See Part 2 How to Create a Free Report
Creating a Free Consumer Report
Hi this is Samuel Junghenn! I’m the managing director of Think Big Online. Today I just want to speak with you about education-based marketing. Now education-based marketing can be particularly powerful if your market or industry has a lot of reservations or a lot of concerns or if there is a lot of blubbery going on in the market with people that may not be as ethical as you or may not as experienced as you in the market that are doing the wrong thing by people out of ignorance or on purpose if they are taking advantage of people in the market.
Now hopefully if you are watching this, you’re not one of those people that are doing that and that you want to build a solid business built of relationships and built of doing a good job and building up your reputation as an industry expert.
Today I just want to talk a little bit about a simple tool, a very simple way that you can educate your market, build massive trust and credibility with your potential clients and also filter out the people that you don’t want to work with. As you can see on the screen here, we created an SEO buyer’s guide because there is a lot of mystery behind SEO and there are a lot of sharks in the industry that, if you don’t have the skills or like to pull the wool over their client’s eyes and charge exorbitant fees and don’t actually provide any value.
Now when I say providing exorbitant fees in SEO, it’s not about getting the cheapest price which you will see if you actually read through this buyer’s guide that we created but what I’m talking about is people that bring a client on-board and say you know we can do fantastic things or you’ll be on the first page of Google and blah blah and they don’t provide the results that they say they will. That’s the type of people that we’re talking about.
Now with the report that you’ll be creating, it doesn’t need to be a marvel. It can be as simple as a 10 page report that runs people through. I’ll go through all the questions in a moment and the structure on how to do that. The main point is that it doesn’t need to be a gigantic thing and it doesn’t need to take forever.
Also remember that even if you spend a day or two days creating this report, you are only creating it once and it will keep working for you consistently. So if you put it in your website, as you see here you can setup a name catcher.
We use aweber and you can get aweber at awbber.com if you want to use this e-mail marketing software it’s relatively cheap. I think it starts at about $19 a month but you can build your database there and you can also setup e-mail order responders which I might go into if we have time in the end.
What should your report offer?
Now in this video I’m not going to go into how to setup your e-mail sequences for your order responders and that’s another part to this equation
The main thing that I want to get across today is about creating this report and creating value for the community and educating them so that they don’t get burned with the cowboys in the market and at the same time positions you as the expert and build a lot of trust and rapport with people if you are totally open and honest with them and you give them a lot of information that most other companies in your market will not give them.
Okay so we’ll just pull up the report that we’ve created here and you can see that it is in pdf format that people can download as soon as they entered their name and e-mail address. Got a first page, copyright notice and you can also e-mail me there with my e-mail address.
Notice on every page, at the top of the page we got our logo for a little bit of branding and at the bottom we got the copyright business name, a link back to the website which is very important and the phone number in case they got any questions when you go through this or maybe they’ve decided that we are the company that they want to do SEO with because we’ve been so transparent and given them so much value in this report.
Then we got our content section, we got about the author then the way I structured this is through questions to ask a prospective SEO company because everyone doesn’t know what they don’t know and so by giving them the questions that they should be asking companies, its opening their eyes to things that they wouldn’t have thought of or possibly don’t even know exists.
So we got the questions and we got the answers to the questions. Of course we’re not going to get the exact answers correct however we’ve explained the type of answers that a company should be giving if they are a legitimate company.
Then we’ve gone into being a little bit more creative with “Do not ask Questions” because there are a lot of questions that people will ask an SEO company that are not probably the best questions so they are wasting their time or they are setting themselves up to be sold to by an unethical SEO company or people that are just looking to grab their money and so we’ve put do not ask questions and why you shouldn’t ask them.
Questions they should be asking you – if you are in any type of service business, even if you are in a product-based business, you should be asking the clients a lot of questions or prospective clients a lot of questions to make sure that your product or service is the right fit. It doesn’t matter if you are selling CDs, you need to be listening to your clients and getting feedbacks from them which will one, help build a lot more rapport in the conversation that you are having.
Two is it will help you understand the market and understand people that are buying that particular product or service so that you can then possibly use that in your marketing in the future or in conversations with other people that you are going to have.
Instead of just putting your hand out, even if you are selling something as simple as a CD – instead of just putting your hand out and taking the money, engage in a conversation and ask them questions. In our case particularly with SEO, it is very important that we understand what the client wants to achieve with their campaign, who their target market is, what products they want to sell and so on.
Now this is something that a lot of other companies won’t do and they’ll just you know, focus on the rankigs which rankings if you’ve seen on our other videos, rankings don’t matter squat. It’s about the traffic and the leads and conversions that you get from the rankings but I won’t go into it because it’s a different topic and the main point is that you should be asking your clients questions no matter what industry you are in and that’s a good heading to have in there.
Biggest misconceptions about your industry – this is a really good one. Big misconceptions about any industry no matter what you are in, people will think that they can get it cheaper or faster or better or they are going to get a different result than what actually happens in real life.
It’s all about managing their perception and so by having misconceptions chapter in the eBook or in the report, you can overcome those and you can ground the reader and help them have realistic expectations about the industry or about the product or the service.
SEO lies companies tell you – this may or may not be applicable to every industry. In our case, it is very applicable because there is a lot of things that goes on in the market and a lot of people just tell rubbish because there it is still a very little knowing practice and there is so much to know that it’s very hard for the consumer to know what is right and what is wrong. So we’ve highlighted some blatant lies that some SEO companies will tell people to basically just get their business.
On that in general, if you are selling something to someone that’s not going to make their lives better, you should not be selling it to them. Now I’m trying not to get off on another tangent here but we will turn clients away if we cannot help clients with something, with their online marketing.
If we cannot make them a positive return on investment back, we will not work with them on the first place and you probably should be thinking about that in your business instead of just going for the money grab, think about what’s the long-term value of that relationship. If you turn someone away and give them advice and say look this isn’t probably the right product or the right service for you. However they could look into doing something else.
You can build massive rapport and trust with that person and you don’t know that they might refer another ten people to you over the next two years which you would not have had if you sold them that product or service that they found out a couple of weeks later, was not right for them. They are not going to refer those ten people or whatever it may be to you. They are not going to remember you as the trustworthy and reliable person that they’ve come in contact with if you’ve been totally transparent with them.
So don’t just lie to get the sale. Make sure that you offer true value and think about what the client is going to get as a result of engaging with your product or service and so if you think about it you are going to come up with a lot of questions and lies that other people may tell in the industry just to go for the short-term money grab.
Interesting facts about SEO – we put this in here to offer more education about different statistics and little known facts that clients commonly know about our target market. Now I’m being totally transparent and open here however you choose to perceive this is up to you. Some people might be judgmental and some people might see it for what it actually is in the part of the sales process.
As I said this is education-based marketing so while this is a valuable and totally transparent tool that you can use to promote your business, it is a marketing tool and it is part of your sales funnel to bring new business in. So with the interesting facts about SEO, there are interesting facts in there that help people to realize that they need SEO. They need to be doing SEO and why it’s so important to get started now.
This is starting to pre-sell them on why they need SEO and we’ve already built massive trust and given huge value up here. In our do not ask questions, we’ve also pre-screened people and I guess, filtered out people that we don’t want to deal with. Now it’s our turn to start to persuade them to do business with us. It’s about getting SEO done but obviously if they are reading this from us then it’s sort of suggesting that they should be doing business with us.
Now other tips are a just little bit information or a little bit more of a value ad – we just have some other random tips that kind of didn’t fit in to any other category there. We also put resources as another value ad – so just some tools that people could use to check up on their SEO Company or check out a prospective SEO company and so they are both another value ad.
Then we got our call to action at the bottom. We got our free SEO audit $330 real value which we do normally charge for however as part of our marketing funnel ideas here, we got people opting to the e-mail database and then after they’ve received this free report in their e-mail then they get sent another e-mail and it says you know “have you got any questions?” or whatever.
We give them a chance to respond back to us and engage in a conversation with us and then we follow up by another e-mail which says “If you would like this free SEO audit (I believe it’s at the bottom of this report as well) then you need to go to a hidden URL and fill out your details and we will do one of these SEO audits valued at $330 for your business and then send it to you.
This is qualifying them again – if they got to the end of this report, I think it’s about 27 pages long and if they read through everything, we know they are fairly qualified and they could be a good prospect for us to work with and help grow their business through search engine optimization.
Think about a gift or a one-time special offer. It could be some sort of a discount or a coupon or something else that you could add of value to the prospect at the bottom and you want to have a very clear call to action showing them exactly what to do to be able to redeem that special offer or take advantage of that offer.
