching for solutions that will accelerate revenue growth at reasonable cost. So why is it that revenue growth is so hard to achieve? A part of the reason was that Forrester analyst group found that 67 % of buyers prefer not to interact with sales representatives as their primary source of information during the buying process.

3:37So the bottom line is, is that the way people buy now has totally changed. Buyers now rely on digital content to make purchase decisions. Think about it in your own life. If you're going to go buy a car, you're probably not looking forward to going to 10 different car dealerships just to have that wonderful opportunity to interact with 10 different car dealership sales representatives. now nothing against the sales representatives but the way people buy and shop for a car now is they probably start by going to google they're going to search online they're going to read reviews they're going to do their homework to find out how much the car should actually cost they might go to the manufacturer's site to go build a car and so when they actually go to a car dealer that the buyer is as knowledgeable on the car that they intend on purchasing as the sales representative.

4:44So this new level of information parity during the buying process has totally changed the way marketers need to interact with potential buyers to influence them towards their products and services. And it's precisely why I wrote my new book, High Velocity digital marketing. Now, high-velocity digital marketing is all about how you can become great online to consistently grow revenue. Now, the concept behind high-velocity digital marketing is profoundly simple. The quicker you convert digital content-based leads into paying customers, the more successful your business. Now, it sounds simple, right?

5:31But implementing a high-velocity digital marketing program that quickly moves prospects through your pipeline and into customers can be a struggle. So I'd like to share with you four things that you could do right now to implement a digital marketing program that accelerates your company's revenue growth. Number one, nail a niche. Now everybody talks about finding their niche, but many companies fail to understand just how much this matters. When I ask people who their ideal target buyer is, I often get a vague answer or far too wide a definition. Now finding a niche often requires a company to laser focus in on small segments in the market.

6:22And unfortunately, most companies avoid doing that because they fear that focusing on smaller customer segments limits their growth. And I get it, it can be scary to go all in on a smaller target audience. But if you're trying to be all things to all people or even a broad segment of people, you'll dilute your message and you're going to waste a ton of money when marketing online. So how do you nail your niche and identify your ideal target buyer? Well, it starts by talking to your customers and asking them the right questions. In my book, I describe a system of questions to understand the entire context of your buyer's world.

7:06Let me share one of these. So when talking to your customers, you need to start by asking them questions about the status quo. Now, the status quo represents the current situation for how your buyers conduct business now. And this really matters because often you don't lose business to a competitor, you lose business to the status quo. And this is when you hear potential buyers say, gee, I'm not interested. What we have today is probably good enough. So you need to understand the status quo. So you'll ask questions like, describe your current process for insert the problem that focuses on your business?

7:52What works? What doesn't? What were your operations before you considered hiring us? How does your team stay on top of that challenge that they have or make sure that they don't get overwhelmed by it? What are a few of the tools you currently use and what do you like about them? What don't you like? so this will help you understand the status quo and you want to pay close attention to the specific language that those potential buyers use and I always recommend to consider keeping a master document populated with the phrases that those potential buyers use to describe their situation and problems.

8:40Then in your content, in your ads, make sure that you reflect that language back to them. Because one of the major marketing fallacies is that a creative way to describe products stands out and wins more customers. And the truth is, is that buyers don't care how clever your marketing department is, what they want is they want to work with people and companies who understand them and empathize with them. And speaking their language proves that you do exactly that. Second, create superior content across the full spectrum of the buyer's journey and make sure that content is so good that it gets them to respond.

9:28And by response, I'm talking about someone coming to your website a visitor and actually filling out a form on your site which is a sales lead or buying now for me to illustrate to you how you would do this let's take a look at a simplified buyer's journey now in a buyer's journey there typically are four phases discover consider evaluate and then purchase Now let's talk about content in the first two phases so you can get an idea of exactly what I'm talking about. In the discover phase here this is where the buyer has a problem but they might not be able to fully articulate it. So here you need to create educational content that demystifies the problem content that defines their challenges now at a previous company that i worked for we created for example four dummies books and these books were in high demand and this content helped us connect with buyers who wanted to get educated and it helped us also create the playing field that our competitors operated on.

10:46The next stage in the buyer's journey is the consider phase. Now here, buyers are looking for content that describes their challenges in more detail, as well as presents options for solving them. Here, valuable free tools can produce great results. For example, at a previous company, we created a free tool called the Privileged Password Risk Assessment. So here, buyers came to our website. They answered a series of questions to help them evaluate cybersecurity risk. It took them about 10 minutes. And then we produced a beautiful report that automatically gave them a grade A through F like they were in university.

11:35And then because we collected information about their geography, company size, and industry, we were able to follow up with an email that then gave them an additional report and also got them in the habit of opening our emails, which described how their results compared with their peers. Now this type of content flew off the shelves. It was hugely popular. And because we collected all this proprietary information, we were now able to create an annual report on the state of the industry, as well as many reports that would target various industries or geographies such as financial services in the UK.

12:24Now, all of this content further fed our blogs, our webinars, our social media, which created even more leads and more visibility. And then most importantly, we trained our sales reps and our partners on all of this content and how to best follow up with when they would be engaging with our prospects. So rather than following up like a pushy sales rep, they were trained to follow up in a consultative way. For example, the reps would say, so tell me a little bit about the grade that you received. Where did you score well? Where didn't you score well? Would you like to learn how we can help you to improve to reduce your company's risk.

13:12And so this totally changed the dynamic of our relationships and how we were perceived as a potential partner truly trying to help. Now, how did I know my content was successful? Well, to judge the quality of the content, ask yourself this, is your website visitor to lead conversion rate at least five percent and if it's five percent i can assure you your content is so strong that your visitors are willing to give up their information that they really want to get very badly to you to then get the content that you're making available online third become great on google getting found online is absolutely the key to digital marketing and think about it when you decide to buy something where do you go you go to google google accounts for 76 percent of all internet searches right and so you've got to become great on google now Now, to become great on Google, it starts by understanding the keywords and phrases that your customers use when they're searching.

14:29Now, we knew what those keywords were by talking to our customers, as well as using free tools that enabled us to understand the volume of searches on those keywords. And here's a tip that you could put into action immediately today that you could start to improve your rankings on Google. Because we knew what those keywords were, we had our Google expert meet with content creators whenever they were creating content so that they would review the keywords that that content should have incorporated within it. and then they'd review it once again at the end of the process. With all of that great keywords included within our content, we made sure then that that content was exposed to Google such that it could be scanned.

15:26And if your content is great, your partners are going to use it as well, which will earn you a lot of high quality backlinks. Fourth, build a high-performing website, right? It's very important that you do this because a high-performing website must contribute to revenue. And it does that by doing two things, consistently increasing the number of people who visit and interact with your website and then converting a high percentage of those visitors into leads and revenue. Here are a few ideas you could implement right now to build a high-performing website. Insert a get a quote button at the top of your homepage.

16:12Minimize friction in your forms simply by reducing the forms that you are requiring visitors to fill out could increase the number of forms and increase the number of leads. Implement live chat. or offer exclusive or upgraded content. Think content that takes it all to the next level. Now, we've covered a lot of ground over the course of this audio recording, and if you take away one thing from me today, I hope it's this. High-velocity digital marketing can give your company a step-by-step blueprint for accelerating revenue growth in record time. I wish you great success and the very best. Thank you.

17:04What a powerful, powerful, powerful lesson by Stephen Mark Cahan. One of the things he mentions is to speak to your customers. I can't express how important it is to do customer interviews. You know, one of the things that is very common for entrepreneurs is that they talk to their customers at the start of their business, when they're launching it, when they're kind of validating the idea or talk to potential customers, and then they don't do it again. One of the things Nicole and I have to do constantly is have these customer interviews at least four to five to six every six months or so. This keeps your finger on the pulse.

17:40This allows you to use the language that your customers are using in your marketing, your sales, like you mentioned, but also allows you to know what to build, what to create, what to offer, what to sell. You start to paint a picture of what your customers are like, what their fears are, what their needs are, what they really care about, what they really don't care about. So you don't have to waste your time building that. Because the truth is, is that you are the worst person to use for marketing language, for product development, for idea generation. Why? Because you're too close to the grain.

18:12You're too technical. You know it more than them and you can't speak to them or you can't use the same language or build the things that would be best for you because you're a little ahead of them or maybe a lot ahead of them in your area of expertise. So you should be building for the customer and not for yourself. I know a lot of people say scratch your own itch and that's fine in the beginning, but eventually you need to start understanding your customers very well and building and using the same language that they do, especially painful language, the language they use to describe the pain points of their life, of their business and how your product solves those pain points.

18:47I love how he just simplified that, hey, you just need to convert your visitors into leads on your website. One of the things I highly recommend is every website's homepage has to have a way to collect email front and center, before the fold, at the top of the website, if you can, because you're working so hard with all this marketing and social media and SEO to get them on the website. Once they leave and they don't leave their email, you'll never see them again. It's going to be hard for you to get them back there. So you want to capture that email at all costs. He says 5 % conversion. That's an incredible conversion rate.

19:24You will not go hungry if you could do that because then you're growing your email list very rapidly. And the more people that are interested on your email list that you can promote to email, tell them about your offers, your products, your services, the more you could sell, the more you can grow. If you want to learn more from Stephen Mark Cahan, go ahead and visit his website, bstartupsuperstar.com. That wraps up today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show. Don't forget to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Whatever podcast app you're listening to right now, just hit follow, hit subscribe so you get our next episode automatically and you get access to over 2 ,300 business lessons in our archives, in our back catalog.

20:01Do it, you won't regret it. It's one of the best ways you can invest in yourself and your business. Before I go, I wanna leave you with this. If you have a great marketing strategy, if you are great at marketing your business, then sales kind of takes care of itself. Look at some of the most famous brands out there, popular businesses, successful businesses, whether it's Disney, Virgin, or Apple, or whatever it is. Do you see somebody selling you anything actually going through a sales process? Does somebody sell you on the latest Disney movie or Marvel movie? No, they just market it. The marketing is so good that it just compels you to go ahead and buy and try.

20:38Same thing goes with physical products like Apple or digital products like apps like Spotify or Uber Eats. Invest in your marketing and you can't go wrong. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Wednesday's episode, Q &A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.