We achieved a 200% increase in our client’s website traffic in 16 months. Learn More
xIn this episode of Ecoffee with experts, Matt Fraser interviewed Zach Chapman, Co-founder and digital marketing specialist at Sparkinator. Zach lays forth the procedures required to initiate inbound marketing. In addition, he reveals his method for assisting organizations in developing a customer journey with content. Watch now to learn about successful inbound marketing strategies.
Inbound is not a magic bullet. It takes much time to get it right. It is essential to reset expectations and say, look this magic isn’t going to happen overnight.
Yeah. I’m excited to be here. And that sounds a lot better coming from you than it does coming from me. That’s really cool. Kick-off. I should have you kind of trailed me around and introduced me everywhere.
A lil’ bit, my brother and I co-founded Sparkinator, which is a marketing agency, and we had kind of like schemes work off at that age, maybe more in like around ten years old, we bought like a gumball machine, with like save up and I’m doing like chores around the house and mowing other people’s lawns and stuff like that. We were like 12 or something, we bought a gumball machine and put it in a local restaurant and lost a bunch of money doing that. But like it was a cool kind of mini experience, you know, that was the first path to entrepreneurship. So, we kind of were always toying with the idea. The gumball machine was an absolute nightmare in terms of like profitability, but it was only like a $100 gumball machine with like $20 of gumballs. So yeah, I guess we kind of had like this in the back of our minds. You know, we fell in love with Shark Tank, as I’m sure many entrepreneurs always do. We kind of fell in love with entrepreneurship from there.
My dad, he worked in a corporate kind of sales gig for many years, but he was always trying to scheme and get a business off the ground. So, he started a business, a tutoring company in Saint Charles, Illinois, which is like a suburb of Chicago. We started that when I was probably like 12, around that same time of like the gumball machine. My parents ran that for many years and they actually just sold it a year or two ago.
Yeah.
Yeah. It’s me, my brother and then my dad as well. He’s kind of on like the board. He’s not full time but his kind of role is to motivate me when I get myself into a sticky client situation. He’d be like, yeah, back in the nineties this happened, and here’s how I got myself out of the vehicle, right? So, he’s just got this deep wisdom, but it’s just like, you know, we’re tapping into that. He was not joining client meetings and stuff like that, but still very influential.
My dad was struggling with the marketing for his tutoring business, the digital marketing and this was like when I was 16 years and a junior in college, and we kind of been talking about it for that whole time and then as well slightly after college. We kind of been just like, wow, this stuff’s tricky, it’s tough. And my dad had this problem where, you know, he’s kind of an old school guy and he was like, okay, like he’s a millennial. He’s, he’s been on Facebook before, so obviously, he’d be good at Facebook marketing, right? And like give us bucks with Facebook marketing and Instagram. And so that’s kind of why he thought of doing it with me, which I’ve seen other entrepreneurs do. They get like a kid who’s like 22 and make them in charge of digital marketing, maybe you’ve seen that as well. I assume you have.
Yeah. I was working at AOL at the time and was kind of doing it as like a side hustle and was helping them on the back end, helping them out with my brother. And we were kind of like this is kind of a really tough. Digital marketing is really tough and tricky. And we still were terrible at it, but we knew that other people will be struggling with it as well. So, we kind of did it based on our own incompetence. We built a business and, in our struggles, we were like, I like I bet other people are struggling with this too, and turns out everyone’s dealing with it.
Yeah, exactly. And like, we kind of didn’t thrive with helping, my parents tutoring business out, but it was kind of enough to get us kickstarted and, kind of see that there is a path to success here and there is a path to doing this for other people as well.
We used the great World Wide Web and just googled everything under the sun. Ultimately, you know, where we found success was, one we kind of really liked HubSpot like practices around like the philosophy that kind of created, I think to a degree like inbound marketing and like that. We really like that philosophy and really that resonated with us. And, you know, they kind of had this partnership program that allowed us to to be able to grow and scale inside of it and the cool opportunity to kind of get taught by experts who are already kind of doing it. Because at this point, we really had no clue what we were doing. We kind of maybe seeded a little bit for my parents and we needed some like hand-holding for sure. We’re kind of just two guys with no experience and no concept who are like trying to start a marketing business. So yeah, we leveraged a lot of their training, the HubSpot Academy, but also like guys like Neil Patel like followed him like crazy, like the SEO as well, just all of the big online resources.
Yeah. And I like it better. I kind of think the world has already kind of changed based on this philosophy. And I think it will continue to change in inflection. But it’s essentially like putting your mind in the buyer’s shoes and like, how would they like to be sold to and that’s where it’s at. Well what value and what questions can we get ahead of and kind of get in front of and just make sure we’re able to be found when they are ready to ask those questions as opposed to being like, for 420 payments of 1999, like these infomercials are now, we can cut pennies. I’m not roasting the people who do that there. There’s a product, place, and space.
Well, inbound is kind of more digital-focused, but essentially, it’s just putting out tons and tons of content that allows people gives people the space and the freedom to research their own. And it’s kind of just answers their own questions. And then so when they do reach out to sales, they’re kind of further down the funnel and they’re more ready to buy. Then they can kind of self-educate and self-weed themselves out as well, assuming your good content. But it all starts with huge amounts of content.
For my agency, it was a lot of thinking through, sitting down with the salespeople or the SEO, and just saying, what are some of the common questions that you get asked? Like, what are the 50 most common questions, right? And like, those are all like blog articles, white papers, books. There’s just tons and tons of content around those. And then one, they can peddle those on their own and leverage those pieces of those assets rather. And when they’re selling and then as well, they can get found online and we’ll SEO the heck out of them until they’re found and rank highly and then go from there. It was more of a matter of sitting down with them. That was a key way. What are some of the most common questions you get? That’s the easy win that we found.
Yeah, we had one. We’ve done it for a few, some in like while they were Tech, they were a Tech software company, never mind about them. We had one that was for like a commercial cleaning business. They go in and they clean and this was kind of during COVID and like we had white papers around, like how to sterilize COVID-based things. And then if you’re sterilizing it, we can do it one better than you can have more professionally. That was a really good, timely white paper that we pumped out and kind of pushed as well.
That’s just one example. There’s a lot more, but there’s a lot out there, kind of broadly.
I would say, well, one, make sure they’re a good fit, like these knife salesmen who are ready to cut a penny are. I don’t see inbound marketing really working for them, but really like it works for considered buying processes where this is a long hairy buying process that takes time and research to buy. The worst example of who you could do inbound marketing for is like a stick of gum, right? In which the decision-making process is like you’re in the checkout line and you see it and you’re like zero consideration. It’s kind of just pure impulse and there’s no like, is this Five gum better? I wonder which one is better for my teeth. They were asking those questions, which their customers pretty much never would read a blog on that, but that could be something that would work. But yeah, so make sure they’re a fit, and then it’s really kind of content based. It’s just like let’s bump up all the relevant content and just become like the industry thought leader on this topic. And then kind of all the topics around that. HubSpot, I think also coined this, but like created like topic clusters, if you’re familiar with this.
Yeah, absolutely. We had a client that was a commercial professional cleaner for businesses like warehouses, dentists, you know, just professional spaces. And so, like that’s a considered buying process and we’ve kind of found success with like helping, like, should they hire their own team or should they not? We had kind of a good catered piece of content around that aspect as well.
Luckily our client was pretty savvy and smart and they kind of had a decent understanding of who was buying and selling. So, they had them somewhat established. But typically, it’s kind of like, we do like a workshop, whereas like over a couple of days and we’ll sit down and be like, who buys, why would they buy, what they typically look like, what are the kind of questions are they researching, where are they researching these questions? Typically, they all know and we didn’t get to a point where we would sometimes interview their customers or have them interview their existing customers or like who they thought would best fit. But we weren’t, you know, get them to put on like a whole research panel to go like start flagging people down on the street and say, like are you a person who might be interested in commercial cleaning services, you know what I mean and then interviewing them. Although I think for bigger companies that make sense.
Yeah, yeah. These guys for this professional cleaning company were pretty close with those clients. They had really good relationships. So, like they did ask them some questions kind of that we prompted and as well and they had a really good understanding. They knew how to do business and what their customers were about. They didn’t go through the exercise, they kind of just had this floating around, they knew all these answers, but they didn’t distill them. The distillation process, I think is big and hairy and scary, but like, it’s not in reality.
Oh yeah. 1,000,000% because all the content we create was really based on, what kind of challenges are these guys having? What are they thinking about, like before they even know what their problem is like our SEO spends too much time cleaning our dental practice. Like, they don’t even know that that’s the problem yet. We kind of started with a super high funnel, like how the dentist was like an avenue that we saw growth. And so, it was like, okay, how can we kind of help dentists like be good at running business and then say like, one of those problems is, you know, maybe we are like a small business and like you have five dental hygienists and you’re spending too much time doing this and like, you should just outsource it. And so, we kind of went all the way down, all the way up, I guess, from, like, very bottom up until, like its ready?
Going up the chain, I guess in terms of like where can we meet them and give them all the stuff, they need in order to help grow and succeed as a business. And sometimes, you know, a lot of the very top-of-the-funnel stuff doesn’t include our schools. It’s just like, hey one bullet in that blog article and then like even all the way down. But essentially it was just like we can help dentists, crush their business. We see this is a small piece of that.
HubSpot has a really cool tool, it’s called the Content Plan Tool and so it does this in like kind of builds this like spider web tool, which is really kind of topic cluster-based. So, like if we wanted to become like the leading authority on like growing your dentist business, we could kind of put that in the center of the topic cluster and then just build out this kind of web of blogs around it like and all the things that could be relevant to that. Then we kind of can become a source of expertise in that area.
Yeah, we liked SemRush a lot as well, like the keyword planning tool. So, they have every variation of everything in there, that like so we’d just be like, you know, how to increase dentistry and then just scroll through their list of 60 million topics around that and then it’s kind of do that for each idea. You know, I could only come up with like seven ideas relevant, and then like I would type in each one of those seven and just pull out like the best ones from there. And like related search terms inside of Semrush’s is maybe the most appropriate way to label that.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so typically what we would do is kind of put like, okay, here’s the whole topic cluster. We’d build it out conceptually first, the whole topic cluster, and then go, here are all the pieces of content, and here’s like all the keywords that would go into that and then we would just run with that. So, it was a little bit careful planning and like we were kind of concerned about cannibalizing a little bit. But it was just, I guess thinking holistically, taking like the holistic approach for planning it out, you know, hey, look, here’s the whole topic cluster. What can we do about this keyword, these keywords are really closed and it’s like, how can we separate them? Do we need to? Maybe we don’t. Yeah, we’d like we just have different angles. For example, this angle is going to be about, cleaning dentist’s chairs or whatever and this one’s going to talk about sterilizing the tools. It’s maybe the same article, but like coming at it from a different angle.
Yeah. So, we typically started at the bottom of the funnel, which was like the low-hanging fruit. What’s the number one question the salespeople get? And then build that out, then as we go, we kind of move up the funnel, we kind of go like this. And so, we’re casting a little bit of a wider net, getting more leads and broadly but less qualified. But we kind of would work then into like making sure that our marketing practices are qualifying them on the back end. Was that maybe your question?
I think what we did was we kind of did a splice, you know, it takes a while. It takes months. Sometimes you can get lucky and you get like you can get ranked number one in the first month, which is increasingly more difficult because people have been doing this for now for over 20 years. The Internet is bursting at the seams at this point, although we’re kind of just getting started on this. You know, we as humans are just getting started on this crazy thing.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in SEO in 700 years. There’s just going to be so much, much stuff on the inter-web and connected.
Right.
When I got into this game like seven, eight, six, some years ago, I thought video is the future. And I kind of still do, but it takes longer than I thought. I thought we’d be doing like nobody would be doing blogs. It’d be like the only video by this point. I still see blogs being decently relevant, which kind of surprises me, and like, video is increasingly more relevant, but still just not there. I’m finding myself, I go on YouTube a lot more now and I’m more likely to YouTube, for this like, how do I fix my oven? You know, I would never read a blog on that, but I’ll go to YouTube for that, these days, which five years ago I probably wouldn’t have. But I think video is the move. It just takes a long time.
I like that. We had a client that he put on a podcast pretty regularly. We did the transcript and then we kind of just cleaned up the transcript a little bit. Like, Boom, that was the blog, and that was right from the CEO’s mouth, which he hated writing it, but he was super knowledgeable about the topic, like in ways I would never be like and we got a great five blogs out of one podcast and just kind of like just use the transcript and just kind of made a little prettier, the little edit going into the break in like the paragraphs. So, I kind of did the reverse, but I do think, I did think to do something. Yeah, you could do this for your podcast as well.
So I think that was a nice little hack that I’ll give him credit for this. He gets credit for that one. We just kind of made it happen and then but yeah, as far as reading the articles, I do think that’s kind of an easy way to do it. I kind of like that a lot.
I saw Mission Impossible, third or fourth one, Tom Cruise says, like a sentence and then like, yeah, it was like the quick brown fox ran over the lazy river or something like that or it has all the syllables.
About a year ago, I looked into it and it felt, I don’t know, maybe I’m just old and skeptical, which I’m not that old, but like, I felt like it’s just not there yet. There’s no way. Maybe that’s just pessimistic to me, but I looked into it a little bit. I can remember which site it was, but it was like the leading site of content creation. And I was like it’s probably clerks and like, we didn’t buy anything from it. We didn’t actually do it. But I don’t know, I was maybe just eager for it, however, maybe pessimistic that it’s here today. So, we didn’t bite the bullet and make the jump. But it’s cool. I love the idea. I mean, it’d be cool. Just pay robots $0 an hour to do this, you know, just create tons of great content.
So you’re worried about just the noise?
Yeah. Do you think it’s that good yet?
Yeah, yeah. Show me later. That’s cool off camera. So maybe what’s going to happen and maybe this is breaking my brain a little bit like there is no internet is just we search like what we want and then like AI just writes it right then in there. What about that?
It just makes the answer right then and there and it says, here’s an article based on what we know.
I don’t know how far we are from that, but one day at.
I have an Alexa, and I pretty much just ask to set timers and turn on music and what’s the weather. Those are my three things and I really don’t do anything else.
Yeah. And then you have 70 gallons of milk in your fridge because you never drink. So, it happened to me.
Yeah. So, there’s a few KPIs which like, you know, the people that we’re working with really kind of trust us to kind of build those KPIs. One on the surface it’s how much traffic are we getting. Then it’s like, okay, well, so that’s just like Google Analytics. You know, how much time is being spent on this? These Web pages, how many people are hitting them? And it’s like, what is that audience doing? Is this doing anything right? And so that’s where we’ll have, you know, a lot of CTAs on the website, in the blog to kind of get people down the funnel. Sometimes, depending on the article, it can just talk to us right now like we know your next step is, is buy right from the bottom of the funnel content, and sometimes it’ll be the middle of the funnel. So, we’ll put a top-of-the-funnel lead gen offer. But essentially, it’s, do they fill out a form, how many form submissions do they can do? And then how much do we get to sales? How much ultimately deals do we give to sales? And then like what? And here’s why we fell in love with HubSpot is like this like a full loop close to reporting where you can kind of see like, okay, week 100, we had a thousand visitors to this blog. of that 1%, fill out this form of that 1%, you know, went to sales and the like of that, one person bought. And we kind of see like, Okay, so this blog actually is responsible for this many dollars, you know, of sales. So that’s what we like doing and I find without that, your marketers are really kind of just doing marketing with an arm or two tied behind their back.
And you really need, in my opinion, the sales arm tied to attribution. Otherwise, the CEO is just kind of a matter of time and time you’re fired. And the CEO goes like, Yeah, like you guys are creating a lot of noise, what is this?
Yeah. So, you need that. That poll closed-loop reporting attribution.
It’s true.
That’s one of the conversations I liked having with the CEO and being like, you know, marketing and sales right now do this. We want them to need that to stop. Let’s come up with some like prearranged terms around like, what is a marketing qualified lead. What is a sales-qualified lead? And we’re on board with like an agreement on those like that, right? So, those conversations to me are necessary and essential and like the relationships that we have.
Yeah, I think it’s really important. Ultimately, maybe this is not good, but I have kind of no clue how they work. I just know what they can do in terms of tracking. I cannot set that up for the life of me. I have really good nerds, and I mean that as a compliment helping me out.
Inbound is not a magic bullet, it takes a lot of time to get right. It’s one of the biggest things we have in our sales process is like resetting expectations and saying. The magic bullet isn’t going to happen overnight. Like, are you in this for the long run? In the long run, could be nine months, could be a year. Before we’re starting to see serious traction like it’s an investment and getting people on board with that. I think that is maybe the biggest takeaway as we’ve kind of talked about this and it sounds maybe magic already, but creating that content takes a long time and then like just it takes a long time for Google to appreciate it as well. That’s really where the biggest waiting game is. It’s like waiting for Google to go, I know this is good content, right?
Yeah. You can go to my LinkedIn, that’s I guess the best way to connect with me personally or you could find me, I work at HubSpot now. So actually, my agency is still up and running. However, we’re mostly just getting kickbacks from, like, what we sold as HubSpot partners. So, now I work on HubSpot, bringing on people into the partner game to become HubSpot partners, which is cool.
Awesome. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Buy 1, Get 1 Premium Backlink FREE!