Building Attractors That Wrangle Leads

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Building Attractors That Wrangle Leads

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Chip Fox: Welcome everyone, to our webinar series, Building Attractors that Wrangle Leads. Today's session is all about maximizing your lead generation through attractors. I'm now going to turn it over to Kim Albee and Margaret Johnson.

Kim Albee: Hi everybody, welcome to the webinar today. We're excited to be talking with you guys about attractors, and how to really build them and get your arms around them. I'm here with Margaret. Hi Margaret.

Margaret Johnson: Hi Kim.

Kim: Excellent. Shall we just jump in?

Margaret: I think, we jump in.

Kim: Okay.

Why We Are Doing This:

Margaret: One of the things that we really started to enjoy doing is, really set the stage. Why we're doing this? We had a great series, and I hope that you all were on it as well. It was our Lead Nurturing Easy as PIE series. In that session we asked, "What's your biggest boggle, when it comes to really doing a great job of generating new leads? Then, leading those folks down the journey that they need to, in order to become customers?" The number 1 feedback we got is that, "Attractors are our biggest issue."

When you have great attractors, a lot of good things will happen. You will build a more engaged list. You're going to increase your prospect potential. You have a reason to reach out. This is important, and I want to just pause for a second. On some of our prior webinars, we've talked about the kinds of emails that you want to send out. One of the things that is so important is, value. Last week, wouldn't you know it, we got an email from somebody who's list we're on, that says, "We're happy to announce, we have a new website." That's not really a good reason to reach out to your customers. It's not providing any value to them, except in certain situations it might. "We have a new website that's going to be easier for you to navigate." Even then, it's limited.


Having an attractor, something that's high value, is going to be a great reason to reach out. It's going to allow you to lead your leads down that path, to where they're going to become your customers. As I said, provide value, that's the most critical part.

Kim: Right. I'll just jump in and say, the value you want to provide is ... I think a really good question to ask yourself is, where is your attention? Is your attention on you or is your attention on providing value for your leads? If it's on providing value for your leads, you likely wouldn't ever send an email saying "Hey, we have a new website, aren't we cool?" You wouldn't do it because your leads really don't probably care that you have a new website. They're going to care that, maybe things are easier to access when they go to website, to get the valuable content that you're going to provide them. Just the fact that you've got one, who cares, right?

I think the question, Margaret is, where's your attention? Is it on providing the value and on your leads, or is it on yourself? Most people, we're just self-centered. We think, because it's important to us, it must be important to everybody, right?

Margaret: Exactly, exactly, that's a great point. One of my favorite things to say is that, you get to sell, without selling. When you're providing value, you're building your authority, you're building your reputation. You are increasing the regard with which people think of you, and that's important. When those things happen, when you move those needles, you are selling yourself. You're selling your products or services without ever saying, "Buy my stuff." That is important, very, very important because people will tune out sales pitches.

Todays Focus:

Kim: Yeah. When we look at today's focus, this is what we're going to look at. We're going to go through exactly what is an attractor? What makes a good attractor, and what's the right way to distribute or get traffic to your attractors? Then, once established, how ... Once you've got that attractor, how can you leverage it over time? What are your options for really maximizing how you use it? We're also going to touch on ... Throughout our conversation, it's going to be sprinkled in, how can you use an attractor to generate new leads, to get new leads? That's going to be a really important point. I will tell you, we were going to show you some stunning statistics about why attractors are important, okay? Stay tuned because it's pretty cool.

What Is An Attractor?

Margaret: Let's talk for a second about, what exactly is an attractor? An attractor is any kind of content that is perceived as relevant by your target audience. It's valuable enough, that they're willing to give their email address and maybe more information, in order to receive it. You


might have also heard them called Lead Magnets. They can be variety of things, and we'll get into that, in a moment. Attractors are typically free, though I say be cautious about using that term. Some folks have suggested that in the world of Google, anything that requires an exchange, whether it's money or an email address, isn't actually free. Just be cautious about free, free, free, but you typically would not charge someone to receive an attractor.

Here's an important point. An attractor is not an offer or a call to action. In fact, an attractor is the thing that is ... The gateway to it, is an offer or a call to action. Don't confuse an offer or a call to action, with an attractor ...

Kim: Yeah.

Margaret: They are different.

Kim: The content is the meat.

Margaret: Exactly.

What Makes A Good Attractor?

Kim: It's the meat of what it is they want, it's what they want, once they give you their email. It's, what that value is that they're going to sink their teeth into. All right, let's look at what makes a good attractor? Before we ... We're going to talk about what makes a good attractor, but here is all the possibilities for an attractor. You've got webinars, and you're on ours, right? We've got White papers, eBooks, assessments, checklists, research reports, surveys, Quick Start Guides, cheat sheets, how-to guides. You could do lists of things, the top whatever list. Videos, presentations, trials or samples, consultations, contests, downloadable PDFs. There's just a variety of things that you can use. We're going to show you with some examples, of how those things work. We've used ...

Margaret: Wait a minute.

Kim: Yeah?

Margaret: Wait a minute, Kim.

Kim: What, what?

Margaret: I see something that's not on this list.

Kim: What?


Margaret: I don't see anywhere where it says, Subscribe to our Newsletter. Why isn't that on this list?

Kim: Yeah, it's not on the list because that's not an attractor.

Margaret: I walked you right into that, didn't I?

Kim: You did. It's not an attractor, guys. Subscribe to our Newsletter is a call to action for sure, but we're going to show you why ... If that's all you've got. If all you have is, subscribe to our newsletter or subscribe to our blog, you're going to end up with very low subscription, based on what you could do, if you were really mastering attractors. We're going to show you those numbers. Okay, so give me some examples. Let's talk them through, Margaret.

Margaret: Sure, these are some attractors that we have come up with. We have our scoops, the 3 scoops that we have out at the moment; When Batch and Blast is Okay, is just released. I believe you may have a link to it or you will receive one after this session. These are downloadable, well-formatted, nicely put together PDF documents that people can download. We also have an eBook; The Top 5 Reasons that Marketing Automation Implementations Fail. That is another well-formatted PDF. That's not the only kind of example we have. What else do we have, Kim?

Kim: We've also got webinars. For those of you who've been on a few of our webinars and aren't new to us. In February, we had a whole social media series of webinars. That are things like, "Hey, did you know there's no such thing as social media?" There isn't. If you think of everything all lumped together as social media, you're missing the boat. We had a whole discussion about that, and how engaging people on social media mostly, they're not going to engage back with you. How do you take those lurkers that are out there, and turn them into leads?

We've done a variety of content in webinars. Again, we'll show you the statistics of what we've done, just this year, in webinars. Why webinars are a really good format for you, if you've got something to say. If you want to be a thought leader in your industry, if you really have some good information for your industry, webinars can be a great way to distribute that information.

Margaret: Webinars are super good for B2B, certainly. They might be less good for B2C. Don't think that we're stuck on the webinars idea, we're just showing you something that's worked.

How Do You Know Whats Relevant?

Kim: Exactly. Hey Margaret, how on earth do you know, what's relevant? A lot of times I feel like, in certain cases when we're talking, we sit there and go "Okay, what do we think," right? I


also know that our customers sometimes think that they know exactly what customers want, and they never ask, right?

Margaret: Yeah, so consulting a psychic? No. How about intuition? No, not so much. Maybe a gut feeling? I'm going to say, maybe not. Here's the real answer. We test, and we use buyer personas.

Kim: Right.

Click-Voting

Margaret: We've talked about bio personas before, and we'll talk about them again, just briefly in a moment. The first thing I want to go to is, the testing idea. Again, if you were on the Lead Nurturing Easy as PIE series, you definitely heard us talk about starting out with a broadcast email. When we start out with a broadcast email, it's got 3 to 5 topics in it, that people can click on. Actions that people can take. Now this happens to be a screenshot of a broadcast email that we did, a few months back. As you can see, it's got a WordPress topic, it's got a tip, it's got some information about upcoming webinars, it has a scoop in it.

What we're doing here is, we're essentially allowing people to self select on the topics that are relevant to them. I'm calling those Click Votes. You've heard the term that, when a retail establishment gets on the bad side of Yelp or something, and people vote with their feet or they vote with their wallets. In our world, the world that we're talking about today, people vote with their clicks. That's really what we're looking for here. Let's present a variety of topics, and see what gets interest. Then, that's how we're going to know what has relevance.

I'm going to tell you quite candidly that, we got a fair number of clicks on WordPress, and we could tell that, that was a pretty interesting topic. We did not get very much interest in this tip video, which absolutely crushed Kim because she spent time putting that together, and it's really quite good. We didn't get a lot of clicks on that. Putting that kind of information into an email, is something we're not going to do much of, in the future. It's just not getting the response that we need, in order to justify the time investment to do the creation, right? This WordPress thing got some clicks, the scoop got a ton of clicks, and our webinars got a ton of clicks. What did that tell us? It told us that there's some relevance in the WordPress topic, within our audience. There's some relevance in short, informative pieces like scoops, which you notice, which we're not calling them white papers because for a lot of people, that connotes gigantic document one will never read.

Kim: That was only 3 pages long too.

Margaret: Yeah, only 3 or 4 pages ...


Kim: Really short, like little snacks of information.

Margaret: Exactly. Our webinars got a lot of traction as well. That tell us, the track that we're on here, is the right track. That's a big part of understanding what's going to be relevant to your audience, is planting seeds and seeing what grows.

Buyer Personas

Kim: Yeah, and the other thing is buyer personas. You should watch her ... Those of you who weren't on the call or the webinar with Adele Revella, who's in my book, the leading persona expert out there. You should watch a reply of our recent webinar with her, Buyer Personas: The Cow is on The Ice. I put this here. I know it's long and I probably should have used a Bitly link, but I didn't. Here's Content Zap: Beware-of-the-Buyer-Persona, all hyphens in between. You can go get that.

We also have a Buyer Persona Quick Start Guide, out at our Genoo blog. It's been out there since August of last year, but it's a blog post, "Why you need a strong marketing persona to succeed." There's download you can get right off the bat, that is a quick start guide for buyer personas. The 2 together, may be really, really helpful. It depends on ... They both have slightly different approach, but they make really good points. I highly recommend ...

Margaret: Those links are in the follow-up email that you'll get after this session as well.

The Right Way To Drive Traffic

Kim: Sure. Once you have this ... Now we're going to get really into the attractors, but what you want to know is, "Okay, then you got to attract traffic to them." Margaret's already talked about the broadcast emails, the segmentation emails, giving them options to them. Then, what about calls to actions or offers? We're going to talk about that in our next webinar. That's just a little preview, little teaser. Then there's ads; Facebook, Retargeting, AdWords. We've used Facebook and Retargeting to really good effect. We don't use Adwords very much, because we find it easier to target on Facebook, to demographic ... You can really get right into what people like. We've had some really good results from that.

Then, social media posts. You have LinkedIn groups and LinkedIn. We've tried advertising on LinkedIn, but we haven't gotten a lot of clicks on that. We have been able to do blog posts and we've been able to do group announcements, things like that, that end up really helping in a lot of ways. Here's the thing, and what is it Margaret? That we always want to know about attractors.


Margaret: We always want to know how they're performing.

Kim: Right. We also want to always gate them.

Margaret: Absolutely.

Kim: Yeah. Gating, what we mean by that is, you're getting something, like an email, an email and a name, some information that's appropriate for you to ask for, in exchange for providing it.

Margaret: Kim, can we go back just a moment, to the broadcast email slide there because we had a question come in that I just want to address, before it escapes us. The question was, "This broadcast email, was there a leading paragraphing?" Absolutely there was a leading paragraph. We just cut the offers part, if you will, out of the email and put it on this screen. There was a leading paragraph that, at the time we sent it was, "Start 2015 off right. Here's some great thoughts." The response to it was just really tremendous. We also got a question about, "Did we test, positioning of the offers or switching the order of the offers?" We did not. We probably will, but we did not in this particular case.

Kim: Right, and you could too. It's really interesting ... I'll talk about that for just a bit. It's wild for me to think about, this middle one ... Oops, dang it. This middle one got very little clicks. This down here in the middle, and the webinars down here at the bottom, they got a lot of clicks. We also got a lot in our very first. Then I think about one of our customers; Pierpont Technical Community College. They ran a big, regular email sign up for our classes. Down in the very bottom corner, lower right, out of all this huge email with all these different options. Down in the lower right, they put a sewing class. It had the second most clicked links. The second most links, clicked. I think position is fascinating, in terms of what works and what you'll see with your audience, if you should test it. I'm in favor of the testing.

Margaret: Stop there, for just a second.

Kim: Where?

Margaret: Back, The Cow is On the Ice. The other thing I want to mention is that, when we talk about Facebook advertising, this graphic that you see on the screen is actually the advertisement graphic that we used for the Facebook ad. They're very simple to create. There are great ways to do Facebook advertising, that can keep the cost very manageable, and creating the graphics very, very simple.

Kim: Right. I think we had about 40 people, new leads come in, the day of the webinar, for that one. That was wild. It's just ... Who knows, you got to play with it, but it is interesting. How do we leverage these things for the long term, Margaret?


Margaret: That really is the key, and we've talked before about creating content for reuse. We don't want to create something that's a one and done kind of thing because who's got time for that? Now, if you're an organization that has a 40% marketing team or a 150% marketing team, that's one thing. Most people that attend our webinars, are not in that boat. It's 1 person, 2 person, 3 person marketing teams, maybe 10. You don't have time to create content that only lives once, and then expires. We want to create that content with an eye toward using it for the long term, and it's so important.

We put them on your website as a call to action. "Download the social media content distribution quick start guide or download the scoop; Why batch and blast is okay?" You create website calls to action, that take people to what we call, a Lead Capture form. They put their information in, and that gate allows them to then get the content via email. You also leverage your content by creating clicks in your email. Even if you have an email that's going out about topic 22, you might have down in the corner, "By the way, if you didn't get this yet, you really want it." Use it as a click in an email or continue putting it in your emails, as one of the options in your broadcast emails.

Kim: One of the things that we've seen, and I'm going to jump in here because it just occurred to me. One of the things that we've seen a big deal ... While we're going to cover all the ways you can use calls to action and stuff like that, which is what your clicks and emails and all that are. If you think about when somebody signs up for something, and you take them to a thank you page. Those thank you pages are largely underutilized, because mostly all you think to do is say, "Thank you. It's on its way, check your inbox." Short of just delivering it to them. We always send an email because we want to verify that the email that they gave us is good, part of the exchange. Think about how you could better use your Thank You pages. Anyways, I'm going to stop there because that gets more into our Actions piece that we're going to be talking about, next time.

Margaret: I will only add that, since we started using our thank you pages more effectively, downloads of our attractors have gone up, by a factor of 100%. Keep that in mind, and when we get together in the next session, you'll see more about that. Kim, why don't you talk to us about Retargeting ads?

How To Leverage For The Long Term

Kim: Retargeting ads, that's really going to be more on the calls to action. That's how you can leverage for the long term. Once you get a lot of attractors ... You've got new people, people that come out, that you don't even know who they are, on your website. When they go around the web to other sites, you can put little ads in front of them. It's very cost effective to do so, enticing them to one of your offers. You then can convert them into a lead. You're following them around the web basically, to MSNBC. If they play Words with Friends, that's where Margaret saw one recently. Anyway, you can do that.


Again, it's just a way that you can leverage your attractors for the long haul. How you can reuse them, and use them over again, and in different circumstances and that sort of thing.

Margaret: Exactly. Then, another way to leverage content for the long term, and this is really important. To use that content as a trigger for nurturing sequences, but you can also use it as something within your nurturing sequences. For example, we have as you saw before, the first scoop, The Single Biggest Reason Your Emails Aren't Being Read." We have the second scoop which is ...

Kim: List or Listening.

Margaret: Thank you, Email marketing list or listening. Now we have the third scoop; When Batch and Blast is Okay. Each one of those has a nurturing sequence associated with it. What we can do ... The new platform allows us to do is, I can say anybody who is in the Nurturing Sequence, for the second scoop. I can check and see if they got the first scoop. If they didn't, I can send an email that says, "I noticed that you may not have received the original scoop. Why don't you go get that." Just doing that has increased traffic substantially.

Again, you're hearing it straight from the people that are actually doing this. You're learning from our experience. You can actually leverage a piece of content, whether it's a video, whether it's a survey. It might the report that you generate, as a result of doing a survey. You can leverage that content, time and time and time again, to continue to extend.

Kim: Right. Now check this out ...

Margaret: Go ahead.

Kim: You can repurpose ... I'm sorry Margaret, I got so excited about what you were saying. I was like, "Yeah, but." Then, you can repurpose, for social content distribution. This is really exciting. We have a quick start guide on this. I got to tell you, there's not been a lot of downloads on it. I don't think you all are really thinking about it, but Oh my goodness. What you can do? Think about building a wider content footprint, it will help you with your search engine optimization. Imagine if you had more spots on the search engine results page. They're not going to give you multiple spots for the same site. If you have stuff out on YouTube and you've got things at Scribd, PDF that you load there, or at Issuu. You have audio uploaded in the SoundCloud or even a podcast channel. What happens is, people go searching your social content platforms, for content, on subjects they care about. People find you, it builds a wider content footprint, beyond just your site or blog. It works for you, even over years.

The example that some of you have heard I'm sure is, our podcast channel created 5 years ago. I published to it for about 6 months, and then it just fell ... It just fell by the wayside because we got so busy doing other things. We revived it in February, and we post all of our audio there, for our webinars or for most of our webinars. When I went in to log in to see if it even still existed,


it took me right to a Metrics page. In January, we had 122 listens of content that was 5 years old, in January.

This content works for you, years and years and years. If it's relevant and it's valuable content, it's going to work for you. Think about, beyond that. Then we do have this download. Of course, we didn't give you any link to it, so you'll just have to guess where it is. If you're interested, we've got it. Anyway, that's the stuff you need to think about, for your attractors.

We're going to do one more, real quick thing about it, which is ... Margaret, this is for you, Don't miss the Mark. Then we're going to get right into ... We're going to be brainstorming exactly, some attractors and things like that, so you can see this whole process. Then we're going to work with some of you, on exactly what your issues are, and maybe cause some breakthroughs for you, so that you're on your road with them.

Margaret: Exactly.

Kim: Don't miss the mark.

Dont Miss The Mark

Margaret: Don't miss the mark, exactly because the important thing to remember is that, attractors are not sales brochures, they're not announcements, they're not corporate bios, and they're not in your face. I put it in quotes, so you say it with a accent, you're not in your face. By that I mean, they're not, "Buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my services, buy my stuff." They are again, high value in the eyes of your audience. That you're providing something that cements your position as a thought leader or as a person who's got heir best interest at heart, not someone who's just trying to get them to buy.

The other thing I want to say is that, having no follow-up plan is a wasted attractor. Now, what do I mean by that? When you write an attractor, it's important to understand how meaningful it's going to be, to you, as well as how meaningful it is, to your audience. Now, the meaningful part to your audience is your content. It's, what it says, what it represents, what it allows them to do, what understanding it gives them? If it's an assessment for example, what they get to win, if it's a contest.

That's the value to them. What's the value to you? This is what you must understand because I'll tell you what? If you don't understand it, then you're just throwing spaghetti up against a wall. You know what I mean? What does it mean to you? Does it tell somebody, tell you, that a lead is interested in learning more about something? Does it tell you that they might be a potential buyer of a particular product or service? Does it tell you, how to talk to them the next time? Does it tell you what their interests are? Does it help you map their journey with them, to the point at which they'll become a customer?


Kim: Right.

Margaret: I hope that makes sense. Kim, do you want to add anything to that?

Kim: Yeah. We've got a whole Content Pathways download that walks you right through, how you can really look at, based on where someone is in their buyer's journey, what are the things that they're most interested in figuring out, at that point. If you can design content that hits at each stage, you can start to really help yourself gauge where people are. We have a Content Pathways eBook and a Content Pathways quick start guide, all at the Content Zap site, in our blog area. You can see it in there.

You WANT Attractors

Here's a thing, you really do want to master, how to build these attractors. Here's why. Our scoops have approximately, and this is just this year, 200 new leads. Our webinars; approximately, 1473 new leads, and that's just since February.

Margaret: Approximately, in exact number, I love it.

Kim: I know, I know, approximately. E-books and quick start guides, approximately 150, just from those things. That's just this year. Now okay, think about that. We've aggregated a bit, but think about that, and then look at how many blog subscribers. If all we had was subscribers or blog subscribers, look at the difference. You guys want to master this, you want to build attractors. That leads us right into our next deal which is, hey, let's do some brainstorming, Margaret.

Lets Brainstorm

Margaret: Okay Kim, let's do some brainstorming. I'm going to brainstorm mine first.

Kim: Okay, let's just take a professional services organization that wants to be perceived as a thought leader. What could they do? What are some ideas? What could be some attractors?

Margaret: Some of my background is in professional services, specifically in the technology industry. Some of the things that we did is, we might offer assessments, find out ... Let us do a health check on you implementation or let us assess where you stand against your peers in the industry, in terms of your maturity models." Are a great things for professional service organizations to go after, and try to assess.

Kim: Right.


Margaret: With customers. White papers that offer a point of view, that may to be the typical point of view. Arguing; this is one that I use to great result. Every now and again, I'd read a Gartner article about some piece of technology. I'd write something that said, "Why Gartner maybe missed a mark here."

Kim: Right.

Margaret: People wanted to hear it because it was contrary to the stuff that they were getting in other ways. Those are great kinds of attractors.

Kim: Right.

Margaret: Also ...

Kim: You want to make sure ... Hang on, you want to make sure that you distinguish. I would love to distinguish between what a blog post is, and what an attractor is. I interrupted you and I know that, but give me your thoughts Margaret, on the difference between what you would put on a blog post and what you make be the call to action attractor that might go with that blog post?

Margaret: The difference between a blog post and an attractor is that, in the blog post, I might write ... I'm going to use the Gartner example. "You know, I think Gartner missed the mark. Here's what Gartner said. I'm thinking this is wrong, and I'm thinking this is wrong because of here. If you really want to get in depth about a different perspective on this, here is the link to download my paper. Here is the quick video I did, about it. Here is more information or go look at this other thing."

Kim: Right, or how about, "Here's a checklist that you can use, to assess your own situation to see, if Gartner's assessment is accurate for your organization"?

Margaret: Exactly, exactly.

Kim: Something like that. This is what you want to think about.

Margaret: Professional services, certainly, webinars, in person events, where again they're not ... The story of my company is this, and we were born in a log cabin, in the middle of downtown Chicago in 1975. That's not an event that's giving high value. You need to really provide value. In fact, there's a great book called The Go-Giver. This isn't one that Kim and I really talked about very much. The premise is, "What if we gave everything away? If you give things away, you get back much more than you ever give."

Kim: Right.


Margaret: The Go-Giver, I can't remember the author's name, but it's a pretty fun book and it might give you some ideas.

Kim: Yeah.

Margaret: I would say, B2B kind of thing going.

Kim: Yeah. I would say, here's the key. The key is, we've given you a lot of high-level ideas, so you can map yourself on to that. You want to know, what questions is your target audience asking. Sometimes you think, "Those are so basic, why write about them?" Guess what? Your target audience has them going on. You live and breathe your product and service, in your industry, they may not. The basic questions might give you a lot of leverage. Just getting those sorted out, putting lists together, how-to guides, all that stuff, that you can position yourself in a way that will help them.

Again, you have to garner all of this against your buyer persona. What is it that they need, as they move through the buying process? I'm just going to underscore. Okay, next brainstorm. How about a local geography? A local business, B2C; to consumers. A company like ... Someone in retail or something like that. What would be good there, what do you think?

Margaret: I actually ... I'm so happy you asked this question, because I have a great example. Everybody, you should be able to raise your hands. What I'm going to ask you is to raise your hand, if you've been to Lowe's, Home Dept or Menards, in the last 2 weeks or if anybody in your household has been to Lowe's, Home Deport or Menards, in the last 2 weeks? Just raise your hand in the panel there. Yeah, I'm seeing some hands go up. Now, let me ask you this. How many of you have been to your local hardware store in the last 2 weeks. The little tiny guy, struggling to make it, still? Oh, somebody's flashing. Okay good, you're flashing your hand, I should say. We don't get flashing on the screen here. That's excellent.

A friend of mine has just ... Thank you all very much, you can put your hands down now, I really appreciate that. Thank you for supporting local business. Local business, the shop local thing that American Express has done ... Speaking of which, talk about an attractor. American Express and Shop Small, oh my heavens. That's been a miracle for small business, but it's been a huge miracle for American Express. Think about that, right?

A friend of mine is taking over the local hardware store, in a little suburb in which I live. It's a hardware store that's been there for 105 years. There's a Menards being built in the neighborhood, and there's already a Lowe's and a Home Depot. The question that he's confronted with is, "How am I going to continue to make my small hardware store relevant, in the age of these Big Box stores and the convenience of going in one place and getting your paint and your lumber and your nails and your foam and all that stuff?"

Again, in the spirit of giving you ideas, what he's starting to focus on, are things that are relevant to the neighbors. He's doing some surveys, asking questions on Facebook, of people in


the neighborhood. He's using his personal local network, to build the store's local network. What he's finding is that in our particular area, a lot of people have chickens in their backyards. A lot of other people are super interested in sustainable gardening.

He is actually coming up with classes in sustainable gardening techniques and classes, or having chicken experts come in and speak about chickens. They're coming right into the store, into a room that he's now made into a little conference area. He doesn't sell chickens, but he's making sure that he sells the stuff that supports the people that have chickens. They will be more likely to buy their chicken feed or whatever it is, from him. I don't have chickens. While they're there, they're also going to pick up their nails and maybe they'll get a gallon of paint, and maybe they'll do some other things. He's continuing to build his relevance.

We had a couple of, I'm going to call them Corner Stores, register for this session. When I think about the corner country store and how they continue to be relevant, to me it turns into recipes and cooking contests and making sure that you have specialty ingredients that are super interesting to people. Then, maybe making sure that there's an area or way that people can visit together, while they're in the store. Think about those kinds of things as attractors, right?

Recipe contests, chicken farming classes, sustainable gardening classes. Again, this is again, the B2C type thing. If you're in the skincare business, there's a place again, in my little suburb that does honey-based skin stuff. They do facials, free facials for new moms and that kind of thing. Just think outside the box, a bit. How you can create value, that makes you continue to be relevant? I know I'm pretty passionate about that, I didn't mean to go on that long, but that was fun. Thanks for bearing with me. Thanks everybody, for shopping local.

Kim: There's also, I would say, also in the local ... If you're an appointment-based business, there's a company that I was talking with. What they did and they were really innovate is basically, they would look at their day ... They'd built up their social media profile and this and that. They had built it up in such a way that, they could actually send out an email or send out a post and all of that, that basically said "Hey, we have some spots available for today. If you make a same day appointment today, and come in between this time and tins time, we're going to give you this kind of a discount for the services that we give you." They know that if the day goes by and they don't have people taking those seats, then there's no revenue coming in. They can't get that back. That's another ...

Margaret: I'm not sure it falls into our attractor theme, but ...

Kim: Yeah, but it falls into getting more people in the door, for B2C.

Margaret: Right.

Kim: We'll go on. Let's talk about education organizations and ...

Margaret: Take it away, Kim.


Kim: Education organizations can do a lot of things. It depends, we work with a lot of Continuing Ed organizations that have adult-based, non-credit courses. We've seen a variety of things really be impactful, as attractors. Think about, if you have a leadership institute that you're wanting people to sign up for, how can somebody assess their leadership skills? What about a checklist of the things you really have to master, to be a great leader? With resource guides about how to go out that, that also includes taking your classes or going through your leadership institute?

There's more, but there's things like that. We had Adult Ed, in terms of cooking, canning, sewing, all of that. We had an organization put together a Back to Basics series, and they emailed and they got their instructors involved. They actually had, in certain cases videos in certain cases, an in person presentation. They ended up filling all of the classes for the instructor, just by engaging the instructors, having them help in creating content, putting that together as a series. They filled the whole body of classes that were all, Back to Basics.

There is things there, that are all bringing people in. When you send out an email that appeals to someone, particularly in the education space. If they take the class, invite them to share it with their friends, and have their friends take it with them. There's all kinds of ways that you can do things, that will have people doing things with you, and for you as well. Again, in that vein, an attractor could be somebody signing up for more information that way, to get emails. It could also be somebody registering in a course, that's actually completing the transaction. How do you attract them into, do that?

Margaret: That's exactly right, Kim. The attractors, as we said on the earlier slide, can run the gamut from contests, to checklists to webinars, to in person events, to whitepapers, to eBooks. It can be really, anything. The key is, does it help your audience? Behind the scenes, will it help you get a better understanding of your audience, so that you have a better opportunity to engage with them, and turn them into paying customers? No matter what business you're in, you need paying customers of some kind. That is the ultimate goal here. It's absolutely critical.

Kim: Now it's your turn. Here's what ... We've got some time, and we designed it this way. We would love for you guys to ... Where you have issues around attractors, any questions you have. Anything that's your stop, of why you don't have any or what you tell yourself. Maybe a little bit about ... You could type us a little bit about your situation, your industry, your question, and we will field them and we will brainstorm for you, specifically. You don't have to be in a conversation with us, because I know public speaking is something that people hate more than death, or fear more than death.

Just type your questions in, and let's brainstorm a bit, for you. Really have you move down the road about, what would be an effective attractor that you could use in your marketing? Something that will jog some ideas for you or help you? Go to your Control Panel, type in your question. What is your biggest issue? It is the headline? Is it, "What should I do, should I do a webinar, should I do a video? Should I do a transcript of the video and gate that?" What do you have questions about? Go and type in your question.


Margaret: Here's a great question. "What are attractors for getting traffic at a large industry trade show? Everybody has collaterals, some have gimmicks. What preshow stuff works?" That's a really great question, and thanks for tossing that out there.

Kim: Yeah, I think so too. I think, if you know your target audience, sometimes one of them can be ... You can get all the gimmick stuff. Quite frankly, when I used to attend trade shows. I don't know if you did this, Margaret or not, I just go throw my card everywhere because I wanted the free T shirt and the coffee mug and ... You know what I mean? Just because it was fun to do ...

Margaret: I remember trade shows, where I took a whole empty suitcase, just to bring back the Schwag.

Kim: Right. Yet, they're no good, right? The thing that you want is, you want to know who are the leads, that are really the interested leads, when you're at a trade show? What's going to put people to the next stage? It could be that, you take all of the emails that you get from a trade show. You have a way to follow-up, so you can garner out the ones that were just there for the schwag, versus who's actually interested.

Margaret: Right.

Kim: You might want to use the opportunity to ask them, what is important to them? What do they struggle with? What are their big questions? If you're an industry trade show, you have a whole audience that you can actually do some really good questions around, too.

Margaret: No, I think the question though was more about driving traffic to the trade show, not dealing with people who drop their cards after the trade show. I would offer ... Attractors could be ... Actually, if you could write, "Getting the most out of this trade show" guide, could be a really interesting one for you to use. There could be something ... I'm seeing a lot of trade show booths, where they're actually doing in-booth presentations. Creating that presentation list ahead of time and marketing that out to the group, would be a big one as well.

I think there's a lot to think about, there. Trade shows ... When you say trade show, I immediately get a back ache and my feet start hurting. I may be, not as sharp on that one as I could be, but again, I think helping guide people through the trade shows, so they get value. Doing in-booth presentations and marketing the heck out of those, could be super interesting as well.

Kim: Right.

Margaret: I'm hoping that that's helping. If it's not, let me know and we'll come back to you after the session.

Kim: Right. We've got some more.


Margaret: We've got some other questions that have come in, so go ahead.

Kim: Yeah. We've got. "I am the sole marketing person for a community college with many different programs. My biggest problem" ... I understand this one so good, so well. "My biggest problem is, compiling the info to use, as attractors. I am not an expert in each of these subjects." Right, you're not, so how do you get that information? Enroll your instructors. Do you have instructors that would be willing to provide you some of their expertise and some things like that, that you could then ... You could even interview them, record the interview and get it transcribed and have a lot to go on, that would help you with things.

Then, if it's depending on the kind of class that it is, is there some sort of list that you could provide, that would help people better understand that subject? Is there a download that they could have, that would just be a little quick start guide, but boy is it going to go in depth, in the class. Things like that, that would be teaser things to get that course registration because that's really what I think, what you're interested in there, too. You want to be able to get the lead, before they register. Maybe they're just out there at your site or you could do a Facebook ad and attract them in, just for that. Then follow-up with "Hey, register for the class, we're really going to do some good things here."

You could have an instructor who's interested in doing a video. Have them do a video that talks to the people and gives them something of real value. That will be a portion of what you'll cover in the class, but only ... That touches the tip of the iceberg, but provides real value. Those are some ideas there, so hopefully that gives you some things to think about.

Margaret: We've gotten a couple of questions along the same vein. I want to come on to this one here. With this specific question. "In a broadcast email, is it better to have the links to various attractors or is it better to have a short email and drag them to a landing page?" Do you want to take that one, Kim?

Kim: Yeah, I think you could have links to the different attractors, right from your email. If you have a short email saying "Hey, we have a whole bunch of stuff for you. Click here to find out." You could do that, but now you're not going to ... I don't think, I would test it. I don't think you're going to get the click-throughs that you would, if you just let them see what their options are, in the email, and click through to it. If I'm understanding your question right. When you click through, yes, they're going to land in a landing page because you want them to opt in. Even though ... When we send emails, even though we know who you are, we go to a landing page and we may prefill the form or we may have you entered from scratch, your information. Why? Is because every time we send an email out, guess what happens?

Margaret: I bet, it gets forwarded.

Kim: They do, they get forwarded. If you took them right to the thing, you'd think that, that person downloaded it 80 times, if they forwarded it out everywhere. You want to use it that way. I hope that clarifies and answers that question.


Margaret: Yeah, and I want to tie that back to the earlier question too, which is, "Do you consider it a best practice to do an image and a short paragraph? Making the lead-in paragraph, brief. Is that a good idea?" I'm going to say, absolutely it's a good idea. When it's short, with a click for more option, then you're readability is very good because people tend to scan through the email, for value. Your readability is good. If it's very readable and relevant, then your clicks are going to be the votes that your audience gives you, to tell you how relevant you've been.

Kim: Yeah.

Margaret: I think that's really important.

Kim: Yes. I would say, here's a good one for you. Ready Margaret?

Margaret: Sure.

Kim: How do you attract surgeons? I'm going to say something really smart. I would say, "Need Surgery." No, but ...

Margaret: I have to know more about that situation, before I could really answer that. Do we have a surgeon membership site that we're trying to attract people to? Help me understand why we're trying to attract surgeons, so we can maybe, help you brainstorm how to get it done.

Kim: Right.

Margaret: I really have a tough time answering that ...

Kim: Right. I would wonder, if you want to attract the surgeon or do you want to attract their Office Manager or their Assistant. You know what I mean? Who is it? Is the surgeon too busy? Do you have to get right to them, or is there another one? Then I would say, do buyer persona research. Interview a few that you have gotten. Find out what they like, what they don't like, what's their buying process? Get into their head, so that you can attract with good stuff. You can then get to them, where they need, with the content that would be interesting to them. If they have a surrogate, meaning an assistant or something that vets things for them, you want to get them on your side.

I would want to understand a lot more. I would start out with buyer persona analysis. Really start to get in their head and find out, what is it that's going to make a difference? Why, for your market and your audience? That's what I would say about that, from my end.

Margaret: Good. Somebody's asking, how we end the WordPress example. With the WordPress ... I'm not sure if I'm going to answer this correctly or not. The WordPress was in the broadcast email. When somebody clicked on the link, they got enrolled in a Nurturing Sequence that provided them with more information about WordPress. Nothing about why we wanted to talk to them about WordPress.


We have the Genoo plugin for WordPress, which is pretty phenomenal, I got to say. When they clicked, what we talked about were, "Here are some of the challenges we see people with WordPress, experiencing. Are you experiencing these kind of challenges too?" That was a series of emails that went out. As a result of those emails, then people would come back to us and say, "Okay yeah, I'm experiencing these problems. How can you help me with them?" Then at that point, they'd invited us to talk to them about our plugin."

Kim: What she meant was, how do you end the email closing? That email, how do we sign off the email. That was actually what she was trying to ask, she clarified?

Margaret: That particular email is a very newslettery kind of email, so there's no closing, there's no signature block. Yeah, I think there's a paragraph at the bottom that says ... No, there isn't actually. I think it just ends with those 3 columns at the bottom. Underneath all that is the unsubscribe information and our address. Nothing terribly formal there.

Kim: Yeah. Let's see ...

Margaret: Did you open the buyer persona slide up, in response to someone's questions about?

Kim: I did, how do you build a buyer persona? I replied and said, "Here's the links. Go look at these links and watch that video about, how to do it." The buyer persona ... Adele Revella actually has a video course, a video-based course you can sign up for, that's online, that you can take. It's not that expensive, and it will walk you through videos, examples, the whole nine yards. She also has a book that does the exact same thing. Then we have a quick start guide, that has a little bit, slightly different approach, but both of them may help you figure out and get at, in your buyers' heads, which is the important thing. You want to get in their head and you want to build things that answers questions they care about, that reveal things that are important to them. That will make a difference in their work, solve their issues, handle the problem, things like that.

You've got to know your buyers, in order to do that. Keep coming with your questions and see what other things do you have. I know that the majority of sites that I got out and look at, have a Contact Us or Request a Quote, and Signup to our Newsletter, and nothing else. We know that this ... You guys told us, this is your big deal. We want to help, we want to give you ideas for what you can do, and how you can go forward and attract ... Build attractors that are going to get you that lead gen.

Next Session Actions, Pages, and Bears Oh My!

Margaret: Kim, we are actually running out of time pretty quickly, here. While we're waiting to see if any other questions come, can you go down toward the back of the slide, back there? Our next session on June 4th, we're going to cover Calls to Action and Landing Pages. That you get


the most interest in your attractors. That's going to be on June 4th, at 10:00 in the morning, it's a Thursday, of course. You can register for that session now. That registration site is up, at contentzap.com/events. Actions, Pages, and Bears - Oh My! You might be wondering what the Bears are about.

Tell you, recently we saw someone do a terrific email that looked like they were going to be providing high value. When you clicked on the links in the email, you ended up at a Buy Now page. Their leads turned into angry Bears. That's one of the things, just a little preview. That's one of the things that we will be talking about, in that session.

Kim: Let me ask you this. I don't know what's going on with my mouse, but okay. Here's the part that I wanted to ... My mouse is going nuts. Okay, so here's the part about bears, that I want to get a show of hands on. Show of hands, raise your hands if you went out to a site and you said, "I would like to see pricing on a product?" It was a product-based site, you had all these different solutions. You clicked, "I want to see pricing, show me, requires pricing." What that did was, take you to a landing page where you had to fill out ...

Margaret: A lengthy lead capture form.

Kim: Right, a lengthy lead capture form, just to ... It wasn't at all about giving you pricing, at all.

Margaret: It was going to have a sales rep call you.

Kim: Right. It wasn't about, "I want to view pricing for this, I want to have a" ... How many of you would hate that? Just raise your hands, if you think that's something that you would not appreciate at all. Yeah, yeah. That kind of stuff, don't do that to people. Bears is where you offer something and you give them something else or you make it really hard. That's when people turn into bears.

Margaret: That's not cool.

Kim: Right, exactly.

Margaret: Not cool.

Kim: It's not cool, it isn't cool. I totally agree.

Margaret: It's rude, in fact.

Kim: I agree. That's the stuff that you want to really start to look at is, where are you saying one thing, and giving them either a really hard process going forward, where it's just not straightforward? You actually are ... It's bait-and-switch, you're asking them one thing, but then you're doing something completely different, that nobody would expect. Those are things that create bears, just as a little precursor.


Margaret: Exactly. We are at the top of the hour. I want to go forward one slide, and give you our contact information. If you have questions that continue after the session, don't hesitate to reach out to me; [email protected] or to Kim at [email protected]. We'll also encapsulate a number of the links that you've seen here today, and drop them into the follow-up email that you'll be receiving tomorrow.

Kim: Yes, absolutely.

Margaret: With that, I think we want to say thank you very much.

Kim: Wait, wait. We want to ask one more question. If any of you have, what is your biggest issue in online marketing that you would love help with. Really in depth help, where you can really talk and get it all worked out for yourself or as much as we can, let us know what those issues are. We look for experts, we do our own research, we put together solutions, and try and help answer your biggest questions around online marketing. Just put it in the question panel. We can't answer them right now, but just put them in there. Let us know what they are, and you'll see it probably on a webinar or we'll get back in touch with you, with some things. It will guide some content development on our side, and some of the research and work that we do, to make sure you're the most effective marketers you can be, okay?

Then, I will say thank you, and we are 2 minutes over. Here is how you can get in touch with us. Our Linkedin information, follow us on LinkedIn, connect with us on Twitter, however you want, what works for you. We look forward to seeing you on June 4th. All right.

Margaret: Thanks everyone.

Kim: Thank you very much, and we'll see you soon.

About ContentZAP ContentZAP! Is a professional services digital marketing agency. We understand marketing technology and how to leverage it to help grow your business. We work with companies of all sizes to develop and implement content strategies, plan nurturing and follow-up sequences, or to augment content development.

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Building Attractors That Wrangle Leads

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