There are some basic assumptions to be familiar with when starting any marketing conversation related to your tax or accounting firm.
- You need more than a website.
- You need to be conversion-oriented in your marketing.
- Email is your hidden weapon.
- Tactics are constantly changing.
- There is a specific relationship journey to follow in order to convert a lead into a client.
With that foundation, we can jump into the specific elements of how to make marketing effective.
And that’s what we delve into in this webinar: website, advertising, SEO, follow-up tactics, and more. We’ll explain why most PPC campaigns fail and how to structure your PPC campaigns to avoid that outcome.
Join us … and start to dominate.
Highlights
- You need know that you need more than a website to market your professional services firm online.
- You have got to have a comprehensive online footprint for your firm
Connect with Nate Hagerty
This episode is brought to you by AdvisorProMarketer, a leading marketing agency serving CPA & tax firms. It was established in May of 2007 in response to increased demand for real-world, relationship-building (and profit-producing) marketing tools for use in the advisory industry.
Currently, AdvisorProMarketer serves clients all across the United States and Canada who use their services to build relationships with their prospects & existing clients, as well as to grow the value of their business (for immediate cashflow and future sale-ability) by utilizing the following tools: a relational email marketing program, social media feed program, local listings management & optimization, and creating full “online marketing machines” for clients (which include SEO-optimized, conversion-centric custom websites).
AdvisorProMarketer is an Infusionsoft Certified Partner and a Digital Marketer Certified Agency.
Full Transcript from the Podcast
Chauncey Hutter 00:29
Hey, everybody, this Chauncey Hutter, and I’m with Real Tax Business Success, but I got two studs with me on this call and these are the online guys. And so with AdvisorProMarketer with Nate Haggerty and Christian his right hand, it’s like Batman and Robin– These guys, online get you leads.
Nate Hagerty 00:50
That’s, right?
Chauncey Hutter 00:54
The genesis of my relationship with Nate is we go back about 20 years. But Nate was really strong in areas where I had zero sense as it relates to generating online. The whole online thing was happening 15 / 20 years ago. And Nate transitioned himself into this different piece of the puzzle from a marketing standpoint and went online and started helping advisory professionals in that capacity and has done extremely well over this last, I don’t know how long it’s been, I guess, about 15 years or so.
Nate Hagerty 01:36
We started AdvisorProMarketer in 2007. And actually, it’s funny, because you introduced me into the tax industry, people should know that you brought me into it. And I’ve been in the industry now for almost 18 years. And I started AdvisorProMarketer at your encouragement because we were just dealing with your coaching clients in the beginning, you would tell people what to do, and how to build their business, and they just wouldn’t do it. And I was doing coaching alongside you, and we give them these strategies and people wouldn’t implement them. And so AdvisorProMarketer really did start as a kind of an implementation engine for your coaching clients, Chauncey. To the point where I had to make a choice. And you and I had to make a choice together, which was a hard choice, because you were one of, by far the greatest person I’ve ever worked with, you know, from a boss standpoint. But what was so great about it is you gave me tools and encouragement to start my own thing, and we’ve remained good friends. And there’s been a spirit of no competition and just mutual blessing and benefit. And it’s been a great ride. We do things differently, in some ways. Now, but you are a great leader and a good man. So I’m so thankful for you.
Chauncey Hutter 03:01
So anybody that comes and says, okay, what should I do with my online marketing, or my advertising or stuff, I point them in Nate’s direction. So that’s why we’re having this webinar today, you know, tax season is coming up in about six, seven weeks. And most of you need to do something, or you need to do something you need to improve what you’re doing. And these two guys are the guys that need to talk to you. So I’m gonna kind of slip out and let them, these guys do their thing. And really, you got to pay attention. And do not be overwhelmed with the fact that you don’t know how to do all this technology stuff. This is what these guys do. They are the implementation experts. So don’t worry about if you don’t know how to do it, you need to learn, you need to know about it. But then have them help you go about doing it so they can talk to you about that later. For now, just pay attention, get your notes out, and then absorb them because they’re going to cover some ground. They’re going to open your eyes to stuff that even you didn’t know it was an issue. So you got to pay attention. All right. Thank you, guys.
Nate Hagerty 04:13
Thank you, Chauncey. And I do want to take a moment to introduce Christian Jones, you’ve heard enough about me, Christian is our Director of search here at AdvisorProMarketer. There are 14 of us here atAdvisorProMarketer and we are all here to help you with your online marketing and we do so many different things. But Christian in particular, when he joined us about five / six years ago, he revolutionized the results that we were getting on behalf of clients when it came to search engine optimization in particular, but he has his hands in lots of different areas. He and a couple of other people from our leadership team here at AdvisorProMarketer and speaks with a lot of our clients and people who are wanting to kind of get input on their own online marketing who aren’t our clients. I forgot to update the slide, he just had his second child about a month ago. Is that right? Three weeks ago?
Christian Jones 05:11
On Sunday. Yeah.
Nate Hagerty 05:12
Here we go.
Chauncey Hutter 05:12
No wonder you look like you don’t have any sleep.
Nate Hagerty 05:15
Yep.
Christian Jones 05:15
Yep.
Nate Hagerty 05:17
You’ve got a negative COVID test, which is a good thing because he wasn’t sure.
Christian Jones 05:24
— gonna make this webinar just not spread out. You know, it’s like the new rule, isn’t it? Not having been on webinars? Right– Especially there’s no webinar. Right. Yeah–
Nate Hagerty 05:33
But he’s got a team of about seven of our team kind of work under him in various forms, a couple of them like really directly, and he drives all the actions, all the results when it comes to search engine stuff for our clients, and is paying attention to a very granular level to what’s happening from, you know, the Google Webmaster Tools, the search engine, land, all these kind of high profile Moz sources that are telling us what is changing because stuff is changing month by month by month, in terms of what are the signals that Google is looking for, to rank sites. And there are two primary places that we need to rank sites on your kind of the main Google results and then the local engine, we’ll talk about that a little bit. But here is a snapshot of our team as well. We are certified partners with Infusionsoft, we’re digital marketer, certified partners, and a bunch of content certifications. And we actually recently became Google’s premier partners. This means we’re the top 1% of agencies that work with Google when it comes to pay per click and SEO. So we’re held to the highest standards of ethics and excellence on behalf of our clients. So we’re premier partners, not just regular partners, and my other family, this is my work family, this is my other family, I’m not going to go into a lot of time, because there’s obviously I can talk about this for days. As you can see, we have seven children, and a few of them don’t look like me. And my wife and I, we were not able to conceive children actually, during the period that I worked with Chauncey. And we felt like that was God’s way of shutting one door and opening another. And so we adopted four, two from Ethiopia, two from Uganda, when they were 1, 3, 5, and seven, and we did it at different points, obviously. And then 13 years into marriage. after month after month, after month, and years and years of trying, we conceived, we’ve been told we couldn’t and were infertile, and a light bulb switched on. And then three biological children later, and here we are. So it’s an amazing story, we’re so blessed, thankful for it all. But I also share that so that you get a picture of the fact that I know what it is to battle and try for something month after month after month and have it not land. And from a personal standpoint, I know that intimately. I know that from a business standpoint, where you’re trying to, you know, make a change in your business, trying new marketing techniques, and they don’t work. And then hopefully you find somebody who shines a light or something changes in your circumstances, and a light bulb turns on and everything changes. I hope it’s not too lofty of a goal that this webinar might be some of that for you today. So that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to give you the tools to kind of like, lighten the path for online marketing for you. We have developed over the last three years or so what we call our digital dominance method. And it’s we’re not going to go into every aspect of this. In fact, today, we’re doing new content that I’ve never before presented to Chauncey, actually never before presented period. So we are going to be dipping in and out of this. But this is the methodology that we follow on behalf of our clients in order to build for them an online marketing machine that really works. But we’re also going to peel back the curtain and show you some of the components of that, that you can implement. My goal is to give you tools that you can implement, but also give you free tools that will kind of help you along the way as well. Not just intellectual tools, but actual software tools. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a minute. So we’re gonna start with some basic assumptions that I’m hoping that all of you understand. It is 2020 we’re moving into 2021 some of these assumptions are more controversial than others. But these are things that I have spoken about with Chauncey’s audience multiple times. And so I wanted to do different things today. So the first one is that you need to know that you need more than a website to market your professional services firm online. You have got to have a comprehensive online footprint for your firm, whether or not you maybe you just have a website, the reality is your prospects are looking at well more than just your website. And so the fact is whether you just have a website and you think that you call it good for online marketing, guess what, some algorithms and services are scraping your data on your behalf, whether or not you know it or not. And you can choose to claim and optimize those or not and let the robots do it for you. But if you choose to claim and optimize these, you can create a kind of a synergistic whole that works together. So your website being the content hub, that has to spit out because you can post content to your Google My Business, I’m not sure if people know that you can post updates on the regular daily, if not more than daily to your Google My Business Page, which actually very much helps. Some of you don’t even know what I’m talking about, when I refer to your Google My Business Page, that’s okay, we’ll kind of briefly explain what I mean by that. But there’s all these, there are about 73, different secondary listings that we track on behalf of our clients that, again, are getting claimed for you whether or not you like them, or whether you want them to or not, the robots are doing it if you’re not, the second thing, the website, what we do with the website has shifted so much, right. And then the purposes of a website, it used to be that you just having a website, having your information out there really mattered that alone was enough. Well, now, you’ve got, you know, video, blogs, social media, all the other secondary listings that I talked about how search engines relate to your website, how you write all of these forms, this broader online marketing footprint that you’ve got to understand. The second thing that is an assumption that I’m making is that you have a conversion orientation with everything you do online. And by that, I mean, you’re not just throwing a bunch of crap up hoping it sticks for the purposes of image. Now, if you’re following Chauncey, you’ve already got that understanding that like when you spend money, you want it to come back with friends attached. And when you have something online, you want to have it convert people into the next stage of whatever it is that you’re going to do in the online marketing relationship journey. So there’s a conversion orientation to everything that you do. So some people have taken that. And they’ve taken it all the way to the point where they don’t actually even have a full content-oriented website. And they just use like landing page software or Click Funnel or some of these other things as the primary engine for their firm. Now, there is a place for having these landing pages, these funnels within your broader online marketing mix, we use them, Chauncey uses them, of course, they can be very effective. However, when you are not placing content, they don’t lend themselves to placing informational content that actually gives the algorithms the robots reason to rank you highly in the search engines, which is the power position that you want, because that’s not based on advertising that’s not based on the budget that is based on you doing what is needed to be done right. Okay. So again, these are basic assumptions. I’ve gone over these a few times with Chauncey’s audience. So I’m kind of giving like a quick summary before we dive into the real stuff. The other thing you need to understand my basic assumption that you know, especially if you’re on Chauncey’s list is that you understand that email marketing is your hidden weapon. So here’s the deal with email in 2020. What our data is showing us and what we have seen just from feedback from clients, is this is getting more powerful, not less. I have a bunch of suppositions why that might be the case. Here’s supposition. Number one is that every other space online, especially the browser, app, phone, it’s very noisy, it’s very distracted, you can click away anywhere, but email suddenly feels calm. Email suddenly feels like it’s the place where you can just focus on the one thing and you’re not clicking away and all this different stuff. So whether or not why that’s the case, it doesn’t really matter what really matters is when you do email marketing well, you get results when you don’t, you don’t, but you know, you talk to any online marketing expert worth his salt and they will tell you that having an effective email marketing engine is like the first and most important thing that you can have underneath all of the other components. The other basic assumption is that tactics are constantly changing. And you’ve got to be paying attention to stuff that again, this is why this is brand new stuff. And then the fifth thing is that you want to bring your prospects through what we call the online marketing relationship journey, ie that what marketing really is about is moving people from cold, to warm, to hot to the client to a high paying client, like everything along that spectrum, and building different assets and different pieces that will feed into that journey. And because you understand it’s a relationship journey, you also have to understand that it’s very rare for it to just happen like that. It’s very rare for you to find a spouse and propose marriage on the first date and have them say, yes, it does happen. And the people who would say yes to being proposed to on the first date are weird, and not the kind of people that you necessarily want as clients. Now, obviously, you can take the analogy too far. Because sometimes, yeah, you can get great clients, you just catch them at the moment when they’re ready. And you know, you present yourself, boom, okay, they’re not weird, they’re sophisticated. But that’s the exception more than the rule. The modern prospect today is poking and prodding and looking so many different ways at a business before they make a decision. Oh, I mentioned the free tools. Again, I’ll give you a URL for that in a little while. So let’s start into this. The first thing you need to understand is that marketing your practice, your tax or accounting, whatever you do your primary source of revenue in your firm, moving these prospects in that relationship journey, it’s no longer linear. And I’m not the only one that’s saying this. But let me kind of give you an example of, actually a funnel, quote, unquote, a journey that I see happening a lot, you know, 2 tax professionals and a lot of times people are kind of pointing people to this. And that’s like, the Facebook interruption ad. So while somebody’s scrolling Facebook, you interrupt them with one of these goofy, hi, their videos, you take them to a landing page, you know, that’s just a one-pager. And they go into a booked appointment from that, and then you know, you’ve got to pitch them right away. Um, so that’s like, one path that you see a lot. And that’s a linear path. Um, the problem is, this is not the normal path anymore. This was maybe an innovative path five, six years ago. But if you’re paying attention to what the data is saying, Google, that kind of, I’ve cited this article before, it came out about 18 months ago. But it’s really important for you to understand, Google’s looking at consumer behavior across different verticals across different industries. This isn’t just in the advisory space, they’re talking about how intent is redefining the marketing funnel. And what they talk about is that marketers can no longer plan on a linear journey. And what that means is, so this was October 2018, so this was two years ago, that they highlighted this for people, and it’s only gotten more the case, it means that if you look at consumer behavior, there are hundreds and hundreds of touchpoints that consumers have before they make a decision. And I’ll explain what that means. I mentioned that online marketing relationship journey, right. So this is like the four stages of a relationship that we’ve kind of dialed down. But here is the more common path. And this is, you know, all of these things if you just have a squeeze page funnel, the things that are highlighted aren’t covered. Okay, so somebody’s searching for something. What’s great about search? Advertising and when people find you in a search engine versus being interrupted in a Facebook ad is that they’re already, you know, talking to prospects who are looking for something specific there. It’s intent oriented, rather than interruption oriented. So you might find your website, but then they get distracted by election results. You know, some screaming notification comes in, so they go away, maybe they go to cnn.com. But suddenly, they see your ad is on cnn.com. And they go oh, yeah, I was looking at that website. Yesterday, when I was looking about how to find the best tax accountant in the Peoria area. I’m gonna go back and get that so it goes back to the website does opt-in Finally, because again, they’re not distracted. They go there with even more intense because they see that you follow them, they opt-in on the lead magnet, there’s an email sequence with that lead magnet that brings them along a relationship journey such that they get even more intrigued so they might ask their friends about it. Maybe they look you up on Facebook, they look, find your Facebook page, they see that you’ve actually posted on a regular basis. They like what you posted. So they go deeper. They go to look at the Google My Business Page, they see that you have a pretty good review, you know, a proportion you’ve got like maybe just 20 reviews, but it’s like 4.7 so they that looks good. So then they give you a call. And by the way, what they do to get to give you that call is with a maps listing, does that not sound like how most people may even you interact with finding local businesses. This is a very common journey, there’s about 12, 13 of these journeys, that we’ve kind of identified with different starting points, different middle points. The point is, everything that you see in bold on your screen if you just got the squeeze page, or you just got like the standard brochure style, kind of glorified collateral website, none of this stuff actually will work, you’ve got to do more. Now, if you want us to take a look at what you’re doing, we will do it whether or not you want us to serve you or not. So I wanted to let you guys know we are doing a free online footprint analysis for Chauncey’s audience. Plus, we are giving away 4 free marketing tools for the first 20 people that go to this website, taxproleads.com. Fill out a few quick questions on that website, set a time on the calendar so that we can give you the analysis, we will actually go over this with you and give you access to the tools when you answer these questions. Here’s the deal, this is not a sales call. If you want it to be, we will certainly help you figure out what makes sense for you. We are not a charity, we are a business. But we will go over this information with you to help you dream about what’s possible help you apply what we talked about today, during this session. So this is a complimentary thing that we’re doing for Chauncey’s audience. So you can do that at taxproleads.com. Alright, so let’s dive into the advertising tactics. Again, this is going to be a little bit more like jazz, then like a college course, today, I’m going to be interrupting Christian with snarky comments. And he’s going to do the same thing with me. But we’re going to talk a little bit about pay per click advertising. And again, Christian’s pretty experienced in this because pay per click and search engine optimization really do work hand in hand. Because you can’t really send good traffic unless you’ve built or you can’t send great advertising traffic unless you build something with a good search engine foundation, because Google is actually paying by your authority score.
Christian Jones 22:28
Right.
Nate Hagerty 22:29
Christian, why don’t you take it from here, you’re smarter about this stuff than I am.
Christian Jones 22:32
Yeah, sure. I’m sure you’ll jump in as you want, chime on in. But guys, hey, yeah, Christian here, glad to be with you. We’re going to talk about paid and unpaid traffic. It’s another way to say what Nate’s been describing. This is the paid traffic side, this is the shortcut. I don’t want to wait for my organic rank, to improve, which I’m going to tell you a bit about this is if you need leads tomorrow, or come tax season, and you don’t want to wait for the Google bots to you know, favor you over your competitors, you need to advertise. But a lot of you have either never advertised or you have and it didn’t work. And so skepticism is something I run into a lot. These are the reasons why ad campaigns tend to fail. Let’s start here. There’s an auction process for Google ads. That’s one thing that a lot of you maybe don’t know, there’s a different cost per click, right. Some of you’ve probably heard of pay per click advertising. What you don’t realize, in that whole kind of environment, this whole universe of advertising is, there are some really, really expensive keywords. And then there are some less volume, keywords getting less volume. But longer keywords, like more words in the phrase, but cheaper, and possibly more qualified. Those are things that really among a lot of different issues that we’re going to talk about here really can wreck an ad campaign, because if you just are throwing ad dollars at the wall, hoping it sticks, Google’s going to tend to target 20 to $30 per click keywords for you. So your budgets only a couple of 100 bucks. There goes on the first couple of days…
Nate Hagerty 24:14
I did also want to interrupt and let people know that I will follow up, you’ll get all the slides for, you know, in the follow-up emails from this. So we’re going to be kind of like reading the menu a little bit on these slides. It’ll be up to you to eat, so to speak. So we’re not gonna be able to go over every piece of information on these slides. But I did want to highlight that the one ad group thing, this is a huge mistake that a lot of people make, were like, Christian, you’re better talking about it. I–
Christian Jones 24:44
Yeah, yeah, sure. So again, I mean, another thing, these probably would be the top two things, the one I just mentioned. And then the second bullet point. If you’re really trying to dial in on a certain service or a certain type of prospect There’s a lot of tools, there’s a lot of detailed oriented, kind of granular level demographic stuff with Google ads, you can dig into, or you can just have a catch-all ad campaign. That’s a huge mistake to run simple ads on Google and just say, Hey, I’m Tax Service, ABC down the street, throw 1000 bucks at it, and hope for the best you can get clicks. But where you get money on ads is, again, kind of getting more clear. Who is your ideal prospect? What’s your ideal service, and then back to the auction process, targeting better keywords and not losing all of your budgets, on a couple of really expensive keywords. So those are two that are probably worth mentioning. These are, again, more in positive things to consider as you structure your ad campaign. And as Nate said, we can’t go through all of them. Let me just point out the top and the bottom, actually, the first and this and the last. If you’ve ever done marketing or advertising of any stripe, and you don’t know how to track conversions, that’s a huge problem. Whatever you do come tax season, you must have a concrete way of tracking results before it launches. That’s a huge problem with a lot of ad campaigns is it’s just opaque. It’s unclear what success is. And the last is ads work best when you run them. See the data that comes through the ad campaign? And then make adjustments. Yeah, those are things to consider,
Nate Hagerty 26:26
Like setting an ad group up, and then check in on it like three months later, and they set it and forget it. And they wonder why it doesn’t work? Well, because they’re not inspecting the data on a regular basis, on a daily basis.
Christian Jones 26:42
Exactly. Those are things not to do. Those are things to do, and you’ll have these slides sent to you. And if you want to discuss anything that we go over that I don’t cover and doesn’t cover, grab a call with us. And we’d be glad to try to chat. But really, now let’s talk about results, stuff that we’ve done for our clients.
Nate Hagerty 27:01
And just what we’ve seen too, yeah, go ahead.
Christian Jones 27:03
Yeah. And it’s through the lens of what we know from our clients. But it’s really these macro trends that go well beyond the advisory space. So Surprise, surprise, the Coronavirus caused everyone to have fear and panic. And that causes people to kind of not want to invest money in marketing or advertising. Most industries are down for advertising during this year, including finance and accounting. Yet at the same time, the clicks the engagement, and the search volume has gone up. Why? I mean, all the tax changes won the tax deadline got moved PPP and SBA loans, there’s a lot of reasons for people to be looking for you guys. And yet people pull back their ad budget. So it’s kind of a great time to consider advertising. It’s one of those just windows that doesn’t come up all the time where there are more prospects, and it’s cheaper to start playing. So it’s not like it’s, you know, 10 cents to 20 cents, we’re talking like, you know, $15 to maybe three to $5 on some of these keywords you might target, but substantial drops. So what we’re talking about if this is still unclear, what we’re talking about is how to get your business ranking here. This is a search engine results page. And we’re going to talk about that ad space and how to think about that in light of Coronavirus in light of moving to taxis in 2021. But now more than ever searchers are looking for experienced help. This is the guy who gave us the data on you know, hey, what’s happening in finance and accounting and insurance space in terms of ad spend. And there’s just a lot of evidence that you guys are becoming more and more popular. So that’s a premise. That’s just the premise, as we go into this. I want you to be aware of it’s a great time to advertise. It’s a great time to shortcut the process of getting people to reach out and call you. And hopefully, this is persuasive as we move into some of the more tactics because I am going to get a little more granular moving forward. So Nate, let’s keep rolling if you wouldn’t mind. Okay, so I’m going to show you a couple of examples of different campaigns that we’ve run. And I’m going to rip through them again, I won’t have time to explain everything going on. But there’s a couple of different types of advertising campaigns that we’ve brought into this presentation just to show you guys. So as an example, if you’ve never run ads before, here’s what this can look like. Over June to September, so three months $1,600 in ad spend $3.17 per click a 2.91click-through rate. I’ve got some juicy or data I’m about to show you. But if you’re about to advertise whether you do it with us or someone else, this is just helpful for you to know above a 1click-through rate is the benchmark. I’ll say it again. If you get above 1% click-through rate on your ad campaign. That is an industry benchmark And out of this space advisory or otherwise, that’s a success. Now I got some juicier numbers–
Nate Hagerty 30:04
Let’s say, in this case, that you have a plan for that traffic, which we do on behalf of our client, right, you can send a bunch of traffic and have an awesome click-through rate yeehaw gives a rat’s rear end, you want it to like actually convert to, like leads and conversations and clients. And so you’ve got to build your website or the page that you’re sending traffic to, in such a way that it does convert people. That’s actually one of the reasons why I’m not sure that we’re going to well, we are going to talk a little about a little bit–
Christian Jones 30:09
We will
Nate Hagerty 30:35
We’ve shifted, even in the last few months of the conversion strategy on behalf of all of our clients, because we did some stuff this year. But, you’ve got–
Christian Jones 30:46
Some of that’s coming up soon, isn’t it?
Nate Hagerty 30:48
I’m sorry, what?
Christian Jones 30:49
Some of that’s coming up soon. Don’t we have is our next slide some of the questions I ask.
Nate Hagerty 30:54
Yeah, we’ll talk about it. Yeah,
Christian Jones 30:55
Yeah. So we’ll show you guys from the click, what’s our strategy to get them to take the next step, because that’s, again, this little ecosystem with advertising that circumvents your website, here’s something I don’t have on the slides. May speak to this if you want, don’t send your ad traffic to your main form website, period, have a separate ecosystem, that if they click the ad, they don’t want to go poke around on your service page or about page, they want to tell you their problem and take the next step. And so really, marketing or advertising, both sides will talk about reducing friction, and making it easier for people to just say, help, here’s what I need. That’s a huge thing. So for this campaign, we’ll get to some of the questions we ask as a follow up, this is more again, granular data. This guy went after SBA loan PPP, keyword searches. And he crushed it. I mean, he absolutely crushed it. These are kind of second-level conversions prospects during that three month time period, that converted through our funnel that we put up. And so all of those are juicy, warm leads. And here’s the thing that I was asking Nate about, here are some of those questions that we ask once we get them on the next page. And these questions are different for each of our clients. So they’re customized, but for this individual, he was two different examples. Hey, what’s the approximate amount that you owe on back taxes? because these were tax resolution leads, again, he has different ad groups. He’s got the SBA loan side of things. He’s got tax resolution leads. Coming through, we have different things we’re advertising for. These are two leads that both have massive amounts of back taxes, and they’re saying, here’s my problem. And that can lead directly then to a Schedule page, where they jump on the phone. And we track that data, which is what we’re looking at here. And you can see average talk time–
Nate Hagerty 32:45
…schedule calls, this is calls directly from…
Christian Jones 32:48
Correct,
Nate Hagerty 32:49
Yeah
Christian Jones 32:49
— from the ad. But point being, we track a lot of data to measure conversions. This is hopefully encouraging from a few points of view, one, kind of verifying at the outset, it’s a great time to advertise. And second, you can track a lot of data to see if this is effective. So those of you that are skeptical, the ROI kind of speaks for itself, how many of you would like to have 30 juicy leads telling you, hey, whether it’s SBA loans or tax resolution stuff I’ve got, yeah, 46 real pre-qualified leads from this ad campaign in three months. that’s compelling. As long as you guys are good in sales, that’s where you pick up the ball from us. But this is stuff you could put in place. So here’s another campaign, it’s gonna be a lot of the same data. I think it’s a little even juicy here. But we’ll skip past it 7.63% click-through rate, the same amount of spend stimulus package targeting those calls right there, go back one slide. And they just real briefly, this is June to September as well. This is people clicking his ad and then calling directly 123 calls from his ad over a three month time period. Some of that also depends on your capacity. If your office is set up to take calls. Awesome. If it’s not, we can always schedule or you could schedule Follow Up Calls instead of having to be direct to your phone line. But the point is, it’s a great time to advertise. So, Nate, this is kind of the turning point organic. Is there something you want to add to add before we move on?
Nate Hagerty 34:15
No, I mean, Google pay per click, which we have found to be far more effective than Facebook. And by the way, I didn’t want to have people the freedom to ask questions. There is a q&a box. We will get to any questions. If there’s stuff that you are curious about. You want to get more information about please feel free to use the q&a, which is on the bottom.
Chauncey Hutter 34:42
I have a question.
Christian Jones 34:44
Please…
Nate Hagerty 34:45
No, Chauncey, I meant the participants, not you.
Chauncey Hutter 34:49
I know. But I’m participating.
Nate Hagerty 34:52
Oh, okay.
Chauncey Hutter 34:54
What is the percentage you guys either recommend or what’s the ballpark? We want you to do this many paid ads and this much search as far as how you get clients.
Nate Hagerty 35:07
The vast majority of traffic comes through search. The vast majority of phone calls leads, and everything actually comes through organic traffic. We love paid ads as a kickstart. And as like another source. paid ads are great for quick results. But we get more volume with search stuff.
Christian Jones 35:31
And yeah, I wouldn’t change anything you said I would add that. paid advertising also offers flexibility on the kind of two fronts. One, the organic, Google just loves you you’re dominating in your backyard physically like your physical geographic area gets more volume. But also you can’t, if you’re in Los Angeles, you can’t rank in New York, this is an important kind of unless you have a location there. If you wanted to break into any other market, you must advertise. And all of you probably have services that cross state borders. But Google does not see you that way. Google sees you as local. So when you want to break into a new market, if you’ve got a foothold in another town, it can even be 20 miles away, you probably won’t show up there unless you advertise Google, the denser The city is, the more narrow the radius is. and advertising can be really helpful to break in. And it also can be helpful for a niche prospect. So that’s kind of thing number two, the more niche your prospect is, the more likely you must do advertising to get them to take any action with you. Those are things it’s not always that it’s not like a hard and fast rule. But those are things that I look at when we talk to people like if it’s a really specific client, I’m going to really strongly recommend advertising. But if you’re like a traditional CPA firm, or doing a lot of different services, there is way more volume. And where you want to get is to the point where you can turn off ads if you wanted to, and not losing the lead flow. Because your organic, unpaid Google just loves you is so high that you’re getting tons of calls anyway.
Nate Hagerty 37:12
Yeah, the real problem with the relying on Click Funnels approach for all your traffic, which I love Click Funnels again, I’ve been using it for seven years, I know that Chauncey uses it. Or six years out, how long has it been out? We were like in the Pioneer beta, which sounds about right. But um, like if you stop advertising, then where does traffic come from?
Christian Jones 37:39
Right.
Chauncey Hutter 37:39
I’m just talking about doing both. I mean, why–
Nate Hagerty 37:42
Absolutely
Chauncey Hutter 37:42
I’m a believer in doing whatever works. This works–
Nate Hagerty 37:48
I learned that from you. I mean, when I was running the marketing for your business, Chauncey, what were we spend like $400,000. And it was like 70 different campaigns that like you wrote, and I just said, Yeah, what he said. And I mean, it was, yeah, and we believe that’s why we want to have every base covered with online marketing strategy, not just rely on paid advertising, but include paid advertising, because you might get that different kind of lead that is ready for that thing right now. Whereas the searcher, the searching prospect is more the researcher, maybe more sophisticated, maybe not just depends, but often more like, often more sophisticated, because they’ve bounced around, and they’ve been like that modern prospecting, they’ve done more investigation, so–
Chauncey Hutter 38:41
As long as you guys can track it doesn’t matter to me, you know.
Christian Jones 38:45
Right. Chauncey, maybe this is or native, we need to keep going just cut me off. But to be more specific, if you were thinking about addressing both, you should know that as we transition to organic, I’ll mention this here shortly. It’s not overnight, it does take time advertising is the kickstart. However, if you wanted to do an ad budget, or an ad campaign and think about a budget, we typically say about $1,000 a month to do a Google search, pay per click style campaign, taking you behind the veil, our true minimum for our clients is 500. But that does not activate the pay per click style. Because there’s another type of advertising you can do on Google that we didn’t talk about called display. I’m not gonna explain it. It’s just cheaper. And it’s not the targeting–
Nate Hagerty 39:31
…retargeted not intent based.
Christian Jones 39:34
Right. And it’s not on the Google search page. It’s on the top websites around the internet. It’s just a different pricing model. It’s not ineffective. I’m just finding that the PPC $1,000 start point is a good place for most people to begin. And we can always circle back if people have questions on that and explain that further. So I don’t mean to over confuse it. But is there anything else Chauncey on that we can answer this time?
Nate Hagerty 39:59
If you’re going to advertise, you can’t be half pregnant, you’ve got to go in with a healthy budget. Because Google won’t really serve your ads up. If you’re doing like $2 a day budget. That’s just not enough, you know? Yep.
Christian Jones 40:14
Let me talk about this for a second. Nate and feel free to chime in. This slide here is a switch to organic, unpaid traffic, local SEO. How do you dominate your local search market and send all of the signals to Google? Can you go back to that slide for a second? Nate? I’m not going to explain line by line. No, you won’t. It’s okay. Yeah, see, make controls our slides here. So I’m at his mercy. I’m not going to explain all of these, this is a golden list of things you’ll probably never want to do yourself. But if you want to know how to rank on Google, it’s not an accident. It’s not happenstance. These are the factors and the level of importance one to 10. Look at the top, Google My Business and Google reviews are the top two things, a huge shift, go down this list a little bit on-page SEO elements, that stuff on your website. That’s like Thing number six. So your website still matters a lot. We say that your website’s about 50% of the equation for how you show up organically. But the top two things on this list have to do with Google My Business? Oh, that’s a big shift.
Nate Hagerty 41:27
And let me just kind of like the bigger picture, explain this. Google wants to own every component of some of this online activity. And so they are doing everything they can to keep their users on their stuff, and not send them to other websites, even though ostensibly like they are an engine for people to find websites. Right? Well, gosh, that was back when their motto used to be Don’t be evil. Okay. I don’t know if you noticed, but they dropped that motto, like 4 years,
Christian Jones 41:57
They’re evil. They’re very evil.
Nate Hagerty 41:59
They said, Hey, don’t be evil.
Chauncey Hutter 42:02
What does even mean, we’re not sure.
Nate Hagerty 42:06
So, they no longer say don’t be evil, they want all of you, they want every component. So look. Here’s the other news, if you like, are one of these guys who like is a privacy geek, which I understand more and more and more. What you do to optimize for the Google algorithms actually work works. Similarly with DuckDuckGo, and Bing, and these engines, when you provide them with good content, on the regular basis, it sends signals to the DuckDuckGo algorithm in a similar way that it does with Google, those of you don’t know DuckDuckGo. It’s like a very locked down search engine for people who are worried about being followed around the internet. which is again, you know, I understand, but what like in a business standpoint, from like, you can do that personally. But you’ve got to know what Google is doing from a business standpoint because they’re still the like, huge killer whale in terms of people’s usage. So back to what I was saying, your Google My Business profile, if you haven’t claimed it and optimized it, then you are really, really on your heels compared to your competition? Because, yes, marketers believe that this is more important in terms of conversions in terms of like, actions and activity, then your website?
Christian Jones 43:35
Yes, 100%, Nate that’s well said, and this list is something that you should download these slides and process this if you’ve got someone else doing marketing for you if you get us to do it if you try and do it yourself. This is your list of prioritization, what you should focus on, and how much in terms of getting found on Google. That’s the end of this is showing up on Google which is right here. So remember, I showed you the ad at the top now we’re talking about ranking in this map section. Here’s some other stuff that’s kind of hot off the press. This year Coronavirus, Google, my business has adjusted, they’ve added some new features, you can actually through Google reserved kind of a new program or just by setting up your appointment calendar. You can get appointments directly from Google My Business again, Nate’s point, Google, circumventing your website and just trying to keep stuff right on their business page. You can add that
Nate Hagerty 44:36
What’s on your website to inform their rankings for these things. So that website matters.
Christian Jones 44:41
It’s again, we would say according to what we see and what others say it’s 50%. But that split down the middle is new, that split down the middle is 2020 new, it wasn’t always this way. So if you have a Google My Business Page, consider adding your appointment scheduling link to it. If you don’t have one, you should probably get one. This winter’s probably gonna be a lot of work from home and brick and mortar, whatever you need to be nimble and be able to do scheduling and those features on Google My Business. That’s the Google My Business elements thing that was number one on the list I just showed you. So here’s again, proof of what Nate and I are saying, this is a survey of marketers. How many of you agree that Google, my business is the new homepage for a local business? And we have 35% strongly agree 42%. Agree. So we have like 77% of people in the marketing world, different industries? Yes. But local businesses are saying, your homepage as for your business is Google My Business is no longer just your website,
Nate Hagerty 45:48
what I think is interesting is even the difference between just a year ago, the 64 years versus 77%, that’s a huge jump. You need to understand this trend is just accelerating, you’ve got to have a strategy for your Google My Business Page. And this is one of the great strategies you could use.
Christian Jones 46:08
Yeah, so like Facebook, you can post content to your Facebook page and get people to share it, click on it, whatever. Well, and behold, Google My Business, you can post content. This is about 18 to 24 months old, it’s not brand new, but no one in the accounting and tax base is using it. These links, these posts expire after a week. So you don’t have to do it every day. You can. But you should. And this is what we do for our clients. And there are other people that do it as well. You should have a weekly posting strategy at a minimum so that even if no one ever clicks on your post with the link or the stuff that you put out there, guess who likes it? The Google Search bot Google likes when you do the things that they’re putting forward as features and signals. Here’s what happens when you do Google My Business posts.
Nate Hagerty 46:54
That counts. Sorry, go on.
Christian Jones 46:56
Yes. Yeah, well, and that’s exactly what I’m about to get into is this little graphic here is our client’s photos from Google My Business, how much they get viewed. When we started posting for this client, his photo views on Google, my business went up 278%, I think this was over nine months. So those are impressions, they’re not phone calls, but you need the top, that’s the very top of the funnel is just impressions that will filter down to engagement and phone calls and appointments. Let’s talk about reviews for a second. Because reviews are important more than anything on kind of two fronts, they’re massively important for rank, they have a lot to do with how Google sees you, not just Hey, I’ve got five stars and 20 reviews, but the frequency and the freshness of your reviews, it matters now. But it also matters to the end user. So if we get you– go ahead Nate.
Nate Hagerty 47:46
This also impacts your website showing up.
Christian Jones 47:51
Yes
Nate Hagerty 47:51
What this slide is actually talking about is your reviews impacts the non local, like, show up of your content.
Christian Jones 47:59
Exactly
Nate Hagerty 48:00
So the use of your business, don’t just show to the person who’s like considering using you, they actually impact your rankings for your content.
Christian Jones 48:11
Right. Google is using reviews as this signal to control a lot about how you show up. And so it matters to them. But here’s an example of a client we have. Who are you gonna call if you’re a prospect in this area, this is that top part of the search page, you got the top three businesses, I did this from a desktop. So the option to call them is not there. But if you did this from your phone, you can get directions, you can visit their website, you can click call, you’re probably going to pick the guy who’s got 64 reviews and a 4.7 star rating. This is an extreme example. But a lot of your markets that you guys are in, do not have people with anything more than two to five reviews. And maybe one of those guys has a perfect five star rating. So not only does this matter to the back end search engine, how they rank you. But when it comes to the dog fight of these top three, on page one, if you get there for a competitive keyword, it’s not a guarantee, you’re going to get the calls. If you’re like guy number two or three on this list, they’re on page one, for any person doing search engine work. That’s a huge win. And yet, I guarantee you, this guy at the top, that’s our client is getting, not only the lion’s share probably almost all of the engagement from his market because he’s just so far and away. better looking to the end user with those reviews. So these are four examples.
Nate Hagerty 49:40
Which by the way, one of those free tools that we’re providing will help you generate reviews. It’s actually a review generating tool, that if you fill out that information on taxproleads, I had James Byrne say that the link that I think maybe Christian put up didn’t load or something. It’s a redirect it’ll take you to a page on our website that I’ve just put right in there. So if you were looking for this link to get access to these review generating tools, you can also go to AdvisorProMarketer.com/flow, which I put in the chat as well. Sorry, Christian, go on.
Christian Jones 50:15
No. And Nate, let me read through this so I can get you back on the horn. And we can answer questions at the end. These are four different examples of clients who, on the slide before this kind of shows when they started with us, so full transparency, how long have they been clients of ours? What market? Are they in? How are they doing on Google? You can see here, this guy who signed up, yep, August 2019. His data from January 1, 2020, to September 2020. And the thing I want to direct your attention to on these slides, whether you look at it now or later, look at the number, the smaller percentage number beneath the big number, no matter what factor you’re looking at, that’s the percentage of change, that person is a change is in relation to, okay, January to September, that’s nine months, let’s go nine months backward and see what happened. So nine months going backward, compared to January 1 to September, if that makes sense. This guy had a 42% increase in his phone calls, his photo views went up 207%. That’s the type of before and after look that you should have in terms of measuring effectiveness. These clients have been with us for longer, and yet even still, nine month period, January to September, compared to the prior nine month period. I’m in column four, row two phone calls, 1500 phone calls, but a 104% increase from the prior nine month period–
Nate Hagerty 51:33
As we’re continuously working to update the data and update or optimize it because it’s not just something you set and forget, you have to continuously be working behind the scenes to add stuff and pay attention to the changes and whatnot. I did want to point out the difference on the left hand side, the discovery versus direct care. What that means is Google is able to track what kind of keywords lead to the results that the actions were taken from. And a discovery keyword is a keyword that’s generic like they’re discovering they’re searching for something like accountants near me or tax professional, near me, best tax professional in Colorado Springs. And that led them to this listing. This, you know, the impression this listing had the impression on that the direct search is when people are searching for the name of the business. So you’ll see that it’s almost like 80% of the traffic is discovered. It’s people looking generically for the category of something. And so it’s an extrapolation. But you can extrapolate that, say 80% of those 1500 phone calls, Call it what is that 1200 phone calls from prospects over the from people who are discovering this business. Right? That’s actually high that proportion or that ratio is high in terms of how– Yes, this is about 90% discovery. Yeah,
Christian Jones 53:09
Most of the time discovery is even higher. But some of these clients actually do have some brand awareness. They’ve been around for a while.
Nate Hagerty 53:17
I’m 18 and five, nine to 3. Oh, that’s actually pretty high also.
Christian Jones 53:24
Yeah. And I picked clients and may all have good brand awareness. But what’s common in these reports is that direct search impressions are virtually nothing. And discovery is the thing that’s booming. So almost all of these slides are showing that direct searches are going down. Discovery searches are trending up. And that is again, the reason for calls, engagement impressions, etc. So Nate, I think that’s all I’ve got. Tell me if I’m wrong.
Nate Hagerty 53:55
You’re running the whole thing, man.
Christian Jones 53:57
I’m doing it.
Nate Hagerty 53:58
Okay.
Christian Jones 53:58
Keep going
Nate Hagerty 53:59
Now. So let’s talk about follow up. What do we do with this traffic? First of all, you don’t want to just drive all of your prospects to scratch their itch in one particular way. That’s why you want to like if you look at heat map data and the way things convert, you do want to have like a primary way that people will convert on your website or on these various properties. But there are multiple ways to capture a prospect when they come to your site. It could even just be a passive non permission oriented pixel fires when they hit the website so that you can retarget them later on with an ad or just you know, a different way of communication. Um, so retargeting has to be an ad. But uh, so you want to have on your website, the ability for them to opt in for a lead magnet, the ability for them to set an appointment or whatever phone social, all of it, okay, um, so you’ll see like, this is actually a snapshot from a client of ours is actually multiple locations based in California. And you’ll see This is from last year, we got, we update these pre-report lead magnets every year, we’re actually beginning to move towards all of our clients towards the process by which this question begins, like right on the website, we are moving. Instead of just sending people to like opting into a lead magnet, we’re right on the main firm website page and every page on the website, beginning to ask questions of the prospect. It’s like the Ryan Lobeck asked method. strategy. It’s embedding the servings right on the page. And we’re seeing some really good results when we do that. So like just asking if you target businesses, are you a business or nonprofit owner, etc. And then after some questions, they can qualify for the next level. Okay, so what’s great about this is just pulling stuff from the previous slide. What’s great about this is you can actually screen out your leads. So you saw that some of our clients were getting hundreds of phone calls a month, well, the form fills, you could at least screen those people so that you can know like if this person isn’t a business owner, but you just want to work with businesses, you can send them to a different person, or treat the phone call differently or treat whatever differently. Um, but then once you’ve done that, once you’ve had them go through, you know, the survey, or they’ve opted for a lead magnet, or Hello, if they’ve called you any tap, you ask them for their email address, if they don’t actually schedule with you, you still want to get their information in, like phone calls that are from marketing are so valuable, you don’t want to just let them go. I can tell you story after story of leads that seemed like they were not like the right kind of lead, but then over time, nurture them. And amaze, like, turns out that this is like a massive client. So once you’ve captured their information, and this is some of the stuff I’ve talked about before, but a lot of people still haven’t done this having an intake sequence. The purposes of this is to indoctrinate the person who has opted in to lead with who you are but also starts a conversation, not just talk at them the whole time, but get them to reply, and ask them questions over email and get them to engage, you actually want to just get them engaged, take them along the journey. You don’t need to like, go for the juggler and pitch pitch pitch right away. You just want engagement and building their kind of relationship with you over time. One of the best ways to do that is by asking them simple questions. If they can send you a short email back to reply to what’s good about that? Is it like the psychological trigger where they just reply and you know that you get like they feel like you’re their person, but other things that help your email sending reputation and your emails go to the inbox better when like Gmail and Yahoo and outlook and these folks see that people are responding to your emails. They don’t put you in the spammer category. So that’s a good thing too.
…Nagy said a CPA in Kansas City said my practice exploded this tax season with full practice revenues increased by 7%. Carlita has actually gone on to sell her business from Chauncey’s coaching. But she gave us a story before she said my calendar is getting booked off, booked up just off the emails that you guys are sending should have done this years ago. Now, what makes the emails and this indoctrination and the intake and all these different things work? Well, here’s what we do for all of our clients, what I suggest you do as well, again, having that intake sequence, but then if they for some reason, don’t act on that, nurturing them over time with real value. And what that looks like is writing a relational one to one emails, not writing an email that’s like the corporate memo from on high that you are just issuing to all of your clients, hey, clients, here’s the five updates to the net operating loss, carryover rules, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, you write an email, like you’re writing it to your ideal client. And why did like it’s a personal note to them, give them timely information and consistency. Okay, now, I’ve actually taken a snapshot of some of the emails that we’ve sent on behalf of our clients, you can read them, I’m actually I’ll read this one because, you know, just to give you a flavor of what I mean by that, so this was written about two months ago, before the election. And you’ll notice that we actually address current events and aren’t afraid to look like in the mirror or not in the mirror, but like to look directly at what’s happening at the corner and speaking about it because that’s what’s on the brain of your prospects. You’ve got to enter into that conversation somehow. Got to do it wisely and delicately because You know, chances are that a bunch of your client base hates Trump, a bunch of your client base loves Trump, a bunch of your client base, you know, is all over the gamut on all this stuff. Or, you know, even now Biden, whatever it is, um, so this was 245 days before the election. And with the passing of Justice Ginsburg, 45 days before the election, we’ve officially entered the political crazy season. This on top of so much conflict surrounding public health measures. It’s also in addition to all of the conversation around racial pain, the difficult issues surrounding suddenly protests and urban riots, and many are without meaningful work and are dealing with schoolchildren at home while having to navigate all of this. So this little political firecracker landed right in the middle of a dry pile of cultural Tinder. And it’s getting hot in here. And that’s why this is the perfect time to do some life planning. Wait, wait, what Roger, because this was written by Roger photo book, I wrote it, but it’s in the name of Roger, one of our clients. He said, That’s right, I said it is the ideal time to take a hard look at what you are really working and living for. Because when you have clarity about these things, you have the ability to put all of these issues in their proper place. When you get clear on your direction, you have the ability to build a financial fortress, because you can decide what to build on and what to eliminate from your life. And of course, we can help you build the tax saving walls around that very fortress and there’s a link to the calendar or phone number. Now for some portion of my readers, these political and cultural events do have a real impact on their day to day lives. For a host of reasons these things are directly pertinent to their work, etc. But that number might be smaller than the number of my readers who are allowing Yes, allowing these cultural riptides to keep them from moving their lives forward. So you see what’s happening there is this tax professional is coaching his client base, this tax professional is speaking into the lives of his clients in a real way that builds relationship engender trust authority, and so that when tax season comes around, this guy’s whoever’s receiving this email they like, they will trust this person in a different way than if they just got a bunch of emails with like the tax code update, you want to talk about the tax code update necessary for businesses, we went into some direct advice about PPP forgiveness, and all the different tax code things you can read about that I’m not going to read that now. The model that we’ve seen that has worked really well as kind of that intro, like real relationship oriented, kind of beginning to the email, and then like a content piece that will build that authority and trust and doing this weekly, that is like a nurture bomb for your clients. And so your existing clients get this, your prospects get this. Now, what we do is we segment small business owners from not you know, 1040 clients, and we actually have a debt relief or is resolution track as well, we segment English and Spanish, we can do all this on behalf of our clients, I recommend you definitely at least have that bare minimum, like segmentation of 1040 small business and speak to them differently. and then when you do this, when you nurture and don’t just pitch pitch pitch on your email list, you get good. Now, this is just our dashboard from our service provider, um, in terms of like, deliverability, and like how people are reading. And when you send a good email like this, it gets to the inbox, people read it and act upon it. So again, another client sent me this note, he said I thought marketing emails were stupid, and would never work. But then my clients started responding with stuff like these are great love emails, I fully expected snarky responses, but it’s only been positive. Um, Mike, another email of ours that we get even gained a few are another client of ours said, we even gained a few more new clients who’ve been receiving them for a few years now, because he puts his prospects on this. Because when you when people, maybe they fill out a form on your website, maybe then you know, often it gets a lead magnet or something, but they weren’t ready or something changed, or that they chickened out, I’ll make it a shift from their tax professional. But if you stay in front of them, and give them this kind of value on a regular basis, you’d be amazed. We get stories all the time from clients who have people who’ve been on their list for years, finally keep their head up and become you know, five figure clients. Um, so again, this is just part of the digital dominance method. You know, you’ll notice we haven’t talked about social media. We haven’t talked about cross selling and ascension. We’ve talked a little bit about local listings, pay per click and SEO and email, nurture and lead follow up. Um, but I did want to tell you guys about these free tools that we have. Again, it’s a taxproleads. com where you can just click on the link in the chat window there and that’ll open up for any questions from you guys or from Chauncey or anything like that. The first 20 people that fill out that information instead of time on the calendar, you’re gonna Get our customer voice tool. And this is actually what enables you to gather reviews, a free tool, it’ll generate reviews on your behalf, okay, completely for free, we actually paid to develop this tool, but you get it for free. Then we have a reputation management tool, that again, this is what it looks like this enables you to actually reply and get notifications whenever somebody leaves a review. Now you can do that with the Google My Business is just basically makes it easy, it makes it smoother, and like a technical dum dum, can do it better with this tool. It helps you respond to reviews. Now what we do with our clients, we actually had a client of ours, who had a kind of a bit of a crisis with getting like a mob of people who didn’t like something that he said in some other forum. And so we had to mobilize to help deal with a lot of negative reviews. So we had to really mobilize in a real reputation management way. And we got like Google and Facebook to remove a bunch of reviews from people who actually didn’t use his services, but just had a bone to pick with this particular client, because that’s, I guess, a 2020 thing. So this reputation management tool will help you know when those fires might start coming. Coming Your Way on the listing builder is a tool that will help you analyze and kind of create all those secondary listings to make sure that those are set up properly. And then we have a social marketing analysis tool, which I was too lazy to get a screenshot for, unfortunately, or I missed it. But what this does, is that it’s an ability to cross post your content from Facebook to your Google My Business. So this is a tool that will enable you to post content back and forth, as well as get some insight into how people are interacting with both your Google My Business and your Facebook page. Again, so those first those free tools are available for the first 20 applicants only at taxproleads.com. My email address is Christian@AdvisorProMarketer.com if you want, send any feedback, send it to Christian@AdvisorProMarketer.com. but again, this is the website you want to go to. So that’s like, the main thing I want you guys to take away from this is that the marketing landscape is changing, and you’ve got to take care of more than just your website, you have got to have a plan for your local listings, you’ve got to have a plan for a website as a content hub, it gets a game to traction in the search engines, you’ve got to have a plan for your social media for your email system for nurturing your clients for cross selling for retargeting. All of these things seem overwhelming. And it can be if especially if you’re bogged down and doing client work all the time. If you pay attention to Chauncey, what I love, how he coaches his people, is that he really helps people to realize the value of delegation and making sure that you have time to work on your business. This is $1,000 an hour of work that we’ve been talking about today. So the other great thing is, we’re right here for you. If you want help, so just fill out that information at taxproleads.com, we will point the way for easy ways you can do it yourself. Or if you just want us to do it all for you. We have great options for you to do that as well. So that’s the ballgame, folks. Christian & Chauncey, anything you want to add?
Chauncey Hutter 1:08:30
I just have a clarifying question. So if I’m hearing you correctly, if I’m a tax business owner, I’m a little overwhelmed by this whole, all the six or eight or 10 things that I could be doing for my tax business, it would be wise for me to go to taxproleads.com, get the free tools, but then also go sign up for a consultation. Appointment thing. So you guys, I fill out some information, I guess I fill out a bunch of questions that you asked me. And then the person on the phone kind of analyzes you’re good here, you’re not so good. Here. You can, here’s what you do here. You go around that circle, see some kind of grid on? Okay, I can do some improvement here or not, or whatever, but at least you come to know where you are. Is that kind of a deal?
Nate Hagerty 1:09:29
Exactly right and you’ll either speak with Christian or our Director of advertising Ben Greutman. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll speak with Ben. They will walk you through simple steps that you can do and also give you choices for how we could just take all this stuff off your plate. Some of our best clients just have us do it all for them, but they still are engaged with marketing their practice. They like, use what we do is kind of the foundational core of what they doing. And then they might try it. Like, it gives them the freedom to experiment, like gives them the freedom to just try different campaigns direct mail, or, you know, different LinkedIn prospecting things that we’re not able to do because of LinkedIn in terms of service. There’s a variety of things that that just having, like an agency, or somebody like in the house, or somebody who can handle a lot of these poor things and do it well, so that you’re building and growing without you having to do any of the work. That is a power position because then you can grow with competence.
Chauncey Hutter 1:10:39
So you know, me, Nate, I’m a big believer and do what you’re good at. Don’t do what you don’t do well at, I mean, so. So if you guys have this all done for your online marketing, all these different categories lead to online stuff. To me, it’s real simple. You just contact you guys and seeing what’s the best way to work something out. But what are the one or two top reasons somebody goes, I don’t wanna talk to you, or I don’t want to do this like this. It’s going to be a common one or two objections that you come across to people over the years that are like, I don’t want to do this, or I don’t want to talk or whatever. What are those one or two things?
Nate Hagerty 1:11:27
Christian, why don’t you take that one?
Christian Jones 1:11:30
Sure. I could answer that a few ways. I could answer that. With what said, or I could answer that with what I’m reading between the lines. Some common objections are, first of all, kind of just press price is a normal objection that we do run into times,
Nate Hagerty 1:11:54
Let me just bounce off of that real quick, people have the wrong perspective, and they see it as a cost rather than an investment.
Christian Jones 1:12:01
Exactly. And that’s where we turn that conversation. It’s, hey, like, I can’t afford X dollars per month, and then the conversation goes to, okay, so you’re going to get more of the same, or it’s going to be on you to learn marketing, and good luck.
Chauncey Hutter 1:12:15
But there are X dollars per month right now. So if they don’t do it, they’re just money.
Nate Hagerty 1:12:22
And people will point to price or point to you know, whatever small piddly investment and they don’t see that when you’re talking about hundreds of leads coming in, whether the phone or wherever zoom, however you process your leads. And even conservatively speaking, if you can just convert 5% / 10% of the phone calls that are coming through that we’re generating, you’re gonna be making your money back and then some. So it’s free money. It’s not a cost, as you know, your office space is taxable.
Christian Jones 1:13:00
And I think if I read between the lines on that, it’s not actually priced. It’s actually a skepticism that this could work for them, a skepticism that they’ve never generated leads from Google. And a lot of people have either tried this, or they never because they’re afraid of it. And it’s a matter of, I see the data, I see the thing I do. I mean, most of us really verify and validate what we’re talking about here with how you relate to any local business, how do you find your dentist, your auto mechanic, as you go to Google, and you pick the one that you find, and you go through the process of investigating them and having this, you know, the whole journey that we talked about. But for some reason, when people think about their business, it becomes muddled or less clear that that really could happen. And so that’s the thing behind price that it’s like, why would I flush X dollars down the drain with you guys to just be in the same place I met? It’s like, well, you’re gonna get leads, you got to believe that people are using Google because you use Google, we use Google, everyone uses it. And that’s not it. Like that’s part of it. awareness and visibility and traffic without the other components that Nate talked about, and a lot we didn’t, doesn’t equal a healthy system. However, you have to start with this understanding that like most modern prospects, are going to the interweb to find local businesses and that’s a leap for some people in terms of faith that I think gets expressed as price, if that makes sense.
Nate Hagerty 1:14:26
That’s one of the benefits of how we set up our business is that we just do it for you. So whether or not you believe in yourself, we’ve got a proven track record and hundreds of firms across the country who were very happy we’ve got clients who’ve been with us for over a decade, that are extremely happy with ongoing results. Some of the people maybe even on this webinar that we met through you Chauncey. And what’s great about having somebody like us who specializes in the advisory industry, and only the tax accounting industry is that we do all the work for you, we produce all the content for you, you are free to just do what you do best take care of clients and be an awesome tax professional and geek out on that stuff. And maybe also you want to build and scale in different ways. And you like you have like these things that like take labor to accomplish. It takes labor to do your Google My Business properly to build a good website that isn’t just like the same website that 10,000 other CPAs and tax professionals have. It takes labor to do that, we will do that for you. And therefore, it’s not about belief anymore. It’s about having a proven track record team in your corner to handle it. So yeah
Chauncey Hutter 1:15:48
Well, to me, everybody here on this call, they’re my clients. So I’m going to highly recommend you at least go knock on the door, sit down, have the conversation online, and have this meeting. And you go to taxproleads.com and get this done. Because it doesn’t make any sense to sit on your hands and do not do it. So at least I do it. And then let these guys talk to you. If it works out. Y’all work together great. And they show you some things to do, go do that. And I mean, but it can’t hurt. So I would I want to just encourage everybody, go get those free tools and let’s get this thing done.
Nate Hagerty 1:16:25
That’s right. All right, everybody. Well, for the sake of time, we’re gonna end it there. Thank you, Christian. Thank you, Chauncey. I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak to your audience. You great man.
Christian Jones 1:16:37
Thanks, guys.
Nate Hagerty 1:16:38
See you soon.