EP 4: Don’t Be a Marketer, Be a Servant

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

In today’s episode, I want to talk about letting go of the role of marketer and placing yourself firmly as a servant to your target demographic or your target market. In doing so, I want to tell you a story from my past life. I’m telling you this story because it is a perfect example of using the role of servant to produce big SEO results.

When I entered into the role of servant some 10 years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. Well, I take that back. I knew what I was doing. I just had no comprehension of how far-reaching results it was going to produce.

Prior to founding Web Savvy Marketing, I worked as a VP of Marketing for an ERP software company. At that time, we had a very good product but no one really knew who we were. If we were able to work our way into an RFP situation and perform and on-site software demonstration, we would win the business about 90% of the time, and that’s really a large number for that type of product in sales cycle.

Our issue wasn’t our product or our sales team. It was simply the fact that we didn’t have enough leads coming into our sales funnel. We were a small developer and we were competing against really large organizations like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle.

I had an internal sales team that do telemarketing but I didn’t have any other support for marketing efforts. And here I was competing against really large corporations with million dollar budget for SEO and even bigger budgets for Pay-per-click.

Our company didn’t have a huge budget or staff but we had some really smart people in our team and we came up with a really good idea. What we did was we decided that we were going to position ourselves early on in the buying cycle and way before prospects knew about big software companies. This meant we needed to make sure that they knew about us well before they started to consider a specific vendor or a specific software package.

Now, our sales cycle was long and would generally lasted about 9 to 12 months. They gave us a lot of time to nurture leads but it also had a lot of opportunities for someone else to steal that lead away. So we came up with the idea of creating what was called a software selection toolkit. The software selection toolkit was simply an old style DVD that included a large list of resource documents that would help someone search for, evaluate, and select an ERP software package.

People would request the DVD be mailed to them. And as a result, we would have a lead that would go into our sales funnel. Once the lead came in, I would physically mail a DVD full of templates and whitepapers in like Excel, Word, and PDFs. Sounds really exciting, doesn’t?

Well, my college degree was in accounting. So creating this toolkit was right up my alley. I spent about three months writing functionality list, vendor list, interview questions, RFP templates, demonstration scripts, and whitepapers. Yup, I know. It is super exciting.

But keep in mind, we were literally working in lead generation and conversion funnels before those terms were even popular. And the best part about it was we didn’t even really realized what we were doing. We just had what we thought was a good idea and we had hoped it would translate into really good leads.

Back then, there wasn’t a lot of information in these kind of things. So we didn’t realize we were being trendsetters and that our little DVD was going to be a very powerful sales tool. So this DVD was just something that we tried so we could stay alive and bring leads into our sales funnel.

And as part of this toolkit project, I created a content silo in the website that had a page for each template within the DVD. I optimized each of these URLs for SEO and used them to drive traffic into the site and into individual pages of the site, not the homepage. But I was using SEO to drive traffic into each one of these little templates or whitepapers.

My SEO was driving traffic for search at various stages of the buying cycle and that was a critical part of our success. Honestly, we knew we were smart kids but we had no idea how cool we were. And I say that because looking back, I really find it funny on how this whole thing transpired and how it really worked.

So that section of our website started to drive a bunch of traffic and not just traffic, super targeted traffic. It was exactly the people that we wanted to reach and we were able to grab people early on in the buying cycle and we were able to gain trust and authority with them, which – that gave a huge advantage over our competitors. It filled our sales funnel and it shortened our overall sales time so we could actually close deals and get new clients faster.

Before I knew it, I was receiving industry awards and writing feature articles for industry magazines and all because we provided real value to website visitors and people around us were taking note.

So, our little company in Toledo, Ohio which there’s a lot going on in Toledo, Ohio especially when you’re competing against SAP and Microsoft and Oracle. But that little company grew sales 400% in just two years. And a very large portion of that was because we were utilizing this toolkit in SEO to drive leads and fill our sales funnel.

So here’s what makes this story special and why I wanted to share it today. While we were technically playing the role of marketers, we were so much. We were actively playing the role of servant. And this is why it worked and it worked for years, actually, for more than a decade.

We were playing the role of servant to our target market and we were actively serving their needs. We were helping solve their problems. We were providing them with education and we were freely giving away tools and templates.

And most important, we were helping IT managers do their jobs better. So in that type of sales cycle, it would either make or break an IT manager’s career. If he picked the right software and the implementation went well, he was the hero. If he picked the wrong software and he made a bad decision and the implementation of the software went poorly, he was most likely fired. So this job of selecting this business software was huge and it would make a big impact on somebody’s overall career as well as just their everyday lives.

So this is why it worked a decade ago and why a lot of the content still ranks in Google today. I wanted to tell this story and take you through this example because it’s a great illustration of using SEO to focus on your website visitor and to help others.

Remember that SEO is about the user experience in helping people. That’s what we did then and it still works today. And today, it’s really the only kind of SEO that does work. You really need to focus on helping people and serving their needs, becoming a servant for them. That’s what really makes SEO special.

So now, I want to ask you a question. How can you be a servant to your target demographic or market and your website visitor? How can you help those who visit your website or blog? How can you gain their trust, build their authority, and produce tangible results? And the most important one is are you doing any of that right now?

As you progress on your SEO journey and you work towards building your traffic, I want you to remember this story and that 400% growth rate. And I want you to remember, it was only achieved because we did the right thing in serving others and providing help, real help that people were thankful for.

Today’s takeaway is this. Don’t just think about what you can do to get traffic. Ask yourself how you can be a servant to your website visitor and ask yourself how you can provide value. How can you help them? If you want people to remember you, your website, or what you do, you have to provide measurable, tangible value so that they will not forget you. And when you do this, you will not be forgotten. People will remember you and they will stay with you along their customer journey and their buying cycle.

You have to decide that you will become a servant to your target demographic and that SEO is your tool to provide education and value. When you do that, you win and you win is so many different levels.

Thanks for joining me this week. I look forward to continuing our SEO journey next week as we talk about more ways you can use SEO to provide a positive user experience and help those around you.