The Extraordinary Instagram Funnel for Ecommerce – with Ben Leonard from Beast Gear | DMR #231

Full transcript:

David Bain 0:00
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 231, the extraordinary Instagram funnel for e commerce

Bot 0:06
Digital Marketing Radio with David Bain

David Bain 0:11
Hi, I’m David Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio with a show for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers, but want to stay on top the latest tools, tactics and trends shared right here by today’s modern marketing masters. Have you been on Instagram for a while, but you’re not taking it seriously. Maybe you haven’t posted for a while you haven’t interacted for a while and you haven’t even checked your direct messages. If that sounds like you, and you own an e commerce business, you could be making a big mistake. My guest today finds it a brand called beast gear in 2016. growing it to be a mid seven figure annual revenue business before selling in 2019. Thanks in part to his extraordinary Instagram funnel.

Welcome to the ex-owner of Beast Gear – Ben Leonard.

Ben Leonard 0:58
Hi, David. Thanks for having me.

David Bain 1:00
Yeah. Thanks for coming on. Ben crew. Great to have you so we can find Ben over at Ben Leonard dot Pro, as well as some recording a podcast live streaming in different places. We’re also here on clubhouse. So joining us from clubhouse is Rebecca ward. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca Ward 1:19
Hi, this is so interesting to test out the podcasting clubhouse mix together because clubhouse is so big at the moment. For audio. It’s brilliant.

David Bain 1:28
It is it is it’s it’s such an evolving platform, a growing platform and its people are so passionate about it. People are on there for hours. So it’s great to be able to incorporate clubhouse and hopefully a lot of interaction from clubhouse directly on this live stream where we’re streaming in different places so you can find Rebecca over at think social be social calm. So I’m gonna have a bit of conversation with Ben first get some Rebecca’s thoughts on what Ben sharing and I’m sure her general thoughts on Instagram as well. So So Ben, let’s start. Let’s start with you. Would you say that the number of Instagram followers is important, and if not, why not?

Ben Leonard 2:10
It’s relatively important. But what’s more important is how engaged your followers are. So having a small audience is fine provided that that audience is engaged and interested in what you’re doing, because you’re putting out content that speaks to them and is important to them. Hopefully, over time, that small engaged following will become a much larger engaged following. There’s no doubt, I guess that having a large following is is helpful because somebody is so suppose you’ve got an Instagram account for your brand. Somebody comes to look at your brand, and you don’t have very many followers, that can be a little bit of a turnoff. But provided the content is engaging and compelling and helpful. People will will catch on begin to follow you. And soon that small engaged following will become bigger and it snowballs from there. Okay, so use that word compelling.

David Bain 2:57
So So how do you make your Instagram profile compelling, or your initial posts compelling to encourage more people, I guess, to follow you. So it’s so to certain degree, one of the more important aspects of the first impression that people get from your brand on Instagram.

Ben Leonard 3:13
So in my opinion, your Instagram feed needs to be a reflection of your brand. And your brand, it needs to be a reflection of your customer. So people care about themselves. Even the nicest people in the world care about themselves very deeply in terms of, you know, we’re all a little bit almost selfish, and brands need to be a reflection of the customers that they serve. So when we’re building our brand avatar, we need to make sure that our Instagram feed aligns with that. So somebody comes on, you know, suppose you’ve got a an arts and crafts brand, somebody coming on to your Instagram feed needs to see something that’s a reflection of them in their interest, it’s no use just showing off all the best arts and crafts creations in the world. Because that doesn’t speak to the customer. And they can’t see themselves in that you want to show sort of real organic, often user generated content that people can relate to. Okay, okay, so

David Bain 4:09
that’s the brand. But what about post we’re working to posts have been working best for you.

Ben Leonard 4:15
Often user generated content, which you can then brand up to, to either a high high degree, or you know, very subtly branded app, or sometimes just repost the user generated content in its original form. What I like to do is take user generated content, apply some sort of branded aspects to it like our, you know, brand logo for instance, and make it look a little bit more like something we created but of course, tagging the customer in that and giving them credit for it, and it it demonstrates social proof. It’s showing other people on your Instagram feed. Here’s another ordinary person like you doing the hobbies that you do buying the products that you’re interested in and they’re on our feed.

David Bain 5:02
I love the fact that you lead with your user generated content there because I was checking out the beast gear Instagram chat, it’s not a channel, was it? It’s, it’s a profile was the correct result for that

Ben Leonard 5:14
profile or feed or channel? Okay, great. Okay, so

David Bain 5:17
there’s no number one word relapse, because obviously you have different words for different social networks and what a blank they are and what the Instagram thing is called. But I had a look at your your channel this morning. And obviously, quite a few posts are user generated content. And that encourages a lot of interaction to begin with, because obviously, the initial person that’s being featured that sent you the content once their friends to know that they’ve been featured on on a brand that they’re particularly passionate about is a great way of initiating that interaction on there. So how do you actually get someone to send you content to begin with,

Ben Leonard 5:54
so many people are on social media now, anyway, and in particular, Instagram is obviously an enormous social media channel. And the whole purpose of social media and indeed, Instagram is, is to post pictures of ourselves, and to be a little bit vain and to attract attention. So many ways, you don’t really have to do very much at all to get people to post because they just will, of course, you need to have a brand that is quite say instagrammable. And in many ways, I was quite fortunate in that I started fitness brand and it is very popular among fitness fans to post pictures of themselves in the gym, or pictures of themselves. achieving something so perhaps achieving a personal best in a very heavy weight lifting exercise, for instance, and post a video or picture of themselves doing that exercise using your in my case base gear equipment. But equally, people who are found involved cooking might show themselves with their favourite, you know, very expensive, flashy Japanese knives, or somebody might have the latest new crochet Gizmo, and they’ll post that. But of course, you can’t incentivize customers to post. So one thing I used to do was I would in the product, insert flyer, which would come with with the products that I sold, I would mention that if you post a picture of yourself with our product will enter you into a monthly draw to win a prize. So you can you can add an incentive to get people on there.

David Bain 7:19
Great stuff. Okay. Let’s move on to messaging and how you actually move use messaging and Instagram because I know you’re a real advocate for using messaging a lot in Instagram. So why do you encourage people to do that? And also, the second part of that question, do you manage Instagram chat inside Instagram, or the Facebook business suites or maybe a third party service?

Ben Leonard 7:41
So yeah, I’m a big fan of messaging on Instagram. And the reason is that people buy from people, not that not brands until your Nike or Tesla people buy from people. And too many people, they start a small business and then immediately sort of hide behind this veil of their business rather than being upfront and very personal about who they are, who is the person behind this business. And what I found, when I first started doing this on Instagram was the people responded very well to being spoken to directly by the brand owner, or at least a representative from the brand. So somebody you know, would post a picture of themselves with one of my products, let’s say it was a weightlifting belt. And I would like the post comment on it. But then I started to message people as well. And I found that when I was messaging people, and having a real engaged, organic and true conversation with them, they responded very well. And they were very happy to reciprocate the attention I was giving them by perhaps leaving me a nice review. For my product or my brand. People like to get to know your brand that you need to get people to know and like and trust you. And a great way to do that is to show interest in them in their life. So suppose somebody had posted themselves with one of my weightlifting belts, I might click on their post, and then click on their profile and take you know, 30 seconds to a minute to scan their profile and learn a little bit of information about them. And then send them a message showing empathy and interest in them and their life and the content in that post. And that then an organic conversation from there will spiral and these are the kinds of people that then become evangelical fans of your brand. They’ll leave a great review for you if you ask them to you might not then even need to ask them to you could offer them a deal inside of that private message to get them back on your website to buy from you again.

David Bain 9:35
It just works when you show interest in people at that level. Hence the saying the chat fitness is easier. I’m a plumber. How do you preach being a plumber on Instagram?

Ben Leonard 9:45
I think the answer there is to do a few things. One is to be a little bit different. So make your Instagram feed stand out. You don’t need to just post pictures of you know plumbing tools or or yourself you know, mending radiators are something but people buy buy products and services when they have a problem to be solved. And you just need to demonstrate that you, you have the pain, you have the medicine for the customer or potential customers pain. So if you can demonstrate that in a way on Instagram that gets your customer to know you and like you and trust you, then when they have that experience that pain or problem again, you know, their boiler is broken, they’ll come back to you. Obviously, you know, the first place people look for a plumber isn’t necessarily Instagram. But if you can start generating this a little bit of a different thing here, I’m more talking about talking to my customers on Instagram, for a physical product for a service like plumbing, you’re probably going to need to try and generate some interest through some some some viral content. And then when people have that that pain or problem, they’ll remember that you have the solution for it when the time comes,

David Bain 10:54
I love one tip that you shared with me beforehand was that you use a product insert to drive customers to Instagram. So I was thinking it might have been the other way around, we actually got customers Instagram and actually drove them towards your physical product. But is it the other way around? Do you actually get customers from elsewhere and then make them aware of your Instagram channel after that?

Ben Leonard 11:15
Yeah, it’s both. So it’s a two way relationship. So for instance, my my brand, we generated most of our sales on Amazon. And as so many physical products, our sales are now on Amazon. And in my opinion, every brand should have an Amazon presence, even if they would prefer the majority of their sales to go through their own website purely because everyone is shopping there. And that’s where all the eyeballs are. So what we do is we acquire customers on Amazon, they receive our product, and then through the follow up email and also through a with it with a PDF attachment with an instruction guide. And then also with with the product User Guide, or the product insert that would come with the product, we would encourage them to go to our Instagram. From there, we’ve encouraged them to go to our Instagram, they bought a fitness product quite likely to post themselves on on social media with it. And this is where we come in, we message everyone who follows us comment on their post, message them when they post, engage them in a conversation showing interest in empathy about their life. And coming from the position of being an authority on this topic, whether it’s fitness or knitting or motorbikes or whatever, perhaps offer them a discount or a website, ask them to review the product for us back on Amazon, or whatever we wish to ask them for review could be on our own site. So it’s a two way street really, because then we’re what we’re doing is those people will then go back and buy from us again, hopefully now on our site on Amazon. But they’re also posting we can repurpose that content and post it. The content we post encourages other people who haven’t bought from us yet to now go and buy from us. So it it’s a it’s a flywheel effect.

David Bain 12:55
Got you got you and and seeing in the chat. How good is Instagram for local business? It just does Instagram maybe benefits more of a national or international brand that can attract followers from all over the place?

Ben Leonard 13:07
I think the answer sort of overall is probably yes. But that’s not to say that a local business shouldn’t have an Instagram account. Because if you’re a local business that really engages with your local community demonstrates the perhaps you you do good in the community, you can build a loyal and engaged following which is very particular in terms of the geography. So if you if you have a business in Bristol, and you’ve got a euro euro, your local health food cafe in Bristol, I mean, food lends itself so nicely to Instagram, so post on there and and not just random pictures of the stuff you’re selling but post about everything that you’re doing create compelling, helpful, useful, free content. This builds a sense of reciprocity and the people in Bristol who are following your your your health food shop. And with that good feeling and reciprocity they now feel towards you, they’re more likely to come and buy from you.

David Bain 14:09
Got you. So I mean, I would say your process is broken down. Obviously it’s worked very well for you however, is it not the case that it would take a lot of time for a marketer to do this. I know you advocates using a VA, could you perhaps summarise the process that you recommend them to take and perhaps how much time it does tend to take on an on a day to day or weekly basis?

Ben Leonard 14:34
Yep. So let’s imagine that you start just starting this process. So you’ve got a business could be a local business, like we just described a healthy shop in Bristol, or you could be selling online, maybe you’re selling arts and crafts online, on your own website and on Amazon, whatever doesn’t matter. You probably start doing this yourself because in my opinion before you outsource anything, you need to have at least a decent understanding of how the process works out If you can’t manage the process, and you can’t manage the people doing it, so I would encourage you to message everyone who follows you, you know, take it take an hour a day or a half hour a day to begin with and see if that’s enough time. And if you’re spending more than about an hour a day on this, you’re probably reaching the point where it’s time to outsource it. So message everyone who follows you comment on everyone who posts message them, as well as commenting, and engaging in a real conversation about them. So suppose, let’s go back to the beast gear example. If somebody followed me, I might say, Hey, thanks for following hope you’re well, great pictures of your training session the other day, like a tough workout. I see you’re in Edinburgh. That’s my favourite city in the UK. Because I haven’t just sent them a random message, I’ve taken the time to click on their profile. Look at the pictures of their training session the other day, and notice that they’re in Edinburgh write it that otherwise it just feels false. No one’s going to that doesn’t wash, it has to be genuine and real. Perhaps somebody posted a picture of themselves with your product. So you might say, you know, hey, Dave, thanks for tagging us, in your photo, great action shot of you. With your weightlifting belt that look really heavy, how many reps did you manage winky face, and then take it from there and have a real conversation. Over time after doing this for a little while, you’ll be able to build out some general templates of the type of thing to say and build out a standard operating procedure and train somebody to do this. And that could be somebody who’s your employee locally, or it could be a freelancer who may also be relatively local, or there could be you know, on the other side of the world.

David Bain 16:33
Great. Okay. I mentioned earlier that we’ve got Rebecca Ward’s are listening in on clubhouse and patiently in the background there. Rebecca, what are your thoughts on this? Um, I think we had brief conversations before beforehand, and you were looking for a ban on Instagram. But I mentioned that it was probably the best gear brand to look for. What are your thoughts initially on personal brand versus business brand on Instagram? And is there any part of Ben’s process that you’ve got an opinion on?

Ben Leonard 17:02
Yes.

Rebecca Ward 17:04
It was really interesting listening to Ben, explain that. Because I’m probably saying when I’m talking to my friends, clients, customers, to do the things that that Ben is telling people to do. But the way Ben’s explained it, he said, why you should be doing that, what the benefits are. And sort of showing you what that funnel we’ll talk about funnels. But we don’t really understand what it means. But I think the way Ben’s explained that you can then see the process of if I do that, that is going to happen. And actually that is going to benefit me. And also make the customer and client happy. Because if they like your products, they’re going to be happy to to buy again for you from you. I often buy stuff on Amazon and then think I need another one of those or that was quite good. I’ll get, you know, slightly different one and go back and search for the thing that I’ve bought. But if that person had contacted me and followed up with me, I’m probably if I’m happy with the product going to be more, you know, want to buy from them again, because they’ve reached out spoken to me, it’ll be easier to order from them next time because I know the product is there. I know I was happy with that. I know I was happy with the service. And then I’m going to be become a repeat customer.

David Bain 18:28
I was hoping that you’d see I disagree with everything he was saying.

Unknown Speaker 18:32
It was it was interesting, because I don’t like the word funnel. So I you were I was listening to it in a way that I wanted you to convince me that that was the right thing to do. But I do agree. I think you it’s not about followers. It’s about having an engaged audience. I don’t have masses of followers. I don’t need masses of followers. I’ve actually got enough work like that I can cope with at the moment. I’d like to grow eventually. But you know, I see my followers as my community that I help and if they’ve got a question they asked me, and if I had hundreds of 1000s of people, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Also, lots of people just post just posting go off you have posted for today that’s done and dusted. But now you’ve got to go back check the posts, see who’s commented see who’s liked when they’re commented comment back with a question so that you’re building up a relationship with them. I mean, for me, that’s just a natural thing to do. I’m not a salesy person, but I’m interested in people but you can see the benefit of that if you are selling products or a service to build up that that rapport with people.

Ben Leonard 19:49
You hit the nail on the head when you said that you’d built your own your own group of people, you you’ve developed your tribe, and your tribe because of the way you have built relationship with them. They feel reciprocity towards you, they have good feeling and goodwill for you, and are therefore more likely to buy your product or service in the future than just search and buy something else except

Rebecca Ward 20:13
play. And that’s the reason I’m here today. Because David said, need somebody who knows Instagram, and my name was brought forward. I didn’t have to pitch to David, I didn’t have to put out an ad. It’s just that people know me for social media, and particularly Instagram at the moment. And that’s how that sort of reputation. You know, Ian’s seen me. He’s spoken to me before. He knows he can trust me.

David Bain 20:39
One of the thoughts about Instagram actually, is that over the last week or so, since I’ve been broadcasting on clubhouse, the clubhouse offers you the ability to be able to link to your Twitter profile on your Instagram handle. And from there, people can find out more about you or dm you. And I’ve received a few direct messages on Instagram, from people on clubhouse because they’ve discovered me on clubhouse. And that’s really just opened me up into actually realising direct messages are the the hidden piece of gold that Instagram offers. And it’s a wonderful way to let people who don’t know you to have a conversation with you directly. Is that something you’d agree with Rebecca?

Ben Leonard 21:23
Yes, definitely. Absolutely. And I think a lot of people do miss us that, that, you know, you connect with them, and immediately they’ve sent you some sort of pitch, or, you know, they send me a message, they haven’t really read what I’ve done properly. This tends to happen a lot on LinkedIn, and they say, I want to grow your followers or your sales or whatever like that. Or do you want to help with social media, and I might even haven’t even read my profile, and you’re pitching to me, you know, you need to get to know the person. And just because it’s it’s nice to to be social, and you never know who you’re gonna meet. And it might be reciprocal, that it’s a collaboration. And you know, somebody who works in a gym has bought your gym gear. And because you’ve been nice to them and treated them as a person, they then recommend your products to the rest of the people in the gym.

David Bain 22:17
Definitely. Listen, Rebecca, I’m sure we could continue this conversation for a lot longer, which makes me think you have a wonderful future guests and Digital Marketing Radio. And hopefully, we can persuade you to come on at some point in the future. But thanks so much for adding value today. And you can give me your opinion from clubhouse.

Ben Leonard 22:35
No problem at all. It was really interesting actually hearing Ben’s sort of process there. And I’ll definitely be staying in contact with with Ben. And I think, yeah, like you were saying, now that from clubhouse, you can go straight through to somebody’s Instagram profile. Everyone is trying to up their Instagram game at the moment. So this is perfect,

David Bain 22:59
super, super. Well, hopefully you can stay listening in there. And we can maybe even get a further opinion from you later on. But in the meantime, let’s segue into part two of our discussion. So it’s a time for Ben’s thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So let’s start off with SECRET SOFTWARE. So Ben, share our lesser-known martech tool is bringing you a lot of value the moment and why that tool is important for you.

Ben Leonard 23:22
Sure, yep, I really like a tool called seller chatbot. As the name implies, it’s a chatbot. For sellers, it’s also been created by sellers is an important part of my sort of whole Amazon to off Amazon and back again, funnel if you like or network is more of a network than a funnel, if you like, it’s really powerful. It has an extraordinary number of fantastic inbuilt chat flow templates for you to use. The way that I’m using it is, it’s similar to what I described earlier with Instagram, I’m driving people to Intuit from my product inserts, my product PDFs, and also my email marketing, which allows me to have a cross pollinated, if you like, sweet of have touchpoints with customers. So for instance, I will have a flyer with a product which will say get your user guide here and go to this URL when you go to the URL. And the URL lands you directly into the chatbot. And then quite a few things kind of magically happen. I’ve tagged that URL. So somebody’s coming into the chat bot, I know which product they bought, and I therefore know what category they’re interested in. So I can then market to them inside of my chat bot only to market specific products which would be appropriate for that person. So somebody bought a boxing product from me I’ve tagged them as like in boxing and I’ll sell them cross sell them other boxing products. I won’t try to Sell powerlifting equipment to them the same time I deliver on my promise and I give them the user guide there and then right in the chat, and also deliver them a demonstration video, that chat now gives them a touch point to instantly on their phone, ask questions and get customer service. And I can now broadcast message to them offer them deals, I’ll offer them a deal straightaway there and then in that original flow to drive them back to my site, because that the time somebody is most likely to buy from you is when they’ve just bought from you. So from that point of view, it’s incredibly powerful. I’ll also populate chat from email. So email marketing is really important. And I use it to drive sort of about 30% of website revenue. And I’ll cross pollinate the flow there. So I have a classic email and one of my it’s one of my welcome series emails it. It asks people if they would like to join a secret deals chat, and they open the email, they click the button, and they land in the chat bot, and I immediately offer them a deal. And they’re now subscribed to my chat bot, and I can market to them in the future. So that’s that cellar chat bot, it does a whole bunch of other stuff, you can use it to help launch and rank Amazon products. You can integrate it with a Facebook ad to drive somebody into a flow to get them to search for your product on Amazon, and then buy it at a discount, which will help you rank for the keywords that you asked them to search for powerful stuff. Yeah,

David Bain 26:25
I love the strategy overview as well as the software recommendation. So thanks for sharing that there. But let’s move on to something that you aren’t using actually from something that you currently use NEXT ON THE

Bot 26:35
LIST. So

David Bain 26:36
what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet? But you want to test soon?

Ben Leonard 26:40
Yeah, it’s, it’s Amazon attribution. So I mentioned before that a significant proportion of my first brands sales came on Amazon, which is fine. Obviously, you know, in exchange for all the eyeballs on Amazon, you give away a percentage to Jeff Bezos. And of course, the customer is not your customers, Amazon’s customers. So you can’t it’s difficult to remarket back to them, you can but it’s tricky. And unfortunately, when you drive outside traffic to Amazon, you can’t properly measure how effective that traffic is. So you know, I can drive Facebook ads to my own website, say built on Shopify, and I can see how much it cost to get a sale. And I can see my return on adspend. for Amazon, that has been impossible until now or very soon. So Amazon attribution is in beta. And it’s coming for the UK soon. And it this will allow us to as as ecommerce business owners and marketers to measure the success or lack of success of driving traffic from external sources, like whether it’s Facebook, or YouTube or Instagram or whatever, to our Amazon listings. And I think Amazon is very smart to bring this in. Because, you know, some sometimes I know I’m one of these people, people have been hesitant to drive traffic to Amazon because they simply can’t understand or they can’t measure how helpful it is. So they want to drive it back to their own side, the moment we can understand how much how well it’s working, we’ll be more inclined to drive it to Amazon. So Amazon’s very smart to give us this tool.

David Bain 28:09
Exciting stuff. And do you think this is something appropriate for for almost any type of business? Or is it only for businesses that are actively selling something on Amazon?

Ben Leonard 28:19
I think it’s only for business. It’s the Amazon attribution model. So it’s it’s for it’s for people driving traffic to to products on Amazon. However, that’s not to say you need to be you’re selling on Amazon, plenty of people use the Amazon affiliate scheme. Yeah, to drive traffic to Amazon. And if the attribution model will help them to see how effective it how well it’s working, then that that, that that’s no bad thing, either. Yeah, I

David Bain 28:45
guess that’s what I was thinking about. Because I’ve used the Amazon affiliate programme, right many people in the past, and that doesn’t necessarily have to be your sole source of income. And it could perhaps be an interesting way of gathering extra data on your target audience.

Ben Leonard 29:03
Yeah, so I’ve been thinking about how I might use it, because I like to drive traffic to my own site, because then I own the customer. And I can remark it to them, and benefit from the customer lifetime value. So having Amazon attribution is going to be like a football manager with too many good strikers, you’ve got a bit of a headache. So possibly, I’m thinking about what I’ll do when this is fully available is run ads to my site retarget those who don’t buy and drive them back to my page on Amazon, because typically, Amazon has a higher conversion rate, because they’ve got all that trust with the customer, everybody knows is basically going to arrive, so many people have prime even if you don’t have prime, it’s going to arrive pretty quickly. So I think that might be at least something

David Bain 29:44
that I’ll test interesting and you can drive them back to Amazon using your affiliate link as well as if they don’t buy your own product then you can perhaps make revenue. Yeah.

Ben Leonard 29:53
Yes, although the affiliate programme is tricky. You can easily get but I’ve been banned from Amazon’s affiliate programme and I don’t even understand why It’s a funny one Amazon’s affiliate programme has has some complex rules. So if you join up saying that you’re going to post links on your blog, and then you email your email list with the link, this is what I did. You can get banned because it Amazon knows that the traffic came from an email and not from your blog. It’s a funny one. Yeah, it

David Bain 30:21
is funny. Okay. Well, let’s move on to the this or that route. So this is the quick response Ryan’s 10. quick questions, Just 2 rules here. Try not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to use the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready? Yep. Tick Tock off Twitter, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn,

Bot 30:44
Facebook, YouTube or

David Bain 30:45
podcast. Traffic or leads, traffic, paid search or SEO, SEO, ads or influencers?

Ben Leonard 31:00
influences

David Bain 31:01
Google ads, or Facebook ads,

Ben Leonard 31:03
Facebook ads,

David Bain 31:05
email or chat, email, Mar tech stack or all in one platform. a one to one or scale. Scale. I thought you’d leave your boy for that one there is Oh, so it’s maybe a little bit surprised that you chose email over chat. Given that time. We already talked about chat software as well as email still more important.

Ben Leonard 31:28
Email still, number one email still the most powerful, powerful and profitable, in my opinion marketing tool in what for whether in e commerce, whether you’re selling physical products or services. I remember when chat bot came out and everybody said emails dead or it’s dying? Well, that isn’t the case. That’s proved not to be the case. And in fact, as as chat becomes more regulated, it will become more difficult. There was a gold rush. And now it’s getting more regulated and email. The open rates are lower. But I think that the the goodwill and the trust you build with your customers, and the overall conversion rate over time, makes it more beneficial. Everybody checks their emails. Okay,

Bot 32:11
so now it’s time for the $10,000

question.

David Bain 32:15
If I were to give you $10,000, and you had to spend it over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend it on? And how would you measure success?

Ben Leonard 32:22
Okay, for my personal brand, and my ecommerce brokerage, I would use it to get are actually some of the huge podcasts out there charge fees of 1000s of pounds dollars. And you see, I’m not a huge podcast. No, Digital Marketing Radio is the biggest and best podcast in the entire universe. But there are podcasts out there that charge enormous sums of money for appearances. So I would I would do that. And to measure the success, I’d create landing pages unique to that podcast with a free resource, and then measure conversions through it and potentially give a unique discount code as well. And the reason for that is because my target audience as an e commerce expert, if you will, and as an e commerce brokerage, listens to those podcasts. And then for physical products, so you know, more brands that I’m building, influencer marketing. So with my first brand bass gear that worked with micro influencers, although it took several years to kind of get to a good level. So I’d potentially pay an agency to manage it. A simple sort of ROI measure on that is kind of tricky. You could use a platform like reflection, I use reflection a lot with with be scary plugs into Shopify, to track your conversions and then pay a commission. And that would probably be a good part of it. But otherwise, I might just need to consider like a sort of, you know, taking that 10 that 10k and make it a ring fence budget for simply saying I’m going to give up this 10k to just get eyeballs on the brand.

David Bain 33:59
I think that’s one of the most comprehensive answers so far on that I always like diving deeper than normally some people give me just one specific answer. I would spend it on content, or I would spend on this and I have to delve deeper and deeper just to get something really specific and a great example for everyone. But um, I was gonna ask you, okay, how would you measure the value of appearing on podcast? No, he shared? Yeah, I would create a bespoke landing page for each podcast. And I would I would target well this year. So I don’t think there’s any follow up questions I can ask in relation to that one.

Ben Leonard 34:28
So I tend to overthink stuff. So that’s good. That’s really good. So

David Bain 34:32
let’s shift the focus then to someone else who deserves it. So that is MAGICAL MARKETER who’s an up and coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to what can we learn from them, and where can we find them? Sure.

Ben Leonard 34:43
This chap called Paul Harvey, and he is one of the creators of cellar chatbot which is the tool I mentioned earlier that I really like. And so he has created this chat bot because he is an e commerce seller so he kind of understands what e commerce sellers want. He’s not I find often in especially in digital marketing and the online world where you have a lot of people bringing shovels to the Gold Rush, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. We all need shovels to dig for gold, but it’s the shovel sellers who also dig for gold to understand what people want that are the best. And because Paul Harvey has Eazy E commerce seller, he understands what we all need in our chatbot so he developed a really good one. So that’s seller chat. bot.com. Yeah, I have no affiliation to that other than I think it’s great, all superb stuff. Well, we have heard

David Bain 35:33
so much value from you. There, Ben, you’ve been listening to Ben Leonard from banner dot pro Ida Pro. And on today’s episode Digital Marketing Radio, you were sharing so much value in terms of Instagram funnel to begin with, obviously, your solo chatbot SECRET SOFTWARE that you shared as well, I’ll make sure that there’s links to that the other software recommendations that you had your MAGICAL MARKETER can related to that there in the show notes and also in the YouTube description there as well. So you can also will be able to find that on Digital Marketing radio.com I also want to give a special thanks to Rebecca Ward from think social be social comm for joining some club eyes too. And hopefully we can get Rebecca on a future episode of Digital Marketing Radio as well. Ben was the best social platform is it Instagram is somewhere else for someone to reach out to you and say hi.

Ben Leonard 36:19
You can say hi to all of them. My handle is Ben Leonard Pro, which is the name of my website Ben Lerner dot Pro. look me up on LinkedIn. Yeah, I’ll happily Say hi on all the moves. Viewed code DMR on my website, you’ll get 10% off the extraordinary Instagram funnel. Wonderful,

David Bain 36:37
wonderful and there’s that bespoke call to action everyone go for it. I’ve been your host ever been. You can also find me producing podcasts for B2B brands over casting credit.com if you want to watch the next episode, live subscribe on the Digital Marketing Radio YouTube channel. That’s probably the best place to to do that at the moment if you want to watch live. And if you’re already listening to the show on Apple podcast, Spotify, amazon music, other places. leave a review of course but tell a friend it’s good to share as well. Until we meet again. Stay hungry. Stay Foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

Bot 37:13
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