Cheryl and I were featured on a Podcast, Infusion Cast, with host Jason Hartman of Hartman Media to chat about what Barron Marketing does for our clients using...

You guessed it...automated marketing.


You can see the original page here if you’re looking for a solid podcast about how other companies are using Infusionsoft to grow their businesses.

Transcript

Intro:
Are you ready to grow sales? Save time? And make money? Automated marketing has never been easier! And Infusion Cast bring you hard hitting interviews with the thought leaders and experts in small business sales and marketing that will give you inside tips! tricks! hacks! And techniques to grow your business today! And now here’s your Jason Hartman!

Jason Hartman:
It’s my pleasure to welcome Art Basmajian and Cheryl Hunt, who are the co-founders of Barron Marketing Solutions. They are experts in Infusionsoft, they started a whole new business adventure in their fifties and without Infusionsoft, it just wouldn’t have been possible, as they will tell you. So, now they’re helping clients implemented Infusionsoft, do SCO, web design, paper click, etc. So, it’s a pleasure to have them here, coming to us from Pennsylvania, I believe. Art and Cheryl welcome, how are you?

Art Basmajian:
Great, thanks.

Cheryl Hunt:
Very good.

Jason:
Good. I was correct about Pennsylvania, right?

Art:
Absolutely.

Jason:
Automated marketing that’s what the show is all about. That is something that really, really changes things for people, once they get the hang of it and make it work. It helps them scale, it helps them have a life, make more money, it’s just all good as the saying goes. What has automated marketing done for you, your business and your clients in the last few years?

Cheryl:
When we started, this particular business, and I guess we should probably explain, Jason, this might help some people maybe they’re in the same situation. We’re in our fifties and we came from different backgrounds. Art was a mortgage broker, a stock broker for over twenty-three years, and then I was high school English teacher for twenty-nine. And when the real estate industry imploded, then Art started looking online and at that point, maybe seven, six years ago, he came to me one day and he said, “I think we should do internet marketing.” And at that point neither of us knew nothing, we didn’t know what a domain was, we didn’t know what a URL was, nothing. And, so we said, “Okay, how hard can that be.” and seven years later, we just put our noses to the grindstone, and studied under the top teachers. And, really started to enjoy it, and we were doing okay. We were consulting a lot of baby boomer, but I wouldn’t say that our business was really taking off, and we didn’t really even know really what our niche was, what we were doing. That’s when Infusionsoft entered the picture, we were checking it out for one of our clients, and they talked about automating your marketing. And, we thought we were pretty good, we thought we knew what we were doing. When we got Infusionsoft and started digging in and creating campaigns and segmenting our lists and not talking to everyone the same way, but automated it so that it seemed natural and progressive, that started to change our entire business. Art, why don’t you tell about how our business evolved, the three pieces to our business. And, then we can go from there.

Art:
Yeah, basically when we took a look at the customer life cycle with Infusionsoft, and I’m going to kind of refer back to my mortgage business, that I had for twenty years. Once I saw what I left on the table it just blow my mind. Because when I was in the mortgage business, it was fast and furious, I was in a refi boom, and my main focus was just generating leads, and I didn’t focus on ones that said no, or the ones that didn’t respond. And, had I started to focus on those types of people, quite honestly, Jason, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. I was licensed in three states, marketed in three states, and it was very targeted marketing. But when I saw what power Infusionsoft could do, by segmenting my lists and my potential customers, and the follow-up that I didn’t do; it just blow me away.

Jason:
Yeah, well, it really gives you the opportunity, it gives everybody the opportunity, mass customization. So, you’re saying the right things to the right people, and you can keep, really all those balls in the air at the same time. It’s amazing ability that it offers you to do that. Yeah, no question about it. So, segmenting the list, talk to us. It’s interesting, because you use it, of course in your own business, and maybe really that was the first thing. But, you got your own case study and then you got case studies of clients that you help with implementation, roll-out in on-going use. Give us any of those case studies you wanna share with us.

Cheryl:
For example, after working with several people, and kind of testing the waters and seeing where people are with their skill level and so on, with Infusionsoft, because some people are not technical, so, that’s where I think having teaching background has helped a little bit, because as soon as we start to talk to somebody, we can tell what their learning style is, how hands on they’re going to be, where we need to start. But what we found with, and we are a little different in, I guess our thought process and the way we approach working with people that are new, or establish in Infusionsoft, but what we found, Jason, is that, you know the old adage, teach a man to fish and you give them everything, and in today people seems to want the done for you. But we have found that the people that are really, really successful, take the approach where know they may not always choose to do all the work themselves and they may want some help with implementation. We found that those that have an active part and it’s more done with you, and we sit with them and a lot of times they’ll come to our office in Pittsburgh, but we sit down with them, whether it’s online or in-person, and they get in there and they do the driving. Because I could sit and program everything and I could create all the campaigns, but then they’re going to leave, or our time is going to be up, and they’re not going know what to do, and then it’s a frustrating mess for them, because they invested in this and they don’t know how to use this Ferrari of a motor.

And, so we found that the more that we can help people understand that number one, keep it simple, because when things get complex, they get real out of control really fast. And, so if you can keep the campaigns simple and think of it as layering. Get some basic campaigns in there, get a lead generation; you know done. Don’t forget about your customers that’s another area, where we were totally negligent in our early on. It was just that lead generation, and you know full that top funnel and just keep fulling it fast. But, gosh, your customers they’ve already handed over, open up their wallet. They’re the ones that are interested, they’re the ones that you should be just pouring the attention on, and giving them more then they ever expected, and give your attention to them; it’s the twenty-eight rule. Get a campaign where you’re wowing your customers and really over delivering there, and then you just start layering from there. And, we, guess you could call it a case study, and we’ve used this with several of our clients, because they don’t know a lot of times what that looks like, what does a nurture look like.

So, one of the best tips that we’ve give our clients, because content is real issue, people are lacking in time, they’re not expert copy writers, and that’s a real intimidation, and so, what we’ve done and a lot of people have successfully use is, I made myself write one blog post a week for over a year, now I’m on the second year, and I spent a good amount of time, sometimes three, four, five hours and I made it ever green, in other words it wasn’t related to any events going on right then, it was marketing, dealing just with either B to B or social media or something that was going to last for a good amount time that just the concepts don’t go away, it’s just good value, and then that became the attention getter, the beginning piece of my email, of the nurture sequence, so I would write it so that the first couple of paragraphs would grab their attention, and then I would put a read more link in that email send them over to the blog. So, now we’re getting people on our website, checking things out, we’re getting traffic, the SCO is kicking in, and it’s done incredibly well, and that’s what Art was talking about in the beginning is that people are going opt-in for your irresistible offer; that’s the whole point. They’re going to opt-in, you’re going to grow your list, but not everybody is going to do ready to become a customer right away.

Jason:
Oh yeah, of course, definitely not. So, the blogging, etc, and, that’s really your co-founder specialty area which is the SEO and I think the pay per click, is that correct?

Cheryl:
That’s exactly right.

Jason:
Maybe he can talk about that a little bit. What are the best practices and tips and tricks of the trade, Art?

Art:
Well, [Laughs] you got an hour, Jason?

Jason:
[Laughs] Well, actually you got time for three day seminar is what I thought you would say. What’s the? Not even the readers digest version, it’s literally the five minute version. [Laughs]

Art:
Right, well the five minute version of it. Let’s say, when I get a client that wants me to run traffic to their website, the first thing that I do is, I take a look at their website, I make sure that there is some type of offer on their landing page, again this all backs up to Infusionsoft, because you can run traffic to a website all day long and not get a good ROI. And, the key to these successful with running AdWords campaign or even Bing is to make sure that you have a back-end in place, a follow-up sequence, and this what really Infusionsoft brings to the table. We basically will not and I will not run traffic to a website unless there is a back-end in place.

Jason:
We definitely have talked about the back-end, and we can talk about that more, and we all know that’s a great benefit of Infusionsoft, just like you mentioned. But, please tell us some of great practices on actual SCO, or maybe you can tell us do you prefer one over the other? Do you prefer PPC over SCO or SCO over PPC?

Art:
That’s a good question, I actually prefer PPC simply because I have a lot of tools in place where I do a lot of competitive analysis, I learn a lot about the industry in particular vertical that my clients are in. The SCO part is to me a little more tedious, but it’s also very rewarding, because when you can find those keyword phases for the customer that do convert and get them ranked on the first page of Google. It kind of coincide with the AdWords and the organic traffic. Cause you have two sides, you have the paid side and you have the organic side, and Google kind of rewards you both ways if you’re running both sides of the fence. And, in finding those keywords that will convert, there is an art, there is a science to it, it’s basically, hmm how do I want to say it? It’s an art not a pun, [Laughs] but really it takes, you got to know what you’re doing, to find those competitive keywords, and really what I look for when I do SEO work is basically competing keyword phases for everywhere between fifty and a hundred-thousand competing pages.

Jason:
It was interesting what you were saying about one of your clients in the case studies, but things change with the consumer focus they change in fact in one way based on seasonal issues, right?

Art:
Yeah, that’s exactly correct. And, what I was saying early was that I have a client in Cleveland, he’s in landscaping business, he sells mulch, top soil, sand stones, bah bah bah, in the summer, and we run a GEO targeted campaign in the Cleveland within a fifty mile radius of his business, because that’s as far out as he wants to deliver. What happens is in the fall and late fall where we are right now, he changes his focus from that to firewood because he has probably one of the best sources of firewood, he kindle dries all his firewood, that being said. Focus from his name keywords in the summer which are mulch, top soil, and etc, shifted to firewood in Ohio, firewood in Cleveland, and those keywords sequence are really specific to people that are searching for that. And, this is what shifts back to the SEO, because you want to keep interesting to the reader, he does do blog post, but he relies on me to give him the keywords that are converting the most off of his PPC campaign. So, when we write the blog posts and we do the SEO work for those blog posts, they’re focus on keywords that are converting; plain and simple, they convert. And, because they are GEO targeted in that specific area, it works. His click-through ratios, just to back up a little bit average on Google is one to two percent, were anywhere between ten to fifteen percent on couple of the ad groups, top ones are anywhere between twenty to twenty-five percent click-through ratios. Which are basically off the charts.

Jason:
Yeah, fascinating, that’s great, good stuff. Well, what do you see coming next? It’s always good to look at and predict how our businesses will be in the future, and we’re right around the corner from a next year here. Infusionsoft I’m sure has new developments, I’m sure you have new things that you’re thinking of. Tell us what you see out there.

Cheryl:
Yeah, we’re excite, recently Infusionsoft asked Art and I to serve for a year on their inaugural advisory group. And, so we’re really excite about being able to take what our clients are telling us, that they need in the software, things that will make it a little bit more user friendly even then it is; we’re excite about that. Infusionsoft knows that mobile response is a necessity, so that’s one of the things on the horizon that they’re really going to be putting into play is making their host of landing pages and the email templates more mobile response; everybody’s excite about that. As far as our business, we’re kind of at a point now where we need to expand again, and so, we are going to be adding to our team, so that we can service more Infusionsoft customers at the same level that our customers have come to expect; we’re in another building phase. And, the other thing we’re just so excite about is what we’ve seen in Infusionsoft do for our customers, that we’re going to start focusing on specific verticals as far as industries of new members coming in Infusionsoft and because Art’s background in the mortgage industry, that’s where we’re going to start. And, so we’re going to be putting together campaigns that are optimize for that industry, and then having them basically all ready to go for other new members of Infusionsoft, and just take it one vertical at a time.

Jason:
Well, good stuff. Give out your website if you would.

Art:
The website is barronmarketingsolutions.com.

Jason:
barronmarketingsolutions.com. Well, Art and Cheryl thank you so much for joining us.

Art:
Thank you very much, Jason.

Cheryl:
Thanks, Jason.

Outro:
This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email media@hartmanmedia.com. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network Inc. exclusively.