Online Marketing & Creative Solutions in Orange County with Sean Sloan of Open Interactive

Online Marketing - Sean Sloan - Open-Interactive.com

Online Marketing – Sean Sloan – Open-Interactive.co

Sean Sloan: Part of the challenge in what we do is staying on top of evolving technology and there’s a lot of study and work that goes into doing that. And then we try to you know, bring those things that we learn, we bring them to you.

So last week you heard me mention that we have an exciting announcement to make about a new system, software system, and it’s more than that it’s a philosophy that helps pull the various complex threads of online marketing into one coherent system in which reporting is and tracking is a cornerstone of it. Now we’ve offered all of these things separately in a kind of a la carte fashion but this system pulls them all together.

And you know I’m perfectly happy in telling you the name of the system is HubSpot. And it is a very incredibly well thought out and very well organized and supported system that pulls the thread of search engine optimization, of e-mail marketing, of pay-per-click advertising and social media into one coherent platform and allows you to monitor and track this so that you can determine return on investment.

That’s one of the hardest things for people to do. That’s one of the, you know, biggest challenges around online marketing and it is of course the desire of every business person to want to feel that their money is being well spent. So in our adopting of this program, which should start within the next several weeks, we will be going through a series of training. It’s about 10 hours of training a week that we’ll be going through to learn to use the ins and outs of it. In this specific version of it.

The cornerstone of this system is the creation of content in the form of blog posts but also in things like white papers, which are generally industry specific position papers. In case studies and in how to manuals and things of this nature, things that your clientele might find value. This could also take the form of things to watch out for when you’re making a buying a decision or reasons to choose your service in comparison to someone else who offers a very similar product line.

This is where the creative work and the assistance of someone like ourselves is very important because we have, you know, the marketing background and the writing skill to help you create this content that is going to allow you to systematize your marketing and track the responses to it so that you can see a person come in as a visitor to your site, then become a contact. And then you can nurture that contact over time by providing them access to additional pieces of content that they will feel that are valuable to them in making their buying decisions to use your service.

And that, you know, in by following this procedure that you would turn them into, essentially, a very warm lead, someone who is make the choice to use you. And how do I know that this works? Because this is essentially the exact pathway that I followed in hiring this service that we’re going to engage with. And this is, you know, in my experience, the most well thought out and coherent platform for doing this sort of work.

Now, the challenge has been, and some of you may have heard me joke about this, that the cobbler’s children go barefoot, you know. In regards to our own website, we have not been marketing ourselves using the tools that we offer or encourage other people to use. This is going to change immediately because, you know, we’re going to be, this is going to be an inarticulate phrase, but eating our own dog food is a term that people use to describe the process that we’re going to be engaged in. And it will be one of personal growth and business growth because we will be then casting our net out and pulling in new clients that we would not do so otherwise.

We set ourselves very aggressive sales goals for the second half of this year. We’re trying to increase our sales by 50%. While all of you have been very helpful in referring us people, we need to cast our net even wider to grow our sales in that regard. So we’re going to be our own first guinea pig and that will then allow us to use this system to sell out to you.

Now, it’s not a magic bullet. It still takes work and it still takes thought and that is again where the content creation comes into play. We will have to work with ourselves and then with each person who chooses to adopt this program to create this compelling content. It will be based on your experience, it will be revolving around some of the other things that we’ve talked about in the past. Your unique value proposition in the marketplace, how you differentiate yourself in the marketplace and you’ll have to be done in a way that others perceive value there and are willing to give up their contact information in order to get to the information.

So I’m excited because of the comprehensiveness of the program and because of the quality and the attention to detail that I’ve seen in their system. Again, it pulls a lot of disparate areas of our business together into one coherent thing and I’m looking forward to applying it. It won’t be for everyone and we will continue to offer all of the services that we do offer but now it may allow us to help businesses at a higher level businesses that know that they need to have a monthly marketing budget and that they want a system in which their return on investment can be tracked and realized.

In general my talks in the past have dealt with technical issues… two minutes. Well this is more of a philosophical approach to web marketing and it’s one that I’m excited about. I would like to open it up to any questions. They don’t have to deal with the topic that I just talked about, if you have any questions of websites. Yes, Dr. Tran.

Dr. Tran: I’m hearing something about a responsive website, I guess if you use that

Sean Sloan: Mobile responsive, yes.

Dr. Tran: Is there a way to tell if your website is responsive or it hasn’t been coded to do so.

Sean Sloan: Yes, generally just the act of going to it on a smartphone or an iPad device will tell you immediately if it is responsive. Generally the ones that are not responsive, what happens is that the entire page is shrunk down to fit the screen dimension and things can look very tiny and it can be hard to navigate around. A mobile responsive design what it does is it actually detects the device that is coming to it and it presents it with a version that is sized to fit in that screen. And when it does that it sometimes uses a variety of techniques to reorganize the navigation which is often very wide and horizontally oriented and it orients it in a more vertical position. It also generally narrows down the content into a column that fits the screen and can be easily read. It may also adjust the font size so that it is larger and easier to be read on a mobile device. This is a component of literally every new website that we develop and it involves creating a separate set of what’s known as cascading style sheets, which are the markup language that tells the content of your site how to appear. The colors, the fonts, the positioning and things of that nature that tell it how to appear in the different browser devices. Does anybody else have any questions? Quinn.

Quinn: Is HubSpot a CRM for business owners or is it industry specific?

Sean: Right, well it could be looked at as a CRM for businesses in that you would use it to create what is in essence a master marketing list and you would use that then to gradually over time repeatedly engage with those people that have contacted you through your website. So yes.

Quinn: Does it also include online scheduling?

Sean Sloan: Online scheduling? I don’t know enough about it yet to say whether but I would say yes 100% it does include scheduling for sending out e-mails to people, responses to questions and things of that nature could be sent in a scheduled fashion. Yes. Okay is that it? Thank you.

Check out my website, open-interactive.com, for samples of my work or give me a call at 949.722.6119.

sean@open-interactive.com