Special guest Laura Roeder, founder of MeetEdgar, joins the experts to detail the strategies that grew MeetEdgar to over 7,000 customers—without venture capitalists. Laura, Molly, Keith, and Ralph discuss the funnels and acquisition tactics that are driving MeetEdgar’s success, along with how they’re reducing customer churn. Listen and learn how you can apply these same strategies in your own company.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The “catch-all” strategy inspired by MeetEdgar that is generating 500-700 opt-ins a week for DigitalMarketer (« that you can apply to your website, too).
- The three strategies MeetEdgar uses to generate leads and move them through the Customer Journey towards a conversion (« use this as inspiration within your own company).
- The messaging and hook MeetEdgar uses to connect with people who aren’t aware of their product.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
MeetEdgar
Episode 78: 8 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2017: Facebook Messenger Ads, Ad Load, and Brand Personality
Episode 81 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Welcome back to Perpetual Traffic Episode Number 81. Today, we are excited to have a very special guest. Somebody that we’ve been wanting to get on. We’ve been trying to get on the show for quite a while, and, finally, we’re able to make it happen thanks to additional help from Mr. Ryan Deiss.
|
| The guest we have on today, I’m really excited about because a lot of times on this show, we talk about unique strategies that we use that are sometimes against the typical grain of how everybody else says to do things. Things about how really treating these platforms differently, like you would treat somebody in the real world.
|
|
| The one thing that I’ve noticed about Laura Roeder, who’s going to be on today, I’ve just loved seeing how she’s built her brand, her personal brand, her social media, her blog, everything that she’s done and now recently launched and has a super, super successful software as a service company called MeetEdgar, which we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about her unique customer acquisition strategy. Like I said, Laura has always done things against the grain and very, very successfully. I love that you’re on the show today. Laura, thanks again for coming on today. I appreciate it.
|
|
| Laura Roeder: | Yeah, thank you. I’m excited to be here.
|
| Ralph Burns: | Molly really made this happen. Molly tell us the story. Ryan came up to you at the office or whatever and what happened?
|
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, Ryan was like, “I’ve finally met Laura Roeder in person, face-to-face.” He was like, “F-to-F.” I was like, “Who are you?” He’s like, “You’ve got to have Laura on the podcast. She’s doing some really, really cool stuff in terms of customer acquisition.” And I know some of the tips that you gave Ryan at that event, we’ve already implemented at DigitalMarketer, which is really, really cool. Thank you so much. Ryan came back really excited and had copy written for landing pages and this whole new process design.
|
| On Perpetual Traffic, we haven’t talked about customer acquisition for a SaaS company. I think the reason we haven’t is that most SaaS companies go about customer acquisition in very different way than any of us have experience doing so. Most of them raise a ton of money or they have a massive affiliate launch. They get a lot of PR from big tech sets likes Mashable or they’re just really well connected in the tech scene. That’s really, in my opinion, where you see the SaaS companies find success.
|
|
| Ryan came back as was like, “Molly, Laura’s doing it totally different.” So we really want to dig in today and figure out what you’re doing and how you’re creating this slow but steady acquisition process. I know you guys already have 7,000 customers which is pretty amazing. I know we use MeetEdgar here at DigitalMarketer. Again, excited to have you on and really just want to start the conversation with tell us a little bit about you. I’m sure you tell this story all the time, but how did this come about? How did MeetEdgar happen?
|
|
| Laura Roeder: | I’m sure we have a lot of listeners today coming from the information product training world. That’s where I came from as well. That’s my background. MeetEdgar actually came as the direct result of an information product, which I think is pretty unique. I had developed a methodology for doing social media. Basically, I had realized that if you are trying to create five to 10 original pieces of content to post on social media every day for the rest your life, you have quite a job ahead of you. Which is and how most people approach social media.
|
| Molly Pittman: | It’s so much work.
|
| Laura Roeder: | Yeah, they get really burned out. I realized you should be repeating content on social media. It gets more exposure. I developed this methodology of creating a library of evergreen and different categories. I link through it on social media. I was doing that for my own business. I was teaching people how to do it. People were actually doing and having great results with it. The actual scheduling involved a lot of grunt work. The tools at the time were not very helpful. You had to store all of your status updates in a spreadsheet or Google Doc. You had to copy and paste them over and over and over again. If you had an image, you were screwed.
|
| Molly Pittman: | You’re like, “How’s it going to show up? Are my dimensions correct?
|
| Laura Roeder: | Yeah. All these problems are what led me to create MeetEdgar. I thought why is there not a tool that one, stores in a library of online content. I’m to this day, surprised. I thought that at least that aspect would be copied immediately, once we came out. If not the repeating, “Just please, just store our library. Just show me whatever you sent.” Still most of the other tools don’t do that. Creating a library of all your content and then automatically repeating it is what we taught people to do in the information product. Edgar the software just does it for you.
|
| Molly Pittman: | You know what’s interesting, we actually had someone write a case study on how DigitalMarketer uses Twitter. We lost our social media manager a few months ago. A few of us have really been trying to keep up with Twitter and Facebook and posting new blog posts. Honestly, we’ve been using MeetEdgar. And it’s recycling all of our old stuff. We haven’t had to add anything new. The case study basically said, “Hey, you can use this tool. You can recycle all of your stuff and it still works. Like, look how much traffic DigitalMarketer’s driving. They haven’t added new content, sad face, embarrassed face, in like three or four months.” Which, of course, will change soon. That’s just a testament to how cool that software is.
|
| Ralph Burns: | You know what I think is so cool about your story though is that Sony consultants, I think we all started as consultants. I know Keith and I did. Molly just immediately jumped to rock star status. The thing that you did is you took a consulting business and then created processes and obviously, a SaaS that could replicate what you were doing as a consultant. Which is like every consultants dream. If you’re listening to the show and you’re consultants, you’re saying, “All right, well I’m doing all this one-on-one stuff.” If you haven’t gotten this software and you’re doing social media management, you’re totally missing the boat, without question. You did it from scratch which is so awesome.
|
| Keith Krance: | The tagline on their website is “Want to double your traffic?” The title of our show is Perpetual Traffic. I’m sure it’s a pretty good solution. We talk about page traffic a lot, obviously. We also talk about creating goodwill. A lot of times people need more time. The great thing about it is whether you don’t want to spend a lot of money running your social media and your business, if you don’t have that budget. Or if you do and when you are amplifying that with paid Facebook advertising, YouTube ads, or twitter ads or whatever it is, guess what, you’re building up that following, you’re building up your email list, you’re building up your fan base, and you’re organic reach will continue to increase and improve and generate more ROI on that previous spend that you have been spending on Facebook ads over the past 60, 90 days or 12 to 24 months.
|
| Software like this is so great. If you’re a numbers person and you’re looking at your numbers of what’s my cost per acquisition. If you take something like this, you end up generating more ROI on a long-term basis. And of course creating more goodwill with your audience as well and making it easier, saving time. I love it because you created this out of a need that you needed for your business.
|
|
| How did you launch this and how did it become such a big success so quickly without using outside funding and some of those types of things that people might do with a SaaS?
|
|
| Laura Roeder: | We haven’t raised any money but we did self-fund. Meaning I took profits from the information product business, LKR social media. I took those profits and put them into Edgar. I was kind of all mixed up, but I would say about 200,000, probably went into Edgar to launch it. I just point that out because, we are bootstrapped but also sometimes people are listening who are truly bootstrapped as in earn $5, spend $5. It’s not really fair to compare us because we did have a little money to start out.
|
| I did really consider raising money. I talked to a lot of people who’ve done it and really looked under the pros and cons. Basically, all my friends who did it said, “I would not do it unless I had to do it. So, if you think you can make it work without raising, you should definitely try that first.” In retrospect, it was absolutely the right decision, thinking about future businesses, I would be really hard-pressed to ever raise money. I love it forces you to focus on profitability from day one. I love the idea of the business being proven by its customers. Our customers decide if we’re worth their money every month. If we’re not delivering that value to them, then we’re going to go out of business. I just love that clarity in the business.
|
|
| Molly Pittman: | I can relate to that. Obviously, I don’t own DigitalMarketer and these are all of Ryan’s decisions but knowing that everything is up to us and the team. Not having to listen to other people is nice, to hear their opinions and, “Hey, I invested money and therefore, you know, I have these expectations.” Having that freedom is nice. Also knowing that this is all up to us. We must create the best product. We must have the best customer acquisition strategy. We must be the best we can be because there’s nothing to fall back on.
|
| Ralph Burns: | Let’s get into what were some of the strategies that you used as far as launching this thing.
|
| Laura Roeder: | The most unique thing that we probably do in the software world and something that is probably one of the ideas that Ryan took away is on our homepage, we collect email. Which may lead to a bunch of internet marketers. Doesn’t sound-
|
| Molly Pittman: | You noticed we did that.
|
| Laura Roeder: | It’s not a very innovative idea. In the SaaS world, it’s actually a very innovative idea. If you go to our homepage, our call to action is request an invitation. The downside is that people do often think we’re in beta. They’re like, “Do you exist yet? Have you launched yet?” It’s like, “Yeah, we have 7,000 customers.” We don’t go to a trial right away. We also don’t just go to purchase right away which is what most SaaS companies do. We collect email and then we use that good old-fashioned email marketing to educate them about the product and to become a customer. It’s something that we’ve stuck with over, it’s been two and a half years now because it works really, really well for us. You wouldn’t believe how many people tell me it’s just a terrible idea. We’re selling B2B software. I really am hard pressed to imagine that there’s a lot of B2B software customers that are not willing to give their email address.
|
| Molly Pittman: | That’s really the biggest take away that Ryan got from you, this invitation process. If you go to digitalmarketer.com, we’re absolutely testing this and it’s working so well. Obviously, we’re not a SaaS, but it’s a monthly continuity program. I think even for us, it’s more of the aspect of that get your invitation. It puts the software or the product behind this wall of—
|
| Keith Krance: | Exclusivity.
|
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, this is special. You need to be invited. I haven’t gone through your process. I do know once you enter your email address in our process, on the homepage, they’re going through a second form too. We’re asking questions like, “Are you an agency or consultant? Are you humble enough to ask for help when you need?” That’s really important inside of our group that people ask for help. “Are you willing to help others?” You have to be able to do that to. If you answer these questions incorrectly, this isn’t just a ploy, you will be denied.
|
| Ralph Burns: | I love this. Tell us what kind of systems are you guys using or process are you guys using to drive new customers? Whether it’s cold traffic or warm traffic or not a continual basis.
|
| Laura Roeder: | How I generally think of it is I always have a mix of organic search traffic that we’re growing over time as well as optimizing our paid efforts. What’s amazing about paid acquisition is you give Facebook money, Facebook shows your material to someone. It’s an agreement that you’ve made with Facebook. It’s totally clear that happen.
|
| Obviously, search is not that clear. I’m going to put something out, I’m going to Google likes it and Google may or may not like it and may or may not choose to show it to anyone. Obviously, the big benefit of search is that it can continue to grow organically and build over time and you don’t have to pay for every single eyeball that comes in. We do a lot of content marketing, social media marketing, blogging, all that stuff balanced with Facebook ads. We’ve done AdWords in the past. We’ve experimented with it. We actually haven’t experimented with Twitter or Instagram, or YouTube, or a lot of the other platforms out there because there’s a lot of people on Facebook.
|
|
| Keith Krance: | We’ve noticed.
|
| Laura Roeder: | Most of our leads actually do come from either search traffic or direct traffic. That’s always that mystery one and analytics. Hopefully, word-of-mouth is a big driver process. It seems to be a big driver for us.
|
| Molly Pittman: | I was just thinking on this invitation process, I’m not sure how deep you want to get, but have you guys tested different versions of this? Maybe showing them a trial after they’re invited, or doing a one step, or just different variations. We haven’t gotten to test much and I’m just wondering is this your final like, “This works the best.”
|
| Laura Roeder: | Yeah, one of the big things we play around with is the timing of when they receive the invitation. Because, of course, we want to become customers as quickly as possible. The shorter be tested, always works better. We’ve done it everywhere from two weeks later to as soon as you opt in, you get the invitation. The sooner the better. It’s funny because I think from the company point of view, sometimes you overthink it and you think, “Oh, well we said it was an invitation so maybe it needs to be like something is supposedly is happening.” The lead is usually just sort of excited to get in, see what they see. We have experimented with that. We’ve also experimented with offering different offers after you opt in.
|
| I always think about the startup/ When I lived in L.A., there was one of these startups that came to our house and did your laundry.
|
|
| Molly Pittman: | That nice. I need that.
|
| Laura Roeder: | I got on their list from a Facebook ad. They were the most persistent marketers in the best way. They just sent me offers that just kept getting better and better and better. In this case, it’s just like more and more laundry. They send you the first offer and it’s like, “We’ll do a bag of laundry.” Then it’s like, “We’ll do two bags of laundry.” “We’ll do all your laundry!”
|
| Molly Pittman: | “And we’ll do your friends laundry!”
|
| Laura Roeder: | I always think about that as long as you’re making an offer that is obviously targeted to the right person, you just want to keep making offers. “Don’t want this, how about this?” “Don’t want that, how about that?” What’s so cool about the invitation sequence is that they haven’t signed up for a webinar, they haven’t signed up for a white paper. All that stuff is great, but you don’t really know for sure if they’re interested in what selling. You’re selling something related but it’s not exactly the same. Where if they’re requesting an invitation to DigitalMarketer. All they’re saying is, “Yes, I’m interested in buying this.”
|
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, I want to be a member. We just started running some website conversion campaigns last week on Facebook to warm traffic, so people that know us. I’m not quite sure how an invitation would perform as an ad out to people who don’t know you, of course. Probably not great, but it’s doing well and people are just showing interest in buying, like you said. I think a lot of us try to over complicate the acquisition process. When we first tested this, I was like, “Okay, we’ll see what happens.” I think the biggest benefit, honestly, is all of our acquisition funnels that are built in more of a five-step sequence, those are still running, those are still acquiring customers. This is kind of a catchall for us. It’s on our homepage. I think we’re getting 500 to 700 people a week that are opting in for this just outside of ads. I think it’s a cool way to, even if you’re not a SaaS, to indirectly promote your product on your website. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have a direct offer for your product on your products page. This is just a great catchall for people that might not be interested in buying right now, but they are interested in the product and they might just want to buy in a different way.
|
| We had a conversation last week. We ran a big promotion to this invitation. We were seeing how everything was going to sift out because, like you did, once they applied and they were accepted, we sent them straight to its $38.60 a month. We didn’t do the dollar trial. We were doing the math backwards to figure out, “Okay, what performs better in terms of actually generating customers? Is it this invitation? Or is it the dollar trial? Or you know, is it the a five-step acquisition funnel?” What we’ve realized is you can’t compare apples to oranges. These are all very different.
|
|
| Laura Roeder: | We had to make similar so we know everyone who’s listening will have this little hot tip. We don’t usually give a free trial, but we do have one in customer service’s back pocket, right?
|
| Molly Pittman: | Right, a little down sell.
|
| Laura Roeder: | When the people email, they do sometimes end up getting a free trial and they ask for it. We were looking at the conversion rate for how free trial performs against just signing up right away. Which one has the higher lifetime value in the long-term. It’s difficult to compare because in our case, the people who asked for the free trial. On the one hand, there really, really interesting because they bother to email and have these personal exchange. On the other hand, they’re really not willing to give us any money because they were so intent on getting a free trail.
|
| Molly Pittman: | They’re so skeptical.
|
| Laura Roeder: | It’s interesting testing these things in your business. I think sometimes there’s a bit of a fantasy that you’re just going to get that number. You’re going to be like, “We’re going to do A or B.” There’s going to be a hard number that proves it. I do think a lot of it is really looking at your product and looking at your business and seeing what marketing funnel is really aligned for you. A big reason why we generally steer clear of trials is because Edgar takes a commitment to set up. We’re not a product, like you can use Dropbox and you can share one file and it can take a minute. You’re like, “Oh, cool. I get it. You know, I’m getting the value. I get what this does.” With Edgar, you have to spend at least an hour at first putting your content in, building your library. We have ways to make it easy with our access but it requires some commitment from our customers-
|
| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely.
|
| Laura Roeder: | -to make the product work. We want them in that mindset. Now, we’re making yearly the default because we find that yearly customers just have so much better success rates for the product because they’re in there thinking, “I’m not going to see if this works for me for a month and then decide if I want to continue.” They’re like, “I’ve committed to a year. So, I’m really going to take the time to set this up and really allow it to work for me.” That’s something that sometimes gets overlooked when marketing is not just what funnel performs the best for getting customers. What funnel really matches the value that your product brings.
|
| Molly Pittman: | What’s going to generate the customers that are going to stay around the longest. I think that’s a cool concept to. We spent the last year, obviously innovating in and figuring out how to acquire more customers. A big, big focus on churn and getting people to stay in DigitalMarketer Lab. (Not a DM Lab Member? Start your trial for just $1.) We’ve gone as far as every person that joins receives an actual welcome packet in the mail. It is an online products so this gives them a member’s card and a sticker to put on their computer and something really tangible that they can hold. Different email sequences to really get them to consume the information. What do you guys do after they join to get them to stick around?
|
| Laura Roeder: | Obviously, this has been a huge focus for us as well. One of our biggest challenges has been that set-up.
|
| Molly Pittman: | It takes a lot of work. I think with Edgar too, it’s something you have to be doing enough. I’m probably not saying that correctly. You have to be doing enough with social media to use it. If you had one blog post that was on a rotation, I don’t know how effective the tool would be.
|
| Laura Roeder: | One thing that we do is constantly experiment with our onboarding. We do have a forced onboarding sequence now which means we do make people go through a brief onboarding to make sure they understand the product. Another huge challenge for us is we are very different from our competitors. Which a lot of prospects don’t understand because they’re comparing tools and are thinking like, “Uh, this looks similar to Buffer Hootsuite.” We actually approach social from a different paradigm. If you just log into Edgar without understanding this whole paradigm of “I’m going to create an evergreen library and then it’s going to keep going out.” People, they don’t get it.
|
| Molly Pittman: | Right, absolutely.
|
| Laura Roeder: | People don’t get what we’re doing. That’s why it’s kind of cool for me coming from this background of training in education because once people understand the idea that, “Oh, I can use my evergreen content just like you said. I don’t even have to create new stuff, right? I’ve already spent all this time building a library. This can keep generating traffic for me.”
|
| Once they’re on the same page with that. Edgar is a no brainer. We found for us, the education piece really is huge. The lesson we keep learning is “You can’t tell people enough.” When it’s your stuff, you’re often like, “Oh, but I told them that on the homepage,” or like, “I told them that, you know, in the intro email. They, they know how it works.” We’re like, “We sell to entrepreneurs. They’re busy and they’re not reading every line on our homepage.” I think, honing in on that core concept. For us, we’ve honed in on double your traffic and just explaining to people over and over again, “This is what you’re going to get.”
|
|
| Molly Pittman: | Is there anything inside the actual tool that you guys use for onboarding?
|
| Laura Roeder: | Yeah, we do it mostly via email. We’re experimenting now with more personalization. So now we have someone on our customer service team dedicated to onboarding. We just hired a few weeks ago someone on our marketing team to talk to people on the phone and do demos with them.
|
| Molly Pittman: | Nice.
|
| Laura Roeder: | We’re definitely experimenting within our price point which is a small business price point. We’re less than $100 a month. It’s not the type of price point where you’re doing really in depth long-term personalization stuff with people. At the same time, one they have content loaded, they’re in and they’re going to stick with is. It’s a mix of experimenting with how much hands-on help can we give people and just features in the software. We’ve always had RSS. We changed it to make it much more prominent because we knew that if you connect Edgar to your RSS feed both during initial set up and ongoing, then you’ve won. I always tell people, “If all you did was connect RSS and just have Edgar send out a blog post every day-”
|
| Molly Pittman: | That’s worth it. I think it’s really important in a SaaS or any sort of continuity program to get someone to just do one thing. In our pamphlet and in the onboarding email sequence, it goes through, of course, all of the features of the product and what they can do with it. People already know those. That’s why they bought. It’s not that you shouldn’t reiterate it. They are already sold. We also give them a few action items. We know that the private community is a big aspect. It’s probably the biggest sticking point for most people who stay in the program. We have them join the Facebook group. Then we give them a sentence to post. We give them a few ideas of questions to post and then we get the hashtag. #ImNewHere. Everyone pays close attention to those posts and welcomes people. That’s it. We figured out if we can get someone to post in the group. Their lifetime value is insane. There’s execution plans and calls and deals and all kinds of stuff that goes into this program. If we can get them to consume one piece of it, we know that we’ve immediately increased their lifetime value. For you, you know if you can get them to upload the content, they’re to stay for a while.
|
| I think anyone out there that has a continuity program or a SaaS, really with your onboarding which of course is just as important as your acquisition. If you can figure out that one thing to tell them to do in the onboarding process that you know is really important and will get them to stay, that’ll make a huge difference for you.
|
|
| Keith Krance: | Love it. Love it. For those people that are listening right now they might not have a SaaS, they might not have a software, they might not have a big brand that people are searching for and coming up to their homepage. I’ve got a question for you that I think is a big one that people have a hard time understanding quite a bit. Even back on Episode 78 where we talked about “8 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2017” and beyond. On that episode, I made a comment about how do your ads, specifically if you’re running Facebook ads. What kind of impression do they make on the end user? Even if they don’t click on your ad or even if they don’t take action and opt in. How you connect with that end user that is not aware of the solution that your product or service provides? They may be aware of a challenge but sometimes you have to make them aware. Is there a specific type of just general messaging or strategy that you guys use to help take people to become aware that they need a solution like yours and yours exist and then move them into that funnel for that cold traffic acquisition?
|
| Laura Roeder: | We’ve moved to that positioning of double your traffic and that’s something that we didn’t launch with. That’s something that we have moved to overtime. That’s an interesting way to get people’s attention whether or not you’re looking for a social media tool. And also start to educate them that their social media tool is related to their traffic. Which, of course, often isn’t how people are thinking of social media. They’re thinking of it as a chore that needs to be accomplished. They’re just looking for a tool to help with the chore. I want them to think bigger as a marketer as to what impact can my social media really be having. With ads, we do a mix of that kind of messaging, sending people to our homepage. We also do showing people blog posts just to create like you’re saying that goodwill and education, about our company.
|
| I think it’s interesting what you’re saying because something that we’ve noticed with ads. We’ve experimented with Facebook ads a lot. We’ve had periods of spending a ton and months were we’re not spending anything. I think there’s a big effect, exactly like you’re saying, of people who see the ad, but you can’t track them because they didn’t the interact with the ad. Like you said, maybe the saw that and maybe they Googled you a week later. We’ve noticed that when we stop running ads, it’s this larger trickle of effect where things slowed down unrelated to that direct ad traffic. I’m also not a believer in list cleaning for the same reason. It’s a really unpopular point of view. To me, if someone is seeing our name in their inbox, even if they never click us, that’s just that little extra bit of exposure.
|
|
| Molly Pittman: | Totally. Top of mind.
|
| Keith Krance: | That right there is so underestimated. It’s unbelievable. A while back I was an ecommerce account manager for a $60 million company. They’re in the health and fitness base, they saw a $300 product. They spend about 4 to 500,000 a month on TV in two minutes as well as 28 minute infomercial shows. The key there is they break even barely on an annual basis on their TV. However, it drives all of their other sales. Dick’s Sporting Goods, Costco, Amazon, 250,000 a month. It’s all driven because of the brand awareness that happens from that TV that they run. People do not understand the brand impact that’s happening when you’re running these really, really high quality Facebook ad and video ads and long copy ads, you name it. It just makes a bigger impact than people realize. It’s tough to measure. It really is.
|
| Laura Roeder: | We like online marketing, because supposedly we can measure it. Supposedly we can see exactly what’s happening, but obviously, anyone who’s been doing it for a few years knows that that’s really not the case. That’s very obvious, I think if you really observe your own buying behavior. It’s so extremely rare that we go to a site having never heard of the thing and then we buy it the first we visit the site. It just almost never happens. It’s like your friend tells you about it, you forget to look it up. You look it up, you forget about it. You see an ad, you forget about it. You sign up for the email. You see it on Twitter from another friend. We talk about funnels. It’s not a funnel really. We try to give them an email sequence.
|
| Molly Pittman: | It’s consumer behavior.
|
| Laura Roeder: | I do think it’s so important to look beyond what you can directly track and make sure that your brand is showing up a lot of places for people.
|
| Molly Pittman: | People are going to be forced to quit worrying so much about specific attribution. I’m a total culprit of this and have been. This campaign, what is the ROI on this campaign. There are too many channels online in too many ways that people are researching and getting information and buying that I think a lot of us are going to have to let go a little bit and say, “Did I make as much back as I put in that I can directly track from whatever sources I’m looking at? Okay, good.” I can only assume that this resulted in more sales than that. Because that’s only what I can track. And then we have word-of-mouth and everything else that I can’t track. If we can keep it that baseline, I think that businesses will grow.
|
| Laura Roeder: | People like to talk about blog attribution, content attribution directly tied to sales. If it’s just a blog, that’s a coincidence. If someone views a blog post right before they buy, I don’t think you can attribute that sale to them reading the blog posts unless it’s just a sales letter in blog posts format. People will rate their content based on attribution of which blog post is driving more sales. I just don’t think that’s how you look at your blog. That’s your content. That’s traffic. I understand why people do it, because we want it to be that clear. I would love it if I could figure out exactly which blog posts was driving sales. You can look at metrics just like your entire marketing spend rate, everyone’s salary in the marketing department and be like, “Are we making money or not?”
|
| Molly Pittman: | I know that’s hard to tell businesses that are really bootstrapping. I understand were that can sound like, “Oh, of course, you guys can do that.” But really you can do that on a small scale and just realizing that you need to start with two or three ad campaigns and one that warms up the cold audience and gives them value and is the branding aspect. Then some other campaigns that are more retargeting and a little bit more direct response but realizing that if you are making as much back as you’re spending your acquiring customers and leads, you can only expect that through word-of-mouth and everyone who’s seen your ads and never clicked that you’re definitely ROI positive on your media spend.
|
| Keith Krance: | I love it. I love it. this is good stuff. Listen to what Laura said about how they made that adjustment to make their main hook double your traffic. We’ve used some examples before Brian Moran over at SamCart. They’ve got a few different hooks that they use to bring people in. I’ve talked about before, were they use profits. For X your profits of your sales funnel. When they’re selling a checkout designer, a checkout order form designer. They’re not talking about order form design, typically. Laura’s not talking about social media management, but she’s leading with something she knows the people want. Then you can educate them on how to improve that and how your product, your solution can make that easier or faster or cheaper.
|
| Awesome stuff here. Is there anything else that you want to share with us. How can people get access to MeetEdgar or anything like?
|
|
| Laura Roeder: | It’s always a little funny to me. After you’ve heard such a behind the scenes marketing stuff and then I’m like, “And now go see our marketing sequence.”
|
| Molly Pittman: | People are like, “I already went to the homepage.”
|
| Ralph Burns: | That’s what I tell people, “So why don’t you just go opt-in for this so you can see my funnel and then, you know, you might want to buy it. If anything, I can get behind the scenes look.
|
| Laura Roeder: | A lot of people are still scared about social media for marketing. You still hear people say, “Oh, social media should just be like, live, authentic conversations.” I’m saying, “It’s, it’s a communication channel. Like, you know, use it to promote your business.” It’s fun for me doing stuff like that. I love all the marketers who come to use the software and can appreciate the funnel experience as well.
|
| Keith Krance: | Love it. Good stuff. It’s meetedgar.com. We’ll have the link in the Show Notes.
|
| Laura Roeder: | meetedgar.com. You can find us as MeetEdgar on Twitter and on Facebook.
|
| Keith Krance: | Awesome. Once again, we’ll have anything else mentioned here the Show Notes that at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. This is Episode 81. Guys, this has been great. Laura, thanks again for coming on, appreciate you. I know you’ve got a busy schedule.
|
| Laura Roeder: | Thank you.
|
| Ralph Burns: | Awesome.
|
| Laura Roeder: | Talk to y’all soon. Bye, bye.
|
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes!
iTunes not your thing? Find us on Stitcher or at DigitalMarketer.com/podcast.
![[INSANE Case Study] How to Spend LESS & Make MORE on Meta & Google](https://perpetualtraffic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/646-768x768.png)
