HI Victoria here, owner and director of The Bookkeeper Hub, HBA Encompass, and of course author of Zest for Success. And yeah. Back in my car studio still waiting for my daughter at swimming training. Still banging on about marketing but as I’ve said I’m an accountant and a bookkeeper not a marketing expert but some of these fundamentals are really important to talk about.
Today we’re gonna talk about getting more bang for your buck, levering technology, and how to work smarter rather than harder. Because I know that I like you don’t have a billion dollar budget like Coca-Cola. So today, we’re gonna talk about getting found and getting out there. And the best way you can do it is to leverage technology. Now, there are thousands of marketers out there who will contact you mainly from East Europe or India and they want to get you on the first page of Google. They want you to pay. They want you to use SEO to get found, to be on the first page. Well you know what, no one can guarantee you that you will be on the first page of Google. The only person who knows Google’s algorithm is Google. I don’t think there’s actually anyone in Google itself that knows the whole algorithms. I think it’s all spread out between different people so that no one can ever share their secret. So anyone who can say to you “I can guarantee to get you on the first page of Google. I know how it works” is speaking absolute garbage. There are tips and tricks however to get out there to make sure that you are found. The best thing that I can explain to you about Google and its algorithms and the way it’s explained to me is that there’s thousands of little Google bots that search the world wide web. And they’re searching for thing that involve content. Stuff that’s making people understand and learn more. Things that are easy to read. Your website needs to be mobile friendly. And this is a whole heap of things but at the end of the day, content is king. If you’re putting out useful content that can make people’s life easier and it’s easy to understand and it’s not copied from somewhere else, then Google is gonna pick you up. The best suggestion that I can have for you is exactly what we’re doing here which is harnessing the power of video. I don’t know if you know this. Google loves YouTube. Now, chances are you are either watching this video on our Facebook page or on YouTube because we’ve decided to use those two as supposed carriers of information to get our message out there. But it’s important that when you put it up, that you do put in information out in a typed form as well of what you’re doing because that’s how the Google bots pick it up. But Google does, at the moment, is loving video. And the more stuff you can get up there and video, the better off you’re going to be. Hence the fact that I’m sitting here in my car at 7:30 in the morning outside the local high school talking to you guys about marketing. So, I suppose work a bit smarter. Do your own SEO by making sure that you’ve got information out there in the places that it’s gonna get found. If you are gonna to look at video and I know that it’s probably a bit silly and me sitting here talking to you about creating video and here I am sitting in my car. But if you wanna see an example of a video that’s gone viral and it’s just gone up and it’s nut. Get on YouTube and search blender guru. Have you heard of these guys? They have this blender and their marketing manager went to ‘you know what we need to get this out to the world how great this blender is’. And he used to do I think it was a weekly presentation of the stuff that you could put in this blender. Now, it started off with ice and the usual type of things. But it got crazier and crazier to the extent that in one of his videos he blends a brand new iPhone just to prove that his product is that strong and that capable. And here I am in Australia years later explaining it to you. It’s just an amazing thing. Now, I’m not expecting that this video is going to go that viral. No way. I’m just hoping that the content that I’m giving you is giving you some values, some bang for your buck, and making you think that ‘you know what these guys do know all about businesses and when I want a bookkeeper who understands what I’m doing; understands that I’m trying to get ahead.’— that you think about The Bookkeeper Hub because you’ve got better things to do. So, let’s talk about — still on the getting found method and leveraging technology. Let’s talk about getting stuff away. So, the best way to get out there is to get an email database. And the best way to do that is obviously to collect emails. Now, there is legislation in Australia, an anti-spam legislation. You can’t just go out and collect emails randomly and send emails to people that have nothing to do with them. There is an exemption for business-to-business. But personally, I want people to opt in to me, to give me their email in exchange for something that I know they’re gonna give value to. We all know. We see courses. We see downloads. You opt-in. You get what you wanna read. And for months and months and months, you get email after email. So, I’m not talking about spamming the daily life of someone just because you’ve got their email. I’m talking about using it wisely. So getting something from someone in exchange for something. Having a giveaway or a download that is giving people value that in exchange they are willing to give you their email address for that you can then use through an email system to send out regular useful information. Remember a couple of days ago, we talked about hunting versus farming. Same analogy is applied here. Making sure that when you’re selling, sending these emails out, we are farming our people. We are giving them value. Yes, a sale needs to be gone at the end of the day. The recommendation is a five email process. When there’s for full information email, a sale email, for more information email, a selling email. And you’ll see that if you get anything else from us that’s the way that we do it. But it’s not about jamming your ‘sale sale sale buy now’. Then the throw to the person who’s giving you their email address, they’re giving you something valuable. Treat it wisely. So let’s talk about the type of things that are good downloads. Now, I’m gonna have a bit of a read of this because it’s something that I’ve got a list here of. So you know the other day, we were talking about strangers. So something that they might wanna download from you because they’re the ones who are initially giving you their email address is a fact sheet, a map, or a poster, or something that is relevant to your product that’s gonna be of interest or of value to them. Your suspects, you’re moving along the timeline of how warm your customers are. They might want a checklist, a road map, or a strategy on how to get past their own obstacles. Our prospects were getting warmer and warmer, a free product or a trial period. For instance, we caught off a more affordable offer two months free trial of our Xero Fix-It service to somebody. Then our customers, they’re people who have bought off us once that we’re trying to get to buy off us repeatedly. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean to be a download or a virtual thing. It could be a loyalty card. Think about how many cards you’ve got in your wallet that you buy a pie and you get a stamp and when you get to ten you get a free pie or a coffee or whatever it happens to be. Bonus offers — on going, low cost, high margin products such as a virtual community or a free ongoing education material. So when I look at that, I look at our products and services. Our key service is bookkeeping. But for those people who wanna do it themselves, we offer bookkeeping training. If someone has bought our bookkeeping or bought our book track more particularly our bookkeeping training, we know that they’ve bought from us once and we can offer to them a Xero Fix-It service because they’re gonna do it themselves. We’ve given them the knowledge to do it but from time to time they want some help, if we can get them to subscribe to our service then we’ve got reoccurring income, coming from these people. Yeah. I just told you about our secret. But you know what it’s not a very good secret. It’s just a straight membership site and by doing that we need to make sure that we’re continuing to give value back to our members. That the fix its that we’re doing are correct. That we’re giving the service, the turn around. And that the videos that are going in our library getting bigger and bigger so that you’ve got something that’s worth while subscribing to. So it’s a win-win situation. Everything in marketing and sales needs to be a win-win situation.
So tomorrow, we’re going to talk about the actual getting you in front of strangers and then talking about building your email funnel but for me that’s enough for today. I wanna go get my daughter to school and I talk to you on the other side.