What Is In It For Me?
Everyone's goal is to build trust within their social platform communities. However, it is not as easy as it looks. In order to generate sales, you need to have a trusting community that would then turn into your customers. The fundamental of marketing and sales is building trust with your customer. What is in it for your customer?
Leads and sales are a byproduct of something else at the end of the day. Your prospects and customers always care about what is going to be in it for themself. Matthew Hunt is here to dive in deeper and tell us how to do this. In this blog, Hollywood Branded shares how to secure leads and demand through social platforms properly.
A Little More About Matthew
Matthew is the founder of Automation Wolf, a B2B demand generation agency that drives community building through content creation and messaging. He is a two-time agency owner with over a decade of experience. Matthew has run thousands of marketing campaigns for hundreds of B2B companies. He now coaches companies, CEOs, marketing directors, and other entrepreneurs. His calling card...helping clients generate a full month of LinkedIn content in just one hour per month.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: What I'd love to do is start off, how did you get here today? I know you and I had a conversation before this podcast and you certainly have a tremendous amount of experience in the B2B space.
Answer: So, I didn't start my first business till I was 31, and I was toying with it for a number of years before that, but just didn't have the confidence to make the leap. But two things pushed me into it. It was having a really terrible boss that I walked out on "If this bleeping person can make millions, so can I." And the other part of it was having my first child."Okay, if you're going to do this, you better just get in there and give it a shot." And so I started the first business in 2010, but I was secretly toying with the idea since 2007. I just lacked a little bit of confidence. I had that imposter syndrome.
Question: So, you started your own business. And then what?
Answer: So, once I started my own business, I started out doing digital marketing for small businesses, really focused on inbound and local SEO and search was where it was.also search paid ads like pay per click for AdWords or Bing ads, and then eventually learning a little bit more about Facebook ads. And so that was great. What was great about it at a time was I was just new to the market, so I didn't have to be good. I was a success of just good timing. Anybody who started a digital marketing agency in 2010 could have knocked it out of the park. And so it wasn't until I went through some pain again, before I started getting better. So as an example, I can't remember the exact year. I want to say it's 2013, the smack down came with getting penalties from the search engines on back links and spamming basically get rankings. And I definitely felt the impact of that I quickly realized, "Ooh...
Question: Well, I think all of it too, is obviously you're a man who is able to pivot because the world you work in, it's not only that things change, but they dramatically change. And even with Facebook, and there's no such things as Organic Facebook really anymore, because you get less than 6% of your follower base who sees any of the organic content you have. So you have kept moving the needle.
Answer: Well, it happens with all social media platforms. So once a social media platform gets more content than there are eyeballs, they start switching it from free organic to pay to play, which is just a total normal thing. So one of the last platforms socially, there's two right now, actually there's three, I'd say, that allow you to have a lot of free organic reach. So LinkedIn is still good organically, although it's getting diminishing returns over time. But it's very powerful. When I identified it as still being great organically late 2017, it was like, "Awesome." I could get 100,000 impressions on a piece of content every single time. Today, it's a fraction of that because it's noisier. And so what's going to happen is people are going to start moving into the paid platform, which is totally okay. Paid ads are also good too. It's just, "This is what you need to pay to get your message and your brand in front of your ideal audience." It doesn't matter where it is or how you go about doing it. That's just the cost of doing business at the end of the day. And advertising is an important part of doing business. It's the lead domino, really.
Question: What is the difference between lead and demand generation?
Answer: Yeah, it's a great question. So as you start to get a little older and a little more mature and a little bit more experience with this, you start coming back to the fundamentals of advertising and the fundamentals of universal laws. So when you focus on leads and sales, that's a byproduct of something else at the end of the day. But if you only focus on leads and sales, you're usually going to end up having a false start or leading with the wrong objective because it's about me. Me, me, me me, me, me, me. Right? And your prospects or your ideal customers and clients don't care about you. They care about themselves. We all tune into our favorite radio station, which is WIFM, which, it stands for, "what's in it for me?" So that's a universal law. Okay?
Second universal is we only buy from people that we know, we like, and we trust. Okay? Everybody knows that when it's not something new, but the higher the ticket price goes, the more and more important this becomes. If you're selling something for two bucks, obviously not that important. But you're selling something for half a million dollars, pretty darn important. And this is why you hear in B2B businesses, a lot of times when you hear about deals, you'll hear people say all the time, "No one gets fired for hiring IBM." It's because they know them. They like them. And they trust them to some degree. Or at least it's the devil they know versus the devil they don't know. So that's the real barrier that you're trying to cross. And if you start answering that, the challenge is, most people are trying to do selling way too early, right?
If they look on the trust-o-meter, they start selling and they don't even know them yet. That's a false start. Or even if you're at the stage of like, right? Still a false start. You really can't do any selling until you own trust. Until you own the relationship. Otherwise, you're going to false start. Or if you do, and you do get invited to the party, what's going to happen, Stacy, is you're going to be treated like a commodity. Right? And you don't want to be treated like a commodity, right? So if you own the relationship and you have trust, then you can what? Suck at sales, and you can charge more, because they already know, like, and trust you. And so what we're really trying to do is how do we speed that up? Well, to speed that up, we have to understand another universal rule.
And this rule wasn't created by me, it was created by, I believe the gentleman's name is called Daniel Priestley. And he wrote a book called Oversubscribed in 2014. It's an evergreen book. It's great. It still applies today. So this is how you know there's a good book that's been written is when you can read it today, yesterday, tomorrow, and it still applies. So this is one of the things I learned time was getting back to these fundamentals and getting good at marketing or advertising has never changed. The mediums and the format and the place that exists or the platform or the channel that it's in does change, but not the universals.
Question: What are the types of ways that you have that controlled continuity that you are building?
Answer: Well, you want to go where your client's ideally are hanging out. Sometimes that's a Discord group. Sometimes it's a Facebook group. But the real trick is actually, it could be online or offline too. So for an example, I ran a Mastermind CMO dinner once a month, locally in Toronto. And that was a great way for me to get business. I would just invite five CMOs at Fortune 1000 companies out to dinner once a month. I would pay for dinner, break bread, and I'd facilitate an experience that was for them, not for me. And of course, at the end of the dinner, because we broke break and spent two hours together, they always ask, "What do I do?" And now they kind of know me and kind of like me and maybe start to...pay attention to my content. Now they have the opportunity to throw my hat in the ring. I never left a dinner without a referral or have the opportunity to be able to be invited to the party to do somewhat of a pitch. Right? So it always worked out in my favor. But just remember, doesn't need to be so big or small. What I usually recommend is something that's very simple like a free course or workshop series to begin with that also includes the ability to participate in a private group. The trick is to make it as private as possible, as secret as possible. So we all know this is how this is done. This is why when you go supper club, the yacht club, the ski club, you name it. That's how business is done. Right?
Check Out The Podcast!
Matthew shares so much great information from his experience in securing leads and building trust with your community. Check out the podcast below to learn more about creating demand with your audience on social platforms.
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
- The Ever Changing Digital Content Landscape
- Let's Talk Streaming
- Tracking and Achieving Your Clients' Goals
- Increase Your Revenue By Leveraging Data
- What To Know About Influencer Marketing
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