How to Produce SERP-topping Viral B2B Content – with Brad Smith from Wordable | DMR 248

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David Bain
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 248: How to produce SERP topping viral B2B content

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Digital Marketing Radio with David Bain

David Bain
Hi, I’m David Bain and this is Digital Marketing Radio: keeping you on top of the latest tools, tactics and digital marketing trends. Though it’s common to have SEO and social media experts in digital marketing teams, but unfortunately, it’s also too common to have SEOs and social media marketers produce content by themselves for their own specific needs. What would happen if SEO and social media marketers worked more closely together with each other, producing incredible content that’s more powerful than the sum of its parts? That’s why I’m going to be talking about on Digital Marketing Radio Episode 248 with a man who whose content has been featured on Shopify unbounce, HubSpot, just to name three. He lives in Hawaii, and he’s the CEO at workable Welcome to DMR. Brad Smith.

Brad Smith
Thank you, David. Appreciate it. Looking forward to this.

David Bain
Yeah, great to have you on Brad’s Well, I would just say you can find Brad’s over@workable.io. So Brad’s when working on a piece of content. Is it possible to optimise for SEO and virality? At the same time? Or should you focus primarily on just the one objective?

Brad Smith
It should be both it is possible, it’s not easy, as you can imagine, and we’ll go into like why that is, but you should. And the reason for that is if you are investing a significant amount in this stuff, which again, you should be based on how difficult the world is and how how difficult and how crowded it is and how much of an echo chamber it already is. If you’re going to the effort and expense of doing one or the other, you might as well do both at the same time. You know what I mean?

David Bain
And we’re talking about primarily by B2B content, but what’s the main difference between B2B and B2C content?

Brad Smith
B2B buyers tend to invest a lot more time energy researching things upfront, because there’s generally speaking, it’s a lot less of an impulse buy. So in other words, if you’re promoting, you know, 50 to $100 ecommerce product, someone might just buy that without even looking at it, I might just buy a watch on Amazon just because it looked right. And in that moment, and I don’t really care about researching it, I don’t really care about the specs I don’t really care about necessarily like the movement behind it. Whereas B2B Pires and tend to be a lot longer, so it’s more, it’s more of a complex sale. And what that means is, people will do research for weeks and months. And what we see, for example, even our own company, a lot of our best clients and customers will will convert within, like 30 days. And that’s not because we’re an amazing, you know, that because we’re amazing at sales, it’s because they’re already pre sold in a sense before they even come to us. And so a lot of the content we’re producing obviously, is is meant to help guide them through that again, without even picking up the phone.

David Bain
So we’re zeroing in on B2B obviously, and what makes success in terms of the content that you produce? So what are some of the common elements that makes a successful B2B piece?

Brad Smith
Definitely. So we, we almost think of it as like a checklist or like a balanced scorecard in a sense. So it’s like it’s got to have these elements and they have to be done to a certain degree or certain and and balanced scorecard meaning part of that SEO focus. Part of that is actually like copywriting focus. So is there a hook? Is there an angle is there actually something interesting, that’s that is reaching out to someone’s like lizard brain and getting them to sit down and read this thing and focus on it. There’s also the grammar, there’s also plagiarism, there’s also design, there’s also video in some cases, depending on what we’re talking about. And so it’s kind of like a balanced mix of different variables that we want to see. And again, I’m happy to get into all those independently. But that’s generally speaking. Again, if you’re going to the the effort and the expense to do all this stuff, then again, let’s let’s do it. Right.

David Bain
So you mentioned lizard brain, you mentioned plagiarism as well, I assume you’re not looking to copy any existing article either

Brad Smith
know, what happens a lot, unfortunately, is that people, especially writers who don’t always know what they’re talking about, so, you know, read less expensive writers, writers who aren’t subject matter experts, what they’ll often do, and we will all tell them, it needs to be it needs to match search intent. So so go look at what’s already ranking, try to reverse engineer what they’re already doing well, and follow those things. So once again, not very good practitioners do is they go and they look and they basically regurgitate what’s already ranking. So in other words, they take the first three articles, and they look at Okay, they’re talking about this and this and this and then they basically just write the same exact thing. And so it’s not plagiarism. It’s not direct plagiarism in a classic sense, but it’s it’s I am we think of it almost like an indirect plagiarism, where it’s like, well, you’re not really adding anything new and you’re not really helping the further you know, but the cause so that’s, that’s also a pretty common issue. And again, it’s one of those things that unless you’re looking Before it, and unless you’re actually digging into a lot of the stuff, and you have editors going through it, a lot of people aren’t gonna catch.

David Bain
So how can you actually research what else Google is looking for? If you’re wanting to rank for a particular keyword phrase, and you see articles out there already that are fairly decent, that are fairly similar, as you say, the contain maybe a certain type of answer, how do you discover new opportunities, new things to write about that will give you a better opportunity to actually rank higher than the existing articles?

Brad Smith
Sure. So it’s kind of a mix of approaches. So again, assuming we’re already skipping over a little bit keyword research. So assuming you’ve already done a little bit of work to figure out, you know, can we actually rank for this thing? sometime in the near future? That’s not an insignificant step. And so if we’re, if we’re kind of like glossing over that a little bit, just to dive into, okay, we’ve already decided this topic, we’ve already decided this keyword, one of the easiest things you could do is just go to Google to start with, and look at what’s already ranking, like I said, and again, there’s there’s a fine line, you’re gonna walk here, but what’s important is to figure out what type of content should we be writing in the first place? So in other words, if I type in or if I’m looking for a question, that’s an education based question, like how to make iced coffee, I know that’s probably going to be a blog article that’s showing up for that it’s probably going to be some sort of blog posts, some sort of article, I’m guessing around the 1000, word, ish range. Is there an image gallery? Is there? Like, what type of info is there a video, there’s probably a video and there’s probably a lot of video showing up for that sort of thing. So in other words, like, is it not a landing page? Is it not a feature page? It’s not like a Keurig. Amazon page showing up for how to make iced coffee because that that search, there’s a mismatch in terms of search intent in terms of what people are searching for, and what you’re showing them. So the very first step is like, what type of content are we trying to do? Second step is like what’s already ranking and why. And so in other words, it’s one of the best there’s, there’s two places to look that that’s great on the actual search itself. If you look at the people also ask questions, usually a little drop down. That’s a really good place to look and especially good ideas for what your subhead should be. So how to make iced coffee. I’m not looking at it right now. But I’m probably guessing it’s like, how to make cold brew, like, as an alternative to make iced coffee? How do you make iced coffee at home? How do you make iced coffee like Starbucks, there’s going to be like a few of these different ideas. And those are like really good. starting points for again, like what your major subheads or themes should be within a piece, you can also go down to the very bottom, which will be related searches. And again, this shows you a lot of the same information. So it’ll show you if people are searching for how to make iced coffee, they’re often also searching for how to make, how to make iced coffee, like Starbucks at home, on the road, in a Keurig, like all these related ideas, and what you’re doing is you’re kind of like gathering all this stuff up. We also use a lot more specialised tools for this, as you can imagine. So one of them’s marketmuse that we love, basically. And we also use clear scope. surfer SEO is another bigger one. What these tools often do that most people get wrong, is they’re trying to help you understand what semantic topics, what related topics should be included when you talk about keyword or topic x. And the fine line here is making sure you’re including a lot of that information and you’re referencing it, but you’re not sticking to it blindly. So that you’re you’re producing something that’s dry, it’s it’s not interesting, it’s basically generic ripoff of what else is already out there. And so that’s where the copywriting comes in. That’s where the lizard brain comes in. That’s where customer stories come in. That’s where that’s like the other side of it. So it’s kind of a yin and yang approach that makes sense.

David Bain
I love people also asking Google and that’s something that I use all the time as well. I actually use it to suggest to clients how to actually come up with ideas for podcast episode. So very, very similar kind of thing as well. If we’re creating a podcast series about a particular topic, I say, go into that type of question about the topic and expand on the questions I love. I love how you click on the questions, and you get more questions once you actually click on the questions as well. I searched quickly for how to make iced coffee and it says how do you make iced coffee with regular coffee? How do you make coffee? Yeah, so a lot of the things that you suggested there as well, wonderful resource. I used to use them and to the public. But the limited or free version, I think in the last couple of years, so I haven’t used it quite so much. One thing that you mentioned was you have a look at a blog article that exists already. There’s probably a blog article out there of about 1000 words, you also talked about video as well, is it’s good practice to have articles of a certain length iE 1000 words, or it doesn’t need to be just as long as it needs to be in just second part to that. Does video and embedding video help as well?

Brad Smith
Yeah, so the short answer we give for workout is, again, generally mimic what’s out there. In other words, if if what’s already ranking are a bunch of 500 to 1000 word articles, then you probably don’t need something that’s 5000 words. But conversely, if you have a lot of long technical guides right Which you often do in B2B, especially competitive spaces like software, then something that’s 500 words 2000 words isn’t gonna be able to compete well. So again, this is one of those things that we, we can use specialised tools for or you could just do it the manual way of opening the top five articles, and then actually copy and paste them into Google Docs and then look into workout like, you don’t need to get technical about this, they just a lot of the tools will save a lot of time. So that’s the first issue is generally said, just just mimic what’s out there and make it close, if not a little better in terms of workout. So you don’t need to, again, you don’t need to go overboard on that. The second thing, video helps a lot, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. So video can help with SEO if, again, if you if you kind of know what you’re doing, but also if you know that a lot of videos are actually showing up in search results. So you kind of have that blended SERP and so to speak, where you have a lot of videos and this often, for example, I think HubSpot tutorial, if you googled HubSpot tutorial, I want to say a lot of the content ranking are actually just videos, and a lot of them are videos from YouTube. So in a case like that, it’s it’s obvious that you might want to make a video first approach. In other forms of content video helps with engagement, especially in the B2B space engagement, so keeping people on the page and reading it, and it helps a little more in actually driving like the action you want. So are we trying to get an opt in? Or are we trying to get them to read another article?

David Bain
How do we keep them on the page, and if we keep people on the page, and we keep people happy, and they return to that page, then there’s also a better chance we’re probably going to rank even though again, these are these tend to be a little more indirect in terms of, you know, actual ranking factors. And we’ve already mentioned the fact that you’ve published quite a few articles on many other top websites out there is it best to publish an article, a significant article on your own website, and try and build your website as an authority on that particular topic, but you’re not necessarily going to get that many eyeballs initially to that, or is it best to actually try and publish your article on a third party website, you’re not building up the authority to your own website, but you’re potentially getting more eyeballs on it to begin with,

Brad Smith
definitely, if you’re newer or smaller, and you don’t have the awareness, you don’t have the domain authority, you don’t have the traffic, you don’t have the Brent, like the brand, meaning like people aren’t coming in searching for you, it’s probably better to spend your time on bigger websites, and contributing there. The other thing that I’ll throw out though, is think of it like a hub and spoke approach. So always try to put your good foundational ideas and content on your site and think of stuff off the site as an extension of that. So in other words, if you took, I don’t know, some, like, especially in the B2B space, some some guide to making iced coffee, I don’t know, we’re gonna do like a B2B iced coffee, where we sell to like to retailers instead of people directly. But like, if you want to put like the big in depth, awesome guide there, and that’s where you put the video, that’s where you put the extra design. And then when you’re going out to all these big places, you’re essentially just repurposing content. So you’re using the same ideas, you’re using a lot of the same graphics even. And the benefit of this is you already know what works and what doesn’t. So if I’m going to go publish on a big site, I want to make sure that’s actually going to do well, and that people are going to see it and love it. And the reason or the way I’m going to do that is by knowing already what topics are going to be successful, what headlines are going to be successful, because I’ve already done it five other times, you know what I mean?

David Bain
So we’ll come on to discussing the software that you can live without, and other questions like that just in a bit. So someone previously mentioned conversion to AI, Jarvis as a tool that they couldn’t live without, that’s an automated way of generating content using AI. Do you ever advocate Have you ever ever trialled the accuracy and readability of maybe taking an original article from your blog, recreating it using AI and then attempting to publish that version on another website?

Brad Smith
Yeah, AI. The good news. The bad news with AI so far that we’ve tested is that it’s not replacing writers anytime soon, full stop. The reason for that is it does a decent job, regurgitating fact based information. So it’s very binary, meaning it’s very black and white, it doesn’t understand nuance or context, it doesn’t even understand kind of what it’s talking about what it’s doing. A lot of times what it’s doing is it’s just grabbing, almost like we’re talking about mimicking what’s already on what’s already ranking for. In search engines. It’s kind of doing a similar process, or it’s just taking in a lot of data, and then kind of saying, okay, a lot of these words and phrases should fit together. The challenge with that is, is there’s very little nuance, like I said, it’s very difficult in the B2B space to get something awesome. So if it was like, how to make iced coffee, again, even has a little bit of subjectivity. But if it was like the, you know, the benefits of Advil, it could maybe do it can maybe do a decent job at that because it’s all just like, fact based information. You’re gonna mean but if you said the pros and cons of Advil or Advil versus IV provan that’s where you’re going to run into all kinds of challenges and problems because it doesn’t, it doesn’t really understand again, what it’s talking about. And it’s, and it lacks. The other thing that it lacks that I think is a big deal with content today is it lacks personality and style and substance. And so what’s the thing that’s actually going to get people to read this and care and come back and remember, oh, this brand, now I remembered this brand, I’m gonna actually try to like, see if they can help me in the future. All the all the benefits of like a magazine article, like a really interesting feature, a profile, the style, all that is, you know, lacking, unfortunately. And so that’s where we’ve seen AI content can help and very limited, it can help you figure out more or less what to write about, it can help you figure out like, short short copy. So I don’t know like a product description, maybe. But But in terms of like longer, in depth, interesting articles,

David Bain
it lacks a bit, okay, I’m old enough and experienced enough in SEO to remember spending articles. So back about 15 plus years ago, used to take different phrases and don’t add curly brackets around them and give whatever tool you’re using options to spin different phrases and create allegedly unique articles out of that, and maybe AI is is a more progressed version of that, I guess we’re delivering you.

Brad Smith
Yeah, the article, it’s like, it’s like article spinning 2.0. It’s definitely better than that. Because I remember a lot of the article spinning stuff back in the day didn’t even make sense. And like the words in the sentence didn’t even make sense together. So it’s better than it’s better than that. The challenge is, you often still need an editor and or a writer to run through it. So if you think of it as like, maybe a rough outline, or a rough draft, that you’re still gonna have a writer go through, it’s still it still can save some time. So don’t that’s not again, that’s not especially if you’re doing high volume, that’s that’s a good thing. You still want some eyeballs going through that after that?

David Bain
Yeah, one thing that I’ve done in the past is I’ve, I’ve hosted mega live streams, and then turn them into transcripts, and then turn those transcripts into books. And then I’ve had to do a lot of rewriting of the transcript, basically restarting the book from from fresh, because you realise that actually, people don’t write the same way that they they say things. So I’m, I’m thinking about the possibility of putting transcripts into the AI to see what it comes up with to see if I can actually come up with a slightly better way of putting it before doing a further edit after that. But it certainly wouldn’t be the final production, it’s more of an experiment, I think, at this stage,

Brad Smith
I think it’s a really good idea. I think combining approaches to like, that makes a lot of sense. Because if you think of a podcast, even like this, all the content we’re talking about today is great, but it’s not search focused at all. And it’s gonna and I as the guest, I know this, I’m gonna bounce around way too much for you to create like to take this transcript and create a really good article that’s just focused on a very particular topic or very specific topic in search. So it could be interesting approach to almost combine the two worlds of like, the AI survey stuff that’s a little more dry and technical, with the transcript stuff and try to find a middle ground where you can you can kind of possibly do both. But I think it’s interesting, I think, I think it’s kind of what you have to do still is get creative with its with the uses. Because it’s again, probably one day like don’t get me wrong, probably one day, we’ll all be out of a job because machines will be doing all the content. But But until Until then, we’re not there yet.

David Bain
Yeah, I think blending a couple of approaches are probably give you more likely to give you a better result. I’m using otter.ai to create transcripts at the moment, and it’s a wonderful, accurate, relatively accurate piece of software, I would say it’s just it’s only marginally worse than something like rev rev.com. You didn’t have to go in and edit there. And then they obviously use human editors, editors as well, it’s you really need to go the extra mile though, if you if you want to deliver high quality content. I’ll tell you what we’ve made it on SEO and I guess the quality of content quite a bit. I’d like to just ask you one other question with regards to the production of articles. And we were talking about the virality of articles, and how do you make articles successful on social media as well as SEO? So what’s maybe one tip that you could offer to add more virality likelihood of sharing to articles to make it a success from that perspective as well?

Brad Smith
Totally. Yeah. So if we if we go back to the lizard brain for a second, there’s a really good everyone should go to I think it’s still alive maybe headline hacks.com from john Mara, who used to be or is that smart blogger now, is that still the name? I don’t know. He’s a copy blogger back in the day. Like a brilliant brilliant copywriter and marketing writer, more people should write like him. In my, in my humble opinion, headline hacks, often it will break down all these different headline frameworks and formulas down into like five different themes. So in other words, the threat of external mistakes like how do you protect yourself? The our, excuse me, the internal mistakes You’re already making and how you, you know, stop doing that you’re self inflicting harm the the external threats that are out there, and they’re gonna get you if you don’t do X, Y, Z, or if you don’t, you know, help it or conversely, on the other side like Zen like the x, y, z hacks to do something, it’s the simple, less time consuming, less painful way to lose weight, all those types of ideas. So I think you need to start in all the content you produce, especially in B2B, where things tend to be dry and boring. And especially on social where again, if you don’t have some of these ingredients, you’re what you need to do is like cut through the clutter. And these are all, like time tested, proven kind of old school copywriting ways to to quickly separate your content out and jump out. The other mix on that is to do things that like you can riff and piggyback on, on cultural things that are already happening. And so a really good example of this, one of our friends, Gaetano, over at nextiva, did a LinkedIn did a video where he went to a mall, and was trying to like approach strangers and ask them or basically read off LinkedIn called LinkedIn messages. Just to kind of just to kind of show like how absurd that is, and how like awful most LinkedIn messages are and how most people act on LinkedIn, doing it in real life at a mall to strangers, and then eventually getting kicked out of the mall, as you can imagine. So he just, they just like, came up with this random idea took their iPhone film that they didn’t like script, anything that he didn’t have to like, do much work. And it ended up like blowing up, you could imagine and getting tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of views. And so that’s where you can definitely be a little more creative with the format. So if you’re doing something with social, it’s got to be some type of video, it’s got to be some sort of mix of like entertainment, with again, like the kind of copywriting ideas,

David Bain
I love that. And that’s so funny about the whole idea and the same introductions as what people use on LinkedIn, because it’s just terrific half the messages you receive, it’s so obvious that people just haven’t looked at what you do. And they just immediately want to sell their own services and what they do, and it’s just just so off putting, please change it between your people, if you’re listening, if you if you’re doing that at the moment. And that resource that you mentioned headlining acts that’s still alive at the moment that gets forwarded to a page, it looks like a LeadPages landing page. So you can sign up and get the 50 to headline hex there as well. But let’s segue to part two of our discussion. It’s time for bands, Brad’s thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET SOFTWARE, so Brad share a lesser-known martech tool that’s bringing you a lot of value at the moment and why that tools important for you?

Brad Smith
Yeah, definitely, it would be completely self serving to mention my own tool, so I won’t, what I’m what I mentioned instead, and this, everyone knows this tool, but I think I’ve been using loom multiple times a day, for everything for like martec related, so in ways that people maybe don’t, so a lot of people might use like loom for, I don’t know, just simple internal, like memos. And in a way I use it for talking to clients, I use it for I’ll put up I’ll use it for talking to customers. If you think of things like martec tends to be a lot tends to be acquisition focused, meaning a lot of martec tools and marketers and myself included, we tend to be very focused on acquisition, meaning like SEO, content, social how we’re going to bring people into the funnel. But where we often should be spending more of our time is like, helping customers and clients and actual like customer service and keeping people around and keeping them happy. And, and so that’s where I’m using loom multiple times a day, with a video like this, I’ll do a screen share, but I’ll also use the video so I can kind of communicate to people and and that personal touch, I think makes a huge impact to people, what I spread across time zones. So a, there’s nothing lost in translation, meaning if I just type out a bunch of texts, or along at a long email to someone, that’s going to be confusing, or if I’m especially if I’m venturing in anything technical, it’s going to be, you can’t always get the intent behind it. So even if I’m pushing back on something, someone’s not able to understand that properly. Whereas if I can create a video like this, I can kind of walk through that thought process and kind of connect a little more personally, with people and I think that makes a big difference in a world that is increasingly disconnected. And, and and especially in a world where like, I’m off, we’re all doing everything, or a lot of us are doing things today asynchronously. And I don’t think that’ll change anytime soon. So I might not even talk to these people and have an actual conversation like we’re having now. But a lot of these little touch points help a lot of things.

David Bain
Yeah, I love that. loom has been recommended before. So certainly a great platform. I’m intending to use it at some point. And I guess once I integrate it a little bit more than two to do what I’m doing. I think it’s a great tool for doing things like once someone becomes a customer, sending them a personal video thanking them for signing up and maybe demonstrating that you’ve checked out their website. To know something personal about them as well, I, I just feel that automation for the sake of automation, without any personalization can sometimes have a detrimental effect. But real personalization aided by automation can make a massive difference in terms of the building of relationships.

Brad Smith
Totally, yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been like just emailing customers recently, randomly, I’ll just email them and be like, Hey, I’m just looking at our, I’m looking at our admin section of our app. And I’m saying, okay, I noticed you, you know, I noticed this worked or this didn’t work, if something doesn’t work, I’ll often I’ll try to see that and then reach out practically. So like, they may have not even reached out to customer support, they may not have even, like tried to, you know, talk to anyone to actually they’ve, they’ve been trying to troubleshoot it themselves. And I’ll just manually reach out and do something like that, or send me and I even used, I think loom too, there’s a lot of other tools like it, but it’s just easy, and simple. And it’s fast. And so I’ve even created like little, little almost like, I’ll take like a little like a webinar and break it down into like five or 10 minute videos with something like loom and then use that as another way to drop into emails as almost like a drip sequence. So I’ve even used it for more like classic kind of martech, you know, use cases again, just because I find it easier than, I don’t know, recording everything was like, you know, quote, unquote, more professional software and then uploading it to Wistia. And then like grabbing and like customising every little detail, I think I think what’s more important today is, is just like that empathy and that connection, a lot of times and a lot of cases. And if, if we’re not a huge company, if you’re not already a huge conglomerate, then don’t don’t maybe act like one just act more personal. Because I think that’s what your that’s what your selling point is, you know, it’s access to like the people who run it and the people who personally care and are personally invested in making sure that their customers are happy and all that kind of stuff.

David Bain
Absolutely. That’s one thing that I love about digital marketing today, it’s much more personal. Going back 1015 years ago, people hid behind websites, they hid behind their own brands, they didn’t do video, or hardly anyone did video, and it’s nice to see a face behind the brand and actually get a sense of the real person.

Brad Smith
Yeah, definitely. I think, again, like B2B buyers tend to be more logical, they tend to do more research, they tend to, they tend to have like more of a structured budget. But at the end of the day, a lot of times that logic is still being used to reinforce their emotional feelings. In other words, if someone likes you better, they’re gonna buy from you. Even if you’re 5% more in the B2B world, like people, I think people need to understand that too. And still understand that there is still emotion involved in a B2B process. It’s not like, it’s not like people are robots, you know, in the business world, not everyone anyway, some people are

David Bain
moving on from loom, something that you currently use to something that you’re going to use the that is NEXT ON THE LIST, what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to test soon,

Brad Smith
I was thinking AI only because like I said, we still haven’t been able to kind of crack the code, so to speak in terms of how to actually use it properly, because I for for various reasons. So that’s one idea. We’re doing a lot of video a lot more video. And I only see that increasing, especially in the B2B space, we do like three or 400 articles a month, and they tend to be much longer, like 2000 words. I don’t think people like real humans listening to this want to read a 10,000 word article on something. I think that works right now, for Google. I don’t think that will work forever. And I think that the vast majority of content and digital consumption will be through video through audio. And so I think the more you can get into that, the better. And I know we’re getting into a lot of tools and stuff around that because I still don’t think there are great options out there like h refs for SEO and keyword research. There’s not a lot of good solutions right now for video in terms of everything from keyword research, to Wistia is great on the on the hosting side. But then on the on the back end for actually promoting video content, all that kind of stuff. I think there’s a lot of cool stuff coming out. So what would one example be like, video or maybe I’ll top my head. And I know there’s there’s a lot of other like really good social promotion based things, I think, when you think of, I think of marketing as like the classic marketing sense. So the old school 1960s, four P’s, and one of those is distribution, placements. And I think again, this is something most people overlook. most marketers today just focus on they don’t focus, they don’t have any control over the product or pricing over any of this stuff. Distribution is also can be applied to like the distribution of the content we’re creating. And so how do you do that better? If you’re spending $10,000, you know, segwaying a tiny bit to your next question. You’re spending $10,000 on ads, and your your cost per click is x video I can almost guarantee will reduce that cost per click by 20 to 50%, if not more, so. In which case you can save money or In which case, you can spend a lot more money on that activity and get a lot more results. And so I think that that’s, I think video, anything social based, especially as kind of like the foreigner is going, you know, to video as quickly as humanly possible.

David Bain
Well, not to think about there. Let’s move on to this or that route. So this is the quick response round 10 quick questions, Just 2 rules here. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to say the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready?

Brad Smith
Yes.

David Bain
tik tok or Twitter, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Brad Smith
Link, LinkedIn for B2B Facebook for B2C. I don’t always agree with that. I actually I’ll say Facebook, I’ll go against the grain. I’ll say Facebook, the reason being Facebook groups for B2B, use your podcast,

Bot
YouTube,

David Bain
traffic or leads, traffic, paid search or SEO, SEO, or influencers. Google ads or Facebook ads, Google ads, email marketing or chat marketing? Email, more tech stack or all in one platform? Or tech stack, one to one or scale? One to one. I thought that was gonna be a real struggle. Because obviously, Facebook and LinkedIn was an incredible challenge. Yeah. So you said I’m presuming that you you’ve tried LinkedIn groups don’t particularly like them.

Brad Smith
Yeah, I have a love hate with LinkedIn. I don’t I’m not a huge fan of most LinkedIn activity. I feel like it’s in trying to be more personal, it should become even more spammy, if that makes any sense. Like people are trying the way people are using it. And trying to make it more engaging and more on Facebook ish, are almost going the opposite direction. And it’s almost like they’re just people, like colleagues are commenting on each other’s things to like, try to try to eke out an extra percentage of eyeballs and click through rates. And people I’ve seen I’ve literally seen the same overall message in my feed multiple times. So in other words, you know, quote, unquote, influencers are just like copying and pasting what other people are saying in the space and seeing other people have success with. So it’s just like a really weird space to me. Facebook groups, we’ve had clients, like add espresso, which was acquired by Hootsuite had a tonne of success with creating a customer based Facebook group. And it was kind of an amazing thing, because people were able to engage and talk again, without necessarily the brand having to like do everything. People were kind of like helping each other in there. And it became almost like a tight knit little organic feeling community as opposed to like a super businessy commercial hard sale type of community, if that makes any sense. So I don’t know, I thought, some some ideas like that could be interesting. I don’t know, I think if everyone is doing something, then that means you’re probably too late. If you’re reading, if you hear about a tactic at a conference, that means you’re like six months, 12 months behind. And so I’m a little hesitant to just jump on the bandwagon if that makes any sense.

David Bain
Yeah, I think some brands have been burnt by Facebook’s lack of organic reach with their pages. And they’re a little bit too scared to committing to the group’s feeling that the same kind of thing might happen there. Do you not think a brand may be better off attempting to build their own community on their own platform?

Brad Smith
I definitely. But that was the question. And the other the other thought like the example I gave, I’m probably gonna butcher this. But I want to say the organic visibility again, in the group, not the pages because I totally agree on the pages in Facebook. The visibility was something like 7080 90% of the people in there were like seeing everything. So if you do it right, there’s still some some hidden gems, so to speak. Okay,

Bot
let’s move on to the $10,000 question.

David Bain
If I were to give you $10,000 and you had to spend over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend on and how would you measure success?

Brad Smith
This is a good question. I was going back and forth on a few different ideas. I would and this is some of this is gonna sound crazy, but I would I would maybe do a if I had to think I would do like an old school off. I don’t know if this is part of the question or not, but I would do I would do like some old school conference thing. And the reason for that, like

David Bain
getting together face to face? Yeah, we used to do in the old days, right?

Brad Smith
Crazy, right? Assuming assuming all this stuff is open. For example, off top my head, smaller conferences that tend to be influential people, like I went to a conference that was a bunch of business owners, and like investors and other things. So it’s a small invite only community, maybe tops 200 people, I sponsored it. So I don’t know, that’s, you know, three to five grand, it wasn’t like a crazy amount of money. It’s as far as some sponsorships goes. Again, if you go to a huge conferences, and you’re competing against like a million other vendors, I wouldn’t suggest this. But I’m talking about like a much smaller, community based thing. And then you go to like dinners afterwards. So you know, pay for people’s dinner. And I’ve had like 10s of 10s of 1000s of dollars of new customers and stuff come out of that, even if it’s six months later. And so that’s probably what I would spend the bulk of that 10 grand on. And then you can always combine it with some online, you know, new aged approach, where it’s like, there’s some additional content and get, there’s some discount offer there some personal concierge onboarding or walkthrough for people that attended that conference, I think I would do something conference based, where I could actually get in front of real buyers, not just again, I think a lot of conferences tend to be like peers. So I don’t want to get in front of other marketers, I want to get in front of like people who can, you know, spend money on my stuff.

David Bain
And in terms of measuring success, you mentioned that it’s often been six months after doing something like that, that you’ve actually seen people spend money with you is that a reasonable length of time to actually have to give before you can actually measure the success of that kind of activity?

Brad Smith
Yeah, again, it depends on what you’re doing, were selling, you might bump into someone or talk to someone who needs your thing, that minute, and then you talk to them three days later and follow up and they buy immediately. That would be great. In B2B, that’s not often the case. Again, it’s like if they need something specific, or if you do something that’s very specific, there’s going to take a little bit of time or need for something like that to develop. And another example here is we, I went to a small group dinner with like, seven or eight people one time. And again, the mix of those people is very important here. But I think we end up working with like, half of them in the next year. And so that was a lot of money, as you can imagine. And there’s there’s no like I can’t I can’t replicate as much as we want to talk about things like loom and everything else, it’s very difficult to replicate. And that’s very difficult to have that sort of conversion rate, so to speak, if you want to even think of it like that. So on our app, our conversion rate, you know, conversion rates for a software product are like, I don’t know, a percent, maybe of all traffic, you get to the site, whereas conversion on that dinner was like 50%. So you know, I’ll take, you know, the big money one any day.

David Bain
Oh, to finish off, let’s shift the focus to someone else who deserves it. The that is a MAGICAL MARKETER. So who’s an up-and coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to? What can we learn from them? Or where can we find them?

Brad Smith
Yeah, definitely. This will be slightly self serving. I think one of the one of the people we work with Jeremy Moser at you SERP is great. I think I think what’s interesting about him is, most marketers are good at marketing. That’s not always a surprise. What is a surprise is when marketers are also good at like operations and scale. So in other words, most companies I think struggle with doing. Like if you read an article, we talked about a lot of tactics today, if you read an article about link building, a lot of times you’ll see articles for link building like 101 link building tactics. The truth of that is you don’t need 101 link building tactics, you need like two or three link building tactics, and you need to do them really, really well. And you need to do them hundreds, if not 1000s of times a month. And so I think that’s what I look for. I was getting really impressed by people like that. We’ve had clients like that to where from the outside, you wouldn’t guess it but from internally, it’s actually like a really, really well oiled machine behind their operation. And that’s usually what dictates success. It’s not It’s not some, you know, mythical unicorn influencer that is just kind of like, what’s the old expression like odds? Like the the guy behind the the guy behind the, the machine, you know? Yeah, exactly. That’s the expression. It’s a lot of times I think success, especially if you talk about like growing a large company or a lot of revenue. It becomes from, you know, a well oiled machine, not just like an individual or two.

David Bain
absolutely superb stuff. So this was Episode 248 of Digital Marketing Radio. We’re Brad Smith from word abodo. io shared great tips about B2B SEO and viral success. You shared some a few tips on people also ask Allah Using that feature in Google, you talked about the hub and spoke model where you shouldn’t necessarily focus all your efforts on your own website. Think of other websites as well. Your core, big piece, maybe on your own website, another new related article and other websites as well. Getting links back to your site as well. You shared a great resource called headline hacks as well, where people can improve their headlines and make their articles more viral as well. Your SECRET SOFTWARE was Luma. Your NEXT ON THE LIST? list. You had lots of advice there as well, I guess you talked about more video, vid yards and other tools like that, but it was in essence, it was around focusing more on video and personal relationships and probably veering away from big 10,000 word articles and really thinking about individuals. And then finally your MAGICAL MARKETER was Jeremy Moser froma you SERP everything Brad mentioned in today’s show and more will be listed in the podcast show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com. Brad, what’s the best social platform for someone to follow you and say hi.

Brad Smith
I’m gonna say LinkedIn now and I’m gonna completely be a hypocrite. I’m on LinkedIn, Bs marketer. And that’s pretty much the the most active as as I get socially,

David Bain
super Okay, well, I’ve been host David Bain. You can also find me producing podcasts and video shows for B2B brands over at Casting cred.com until we meet again, stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

Bot
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