https://soundcloud.com/newfangled-agency-marketing-matters/episode-3-how-big-of-an-audience-do-you-need
Mark:
Hello, and welcome to the Newfangled Marketing Podcast. I’m Mark O’Brien, the CEO of Newfangled.
Lauren:
I’m Lauren Siler, director of marketing at Newfangled.
Chris:
I’m Chris Butler. I’m the COO of Newfangled.
Mark:
Today’s topic is about volume. Specifically, volume of contacts and how that relates to the overall efficiency and return of your marketing. The concept I want to throw out to get the conversation started here, and we’ll dig into it in fine detail over the course of the next 12 to 15 minutes, is time. How much time are you willing to wait? How long are you willing to wait for your marketing to start working? You have a choice. If you basically follow most of our advice, you can wait about eight years for it to start working. If you follow all of our advice, it’ll take about twelve months. It comes down to, really, one issue. If you take all other advice, it comes down to what you decide to do with your contact list, specifically. It’s a critical element of your marketing. It’s something that’s deeply misunderstood because of a lot of really bad misinformation about their in the marketplace. We want to clear the issue on that a little bit today.
Chris:
Yeah. I think we were talking about how to talk about this, because this comes up all the time with client conversations. We’ve been having these conversations long enough that I think we’ve gotten some distance from the real perception that buying a list is a spammer’s tactic, that that is not a positive thing to do, that there’s some kind of ethical, moral issues there. We need to deconstruct that to get people to understand what it means today to buy list, it means something different than it used to, and why one would do that. Lauren you have these conversations probably more often than any of us, so maybe you could help us understand how to think about that better.
Lauren:
Right, the real truth of it is, most agencies who we speak to come to us with a marketing list of a few hundred people, at most. The marketing solutions that we build, you could execute against them perfectly. Ultimately, if you are crafting your entire marketing around a list of 300 or so people, it’s not going to be as effective as it really should be. You are going to require a critical mass of people to be able to target your marketing and communications to. As Mark mentioned, growing that list strictly through inbound organic means, it’s going to take a lot longer than you probably have.
Chris:
Just to clarify what you mean there, when you say, “inbound organic,” what we’re talking about is that slow trickle of, “Someone discovered the site. They saw that we have a newsletter. They signed up for. Someone sent them a link that one time.” You might get a handful every month. With attrition, you’re really not making a whole lot of headway. What you’re talking about is a major leap from that.
Lauren:
Right. Being solely reliant upon people discovering your site organically, and then growing your list through some sort of contact form or sign-up form on the site, relying on that solely for building up your marketing database takes a lot longer than you probably have. The idea around building of that critical mass of contacts at the outset and then growing up from there and learning how to market to that list of people effectively, is really important. There’s a stigma around this today. There’s a stigma around the idea that you should go out and amass a bunch of contacts, purchasing through some list provider and that these people don’t want to hear from you, that what you have to say isn’t relevant to who they are, and that you will ultimately be seen as a spammer. That stigma exists, but unnecessarily so.
Chris:
Right. Maybe I can play the client in this, because you, Mark and Lauren, have these conversations with clients more than I do. When the client inevitably asks, “Those organic sign-ups, they’re expressing interest. There are proactively saying, ‘I want to hear from you. I want to hear about this content. This is what I want.’ They’re expressing that.” They say, “Well how can I do this if I’m buying that, if that person’s never heard from me before, if this is a stranger to me? How is that okay?” How do you guys handle that?
Mark:
Well, it’s a matter of positioning, really. The only way any of this is going to work is if you are offering through your content strategy real thought leadership that is pertinent to the person you’re accessing, be that someone who signed up through your site organically or someone whose name you purchased. It’s got to be at an educational message. Your content strategy, itself, really needs focus solely on the overlap between your expertise and your prospect’s’ pain points. There are going to be people who discover you, because this content does generate these inbound inquiries. That’s wonderful.
It’s not as if this is at all an indictment of inbound. It’s not that. It’s that we feel that why not take for advantage of both inbound and outbound? When you got a compelling message and you are very sharply positioned, you understand exactly what you’re right fit client persona is, you understand exactly how you can help them. You’re in the business of creating value for these people. You’re doing them a favor by sending them your content. This is something, Lauren, you talk about time, the idea of agencies all the time feeling like their marketing is spam.
Lauren:
Right. We hear that so much. With the Whispersync conversation. Then thinking about how to even send outbound emails to the lists that they do have. The idea that maybe these people don’t actually want to be hearing from you. Think about in your everyday life, the emails that hit your inbox that you do find valuable, that you do plan to read later, things that you do sign up for, that is something that we all do. We are all looking to be educated in the space that we work in. The idea that sending out emails with your expertise and your perspective and your voice is not going to be well come to people who are relevant in your industry is just kind of invalid.
Chris:
Both of you are saying something interesting, which is when the concern tends to be around the notion of buying a list of strangers, something that was perceived to be a spam tactic, there’s a lot of fear around that, there’s a lot of assumptions that any email from a stranger is just going to hit a brick wall and never get any traction, but what you’re saying is actually they need to think more about positioning, because if you send it to the right people and you send them the right content, that you wouldn’t expect to have that result. Can you guys talk a little bit about what we have seen in terms of when someone does by a list, how they make sure that the recipients are the right recipients? What do they see afterwards? Do all of those people unsubscribe immediately after they’ve gotten the first email or do something else happen?
Lauren:
No, that’s not what we see. From what we initially see is that communications to your purchase list don’t perform quite as well as to a warm list, but it’s not as if everybody lock the spam complaint and completely unsubscribes from everything. What we see is that it’s actually helpful to continue to nurture that list over time. When you purchase a list, don’t be shy about actually delivering mail to it. Sometimes we have a hard time- an agency will come to us with a freshly purchased list, and they’re hesitant to send even a single email per month to that list. Based on what we’re seeing, it’s actually more effective to send upwards of 2 to 3 emails per month to that list. Again, as long as it’s the right type of content and you’ve been really careful about the makeup of that list, the types of people who are suited to receive that content, if you’re being thoughtful about that, then continuing to prove yourself by delivering the right type of content at a pretty frequent clip is the best way to nurture those people into what we consider a quote unquote warm list.
Mark:
Mm-hmm. We see time and time again with our own business at Newfangled, because we employ these practices as well, and all the agencies we work with, this list purchase combined with the right kind of content that you just described, Lauren, it unlocks doors that were completely shut out before. A list, right fit clients, and big-name brands who get in touch with the agency because they discovered them through email from the agency being in their inbox. Last year, RSW put out a report. It was their annual agency marketer report. They interviewed 400 agencies about how they’re marketing themselves. They interviewed 200 marketers about how they are being marketed to. In that study, the marketers said that they prefer to be marketed to via email by a factor of 2 to 1. More so than cold calls or trade shows or print media or whatever it may be, they’re choosing email, because they have control over their inbox. They can choose to market as spam, to delete it, to save it for later. Whatever they want to do. They have control.
Chris:
Actually, the first word you said in this episode was time. I think that’s the other piece of- Lauren, you were saying earlier, “Everybody needs to be educated.” We’re all looking to be educated. We have things that we need to know, but we don’t have the time to wait to discover them. I think getting that critical email is really helpful. I had a moment last spring at our seminar, which I thought was kind of an interesting realization for me about the value of a purchased list. You, Mark, already knew this, but I was in line getting dinner on the first night. We had a buffet set up. I was talking to a gentleman in front of me who I had just met, and I said, “So, how did you discover the seminar? How did you end up here?”
He said, “You guys bought me.” Then he laughed really hard. After talking to him, I realized that he had been on the first purchased list not that long before then. I can’t remember exactly what content he had received, but the fact that in a very narrow window of time, he had received that content for the first time, didn’t know who we were, ended up at the seminar, I know ended up in many conversations with you and Mark about possible work. That really clicked for me, that this works. This is okay. He feels great about it. I feel great about it.
Mark:
Right. It can works so, so, so well. Going through a very specific method that we prescribe, all of our clients have had great success with this. None of them have had any of the nightmare scenarios that you hear about and a certain business up there preach about. None of that. To bring it back to the beginning, thanks for doing that, Chris. Back to the beginning of what we promised here, this issue of time, we spoke about you have the choice of eight years or twelve months. Here’s a basic math on that. Lauren, you had mentioned that most agencies today have a few hundred emails on their list. We see that again, and again, and again. The average agency, no matter if they’re a ten person agency or a 400 person agency, they have a relatively small list.
For very specific reasons based on very clear data patterns that we’ve seen, we recommend having a list size of at least 3000 people. 3000 of the right that prospect personas based on your position, based on who you want to be working with in the future. We’ve got a Delta of around, give or take, 2500 names. If you’re knocking on the park on our prescribed metrics, which are 2000 unique visitors to your site per month, which is roughly 100 per weekday, and three percent conversion rate. If you’re nailing those two things, which, again, very few agencies are until they’ve adopted these practices, if you’re doing that it’s going to take you through solely organic means of roughly 8 years to grow your list from a few hundred month to 3000. Of course, over that eight year time, we’re looking at after fee, we’re looking at all sorts of things. The list is going to degrade massively in that period of time. Your business is going to completely change in that period of time. It’s simply not sustainable
You have the choice of today, at this moment by the end of this podcast, going and purchasing a list. You probably wouldn’t do that, because there are lots of factors to take into consideration, but even today start marketing to ten times as many perfect fit personas with no downside, at all. If you adopt these practices of committing to a sharp position of being a real market leader, a true expert, if you adopt the track this of content strategy which were going to talk about on our next podcast and hitting the line numbers there, this one element of list size is your magnifying glass you can make it as big as you want, and it costs very little. There is zero downside. From our perspective, I don’t see why you wouldn’t do this. The pre rec is twofold. You have to actually be an expert, a real expert. Two, you do have to create lots of good content around that expertise. If you’re doing those two things, and you’re not buying a list, there’s a real problem.
Chris:
Of course there are exceptions to this, but none of those exceptions are valid in the sense that- I’ve heard agencies say, “what if you have a really strong piece of content that goes viral, and the kind of people coming that way? Yeah, that could happen, but you don’t craft a marketing or business strategy around something that could happen. You crafted around something you know will happen, because you are controlling those events. Honestly, viral content tends to almost always peripherally related to your business, at best. I look at almost all of the agencies that I know of that have had some big fame moment on their content. That content is never to the heart of the business. It’s just some emotional concern that people connect with. That’s great. It gets you visibility, but it’s not your business. You might get 2000 new people signing up for content, but none of them will hire you.
Mark:
This is, again, like all the times we cover here, indeed an interesting and a lot of fun. We’re of course always interested in continuing the conversation with you all one-on-one, but for now we’ll wrap and we’re looking forward to our next episode around content strategy.
Chris:
Yeah, see you next time.
Lauren:
Thanks for listening!