Get More Customers Academy Recap - July 2017

Get More Customers Academy Recap

Didn't make it to our live event? We have the recap below:

Introduction With Dan Tyre, Hubspot

Dan Tyre was a member of the original team at HubSpot, providing his expertise in sales as they grew to be a 3 billion dollar company. An energetic speaker with tons of valuable information, Dan kicked off the event with an enthusiastic intro to inbound marketing.

Key Takeaways: Cold calling is dead, and the world is moving away from interruptive advertising and lead gen. Unlike outbound marketing where you're actively trying to get a customer to buy from you, inbound draws customers in. Instead of "always be closing," the new sales phrase is "always be helping."

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Module 1: Who Is Your Audience?

How to craft the right message for the right person at the right time all the time.

Our founder Stormie Andrews kicked off the event with our first and most important module that lays the groundwork for the rest of the education series: Buyer Personas.

Key Takeaways: It's difficult to win online without knowing who your ideal customer is. Hint: It's not everyone. Building a buyer persona and crafting messaging that speaks to that ideal customer can help marketing, sales, service, and more.

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Module 2: How to Attract More Visitors to Your Website

Our co-founder Darrell Evans built from Module 1 to talk about the one thing everyone wants to know about: attracting more website visitors.

Key Takeaways: Blogging, SEO, social media, and paid advertising are all ways to drive traffic. By leveraging the unaware and pain aware stages of the buyer's journey (people who don't know they need to by yet), you can unearth 85% of your customers from a practically uncontested market.

With this in mind, blogging should be about problems, the pain that proceeds the solution. Darrell also shared several solutions to make content creation a breeze.

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Why Social Media?

De 'Borah Fortune Stott, Yokel Local's education director, further hit home the importance of social media when driving website traffic.

Key Takeaways: Search engines alone are not enough to succeed online. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and LinkedIn are some of the top platforms for social media for business. Facebook, in particular, is the smorgasbord of opportunity, including their "Pay to Play" strategies. De 'Borah also shared tactics and tools to make social media easy.

Module 3: How to Convert More Visitors Into Leads

Darrell opened up Module 3 talking about bridging the gap between traffic and leads. A ton of traffic is worthless if none of them are raising their hands to start a relationship with you.

Key Takeaways: Make sure your website is a resource that meets your buyers at their stage of the journey. If visitors are showing up on your website, there should be a clear call to action. What do you want them to do when they show up?

Bonus Content: The Skinny on Blogging

Amanda Edens, the content strategist at Yokel Local, dives deeper on the strategy and tactics of blogging from brainstorming topics, writing posts, and optimizing for search engines.

Key Takeaways: Writing the headline is the most important part of the process—no one will read your content unless they first get captured by the headline. Amanda shared the best practices of headline writing and one of her key tips, which is "Don't tell readers what you want them to know; write around what they want to discover."

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Bonus Content: The Power of Imagery in Content Marketing

Digital strategist and graphic designer Sha Drena Simon shares how imagery enhances blog posts, helps readers retain information, and strengthens branding.

Key Takeaways: 95% of people are more likely to understand information when accompanied by an image. A successful image is composed of brand colors, creative typography, and your logo.

To wrap up her section, she even did a live demo on how to create an image in under 4 minutes.

Inbound Marketing Expert Panel Discussion

Fresh off the heels of lunch, our experts lined up to take live Q&As from the audience, fostering meaningful discussion on the information up to that point.

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Module 4: How to Convert More Leads Into Customers

After the panel discussion, Darrell launched right back into the heart of our event: getting more customers. One huge problem: 73% of leads are never followed up on.

Key Takeaways: Email is an awesome tool, and, no, not to spam people. Top of mind awareness can always be increased with little effort through email drip campaigns that involve storytelling, social proof, and testimonials.

Dan Tyre also discussed creating a sales process that matches how people buy. The inbound sales formula: Identify, Connect, Explore, and Advise.

Module 5: How to Delight More Customers and Get More Referrals and Repeat Business

Stormie follows up with an assertion: A sale isn't the end of your relationship with your customer.

Key Takeaways: You should have a strategy in place to communicate with your customer after the sale. This turns your customer into an advocate and an advocate into an influencer that generates business. In turn, this improves your online reputation with good reviews on review sites.

Module 6: How to Scale for Growth

Stormie concludes the event with the last module on how to put all of the previous strategies into place. He discusses the different options from hiring in-house professionals to outsourcing key aspects of the process and the different tools that are available for those endeavors.

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The Get More Customers Academy LIVE event was a smash success, and we are so grateful for everyone who attended, everyone who volunteered or partnered with us to make this happen, and of course our amazing team.