Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

Louis: Keith, thank you so much for your time. I have something to tell you. I think that customer centricity and when companies say that they’re customer-centric, I think that’s completely bullshit. The reason why I said that is not because the idea is bad. Obviously every single business must focus on their customers. If they don’t, then they have no money to pay their employees so that’s kind of obvious. But I can guarantee you if I ask 100 digital companies or even companies in general, do they know exactly the people who typically buy from them, do they know exactly what they like and what they don’t like, do they know exactly the key issues that the they come up with just before buying and after buying, do they know exactly the value of each customer, etc. I think 99% of them wouldn’t be able to tell.

Keith: No. No one has any idea.

Louis: Correct. No companies are able to do that. It’s a beautiful thing to say, we are very customer-centric, but it’s very rare to find a company that is truly customer-centric.

Keith: Yeah.

Louis: If you don’t measure the value of the people in your funnel like how much they’re worth, you’re basically fucked, right?

Keith: Right.

Louis: It’s easy enough to measure the value of a lead during the first 30 days because Facebook does that really well. But then it’s extremely difficult to measure the value of a lead, of a customer, of a person after a few months or after a few years. Yet, this is what good marketing is about. It’s about long-term thinking, not short-term hikes.

Keith: Yup.

Louis: What other problems as a result of not measuring the lead value in the long term, what problems are they?

Keith: The biggest problem should be obvious which is you have no idea how much a lead is actually worth. Facebook tells me in the first 30 days, John came and he saw this ad, he purchased. 10 days later he’s worth $20, let’s say. But then the next time John purchases is not through a Facebook ad because he’s already in our email funnel, he’s in our email sequences. He’s now having these touch points and interacting with our company in a way that Facebook can’t measure. Now it’s completely separated. We know that John is worth let’s say after a year $500. But we don’t know that he came from Facebook. There’s no way to track that back.

One of the things that’s become very, very important for us with a lot of our clients is understanding where people come from, what touch points they hit in the funnel and then how much they’re worth at the end.

There’s a great quote from Bain & Company that says it costs about five to six times as much money to get a new customer than it does to convert an existing customer to purchase again. You need to be able to focus on growing that revenue internally rather than just focusing on new customers and new customer acquisition.

Louis: Right. That’s beautiful. That’s a nice thought to say, we’re able to measure everybody’s value over time and all. But let’s start from a point where we are selling stuff online or software, whatever it is. In an ideal world, we have this funnel that is beautiful. People come from the top and then they go in the middle, they have a few touch points and they can go at the bottom and they convert and happy days. It usually never happens like this. The cycle is much more complicated than that.

Sometimes what happens is as well people use different devices. It’s very difficult to track. Sometimes they use different emails. Sometimes they would just be very difficult to track because maybe they’ve discovered you from world maps. Somebody told them about your product, they Googled it then there was a cookie on that page, therefore you’re being retargeted on Facebook. Maybe that’s when you start the process of entering the funnel but perhaps Facebook wasn’t the first channel.

That’s a very long statement to say. That’s only the first point. How do you deal with the touch points that are prior to digital touch points? How do you measure the effectiveness of this kind of word of mouth or this stuff that are extremely difficult to track?

Keith: It’s super hard. Our company and a lot of the products that we build and everything really deal with once people are on that list. Essentially from that landing page forward. Because it is so difficult to track people before you have that unique identifier that is either their email address or some sort of device-tracking. Facebook kind of helps, Google kind of helps because they know when you log into Google that, oh, John on his desktop is the same as John on his mobile, is the same as John on his tablet. Facebook does the same thing. You can view a site on your desktop and suddenly you’re getting mobile ads for it on your Facebook account because they know how it’s all connected.

The problem is getting that information and bringing it back into a solid conversion before people get onto your emailing list. To be honest, while that’s very informative and I think it would be very good to have that information, at this point in the sales funnel and the technology I think it’s one of those rabbit holes that you just don’t need to go down yet. The reason is because there are just so many variables. Is someone logged into Facebook? To be honest it’s a little, I don’t want to say scammy, but it is a little bit creepy. A lot of people don’t like being tracked around the internet like that.

One of the things that we really look at is not how do we track people across the internet but how do we track people once they have started that permission marketing, once they opted in and said, “Yes. I am interested in this brand and I’m interested in your message. Show me what you got.” Then what we do is we say, okay we have an email address. We have a communication channel with this person. Now let’s track them through every step of the funnel and see what can turn them from a lead into a customer and then a customer into a recurring customer. What are the touch points in that funnel?

When I refer to touch points, I’m talking about PDFs or email content or webinars or something that you have set in that funnel to say, “This is something amazing I am showing you.” You’re hoping that that amazing thing is going to convince them to buy. What are those touch points that people can take in order to increase their lifetime value?

Louis: Before we start in digging into more details, to summarize what you’re saying is if you start as a marketer to try to understand whether branding exercise, which as you know word of mouth and stuff like this. If you start to try to measure that, you’re going to go into a rabbit hole that is extremely difficult to get out of. You will advise instead to start really measuring things when you gather the first information about them thanks to their action. An email address seems to be the kind of unique identifier nowadays. It seems very much used. Everybody has an email. You would recommend to start with that.

Keith: Exactly. Then you can measure those same touch points from the acquisition side. Let’s say that someone has been on my list for a year, they haven’t bought anything. Then they see one of my Facebook ads and they opt in for that Facebook ad. Then they’re on the sales funnel when they purchase. I don’t know about the word of mouth. I don’t know about the social connections and stuff that they’ve had. But I do know that after a year of being on my list, this ad was a touch point that convinced them to go on to the sale. I know that that ad is doing something right for people who have been on my list for a long time.

Louis: Okay. We’re starting here at the very top. You would advise, obviously from what you’re saying, the sooner we get an email address, the sooner we get somebody to say I agree, I would like to hear from you again, the better. We should probably use a tactic that would give them value – very good value for free. The only thing that they have to do to get it is to give their email address in return. Try to get as fast as possible in this particular step of the funnel.

Keith: Yup, exactly.

Louis: Let’s say we have an email address of some sort. How do you go about measuring the value of this person over time? How do you exactly go about it? Let’s try to get into the step by step of the typical scenario.

Keith: What we will generally do is in the old way, in the traditional way, it involves a lot of Excel spreadsheets; a lot of data exporting and a lot of merging. We actually built a tool to help with that because it took so much time.

Louis: What’s the name of the tool?

Keith: Segmetrics. We worked with Infusion Soft for seven years or something like that. Just tired of exporting these Excel sheets which I’ll talk about in a second then just built something that will do it automatically.

Essentially what you need to do is you need to look at the total amount that someone has paid you over time. Each person has an amount of money that they’ve paid you over their life span. Then what you need to do is look at any of those touch points. What people will tend to not do correctly is that when they’re looking at data, they’re really looking at, “Oh, I want to know the best lead magnet.”

You have to come in with a question. You have to come in with a very specific question. You can’t just go into data and say, “Show me everything.” Because it doesn’t mean anything. I know a lot of people jump into Google analytics and they’re like, “I’m totally going to find out what I need to do today.” You end up spending six to seven hours in there and don’t get anything from it. You have to have a question that you’re looking for an answer.

Let’s start with the first one which is which Facebook ad is the most valuable over time? I can look at my Facebook ads in the Facebook editor and I can say, okay in 30 days this is the best ad. But what about in the long term? I need to look at every person on my list, how much they’re worth and then where they came from. I’m tracking their Facebook UTM codes or which ad they came into on each of those people. Then I pivot on my data set and I say okay, I have these campaigns, I have this many people after their entire life span which maybe 90 days, 1000 days, maybe 10 years. This is how much this campaign brought me in that time frame. Especially for cold lead traffic – I’ll get into that in a second.

Cold leads and these nurturing campaigns, the result is not always immediate. I’ve worked with multiple clients where their initial email sequence that they get from a Facebook ad is 30 days. Facebook’s not even tracking at that point. Just the warming to get someone ready for the sale can be 30 days. What we generally see is you can see a Facebook ad that looks on the surface like it performed horribly but if you look at it 90 days later, 120 days later, people are worth maybe $10 a lead or $20 a lead when you thought they were only worth a penny.

Louis: Let me start right here. It’s obvious for you because you’ve been working on it for years.

Keith: That is my biggest problem.

Louis: One of my biggest strengths is basically the ability to go back in time and just try to explain stuff a little bit. You mentioned two things that are important. First of all I think the step one is to have a CRM of some sort. Because if you do not have that, how are you able to track? It sounds very simple. But there might be businesses nowadays that are still using Excel spreadsheet to track their customers and that might not be the best option. If you don’t have a CRM right now, definitely get one so that you can store your contact details and your customer details. That’s step one.

Step two, you’re mentioning a term that I hate. Not because the term itself is bad but because the technology—we’re in 2017 and it’s still so bad. The UTM tracking which is those little snippets at the end of a URL that tells you, this is this campaign, this is this medium. Like Facebook, then it tells you this is this campaign. Basically any tool that does any type of tracking analytics take that and show that in your inbox. I find it absolutely mind-blowing that in 2017 we don’t have a better way to track this. Seriously.

Keith: That’s true. It’s true. Managing them is a huge pain but unfortunately it is the only way to track that information across multiple sites; to track your ads, to track your Google analytics, to track anything, that’s what you need.

Louis: You have your CRM. Make sure that every single campaign you’re doing, whether it’s on social media like Facebook, Twitter, whatever it is, paid ads, normal social media updates. Even on your own website, in the footer and the header, make sure to add the UTM tags so that you know exactly where people are coming from and so that you can track them.

Keith: Yup, exactly. Depending on the CRM, I know this is possible in Drip, Infusion Soft, you can actually set events on each of those people. Every time someone logs in it has come from your email address and they hit a page from an email you can say, “Hey, this person just clicked on this email and came to this page.” Or, “Hey, this person’s interested in this content. This person is interested in this content.” You can create these kinds of micro-touch points throughout the site. Every single touch point that you have gives you a question that you can then ask.

You can say, “Okay, people who saw this ultimate guide to playing frisbee, how many of them turned into customers?” Now I can see because everyone on my list is tagged on that. Because here’s the question you want to ask, here’s the crux of this whole thing which is I have people going through let’s say a two-week funnel. This is a two-week nurture campaign. I’m giving them great information the whole time. I’m going to offer them a PDF on how to play better Frisbee. How much are people worth that don’t click that link and don’t download the ultimate guide? How much are people worth that do click it?

What you generally see is if it’s a good touch point like webinars, quizzes, that kind of stuff, the people who click on that who say yes to that touch point are going to be worth up to 10, 20 times as much as someone who doesn’t. Once you know if the touch point is good at converting people to sales you then know, “Okay, we got to get more people to click this. We got to get more people to take this touch point.”

It’s a journey. Your whole email funnel is a journey. You want people to touch those points that are the best parts of your journey. They give them the most information, the best value and convince them to purchase at the end.

Louis: Step one, you pick a CRM. Then I said step two, you put UTM tags everywhere. I think step two should actually be map out your current journey.

Keith: Your flow.

Louis: Map out the flow. Let’s take a very simple example now for the rest of the episode where we are selling frisbees. Actually, wooden frisbees are the best in the world. What we want instead of just making random people buy frisbees straight away, we want actually to educate them about the benefit of using this specific frisbee and also how to use it better. Then at the end, the final touch point would be to buy it.

Three touch points. Number one would be an email sequence. Number two would be a PDF. Number three would be to buy the frisbee.

Keith: Yeah.

Louis: I’m mapping out my journey, the typical journey. Yes, people might go back and forth, they might actually check on Google and do many other things before buying from you or whatever. But those are the main touch points that you control.

Step three then is to make sure that you’re tagging those touch points accordingly. I like what you’re saying about the events. Most CRMs and most marketing automations will now allow you to create events every time specific conditions are met such as if somebody comes from this campaign which is a UTM tagging campaign then create this event, right?

Keith: Yup. Exactly.

Louis: You were saying, if you know that this touch point brings a lot of customer value what should you do with it?

Keith: If you know that a specific touch point is a converter, then you should try to get more people into it. Whether that’s putting more information in earlier emails, if they don’t take that touch point then sending a reminder email afterwards or even just hype up the touch point itself; improve the email that leads to that touch point.

One of the common touch points that we see and then we can do it for the frisbee. Let’s say halfway through our email sequence, we do a webinar on how to be an ultimate frisbee master. What this is going to be is just going to be a 30-minute video of people jumping through hoops and throwing frisbees and just looking amazingly cool with their frisbee that you can buy right now.

We find that people who attend the webinar purchase at about 10 times as much as the people who are not. They were 10 times as much. Someone who doesn’t see the webinar’s worth $1, someone who does see the webinar’s worth $10. What we can do is increase the number of emails that lead up to that webinar. We can say, “Hey, by the way we’re running this webinar tomorrow. You should totally see it. By the way, this webinar is in four hours, come check it out.” Then we can send an email afterwards. If they didn’t attend we say, “Hey, so you can’t get to the webinar. That sucks. We’re doing a replay right now. Why don’t you come check it out?” In some cases you could even say, “Hey, you didn’t catch the webinar, the replay, so sorry. But I tell you what, we have a special offer for you right here.” Catch them on the back end.

The idea is to increase the surface area of that touch point. It’s kind of what Laura Roeder says with the Edgar which is most people are not opening their emails. 20% open rate is a good open rate. You don’t just email them once. You email them three to four times about something that you know is very effective. You don’t want to email them four times about everything. But if this webinar is super important to you and to the efficacy of your funnel, then it makes sense to email them again to remind them and to keep them abreast of this thing. It also creates kind of an event.

You need to remember that not everyone understands that these emails are timed. They think that they’re live. If you’re offering this webinar on Tuesday at 4:00PM and you’re like, “Hey, remember next Tuesday is this webinar.” Then you send another one it’s like, “Hey, we’re starting this webinar in an hour. You totally need to be here.” That creates an urgency. That creates interesting information for the people on your list.

Louis: Yeah. This is a good point about Laura Roeder who is the CEO of Edgar. She’s making a point that yes, you are reading all of your marketing material. When you send it to people, you’re kind of scared that they’re sick of it already but they actually haven’t read it.

The point here is that people are not as sick as you regarding your marketing steps. It’s okay to repeat yourself on certain things that are very important as you said. It’s not bad marketing to do it if you know that what you’re doing is valuable. Obviously don’t spam people with shitty content that you know is completely useless. Focus on things that you know are valuable based on what people have been telling you before. Try to make more and more people aware of this touch point that is incredibly useful because you know that for a fact, people who go through it usually are more valuable than people who don’t.

Keith: Right. Exactly.

Louis: We are in the step where we’ve kind of designed this customer journey, we have the touch points, we are now able to track those touch points. How do you go about finally measuring this lead value? Let’s talk about a report that you would typically generate. The most valuable report you generally generate for clients that people could do and generate themselves using an Excel spreadsheet.

Keith: The easiest number that we always pick out, the top level number is how many people went through this funnel and what’s the total amount of revenue we’ve generated for the funnel. Those are two pretty simple numbers. What you do is you say, “Everyone who submitted a form to this funnel, how many people was that? What is the lifetime value of all those people?” Now you have a number. This is how much your funnel is worth.

Then you go to the next step. You say, “We have this webinar. Let’s give numbers. We have 1000 people in our funnel.” I’m going to write on the board so I remember these numbers as well because otherwise I’m not going to remember them in 10 minutes. We’re going to say that we made $10,000 from this funnel which means that each lead is worth $10. That’s our total funnel lead value. Over time, however long the funnel is, and through the entire lifetime value of that funnel, those 1000 people are worth $10,000.

Let’s look at the touch point. Our first touch point is that webinar. What we’re going to see is we have let’s say 200 people hitting the webinar and we have 800 people not hitting the webinar. The 200 people who are hitting the webinar are going to be worth $7,000. The 800 people are worth the remaining $3,000. Now we can see that people who hit the webinar are worth so much more than people who don’t hit the webinar. What we’ve done here is we did the same thing. We said, “Of the 1000 people who’ve gone through this funnel, how many of them have the attended webinar tag?” 200. How much are those people worth for their lifetime? That’s $7,000. Now we know exactly how much that webinar’s worth.

Then we can do that with the next touch point. We then say, “Okay, after the webinar, we send a PDF. How many of those people took the PDF, how many didn’t and what’s the value of each?” As we go down each touch point, we’re just doing a simple calculation of how many people sought, how much are those people worth in their lifetime. That’s how we kind of figure out what the value of each of those touch points are.

As you go down, it gets more complex. After this funnel, you have a secondary product, you have a third product, you have a fourth product. It gets more complex as time goes on. But the actual number you’re looking at at first is super simple. How many people touched it? How much are they worth?

Louis: Very cool. Listeners are not as lucky as me because I have the live demonstration on the whiteboard but we’ll make sure to add the picture to the show notes.

Yeah. It’s a very simple way to see it. But I would say that not many people are doing it this way even though they should. Thanks for that.

Let’s stop talking about marketing for a second and talk about you for a bit. Your website is developyourmarketing.com. You also have other products as you mentioned you have SegMetrics which is one and we’ll also mention the other ones that you have in the show notes. You have a particular set of skills. You’re a marketer and a developer which I think is quite rare. How did you do on your products?

Keith: Yes, it served me well. College was many, many years ago but I double majored in Design and Computer Science. I’ve always been interested in design. I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was growing up. I’ve always been interested in development. I got my first computer at the age of 5 and started programming pretty much right away.

After college, I realized that I couldn’t live as a cartoonist. I decided to forego that. I went to Japan. I taught English there for three years and then started at a Japanese start up. I went from essentially hey, this is a guy doing technical translation to a developer and then essentially running the entire technical side of the company. I did product design, product development, strategy and all that stuff. I did that for about six years. It was a small company.

The good thing about small companies is that you have to do everything. There’s no team that you can say, oh now you go do this and you’re not siloed. I had to figure out, hey what designs work? What marketing strategies work? How do you develop software that works well? How do you develop things that convert well? I did that for about six years. Then we got acquired. I decided to go out on my own.

At this point, I had a lot of design experience, I had a lot of development experience and I had a smattering of marketing experience. I decided let’s try this. Let’s work on the marketing side of things because that’s where the skills that I have get applied the best. I started working with Ramit Sethi at I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Worked with him five or six years and started building a team. I was focused pretty much on his CRO and the technical side of his company.

I don’t know how many people know Ramit Sethi but he is a whirlwind of force. It was essentially like being thrown into the fire. The amount of marketing knowledge and technical knowledge that I learned in the first two years eclipsed anything that I have done previously. It was pretty amazing.

Louis: How did you learn Japanese, by the way?

Keith: Japanese, I’d studied it in high school and a little bit in college and I had studied abroad twice before. I’ve been studying it a long time, I was never very good until I moved there.

Louis: Okay.

Keith: The good thing about going and teaching English there is that it’s a very easy job for a pretty good pay, at least in Japan. I was able to study a lot of Japanese. When I decided to stop teaching English, I could go and work at a standard Japanese company. I was actually the only English speaker at our company.

Louis: I’ve never been to Japan. I don’t know the Japanese culture that much. But what would be the most surprising thing if I went there today to work there in Japan? What would be the single most surprising thing about it?

Keith: A, how long people work and b, how little they actually get done each day. It’s because people know they have to be there from about 8:30AM until 10:00PM or 11:00PM. I rarely got home before midnight.

Louis: Fuck.

Keith: That’s why I don’t work there anymore. It’s amazing because I would say the amount of work that gets done is comparable to the West. It just happens over a longer period of time. If you got to be there for 14 hours, you’re not in a hurry. I had co-workers that were cleaning their ears, they were taking naps on their desks. One guy was building a bicycle in his cubicle. I looked at him and I was like, is that a bicycle for the office? He’s like, “Nope.” He spent two hours that day just building a bicycle in his office. It’s the same amount of work just spread out over a much longer time period.

Louis: Wow. It’s crazy. I don’t know what to say after that. It’s sad as well, right?

Keith: It is.

Louis: What a life.

Keith: Yeah. I think the younger generation is starting to change. I didn’t live in Tokyo. I lived out in [00:31:39], very much an old style of working and an old kind of idea. I did a lot of enterprise sales and stuff. I had to work with companies that have been around for 100, 200 years or whatever. It was really good because you just can’t get that experience, especially here in the States. It was a great experience to go through. I am also very glad that I’m not doing it anymore.

Louis: Have you been to the Jiro restaurant?

Keith: The GRO restaurant?

Louis: Have you heard of this documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi?

Keith: Oh, the Jiro Dreams of Sushi. I have not been there. They actually got famous close to when I left.

Louis: Oh. Sushi is my thing. I’d love to go there.

Keith: I need to watch the documentary at some point.

Louis: Yeah, you do. It’s actually quite good. It teaches you the value of specialization over generalization. The fact that this guy has been willing to specialize his own entire life on one particular craft. This specialization enabled him to be the best in the world at it by a mile. I think he’s a good lesson for anybody who wants to get into marketing in particular. You’re not going to be the best marketer in the world, right?

Keith: Definitely. Jiro’s a great example because he’s so specialized and it becomes such a good story. Especially in the West now, when you think of sushi, you think of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. There are a lot of things like that. There’s sushi restaurants everywhere. Why is it Jiro that has that documentary about him? Why is it Jiro that has this following? It’s because he’s now known. He’s been able to niche down into this beautiful story about what he’s doing. If he just said I’m a Japanese chef, it’s not as impressive. But he has his story, he has this narrative about him being the best in the world, him being a craftsman.

That’s one thing that I always loved about the Japanese, I won’t say workforce like the business, but the Japanese work ethic is this idea of being a craftsman. I think that as marketers, yes there are slimy marketers who are just out there to get a quick buck but if you look at the people who are succeeding and the people who endure with their message and their marketing and their sales over years, it’s the people who treat the marketing and treat what they’re developing as a craft. It’s people who look at what they’re doing and say, “I want to provide the best content and the best value to my readers because I value them, because I value the work that I am putting into it.”

I would just say I worked with a lot of clients who run the gamut between ‘I value my readers’ versus the people who are ‘I just want to make a ton of money’. I’ve seen lists that are 20,000 people in size outperform lists that are a million people in size. Just because that 20,000 people list is so much more dedicated and so much more engaged with the message that’s being presented from this craftsman marketer rather than a blast of hey here’s my affiliate link for the week or hey, you should totally buy this other product or hey, you should buy this other product. Especially as we’re talking about lead value and especially as we’re talking about these email funnels.

To me, the number one important thing is to have great content and provide great value over time. That’s why we’re talking about the lead value increasing exponentially as time goes on because people come to know you, they come to trust you. At some point, that trust level has overcome the objection level. That’s when they become the customer.

Louis: In the documentary of the Jiro Dreams of Sushi, there’s a scene where Jiro massages his octopus. There’s a dead octopus in a bucket. He knows the exact amount of time he needs to massage this octopus. He knows that for optimum taste experience, he needs to be massaged for I think three hours or whatever. He would do that every time there’s a fresh octopus in the market.

I would go and I would try to make an association, a correlation between the two that might sound weird. But you do as a marketer, you need to massage your customers the same way that Jiro massages his octopus.

Keith: Yeah. You need to treat everyone on your list as if they were an octopus. Exactly.

Louis: There you go.

Keith: That’s the number one take away from the show.

Louis: You must massage your octopus. I meant to ask you why do you think marketers have a bad reputation in general but you answered this question which is great. What advice would you give to people who want to get into marketing or at least who want to get to the better side of marketing? What would be your number one advice?

Keith: It’s two parts. The main one is to create a niche where you are separate from the people around you. What makes you different? What is the key point that you can provide that other people can’t provide? What makes you different? Then write great content that goes around that. Honestly, don’t hire copywriters off the bat. Especially don’t hire content farms or content creation agencies that are like, “Oh, we’ll write content for you.” The problem with them is that they’re not unique. They are not you. They don’t get your unique selling proposition. They don’t get what makes you different. Especially in the beginning, you have to figure that out for yourself. Your copy will suck at the beginning. It sucks for everyone at the beginning but you keep doing it. It keeps getting better every single time you write.

Louis: Yeah. That’s a perfect way to describe it because it’s the same for me. I’ve been struggling to write for years. Only now have I started to become better at it and starting to enjoy writing. It takes years and years. Yes, pick a niche. I like what you’re saying about the content. There’s so much buzzer on this term at the minute and at creating content.

Keith: It’s miserable.

Louis: It’s not about creating content, really, it’s about the value. Value is also a miserable term. It’s about helping people and understanding their biggest problems, right?

Keith: Right. It’s interesting because people say, “Oh, you have to have a ton of content.” You don’t have to have a ton of content. You have to have one to two pieces of amazingly good content. Then you can grow off of that. The reason that people say you need a ton of content is because they’re not thinking about the content. They’re using a shotgun approach. Let’s just put a bunch of stuff out there and see what sticks. But if you really think about it, it’s not that hard, I say up on my ivory tower. But it’s not that hard to find something that can be interesting and connect with your audience if you think about it. But you really have to think about it and be in that content.

Louis: Absolutely. There’s not much to add to that. I think you’ve described it quite well. On that, what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years?

Keith: I think the two biggest things that people need to remember, and this is kind of a recap is that one, people are worth more the longer they are on the list. You should not focus on getting thousands of new customers in the top of your funnel. You should focus on the customers you already have. You should focus on what is the experience of people once they go through your first funnel. Are you dropping them and letting them have nothing? Or are you continuing to support them through good content and good sales?

The second thing is that you need to remember that people respond to good content with trust. That’s what you’re trying to build with these email funnels. You shouldn’t even think of these as sales funnel, although they are. What they really are are trust funnels. How can you talk to people on your list in such a way that they understand you, they trust you – they trust you to bring good information and not stir them wrong. At that point, that’s when they’re going to turn from a lead into a customer.

Louis: I’m glad you’re mentioning trust because that’s a big, big belief of mine that trust is the base of good marketing. If somebody trusts you then he or she would be willing to do much more than somebody who doesn’t. That’s what you need to seek absolutely.

There’s a good report that I would recommend everybody to read called the Edelman Trust Report which is every year that goes out, basically states how trustworthy are people in general, how trustworthy are people towards companies, towards businesses, towards charities and towards politicians every year. It’s fantastic because you see the evolution of trust versus the fake news, bullshit and all those kind of stuff. You see how the trust is shifting and why people trust certain things instead of others. It’s a fascinating way so I would recommend everybody to read that.

Outside of that, what will be the top three resources you would recommend marketers or the listeners to read or to listen to or whatever it is?

Keith: Yeah. The first resource I would definitely recommend is getting a CRM if you don’t have one already. Some of the good books I’ve been reading recently are War of Art is really good, it talks about how to get over writer’s block and how to write things that are interesting and understand the issues that our writers have. Ultimate Sales Letter which I really enjoyed reading. Getting Everything You Can Out Of Everything You’ve Got. Those are kind of my three go-to books right now that I’ve really enjoyed reading about marketing.

Louis: I see you came prepared.

Keith: I did. As I was listening to the other podcasts I was like, okay he’s definitely going to end asking me what my resources and books.

Louis: That’s good. I think two of the three books, I’ve never heard of. I’ll definitely check them out. Who do you think I should interview next?

Keith: That’s a good question. Have you interviewed Philip Morgan?

Louis: Yes.

Keith: Have you interviewed Kay Davis?

Louis: Soon. All your friends are in the list. What’s next?

Keith: Yeah. Brennan Dunn?

Louis: Yeah, okay. I will. Brennan Dunn is a freelancer at doubleyourfreelancing.com.

Keith: DoubleYourFreelancing. Then Monika Mars.

Louis: Who is that?

Keith: Monika Mars, she is a copywriter who focuses a lot on freelancing and stuff. Then Jaimie Portman from Breakfast UI who I actually adore.

Louis: Okay. Sounds very good.

Keith: Yeah.

Louis: I’ll definitely add them to the list and email them in the next few weeks. Keith, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

Keith: It’s been so great. Thanks so much. Let me know if you need anything.

Louis: Alright.