21
The Impact of Discussing the Competition
You may be asking what the final results of “Who Are the Best Pool Builders in Richmond, Virginia (Reviews/Ratings)” are.
To put it lightly, the results have been profound.
First of all, as mentioned before, if you search anything to do with “Best Pool Builders Richmond, Virginia,” this is the first result you see in Google.
But the second result is where things get really, really interesting.
Let’s assume you went online today and searched for “Reviews Pla-Mor Pools Richmond, Virginia.” (Note: Pla-Mor is our biggest competitor in the Richmond area.) Once you enter such a search query, the first result you’re going to see is, again, that article.
In fact, today, whenever anyone is researching reviews of our competitors, they usually land on one of these articles (as we’ve now produced many) on our website. All this while outranking such websites as the Better Business Bureau, Angie’s List, and others that often own the conversation about reviews in multiple industries, especially in home improvement.
To put it all in perspective, allow me to share the following story of a lady who bought a swimming pool from us a few years ago. Upon discussing her decision to go with our company, she said:
Marcus, the most interesting thing happened. I was so close to signing a contract with Pla-Mor Pools for my swimming pool. But before I signed the contract, I decided to go online and research their company. While I was researching their company, I immediately stumbled across this article you guys had written and thought to myself, My goodness, these guys are so honest, I should probably call them too!
Of course, you know the end result. That lady bought a $50,000 swimming pool from us. And she bought it all because she had a common question and we were the ones that had been willing to answer it—honestly and transparently.
The year it was published, that one little article resulted in $150,000 in sales. And still today, if you go online and research the best swimming pool builders in Richmond Virginia, we will probably be one of the first companies you come across.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, Yeah, but Marcus, aren’t you afraid you’ve now introduced them to the competition? And if you’re thinking this, let’s be clear about something:
If someone wants to know who your competitors are, roughly, how long will it take them to figure it out?
Maybe five seconds . . . if they’re slow!
The reality is this: Consumer ignorance is no longer a viable sales and marketing strategy.
It just isn’t.
I knew at some point the buyer would learn about my competitors, just like I knew at some point they’d realize there are three types of inground pools (concrete, fiberglass, and vinyl). Plus, I could see how addressing these types of questions would give us a chance at doing business with folks who never would have found us otherwise—just as the lady who almost bought a Pla-Mor Pool had done. But because we had addressed the question, we were now able to enter the conversation with her and many, many others.
To this day, we are still getting rewarded for taking this bold approach to They Ask, You Answer with new business every single month.
And finally, if you’re wondering how our competitors reacted to these articles, I can tell you that over the years, I’ve heard from many of them, and the response is almost always the same:
“Marcus, I don’t know why you wrote that article, but thank you.”
As for me, all I can do is chuckle, knowing the simplistic power and impact of They Ask, You Answer.
Putting It Into Action
Embrace Review-Based and Best-of Content
Brainstorm the top competitors and companies in your space, and then take the time to write an article about the best companies in your field. Remember to stick to facts and stay away from opinions when discussing the competition on your own website. But the key here is your willingness to have the conversation and become the trusted source of your industry in the process.
22
Case Study 3
Small Retail Appliance Store Dominates Online and Makes Millions
If you were asked which company you thought was the biggest online thought leader in the kitchen appliance space, you’d probably assume that it was one of the major manufacturers you’ve been seeing in kitchens for years; names like General Electric, Whirlpool, Kenmore, and Frigidaire might come to mind. Worth hundreds of millions of dollars each, these companies, at least in theory, should “own” the digital space.
However, you might be surprised to learn that not only is the go-to consumer information source in the appliance space not one of the leading manufacturers, it’s not a manufacturer at all. Rather, the company that is making a killing by providing educational articles, videos, buyer’s guides, and e-books that are answering people’s questions about appliances is a regional retail store located in Boston, Massachusetts.
About Yale Appliance
Yale Appliance has been selling to and servicing the people of Boston with all of their home appliance and lighting purchases since 1923. From the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, to the dot-com explosion of the mid-’90s, to the Great Recession of 2008, Yale Appliance has persevered through it all.
So how does a local appliance store maintain longevity over such a long period of time while many other businesses in their field have been forced to shutter their doors during periods of economic decline? The answer is simple: They turned to their customers and started paying close attention to the habits, problems, and needs of appliance consumers.
Steve Sheinkopf, CEO of Yale Appliance, is a perfect example of a business owner who caught on to content marketing at an early stage, when he went to a conference called In Planet back in 2004.
In Planet was the single greatest conference I’ve ever been to. HubSpot’s conferences are amazing, but this one was really foretelling of the future. They were saying things like, “While social media isn’t quite there yet for businesses, it soon will be.” I also learned that the first thing a company needs to do is manage their reputation online, and the second thing is to find a way to control the conversation somehow.
In 2007 Sheinkopf decided it was time to start taking control of online conversations about home appliances by starting a business blog for Yale Appliances. Sheinkopf had always distrusted the measurability of traditional advertising, and he saw an opportunity with content marketing for a greater return on his investment and the possibility to measure that return with concrete numbers.
For four years, Sheinkopf was pleased with the online results he was seeing: a growing social media presence as well as a steady (albeit slight) uptick in monthly traffic.
And as much as he personally despised traditional outbound advertising, there were times when he believed that he had no choice but to turn it.
I’ve never been sold on advertising, even though we were doing some radio and television ads, and buying space in the Boston Globe. We were spending a lot of money. When the recession hit, I had read somewhere that refrigerators actually sold better during recessions like the Great Depression, so we advertised even more, but we didn’t really get anything out of it.
The recession forced Sheinkopf to reevaluate his business goals and plans.
When I was struggling during the recession, we had to ask ourselves the same two questions every other business has to: “how do I reduce expenses?” and “how do I add revenue?” And it usually boils down to the same answers: I need to sell more, and I need to cut more. And that’s really hard to do. Anybody with compassion hates to cut people.
It was during these tough economic times that Sheinkopf decided to explore further why his inbound marketing strategy wasn’t producing the results he was after, so he turned to the Web for answers.
A CEO Becomes the Head of Business Development
Sheinkopf was reading articles about HubSpot when he stumbled across the River Pools story
and decided to reach out to me to see whether having a workshop with his employees could help turn around his company’s inbound marketing efforts. But as Sheinkopf states, our first conversation didn’t quite go as he had anticipated.
My first talk with Marcus was brutal. I thought I was pretty good at business blogging, and I was just thinking that maybe I could improve a little bit. So I sent him a few articles for review and he kind of just beat me down. Marcus said to me, “I can see that you do the work, and that you take this seriously, but the truth of the matter is you’re not doing it right. And we’re not going to talk about what you’re doing right, we’re going to talk about what you’re doing wrong, and how you can fix it. Can you handle that?” I almost hung up on him right then.
On a personal level, as the author of this book, and now a close friend of Steve’s, this statement gave me quite a laugh. But the truth is, Steve’s content strategy was way off. It was almost the antithesis of They Ask, You Answer. Instead of focusing on what consumers were asking, thinking, and searching for about kitchen appliances, he was writing about everything from the business’s point of view (and not the consumer’s) and was therefore experiencing no momentum from his efforts. (This, by the way, is extremely common for businesses all over the world when they embrace an inbound culture with content marketing. Although they are producing content, they are still doing it in a biased, sales-based manner versus one that is solely focused on teaching, helping, and solving another’s problems.)
Fortunately, Steve ended up embracing my earnest criticism of Yale’s content marketing efforts, and after a few further correspondences, he decided to have me come out to his company and teach content marketing in the style that had worked so well with our clients and River Pools: They Ask, You Answer.
After Yale Appliance’s workshop in early 2011, Sheinkopf and his employees began tackling their content marketing strategy with a rejuvenated passion and a new purpose that consisted of a clear direction and attainable goals.
Part of Sheinkopf’s new content marketing plan was to reevaluate his company’s overall goals. He realized that in order to achieve those goals he would have to put the customers first, produce content that was helpful, and aid clients in their purchasing decisions. Specifically, he focused on the Big 5 content and knew that if he was going to become something like a “Yelp for kitchen appliances,” he was going to have to address the same types of subjects they did. In fact, here is a list of just some of the extremely popular articles Yale published since embracing this strategy, all of which have been viewed over 100,000 times each:
“The 5 Best Counter Depth Refrigerators”
“The Least Serviced/Most Reliable Appliance Brands 2015 (Reviews/Ratings)”
“The Best Compact Laundry for 2015 (Reviews/Ratings/Prices)”
“Quietest Dishwasher by Decibel Rating (Reviews/Prices)”
“The 5 Best Affordable Luxury Appliance Brands (Reviews/Ratings)”
“KitchenAid vs Bosch Dishwashers (Reviews/Ratings/Prices)”
“Best Front-Load Washers for 2016 (Ratings/Reviews/Prices)”
“The 5 Best Bosch Dishwashers (Ratings/Reviews/Prices)”
“The Best Induction Cooktops for 2015 (Ratings/Reviews/Prices)”
“Best 30-Inch Professional Gas Ranges (Reviews/Ratings/Prices)”
Sheinkopf didn’t just stop with a smarter approach to the type of content he was producing: he also made content production a companywide policy, going so far as to add mandatory content production into the employee handbook.
Some people are bad writers, I get that. But the other good part of getting everyone to blog is, theoretically if everyone is blogging and really trying, they’ll learn to get better. If you spend a month researching a topic, you’re going to know what you’re talking about on that subject. And if you know what you’re talking about, you should be able to explain it to others.
Even though Sheinkopf made it company policy that everyone in the organization had to help in producing content, whether researching and writing articles, helping draft new ideas, or participating in video shoots, Sheinkopf himself has written a majority of Yale Appliance’s content, contributing more than 1,600 of his own articles.
People would often question why the CEO of a company was working so hard on producing content when there were over 140 employees that could have been handling it. I actually started to feel bad about it. But then I was talking with Ann Handley [author of Everybody Writes and Content Rules] and she told me what I was doing was a good thing. She said, “You’re in business development.” And I thought “yeah, that’s my real job. I’m in business development.” Some of my articles have now been read 10 to 20 thousand times, and my top article has been read over 800,000 times. I couldn’t advertise for that. That’s why I do it, because I’m in business development.
With their retargeted marketing efforts, Yale Appliance’s website traffic, leads, customers, and revenue began to grow at an incredible rate, doubling nearly every year from 2011 until the present, when their traffic averages more than 600,000 monthly visitors in 2016.
Yale Appliance Tackles the Tougher Questions
A big part of Yale’s success is indebted to their steadfast commitment to writing articles that genuinely help consumers make the most well-informed purchasing decisions possible, even if it means ruffling a few major manufacturers’ feathers along the way.
If you want to read an article that manufacturers really hate, read my article on “The 5 Most Serviced/Least Reliable Appliance Brands.” I take people through the whole process of what it’s like to buy something, and what the problems they may encounter are. We don’t just sell appliances; we service appliances as well. And because we service appliances we have actual service data that we can pull from a database that tells us which brands, makes, and models end up needing the most services and repairs.
Think about that for a second.
How many business owners in the retail space would be willing to openly publish the good, the bad, and the ugly of the very brands and products they sell?
How many would admit when one had a very high service rate?
How many would be so bold as to be specific to the problems of that particular appliance?
The answer, of course, is almost none.
But that’s also why almost no one has experienced the extreme success of Yale Appliance. Simply put, they care only about becoming the most trusted source in the world for consumers when it comes to appliances. That’s it, and they let the rest of the chips fall as they may.
For example, though Steve’s commitment to transparency and honesty is adored by his customers, his articles don’t always sit well with the manufacturers. On more than one occasion Steve has been threatened with legal action for his earnest reviews.
I’ve had brands threaten to sue me over claims I’ve made in articles, but I don’t mind, because what I’m saying is the truth, and I have the data to back up my claims. So when I’ve been threatened by brands, I say “Okay, well, I guess we’ll have to give you all of our documentation, but we want the same from you. We want your records too.” And as long as we’re right, nobody wants to do that.
Even though Sheinkopf’s articles may appear to be hard hitting to some of the major appliance brands, Sheinkopf sees his articles as a potential wake-up call to the manufacturers to improve their products.
I just report what I see. It’s not up to me to make their products. They should take the advice of what’s wrong with it and build it back up so it doesn’t break. Threatening to sue me? It’s the dumbest mentality. You shouldn’t shoot the messenger for delivering the message that other people are saying too. You can’t fault me for saying it. They should take the advice and make improvements to their product. I’m not going to trash them with imaginary stuff. That would be irresponsible. What I’m trying to sell is truth and honesty.
Yale Appliance’s Success with Inbound Marketing
Publishing articles based
on truth, honesty, and transparency about appliances has served Yale Appliance very well. Today, Yale Appliances doesn’t spend any money at all on advertising, and focuses all of its marketing efforts into its website, blog, and learning center. And, says Sheinkopf, the results have been amazing.
You want to talk ROI? What is my ROI? My investment is simple: It’s my time, it’s my team’s time. You put our salaries together and it’s still way under what we could have spent for advertising, and we still would have needed someone to maintain that anyways. Just by looking at a customer’s e-mail address (that was attracted through our content marketing efforts) and connecting it to a purchase, we can say that it’s at least 10 million dollars in sales a year. And that’s with zero advertising.
When others tell Sheinkopf that traditional advertising really does work, he has a few strong words on the subject.
People have always quoted me as “anti-outbound,” but I’m not that at all. If you’re getting a return on your investment through radio, home-shows, television ads, then all the more power to you. Typically when people say advertising works I say, “How do you measure it?” and they say, “It’s impossible to measure.” Then how do you know it works? People don’t want advertising. They want to contact you when they’re ready to contact you. There’s a difference between me telling you I’m great, and somebody reading something and saying, “Wow, that was great.” If you, the customer, say it, there’s a better shot at me earning your business.
If I was to advertise saying “Shop at Yale because we have a sale” by buying an audience of 500,000, how many people in that audience are actually in the market to buy something? And of those people, how many are actually listening and not changing the channel or fast-forwarding? You’re paying 500 grand for twenty people . . . maybe. Where’s the ROI on that? It’s not measurable. Inbound, assuming you use the right tools, is measurable, and we’re going to stick with what works, and what we can measure.
They Ask You Answer Page 9
