“We were slightly ahead of the curve of the defense contractors in that we actually saw the value in having a good website and having good content. But we really didn’t know what good content meant for a long time. Even though we wrote some blogs back then, they were very inconsistent. We were lucky to do one or two a month, and we didn’t really have a strategy behind the content we created, as it certainly wasn’t close to aligning with They Ask, You Answer.”
Although Segue had been taking a little time to try and bolster their website traffic through blogging, they weren’t seeing the results they had hoped for.
“We were still growing—we were growing every year, but a lot of that was because of organic growth in our normal customer base. But very rarely did we get new customers coming to our website. We would get interest and maybe some decent leads every once in awhile, but we didn’t close many leads from the Web. It was kind of one of those things that you really had to have a good website on the commercial side more than the government side. A lot of organizations in the DOD [Department of Defense] space don’t really think that your website is that important, and they still don’t. It’s still kind of an antiquated world in many ways, so I viewed it as a huge opportunity to differentiate ourselves from other competitors in our space and start to establish ourselves as thought leaders in our industry.”
Novak was attending an event in the summer of 2012 when he heard me discuss the power of content, transparency, and They Ask, You Answer.
“It was during Marcus’s presentation that I had kind of a ‘light-bulb’ moment. The first thing I thought was ‘Man, I feel stupid. I should have been doing this years ago,’ as we’d had a website up for over ten years, and I couldn’t believe we hadn’t been doing this. It’s crazy because it’s so simple. The connection of answering people’s questions is such a simple concept. But executing it was something that we had just never done before.”
So, it was in January 2013 that I met with much of Novak’s company and introduced to the team the philosophy of They Ask, You Answer and the potential impact it could have on the company as a whole as well as the individuals, assuming everyone embraced this “teacher’s mentality.” Novak has since attributed that workshop as the pivotal moment when Segue Technologies’ online efforts, and entire business model, began to shift.
After the workshop, Novak showed just how serious he was about this new philosophy by making it mandatory that every employee in the company contribute to the company’s content strategy. Each employee was tasked with writing at least one blog per quarter for a total of four blog posts per year.
We wanted to get everyone involved. Whether they were going to be great writers, or whether they were going to be people who were going to do it long term, I just wanted to at least try it. Obviously we had some people that took to it and enjoyed it. We had some people who didn’t enjoy it as much, and others who may have not loved it, but saw the value of it, especially once their articles started ranking and we started getting leads from their articles.
The Snowball Begins
Within a short time, Segue’s newly focused content marketing efforts began to pay off in ways they had always hoped they would. And the early success they found inspired the team at Segue to continue to strengthen and develop their newfound obsession with educating their customers.
We had some pretty quick growth. Before we started this process we had less than 1,000 visitors a month to our website, and within three months of the workshop we had over 30,000. We had several articles rank at number 1 on Google within a couple of months, so that really got people energized. For me it was just kind of a no-brainer from the beginning, but actually seeing it happen—watching the leads increase, and not just the number of leads, but the quality of leads as we improved our funnel and optimized our lead pages—was amazing. It’s been really fun to see it all evolve.
Segue Technology’s Astounding Growth
As Segue Technologies continued their content marketing efforts, they began to adjust their focus from simply getting articles out online to curating specific messages that they wanted to get across to their most ideal customers.
We got to the point where we had to tweak our contact pages, because we were getting so many leads, and not all of them were the right fit for us. Just the shear quantity of traffic and leads was blown through the roof. All of that traffic allowed us to be a little more choosy too. For instance, one of the things we did was to change our contact form. Where it asks for them to give the size of their budget for their projects, we actually raised all of our values on them so that we could home in a little closer to our ideal customers. We added additional questions as well. What it did was reduce the number of leads, but the quality of the leads kept getting better and better.
Improving the System to Produce Content
After they had amassed a large number of articles, Segue changed the method of how content was produced. They then took things a step further and began to refine some of their older posts and e-books with higher quality in mind.
When we first started producing content, we had an intern who we had brought on specifically to help curate, organize, edit, and make sure the publishing schedule was staying on track. And she was amazing and has continued to do really great things for us, so we promoted her to content marketing manager. She’s the one in charge for really keeping it going. It’s important to have a person in that type of role. We became a little bit looser on the number of articles everybody had to write, because we had developed quite a bit of content over the past few years, so we started focusing on refining the message. We may not be producing as many blog articles per month as we used to, but we’re much more thoughtful about what we’re writing about, and we’re doing a really good job of going back to older content and updating them, and updating the subsequent e-books as we have a whole e-book strategy around our different service areas. And because we started doing that, we’ve seen huge gains not only in traffic, but in the quality of leads, especially over the last six months.
Many businesses may think that targeting only specific types of leads could hurt their business by reducing traffic and overall lead generation, but Segue views their new efforts as exponentially valuable.
What’s different about us is that we’re not a business that brings in a ton of new clients each year, especially in the commercial space. If we bring on four or six new clients each year, that’s actually a lot, because the size of our business deals are pretty large. A typical deal for us is anywhere from a quarter million to a million dollars.
When companies truly understand the power of great content and the philosophy of They Ask, You Answer, they don’t just stop at using their content to attract visitors to their site, they continually repurpose their content at every step of the sales funnel. Whether it’s through e-mails, phone calls, webinars, or trainings, companies like Segue recognize the value their content has in guiding potential clients through the buyer’s journey.
One surprising area that we’ve been able to utilize content is during “proposal season,” which occurs every July and August. During this season, the government, and the DOD in particular, have a lot of money they have to obligate and execute before the end of the government fiscal year, which is September 30. It tends to be a very busy time period, and when we’re responding to requests for proposals, we’ll use content created in our blogs to help us with proposals, because we’ve already thought about the questions and addressed the answers. Using content that we had already created previously as part of our proposals really helped us flesh them out and get them finished quicker.
Another factor that has helped Segue separate themselves from the rest of the pack in their industry is that they’ve never shied away from producing the types of articles that addressed questions their competitors weren’t willing to answer, specifically, the Big 5 mentioned in chapter 9.
It may not seem very bold now, but back in 2013, one of the first articles I wrote was, “How
Much Does It Cost to Build a Mobile App?” Within two weeks that article ranked number 1 on Google. Since then, others have written about it, but at the time, no one was willing to talk about it. We’ve also done a whole series of articles that sparked somewhat of a battle between our lead iOS developer for Apple and an Android developer for Google Apps with a number of articles that addressed the question, “Which is better?” Other content has sparked quite a bit of back-and-forth debates in our comments sections. The article “Waterfall vs Agile: Which Is the Right Development Methodology for Your Project?” got a lot of people from both sides sharing some very strong opinions.
And with all of this, Segue continues to build its brand as one of the premier educators and thought leaders in their field. Today, they continue to set themselves apart from their respective peers by staying at the forefront of their industry, all thanks to their commitment to this business philosophy. And the numbers produced from their efforts proves that they’re going to continue leading the pack for quite some time.
When we first started doing inbound marketing and They Ask, You Answer, we were getting around 1,000 visits to the website each month. Last month we had 85,000. And when we started tracking all of the revenue that could directly be attributed from inbound marketing, it came out to $8,053,442.31. And that’s just since 2013. So, I think that’s a pretty cool inbound story.
Eight million in additional revenue?!
Yes, that is a cool story.
Well done, Ron Novak and Segue Technologies.
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Content Subject 2
Problems: How to Turn Weaknesses into Strengths
Now that we’ve covered the first subject of the Big 5—or the five content subjects that move the needle in every industry, let’s move to the second one: problems.
You may be thinking, What do you mean by “problems,” Marcus?
Well, the simple answer is this: When people buy, they worry more about what might go wrong than what will go right. It’s true. It is for this reason that, for example, when someone is buying a 2017 Ford Mustang, their main searches would be either “2017 Ford Mustang Reviews” or “2017 Ford Mustang Negative Reviews.”
But, what they would not search is “Positive Reviews 2017 Ford Mustang.”
Make sense? In fact, I’d venture to say as a consumer you’ve searched by this point in your life hundreds of “negative”-based phrases, but no positives.
As buyers, although we want to know the good, bad, and ugly, we are mostly concerned with the ugly.
The same was true for me as a pool guy. Let’s imagine for a minute that you had met with me back when I was a pool guy, and you had gotten a quote for a fiberglass swimming pool. Let’s say you liked me as well as my pools, and you decided you might just want to buy one. But just to keep me honest, though, you elected to get a quote from a second swimming pool company—a concrete pool company. Let’s call this company Concrete Joe’s Pools.
Once you meet with Concrete Joe and tell him you met with Marcus, the fiberglass swimming pool guy, what do you think he’s going to say about my fiberglass pools?
Of course, Concrete Joe is going to make such statements as:
“Fiberglass pools aren’t wide enough . . . or long enough . . . or deep enough.”
“You can’t customize them.” Or, “They crack.” Or, “They pop out of the ground.”
“You don’t want a fiberglass pool! They are not even real pools. It’s like having a bathtub in your yard!”
And finally, he’ll likely say something like, “If you buy a fiberglass pool, you’re going to have nothing but problems, problems, problems. Don’t get that pool if you don’t want those problems!”
You might think I’m exaggerating with this scenario, but it’s true. I saw it hundreds of times during my years selling swimming pools.
And when it does happen, as the buyer, you now have a moral dilemma. You liked me and you liked my pools, but after talking with Concrete Joe, you’re a little freaked out worrying about all their potential problems.
So the question is, What do you do next?
Sure, you may ask a friend, but what you’re most likely going to do is go to Google and search something like, “fiberglass pools problems.”
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Addressing the Elephant in the Room
Since my first days as a fiberglass pool guy, one of the questions I got for years was, “Marcus, be honest with me. What are the problems with a fiberglass swimming pool?”
And for years, just as I had done with the cost question, I danced around the answer. But once we embraced the philosophy of They Ask, You Answer, I said to myself, Enough is enough, which led to my business partner Jason writing what turned out to be an epic article on the website titled, “Top 5 Fiberglass Pool Problems and Solutions.”
Now, you might think it would be insane for us to write an article with that title and, believe me, so did many people in our industry. But look at it this way: How many of our competitors were addressing that question on their websites? Of course, the answer is none.
Yet, how many consumers were wanting to know the answer to said question?
Pretty much all of them.
The reason for these clear efforts to ignore such a question comes down to a psychological issue that almost all businesses struggle with, and that’s the concept of addressing the elephant in the room.
Herein lies one of the great dilemmas of the digital age: Consumers are not dumb; nor are they ignorant.
If the marketplace believes (rightfully or not) that a product, service, brand, or other factor has problems—they’re very likely going to find out.
As a business, you have a choice:
You can allow the consumer to discover your elephant(s) themselves and in turn lose trust in you.
Or, the minute they walk in the front door (or the virtual front door), you can say, “Here’s our elephant. Do you have a problem with it?”
When we wrote this article, we said:
You know what? Buying a fiberglass swimming pool might not be for you. It might not be wide enough, or long enough, or deep enough. You might not be able to customize it to the extent that you want. But, if you’re looking for a low-maintenance pool that is going to last you a lifetime, and you like one of the shapes and sizes that we offer, well then a fiberglass pool might be the perfect choice for you.
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How Talking about Our Problems Generated More Than $500,000 in Revenue
The reaction to the problems post on our website was very similar to the cost piece. In both cases, consumers expressed their gratitude and ultimately gave us their trust.
Just like before, if they could have responded with their voice, they might have said, “Finally, somebody was willing to address this question!”
What was the result of that post? Well, in simple terms, over the past six years more than 260,000 people have visited our website because their search criteria related to “problems” with fiberglass pools. And thanks to the fact that we can track each one of those visitors who eventually filled out a “Request a Quote” form we also know this one article has generated well over $500,000 in additional sales since the day it was published.
You may be wondering how talking about one’s own problems (flaws, negative reviews, and such) could generate half a million dollars, but the answer is simple, really. People trusted us because we were willing not only to address, but to embrace, the elephant in the room. And that, in and of itself, is power.
In closing, I ask you this: How many times over the years have prospective customers questioned you about any of the potential problems or issues they may experience with your products or services, or your company?
If they have asked you these types of questions, I guarantee you that thousands of others have searched those same issues online. I can also promise you that they are getting their answers from somewhere. Wouldn’t it be better if they were getting those answers from you?
Putting It
Into Action
Turn Your Problems into Strengths
This activity, similar to the others we’ve done up to this point, will not work unless you’re truly in tune with the way your prospects and customers think. Nor will it work if you’re not completely honest with your answers herein.
To start, answer the following two (very related) questions:
What does the competition say is a negative about the thing we sell?
What do consumers and buyers see as the negatives of our products and services? (Is it that you’re the most expensive? Is your product only a good fit for certain applications?)
Once you’ve completed this, ask yourself: How can we address each of these honestly and transparently on our website and within our sales process so as to turn it into an advantage? Assuming you approach this the right way, the answer to this question (and the actions you take) could lead to some pretty incredible results for your brand and business.
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Case Study 2
An Equipment Financing Company Becomes a Digital David and Conquers the Industry Goliaths
Another tremendous success story of They Ask, You Answer—especially when addressing the “problems” of an industry—comes from Rob Misheloff of Smarter Finance USA.
In a couple of years, Misheloff has worked wonders to transform his one-man financial loan information company into an inbound lead- and sales-generating powerhouse, all the while becoming a digital David in a land of financial Goliaths and proving himself nimbler, faster, and more creative than his behemoth counterparts.
They Ask You Answer Page 6
