"The Big 5, Technical SEO, Inbound & Sales, And More:" The IMPACT Show Ep. 28 [Show Notes]

In this week's episode of The IMPACT Show, Bob, Nick, and special guest, Marcus Sheridan talked about technical SEO, how to introduce Inbound to sales teams, the big 5, ending client agreements, and more.

Just in case you missed us live (or if you want to relive the magic), you’ll find the episode’s show notes below as well as the recording.

Enjoy and make sure to share with your peers! 

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Have feedback or questions? We’d love to hear it. Comment on this blog or email us at show@impactplus.com.

Oh, Marcus have you been here the entire time?

Marcus Sheridan is joining us this week, and for those of you who don't know who he is, in a previous life he was a pool guy and now he has a company called The Sales Lion, that specializes in digital marketing and sales consulting. He also teaches sales, digital marketing, and better communication all across the world.

Earlier Bob and Marcus were on a webinar for SEMrush. There were over 200 people watching at one point, and about 20 of those people join IMPACT Elite afterwards. Fernando Dias, who was watching the webinar posted the comment, "I'm at the webinar right now and it's mindblowing!"

You can check out the webinar here!

What Marketer's Be Talkin' Bout

Where we go over what you're saying in IMPACT Elite.

IMPACT Elite is a community of over 900 passionate marketers looking to help other marketers succeed. We’d love for you to join us! Go to impactplus.com/elite or just search the IMPACT Elite Group on Facebook and request to join. 

1. Kevin Mitchell: "For educational content (eBook, White Paper), what have you found to be the best converting CTA text for simple buttons?"
   • From our experience, we've diminishing results on eBook and white paper conversions. Most people don't want to fill out a form. If you're not getting a lot of conversions, the issue might not be the CTA but rather the format of the offer.
   • Suggest don't call it an eBook or White Paper. Call it what it is. When it comes to the simple buttons, we don't suggest using download, but have a little fun and consider using get it now or start reading now. CTA buttons should reflect a little bit of your company culture
2. Kristin Dennewill: "We are looking at a new project management solution and I was looking at Jira Core but it doesn't look like it has time tracking. I'm curious as to how many people are tracking their team's time. People hate tracking time, but I don't know how else we'd know what our margins are if we don't track it."
   • Thoughts on time tracking
     •  At IMPACT we use Jira, which has a time tracking solution called Tempo. When we first went agile last summer, we initially did some time tracking, but our people have always hated time tracking. 
   • Our project management setup
     • When we were originally started tracking time through agile, we identified on average how long it takes our team to do specific tasks and applied points to those tasks.
     • For example, a task that takes 15 minutes to an hour is 1 point, one to two hours is 2 points, so on. 
     • We then were able to identify the capacity of our team and then determine how many points they could handle per week. Depending on their position, they might pull in 36 points per week.

Before we dig in.. start thinking about how the things we’re talking apply to your company. If you have any challenges or questions that you want us to address, leave a comment or send us an email to show@impactplus.com. We’ll get to as many as we can either at the end of the show or during next week’s episode.

Topic 1: Technical SEO Tips and Tricks to Boost Traffic Right Away

• This was a suggestion from Tom DiScipio, our Chief Strategy Officer. 
• As we've been going through this journey of becoming more of a publisher, trying to get our traffic way up, one of the key components has been revamping our SEO strategy, with the help of Franco Valentino. Since we've started working with him, we had 250,000 monthly visitors and now we're at 345,000. Which is a pretty big leap.
• What Franco will tell you:
  • Have SSL on your website
    • Check to see if your website has https
  • Speed
    •  Making sure that your pages are light and lean and optimized for speed. A big culprit is the images on your site.
• Focus on keyword opportunities
• Don't leave potential keyword opportunities on the table
  • Example HubSpot vs. Marketo blog post. A title you might want to utilize is HubSpot vs. Marketo: An In-depth Review
    • By doing that you were able to hit two stones at once.
• You can use a program like SEMrush, and start tackling all of the issues they recommend fixing.
• You should be writing your content with SEO in mind.
• Don't miss Franco's upcoming IMPACT Elite exclusive webinar on technical SEO on November 22, at 11:00 am EST.

Topic 2: Introducing Inbound to Sales

Frances K Bowman: "Introducing inbound marketing to a sales team in a way that creates buy-in"

• Kathryn Gritzmacher: Great question! I recommend reading the book, “They ask, You Answer” by Marcus Sheridan. It’s excellent and I think it would help you.
• The whole key to sales and getting buy-in from them is to speak their language. 
• The problem a lot of marketers have is that because they work in the company, it's just a lot of noise. But when someone comes in and talks about the same thing, everyone gets bought in. 
  • Buy in always stems from a lack of education.
• If you have to persuade someone who doesn't want to be persuaded, you have to show them the mirror (see how they themselves behalf, think, buy). And, if they don't see the mirror, you have nothing. You have to help them discover the truth, without revealing it to them. If you can explain it in such a way that it's conversational and question-based, the light bulb will go off.

Topic 3: The Big 5

• The areas that people have questions about and want to know more about before speaking to someone or making a purchase. And, it can be applied to every industry.
• Big 5 consists of:
  • Cost
  • Problems
  • Versus
  • Reviews 
  • Best
• One reservation many companies have is that they don't want to talk about their competitors. It's not about creating fluffy pieces, but creating content that helps your sales team convert leads into customers. 
• If you're using content the right way and training your sales team on how they can integrate it into the sales process, it can start working immediately.
  • It can cause your prospects to have deeper engagement with your company.

Topic 4: IMPACT's Website Updates

Pamela Frost: "What changes to your web design has performed best for you?"

1. Last week we talked about removing the pop-ups, and how we've had minimal change in conversions.
2. We introduced a better topic categorization system… not that we’ve seen a huge impact yet… but our plan is to implement topic clusters (hubs) around key areas of interest.

Topic 5: Ending Client Agreements

John McTigue: "For whatever reason, your agency-client relationship isn’t working. When is it time for a heart-to-heart, and maybe a divorce?"

• That whole conversation starts at the beginning of the relationship. Don't be afraid to tell people that you don't think they're ready for the commitment. It's a two-way street, and not all of work is in the hands of the agency. Clients also need to do their part.  
• At IMPACT, we definitely take the side of making a promise to the client. We don't want our clients to think that they can be easily replaced. We like to hang on as long as we can. And, we should be coaching them and working with them to understand the long-term goal and value.
• If everyone does what they've committed to then everything is great. One thing we always ask is, " are we setting the right expectations?"
• While we shouldn't take all of the responsibility but the success of our relationship with clients is based on expectations and making sure everyone is on the same page.
• Create opportunities throughout the engagement to reassess and make sure everyone is still good. 

Next Steps:

We would love your comments! Feel free to send us an email or comment on the Facebook thread. 

If you really liked it, please give us a 5-star review on iTunes. 

We're going to IMPACT Elite to ask what you want us to talk about, so jump in on the post there.

Join Us on December 7th! 

Next week is Thanksgiving, and we're taking the week off :)

The next episode will be live on December 7th. Bob will be traveling that day, so the time will be determined as we get closer.

Until next time... get out there and make it happen.