For this episode of E Coffee with Experts we have Jade Arnell, Founder and Marketing Director of Rebellion Marketing. Jade shares several useful suggestions and tips for creating a powerful content marketing strategy to get your business on top of the google search results. Watch now for some profound insights.
There are various technical aspects of SEO, but a huge, huge piece of SEO is just your content production.
Hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of E Coffee with Experts. I’m your host, Matt Fraser. And on today’s show, I have with me, Jade Arnell. Jade is the founder and marketing director of Rebellion Marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency serving B2B and B2C clients located in Fareham, Hampshire, United Kingdom. She is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and has a diploma in digital marketing. As a result, she is skilled in various aspects of online marketing, such as content marketing, web analytics, marketing strategy, PPC, and SEO. She has over ten years of sales and marketing experience in the education sector and as a result, is well versed in what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to marketing and building an audience. When not working on marketing campaigns for clients, Jade enjoys playing rugby, working out at the gym, and spending time with her husband and three children. Jade, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, no problem. My pleasure. So Jade, what type of student were you in high school?
Not a very good one, I was terrible and I think you call me the class clown. Probably is the best way to describe me. I just missed it a lot and I wasn’t really too fussed about doing much in the way of work.
Yeah, I wasn’t either. Did you have a favorite subject at all?
Probably performing arts. So, dance, drama and music. I used to like it a lot.
Yeah, I did that too. I directed and acted in a one-act play. I think it was written by a lady who was actually from the UK. It was a play called “Here we are”. But anyway, do you think your upbringing and parental influence had anything to do with your chosen career?
Oh, good question. Well, my dad was an entrepreneur, and anyone in his family pretty much owned their own businesses over the years. So, my dad’s big glazing firm, my aunty on accountancy firm, my granddad makes fire alarms and my uncle’s got a website development company, so all of them have kind of been entrepreneurs at some point. So, owning a business probably had something to do with my upbringing. But probably not specifically what I do. That was mainly because I got drunk one night and decided that it would be a good idea.
Oh, tell me about that, That’s an interesting story.
Yeah, well. That’s kind of where the business came from. So, I’ve always done sort of sales, marketing type roles, but never really had that as an official job title. Always had very different titles, things like operations, sales, sometimes that kind of stuff. But the real crux of what I did was always sales and marketing, looking to increase the revenue of a business, grow it, looking at new marketing channels, new revenue streams, all of that kind of stuff. And I kind of realized after a long time of starting businesses, closing businesses, working for other people, etc., etc., the marketing aspect was something I enjoyed and was a bit good at. So, it took me quite a long time to get to that conclusion. But I did and then one day with my business partner, who is not my business partner anymore, and we kind of just sat out one night because we were friends. She was working somewhere else, I was working internally for somebody else and we were just bitching and moaning basically about some other marketing agencies and how the service was lacking and stuff. So, after quite a few vodkas, we just decided that we were going to start a marketing agency.
Wow.
And then the rest is history.
Well, that’s very interesting. So, what was it about the marketing agencies that you were pissed off about? You were an intern for a company and you had a marketing agency that was fulfilling the services. It was obvious if you’re in sales and they’re doing a crappy job, that’s going to affect your bottom line and maybe even of your pay cheque is, you know, well, what was it that they were doing so wrong that just was the moment that you were like, Heck with this. I can do better than that.
I think the biggest thing is the bullshit. Like there’s a lot of people that they fall into marketing or think that they can do marketing because you know, it’s just coloring in or whatever. And then they kind of take on these clients and they manage to get to a point where they’ve got some clients and then they’re actually delivering. They just chat nonsense and they’re like, oh, you because it’ll increase traffic, all the reason your traffic jobs because of x, y, z and it’s always crap and you’re really just talking to somebody that knows what they’re talking about marketing and you’re just talking rubbish. And I think that’s what used to warn me up. So, I think that is the thing that hit the nail on the head. One of them told me, oh, you don’t need to do SEO, it’s a dead thing now you don’t need to do any SEO. Well, how do you expect people to kind of find our site and increase web traffic if you’re not working on the site and doing an SEO and you know, that kind of thing? He’s like, oh, everything’s about Twitter now, you just need to focus on Twitter. I was like, Right, sure.
My goodness. You know, and it’s so sad that people can go on the theme for us, grab a template, get hosting for 395 a month, have a logo from Graphic River, and call themselves a marketing consultant.
Yeah, 100%.
I was brought into the dealership as a result of these two young guys selling, general manager/ owner on an SEO plan that included inflated match keywords that had no commercial intent whatsoever and charge him a lack of money, saying that it was going to bring in a ton of business and had them so fully convinced that was going to bring in that business and that’s why they brought me here. And I’m looking at this one. This is just all crap but yet he didn’t really believe me. I was like, well, I’ll just go along with it. He’s paying me to be here. But it was just mean to see people hoodwink business owners and it’s just crazy to me.
Yes, it’s a lot of it.
Yeah, it’s sad. So, what do you think are the qualities of a good marketer? You mentioned that you were good at marketing, what do you think separates the wheat from the chaff? Most of our audience is agency owners, but maybe there’s someone out there who’s going to watch this and thinks, Is this for me? Am I good at marketing? Or how can a business owner identify if someone is good at marketing? or let’s just narrow it down, the qualities that you realize you had, made you realize you’re good at marketing and this is the thing for you.
Yes.
Because you do. I know you do.
I do. I think they had a piece that said about T-level marketers and actually, I think that’s true. So, I call it the T-level marketing approach. So, you kind of have a really broad knowledge and understanding of every aspect of marketing, but you have a really solid kind of in-depth knowledge of one particular area. And I think that’s what makes a good marketer. It’s not just kind of sitting there going, oh, I could do really great graphic design and come up with great ideas so therefore I’m a great marketer. Most of what they kind of mix is that background, understanding, and knowledge of why you are taking a certain action, that strategic approach, and linking everything else together. So, you know, if you are going to write a blog piece, great. Write a blog piece but we’re not just writing this blog piece for fun. What are we looking to achieve from this? So, understanding SEO from that perspective is absolutely key. Are we going to feed that into our social media? Yeah, absolutely. So, understanding how social media works and what’s going to garner a good level of engagement is key as well. There are lots of different areas I think that people should be looking at, not just going up and coming up with ideas. It’s like, okay, brilliant. Now you need to underpin those ideas with some real-life data, that shows you that the idea is going to work and then if it doesn’t work, you don’t just go, oh well, never mind. You learn from why it didn’t work and you try again later. The analysis is the biggest thing, learning from mistakes, and understanding when things are going stale and when things are working.
Yeah, you just shared something that’s so profound in the sense of knowing, number one, being a T-shaped marketer and having a broad knowledge of the different aspects of marketing, but also going really deep. I want to talk about that for a minute and then you also talked about knowing what’s going on. So, is there a specific, T-shaped marketing philosophy of things, what’s the T? Is there a T that you focussed on, is there an area that you like the most as SEO, or PPC content marketing, is it?
Yeah, I think, for me I started off with social media, so at a very first I started getting into marketing and kind of understood what it was and how it works on a real surface level. I think the social media aspect was my kind thing I wanted a deep dive into. So, I did and then specifically within social media and LinkedIn, it was kind of B2B clients, a lot of linked in and kind of got into really understanding how that works, how to make sure they drive engagement and not just engagement, but how you get leads from that platform that turn into paying clients, right? Because that’s what we all want at the end of the day, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
Since I started with social media and these days, I’ve kind of grown from that. I still do lots on LinkedIn, still, kind of learn that platform, understand it, keep up to date and all the changes, etc., as much as possible. But I think for me, an alpha, a lead generation, style marketing, PPC, particularly Google, paid Ads, and SEO, it’s kind of becoming less of a T-shirt market is not following my own advice and I like to go deep down in every area.
Well sometimes your interests change over time I would say, maybe you’ve learned the in-depth things of social media, but now it’s like that the requirements change due to the sense of, you know, you got to this part of the team, maybe those other things. I know I’ve seen that in my career. When I was at the dealership, I had to learn everything, I had to learn PPC, and I had to learn everything as the job required. I’d learn web analytics to keep my job, to prove to the sales team that what I was doing was working. And that’s what I wanted to also bring up was like you mentioned that like do you think web analytics, where do you think people should start? If someone wanted to start learning more about digital marketing, do you think web analytics is a good foundation? Instead of learning how to drive traffic first, figure out how to understand what’s going on and work backward.
Yeah. I was going to say, I don’t know how to answer that. I’d have to think about kind of where I started, where the best place to start. But I think you’re probably right. I think understanding how that all hangs together because ultimately, especially if we’re talking digital marketing, which I guess in the sense we are, everything that we’re doing is going to be driving traffic to that website. That’s generally around the point of sale is a website, where you’re going to garner conversions, whether that be phone calls, direct sales, whatever it might be. So, understanding how that happens together in the first place and how that works, and technically what you need to do to make sure you’re giving yourself a good base point is where I would be looking.
Yeah, because you know. When I was at the dealership. I know G4 is coming out, but universal analytics, I have to look at their goals and it was mind-boggling to me how little Google Analytics was set up, it’s almost as if there was one tracking code put on there. I even saw big, what some people would consider even to this day to be successful marketing agencies. And I won’t mention who they are.
Setting up a view that just made no sense whatsoever. Like, we’re so stupid, to be quite frank with you. That would be like me setting up a view for my company, specifically for that client, and calling it my name, like my company name view. Like, that’s so dumb, it’s just stupid. I don’t mean to insult any other agencies out there doing that, but you don’t do that. The guy who’s behind Optimized Smart had read a good article on the best views to set up and why you should use views instead of segmentation. It made so much sense. You know, having a target market view, a raw data view, a test view and I’m like, I need to use that test you because I was creating filters to filter out the IP addresses of all the salespeople because they were throwing off my data because they were on the website all the time. So, I’m like what the heck with this, you guys are getting excluded, so I don’t have to put up with this. But you know, I put it on and I didn’t test it and unfortunately screwed up the data for a month.
The point I’m trying to make is that it’s so important to know, what are we trying to achieve and I think you would agree, what are the goals of the site. What are the events that are happening that are going to tell us what is working and what’s not working? You could drive all the traffic in the world and if you’re not using proper means of tracking, whether it be phone call tracking, you know, goals set up, Google Analytics, UTM parameters, and so on and so forth, you know.
You need to have that at a real basic level. Lots of people come to us and they’re like, oh, well, we want to use your services for social media management. Okay, great. So, why do you want to use us? Well, we just want to grow up on social media. But that’s not actually it, what do you actually want to achieve? And it goes for everything. Like, as you rightly say on your website, if you don’t know what your goal is for your website, how are you going to build the best possible use? It’s only how are you going to guide your users to where you want them to go and what you want them to do and then when you’ve done that even, how are you going to know if you’ve not set it up correctly in the back end to see where they’re going? So, then you can better serve them later on. There’s so much to it. I think most people just don’t see and they don’t get it. They don’t understand it and that’s what we’re here to educate specifically.
You know, that’s an interesting thing about websites. Like I had a hairstylist that wanted me to build a website at the very beginning of my career, and I eventually ended up giving them their money back because they had no logo, they were running a storefront with no logo, no branding, and they had no pictures, no content. They didn’t want to give me any time to help develop that content and didn’t want to pay for a logo. They were just like, build me something. It’s like, you wouldn’t go to a builder and say, build me a house and not give them any input of what you want a bungalow or do you want a two-story? Do you want a split level? All those things and then the interior designer, like what colors do you like? What kind of furniture do you want? How big of a kitchen do you want? What’s the goal? How many kids do you have? What kind of space do you need? I don’t know if your experience is the same, but I just find that people think that you can go on Wix or Squarespace and just spit out a website. And because Netflix charges 1499 or whatever they’re charging nowadays for their own subscription service, their websites are easy and don’t require a lot of planning. Has that been your experience?
Yeah, loads of people think that it’s just a website you can just spin up. I could just go on, as you said, I just got two weeks and spin it up but is not going to achieve the goals that you’re looking to achieve. I think if you’re a proper, bonafide business star that wants to increase all of that kind of stuff. You can’t be building stuff in Wix and also the background, just from an SEO perspective, trying to get a Wix site to rank is not even possible. It just doesn’t happen. So, if you want to kind of have this wider marketing strategy and grow as a business. I think you kind of need to have better systems in place that can do it. But traffic increases and if it was me and I think the biggest mistake a lot of people make is they don’t invest in their marketing early on enough in their business journeys, and they wait, and then they’ve got a crappy website or they’re not doing any sort of formal digital marketing whatsoever. And then everything just tanked. So, they get to a point just on their own, and then they can’t go any further because they haven’t got any of this stuff in place. And then to get to that point, when you’re starting from absolutely nothing costs quite a lot of money, especially when you think, I want to get in when I need to be getting more leads. And so, my team and I actually want a really good website and why are people coming to me but then they’re not signing up for the final product or those people are hating on the website or they’re not buying etc., so at that point, there’s a lot to unravel to kind of work out where the pain points are for the users, what the objectives really need to be, and then everything back in place. So yeah, we get that a lot like, I can just pay, you know, £2.50 for a website job done and I can. Promise that’s going to cause you later, it is just like, insane. So please just don’t mind.
Do you have to educate clients a lot? Right?
Yeah. In lots of areas, we are just fine and I think because unfortunately, it does make me a little bit sad, that marketing is painted as an easy job. You can go and just post a few posts on social media or pretty graphics and it’s all great and a paint-by-numbers situation. When I kind of get into that, that’s not really how it works. We build marketing strategies along with business plans. You don’t have a digital marketing strategy these days. You pretty much don’t have a business plan. Most of them are based on how you want to grow that business and most of that is sales and marketing. Like you can’t grow business about it. So, when we get into that kind of thing and then we talk about how are we going to drive traffic to the website, oh, we’ll just do a post on social media. Like, you know, that’s not how it works.
Yeah, that’s not how it works.
Exactly. And you know, it’s a consistent thing and then we go into kind of how SEO works, and that just generally blows people’s minds. So yeah, there’s always a massive education piece because most people just go, oh, surely you just create some use for us, and then we’ll get loads of business.
Then we’re just going to get tons of business. You got to educate them about that. Did you know that since Facebook went public, organic reach is down between 2 to 11%, if not more, like just posting on social media. I know a guy who does paper lead and he fires up a fresh Facebook page branded as whatever branding for the market he’s trying to target. He doesn’t post one organic post, it just uses the page.
Facebook is pretty dog shit to be fair, at the moment.
I just did an episode with someone yesterday talking about solutions for iOS14. I’ll tell you about it off camera. But anyway, it’s interesting, like what do you think the aspects are for the foundation for planning on a website for clients? For instance, if you want me to make it easier, like a plumber, the plumber comes to you and wants a website or if you have a different idea.
So, I think generally speaking, when we kind of take on a website build, the first thing that we always ask is, what are the objectives? Why are you building your website in the first place? Do you need one, if you are a plumber and you’re getting all of your stuff out of the local yellow pages, which are not that in Canada but anyway.
That doesn’t work here.
Yes, you know, word of mouth is a referral issue on your own. You’re not looking to grow your businesses, do you need a website? I mean, that’s the first and foremost thing. Then when we establish that you do, most people do to be fair, especially if they’re looking for growth. And the kind of key then is what are the objectives of this website? What do we want to achieve? Where do we want to go with it? Is it going to be a kind of direct sales? Is it like an e-commerce style site? Is it kind of driving phone calls, and inquiries for the B2B market? What type of audience are we looking to attract as well? And then we normally will focus on SEO from the get-go. Now, who is it that we’re going to try and attract? Who is our audience and then we create the content on the page that is structured around that audience? So, that’s kind of where we would go and I think not doing that again makes life a lot more difficult later on down the line. So, if we’re creating content for SEO strategy, most of that is going back to our cornerstone service pages because they’re the ones that ultimately generally want to write it for. So, building is that kind of pyramid that flows down to that kind of easier to get traffic with the more niche terms. As content that backs up the cornerstone content, it’s nice and easy for us to do that. So, focusing on SEO is kind of a key driver plus user journey, and also what do we want them to do, when they get to the point or ultimately where we start from?
Yeah, I was going to ask you that, what part do you think and how important do you think it is to mapping out the customer journey in regards to playing the website?
Yeah, hugely.
It’s just mind-boggling how interesting it is actually. Right?
Well, I love all of this stuff. The user journey aspect, I think a lot of people and actually, even some of the big brands don’t think about it enough. They just watch stuff out there and they’re just like, oh, well, we’ve got a bit about us and we’ve got a bunch to buy something and we’ve got an inquiry form. What more do you want? And actually, when you know you’ve got a great piece of software like Hot Job, for example, that kind of show you where those users are going, where they’re interacting, all of that kind of stuff. And when you start looking at some of this, you think actually the number of conversions that people are missing out on simply because they’ve got a button in the wrong place. The contact details on and off like, the path to guiding that user through that user journey and taking them from that initial point of landing on that home page or where they land through making a purchase or an inquiry, is something I haven’t thought about. Kind of holding that user’s hand and guiding them when they go. Most people are lazy and they are a little bit stupid, so you have to kind of tell them what you want them to do.
Yeah. I will agree with you.
I get on a website and things aren’t immediately where I want them to be. I’ll just go on to something else.
Being able to use the customer journey to map out some kind of funnel and I would equate the customer journey in the funnel to being like the blueprint for a site. How the hell are you going to build a house on a blueprint, if you don’t know what your customer journey is and what your funnel is? And you don’t know what kind of content you need to create. It’s impossible, it’s damn near next to impossible. It’s one of the reasons I don’t specifically design websites for people anymore, but I tip my hat to those of you who still do, and kudos to you, I’ll let you have all the business. But I still like talking about it, in that regard. What about developing a unique selling proposition? What is it about your business, you as a plumber, that people should choose you over someone else? Otherwise, you might as well just go get a domain name. Just another plumber.com.
I mean, that’s all by itself, to be fair.
Yeah.
If there are any plumbers out there, I think just another plumber.com, if it is not taken out. It’s not out.
Oh, I thought it was just a stupid name, but here you go.
Now, I think I would potentially work quite well.
I’m looking it up right now.
It must be gone out. So, you’re going to do it. That’s your next venture.
The next lead generation venture. I will laugh like anything if it’s taken, well, it’s available.
Then do it.
I’ll probably do it. I’ll probably do just another plumber.com
I think it would be good to see.
What it’s like to be a little more unique though. How important do you think it is to develop a unique selling proposition for businesses?
So, we started out kind of and this is like a personal journey kind of growing the marketing agency and all of that kind of jazz. And there are lots of different opinions on USP and creating a niche and all of that kind of jazz. I was a little bit skeptical at first about really niching down, but actually, when we’ve done it for ourselves and clients, it just didn’t say the amount of lead generation you then get by becoming an expert in a particular field so, yeah, with the education sector, that was part of my background prior to the agency. So once, as soon as we kind of said like, we want to specialize in the education sector, independent private schools, universities, colleges, etc. in the UK, we immediately kind of grew that sector.
Oh wow.
Pretty much. You know, in the three or four-month period, we were kind of gaining lots and lots of interest from those types of clients. So, I think having a niche almost gives you your USP as well. So, as a plumber, I might be slightly different but you might be kind of specializing in high net-worth individuals, for example. And then you could brand everything up around the fact that you are kind of working on it with individuals, you’re very safe, secure, etc. And I do think there is something in that, that then kind of drives additional traffic and makes you stay within that niche because I think people get concerned that they’ll lose clients or lose potential because of it. But actually, I found the opposite to be true. I tracked the ones that we actually won, i.e., the education sector, and the schools, but also around that we still get every other type of client coming to us off the back of the content that we produce. Personally, I’m for the clients that we’ve done it for. I have always seen an increase. They’ve never kind of gone, oh, we’ve lost all our clients or we’re not getting any inquiries. It’s always been the complete opposite.
I’ve done a bit of studying on USP from various different people and one guy in the city, I don’t know if he’s in business anymore, but he was an on-time plumber, his business on time plumbing, and he guaranteed that he would be on time or else you got some discount off your service or whatever. Because he found that the number one problem that people had with plumbers was, they weren’t on time. I mean, if you’re supposed to show up at 9:00 but you show up at 11:00, you know. So, he found that problem in the industry and solved it. But yeah, having a niching down and becoming rather than a generalist as an agency has definitely helped you to focus on a particular niche of education and private schools to be able to grow your business. That’s awesome. You mentioned content, what part does content play in that regard?
Huge, most of what we do is content marketing and content production. So, that is quite a massive part. And that is again one thing where I guess people don’t necessarily follow a clear enough strategy. So, think again about the audience that you want to align with, the people that you want to attract, and then produce the content that is for them. A lot of people, I think when they’re writing kind of pieces or that post on social media, I think they often kind of forget about that audience and they’re posting stuff that they like. So, for us, as we approach things, because well, first off, normally, I swear like an absolute trooper. So, that is problematic when you’re trying to cater to guys. And so, for us, the content we’ve produced has slowly become a little bit less in-your-face than it used to be. We used to be very active. Now, but sweary, very opinionated. I’m going to say I’m still all of those things and I still show a personality. I have toned it down slightly too much, the audience that I want to address. I mean, it plays a huge part. I had conversations and I heard people talking about getting off the content production well and all of that kind of stuff, which I find a little bit frustrating because actually anything in marketing really is content production. Content is getting kind of full start really slow.
Absolutely, and figuring out the type of content that you’re going to create based on keyword research and you hit something else on the head based on your target customer. And so, would you agree that developing a highly detailed customer persona or even various personas is of huge importance in value?
Yeah. We generally do big strategy pieces for our education clients. So, part of that is kind of understanding who those people are. And I mean, you’re never going to stick to it rigidly, but being able to visualize the type of person that you’re talking to when you’re creating content just, I think helps align that content with the reader and the user and this person that’s going to be kind of taking that content, reading it, using it, whatever it might be. And I think yeah, a lot of you do say I think they’re a little bit wonky. What’s the word I use quite a lot, which you probably don’t use in Canada, and I won’t tell you what it means.
Okay, fair enough.
You can Google it out later.
I will.
I do think people are going, oh, yeah, you’re going to do a little persona or whatever. But they do really help, especially when you said, multiple, you can’t just have one, one is never going to be one type of person that follows from you is always going to be multiple people. And again, if you are going to produce them needs to be based on real-life data, right? Which I know is hard if you’re a small business because you don’t have any. But if your business has been kind of stunning for a while and use your real data. People don’t collect enough data, in my opinion, even though the world seems to think we do. Most businesses don’t collect enough data, even on their own existing clients. They just don’t have an answer. Okay. Well, who are your clients? Have you seen any patterns in who buys from you? No. Well, you are asking the right questions. What do you hold on those people?
What do you think is the number one thing that is hindering businesses from collecting that kind of data?
I think they just don’t think about it. I think until somebody comes along and speaks. Well, your marketing is not working because you don’t know who you’re talking to. It’s not until that point they go, Oh yeah, actually. Why are we not keeping that data? I think it’s just an administrative-type thing. It’s almost like, right? We’ve done that better work that person next and they don’t think about the repeating business or remarketing or kind of building those customer personas or understanding their audience.
And building that list.
Yeah.
But that requires like, for instance, I guess that’s what I was getting at. Like I worked in the car industry and I shared that with you and everybody who lists those. The car industry is so blessed. I don’t even know what other word to use because in order for you to finally buy a car, number one, when you enquire about a car, you give us your name, phone number, and email account, and if you do call, you eventually get your phone number. But to make a long story short, eventually, your entire being is in that CRM (customer relationship manager). They know what your first name is, your last name, your address, your phone number, and your email address. They know what you do for a living, how long you’ve been doing it, and how old you are. If the salesperson was worth its weight in salt, they know when you got married, how many kids you have, when your anniversary is, when your birthday is, what your favorite color is, what you like to eat, whatever. I’m being facetious a little bit, but like they know what kind of car you bought. Therefore, they know you know what your needs are at that moment. You know, you may have been 18 or 19 or 20 and bought a sedan and now five years later, four years later, you get the itch. You got married, you got kids, you want an SUV. I’m trying to make is that, they know so much data about you because it’s in the CRM even though a lot of salespeople enter the data wrong and screw it up. Because I know, because I worked in the industry, it bothered the crap out of me, but I was able to build those personas. This business was a business for ten years and didn’t have any personas. Even the manufacturer didn’t have any personas that blew my mind away. I was like, hey, can I save myself some time and find out who the persona is that’s buying this particular vehicle? We asked the head office. The Head office outsourced all their marketing to some marketing agency that was started in 1882, and they didn’t even have it. I was like, this is insane. But I think one of the main barriers to entry and correct me if I’m wrong and disagree with, is people. Number one, they don’t think about how important it is. Number two, the accessibility of the technology. Like, for instance, I know that HubSpot has a free CRM now and Salesforce is a booming company and I mean, I could go on and on and on. One of my favorite CRM is Groundhog, started by fellow Canadian marketing automation and CRM plugin built for WordPress that he started several years ago and I’m going to get him on the show. But he built it because he was so tired of all the problems with all the other systems, and he was in all these Facebook groups and he’s like, Heck with it. I’m just going to create, I’m going to solve the problem and create it. And it’s pretty cool.
I think that’s where Businesses come from.
Yeah.
And do you think that knowing that they need it because you’re right, I’ve talked to so many business owners in my life, in my career that just doesn’t have a CRM?
Think about it.
Yeah, and that technology that’s available now, I think it’s becoming more and more affordable and more and more accessible. There’s no reason not to have it.
No, I don’t know. I think maybe partially it’s some fear of how to use it. We’ve always done things like this. So, why do people change? And I think, It’s always the same mantra, right? I mean, that is true. We have some businesses, often recruitment companies, weirdly, we get quite a few recruitment companies that enquire with us and then eventually like, oh, we won’t bother, because everything we do is like, we get lots of stuff anyway. So, we’ve got this possible sales force and I’m like, That’s great. I said, But just because you’re getting business now, do you want more business? Would you like that to be easy to achieve? Would you like those leads to come in qualified, if that is the case, you are marketing like if you just want to stay exactly as you are, great, stay as you are? But if you want to build efficiencies, have a better understanding of your audience. Take the net business to the next level. Kind of get warm, juicy leads coming to you as well as having to do the outbound stuff, then get your marketing sorted out. And you know for most people, it’s like, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
Yeah, it’s interesting. I hope that people watch this and realize that there are solutions out there and the importance of doing the right discussion. Marketing automation is unbelievable where you can apply tags and move people in and out of funnels and apply points based on their actions on the website or what they’ve done and then record the data of eventually going from a marketing-qualified lead to a sales-qualified lead, and why wouldn’t you want to shorten your sales cycle.
I don’t understand it and that baffles me why people are like, well, we don’t need to do that. It’s like, I get what you’re saying, but like stuff’s coming in or you’re making sales, the business is doing well, but surely, you’d want to be more efficient in the way you process things and even if that was the one day, think of how much long hours which equates to bottom line profit that you would save.
Yeah, and what about beginning with the end in mind as Stephen Covey talked about, when you want to exit this business, you go to sell this company to someone and they ask, how are you getting clients? Oh, by the seat of our pants. You know, we don’t know, we’re just doing it. Like, if you have a system in place, it’s a proven system like Dan Kennedy’s magnetic marketing system. I’m a big believer in his kind of style of marketing, a system that actually attracts clients to you, pulls them in, converts them, and turns them into customers in sales. Selling a company like that is so much easier.
Absolutely. It makes forecasting easier, it makes hiring easy, and it just makes everything so much easier and more efficient.
Yeah, I was checking out your website, it’s a pretty nice website, by the way. All the content on your website and when I mean content, I mean pictures, you created some really cool ideas like holding of the letters for the services and those things and everywhere I look, there was a unique picture that was personable to people who you could tell actually worked for you. It wasn’t stock photos. But the name, Rebellion Marketing. I’m just curious, is there a story behind that?
Kind of. So, we wanted to name the client who really knows about us, I guess said who we were as people and what we wanted to achieve, which was shake things up, no bullshit and people like that stuff, come up with cool ideas, be a bit silly, be a bit different. We went through quite a few different ones, but we landed on that one, that says who we are and who we want to be, and mainly based on the honesty thing, which I don’t think should be particularly rebellious. But there are so many people that just aren’t honest in business, that just chat absolute shit. It shouldn’t be rebellious and that shouldn’t be our USP. But I think it is because a lot of marketing agencies do try and pull the wool over people’s eyes, to try and fun fluff stuff up. You can’t stand it. So, that’s kind of where we come from, we’re rebelling against the nonsense, basically.
Nonsense and the B.S. It’s really unfortunate that our industry is tainted with bad actors. People think selling cars in North America is not a very honorable profession. I worked in the restaurant industry for a certain number of years and I served people and then when I went to the car industry, I just saw it as serving people but the very same person yet I’m in a different profession and they automatically look at me like I’m a liar trying to rip them off. So, that was the biggest hurdle that I had to try and craft. I would tell people instead of serving pizzas, I now serve cars. I get a little laugh out of them. But anyway, I get where you’re saying, in regards to our industry, it’s unfortunate that there are bad actors that have tainted it for the rest of us. We all know someone who’s been ripped off by an SEO company or freelancer.
Literally, everyone who comes to us, I think.
And you always have to be part counselor, don’t you?
Yes.
Part therapist and in helping them to get over that betrayal and earning their trust.
I think SEO is the easiest one to fool people with because most people don’t understand it. They don’t really know what it entails. And a lot of people kind of make out it’s big, loaded, technical, really difficult stuff that they’re working on in the background. And actually, that is bullshit. There are technical aspects of SEO, but a huge piece of it is your content production. So, that is where it is, they’re not producing decent content. It’s all about what your kind of creating to drive that traffic to that website. That’s what it’s about. So, if you’re sitting there now as a business and you go, Yeah, my SEO company’s great because they send me a report every month that tells you what they’ve done. Actually, have a look into that and think about the results that you’re looking to achieve from that. Because if that is that you want more traffic to your website in particular areas, you’ve got specific goals. Most of the time they are not doing what they say they’re going to do. And if they’re not producing any content, they’ve only got they’re only doing like a quarter of a job of what you should do.
Again coming back to the car dealership, there was a company that was doing the SEO for them. When I go out there, they would send him a report every month of the traffic. A traffic report?
Yeah.
And they were flipping, going on 5 hours, hiring people to visit the website. I mean that is not SEO and you just say the foundation of all marketing nowadays is content, period or it always was. Whether it’s an Ad that was written as a commercial or an ad in a newspaper or whatever. It’s content, content, content, and if you think you’re doing SEO without content, without on-page content in the form of blog posts and articles that you’re creating for the customer journey. That is based on your customer persona to off-page content that’s helping you to acquire links and build links. And even if you’re guest posting on other sites and I know that Orbit Media, Andy Christina that’s all he does. Isn’t even TV advertising. He just does content, content, content.
Absolutely. It is absolutely key.
Yeah, It’s a foundation. Yeah. Anyway, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. I know we could talk for another 2 hours about so many other things. I would love to have you back on the show. It would be an absolute pleasure to have you. But how can our audience, if they want to get in touch with you online?
Sure. Well, the best place is probably on my LinkedIn account, which is Jade Arnell. So, if you just search me, might still be under my maiden name, which is Jade Scotney. But on my LinkedIn account, that’s where I post most of my content, and that’s where I kind of talk to most of my clients. People kind of get in touch with us all on the website, of course, which is rebellionmarketing.co.uk
Fantastic. It’s been a pleasure again. Thank you so much for being here.
No worries.
Have a great day.
