Getting Your Message Across Via Content Marketing With Josh Turner Are you having a hard time getting your message across of your marketing ideas? Well, this is the content for you! Get ready to be F.I.R.E.D U.P! Today, we have Josh Turner. He is a Wall Street Journal best-selling author, Founder/CEO of Connect 365 – Simple Lead Gen Automation for Small Business which is an INC 500 Company. Today, we will discuss how can you get your message across via content marketing. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!
Krista:
Hey everyone. Are you ready to be fired up? Because I sure am. Today, I've got Josh Turner. He is the CEO of Connect 365 so if you are looking for more ways, not just to generate leads, but to actually connect with them, well then you want to stick around. Hi Josh. Welcome. Super happy to have you.
Josh Turner:
Hey Krista. Thanks for having me.
Krista:
So talk to us, tell us, so you're the CEO. We want to hear your story.
Josh Turner:
Sure. Yeah. Well, a lot of people know the work that I've done over the years with LinkedIn. I've got a best-selling book called Connect … and just did a lot of work over the years, and I used to have a business called LinkedSelling, that I was really involved in that now my business partner runs that business. What happened was is that we serve a lot of small business owners and a lot of really small businesses were coming to us and wanting to implement our systems. But what they were finding was is that the work that it takes to market on LinkedIn, there were really two key areas that people were consistently getting hung up on and then saying, “You know what? It takes too much time, so I'm not going to do it.” That was number one was messaging, so we teach this relationship building process on LinkedIn for getting connected with really, really amazing prospects and then building a relationship with them.
Josh Turner:
One of the key mechanisms of doing that is personal one-on-one messages and … sending hundreds of messages every month through LinkedIn is just something that a lot of people ended up giving up on. The other part of it that a lot of our customers struggled with was sharing content regularly and staying up with that and keeping up with it. So we, a few years ago, I kind of made a pivot in where my focus is in the business and said, “I really want to help these smaller businesses that can't afford to hire our agency, but need a more streamlined method to do this, while at the same time, not violating LinkedIn's terms of service,” because there's bots and softwares out there that you can find that will automate LinkedIn messaging and different things like that.
Josh Turner:
So some of our clients that have tried that have had their accounts shut down and things like that. So we really just kind of avoid recommending that to people. Really, to fast forward to today, Connect 365 is where I spend all of my time now. We've developed a sales automation platform that really eliminates those problems so that our customers can implement our system for using LinkedIn and other things to keep connected with prospects, and then from there, take all the heavy lifting off your plate of sending the messages and sharing out content and all of those things.
Krista:
So how does it work exactly?
Josh Turner:
So how it works exactly is that so we have a number of different methods that we teach for getting connected with new prospects. One of them is using LinkedIn to send connection requests. One of them is a referral network strategy. So it could be using LinkedIn as well, but maybe not going after direct prospects, but it could be centers of influence in your industry. So, for example, with, I know you have lots of real estate agents that you serve, Krista, and for a lot of them, going on LinkedIn and trying to connect with somebody and saying, “Can I sell your house or help you buy one?” It doesn't really work like that on LinkedIn.
Josh Turner:
People aren't going to be super receptive to that kind of a message and so where real estate agents and brokers have more success on LinkedIn is connecting to all the people in your industry who could be great referral partners, and then having a system to stay in touch with them for a long time to come, in a personal way that isn't just like adding them to your MailChimp list or something like that, which doesn't really do any good for most people. So how it really works to get into the weeds of that is let's say you implement this system using LinkedIn, and you're connecting with potential referral partners in your market. Then once you get connected with them on LinkedIn, you then take their email that LinkedIn will give you, 90% of people on LinkedIn, their contact info includes their personal email, as well for a lot of people, their phone number too and it's often their cell phone.
Josh Turner:
But aside from that, then take that email and their contact info and then put it into Connect 365, our software, and then from there, essentially what you're able to do then, and it works by connecting it with your personal email so you can have personal emails that go back and forth with these prospects that look like you wrote them one-on-one, like you just were sending an email to a friend or your mom and dad or your grandma or grandpa or whatever, but that the prospects don't know that these emails actually were automated.
Josh Turner:
So the reason why email, why would we go from LinkedIn to email, is because we can't automate messaging on LinkedIn without violating their terms of service. So the next best thing is sending somebody a personal email and when you do that, the response rate is extremely high and the open rate is very high. So with our platform, our average open rate is over 40%. I mean, you compare that to what happens if you put somebody into your MailChimp list or something, it's like 11% or something like that. Then the response rate is through the roof because people think it's actually a real email from you. So if you get connected with … what's an example of a good referral partner for a real estate agent? A financial advisor, maybe?
Krista:
Yeah or a divorce attorney, yeah.
Josh Turner:
Sure. So let's say you get connected to somebody like that and then your first email that you send to them after connecting to them on LinkedIn is just something like, “Hey, it's great to connect with you on LinkedIn. I just wanted to shoot you an email and do kind of a proper introduction here and just let you know that I like to really keep in touch with my contacts, so I hope it's okay if I send you an email every once in a while, just kind of checking in and sharing some stuff that I've got going on,” and nobody responds and says, “No, please don't send me that.”
Krista:
Yeah.
Josh Turner:
Because they think it's a personal email to them and they're like, “Oh, cool. Yeah, great. It's good to connect with you too.” Then you essentially then have their permission to continue sending them these personal emails. You don't do it like every day, but essentially you want to follow up with them every few weeks.
Krista:
Yes.
Josh Turner:
We have these sequences built out and campaigns to where over the course of a couple months, you can then pivot the conversation from just kind of keeping in touch to, “Hey, I'd love to grab a coffee sometime,” or, “I'd love to jump on the phone sometime, learn more about what you're up to and see if there's ways we might be able to help each other.” So when you work hundreds of prospects through a system like that, you get a good percentage of them to say yes to that, at the end of the day. So whether you're using the system to build referral relationships, or if you're doing direct prospecting for direct clients, whichever of those makes more sense for you, it can be a really, really great way to really increase lead flow in your business. So that's kind of how the software works and the technology.
Josh Turner:
So it works with your personal email to do that and then the other side of it that takes care of the content piece is essentially like, we've all heard of Hootsuite and Buffer, and these tools that automate posting on social media.
Krista:
Yes.
Josh Turner:
There's lots of stuff out there that does that. Our software does that as well, but we take it a step further because we realized that for many of our customers, that's half the battle of automating the posting. The other half is actually creating the posts. So we have a team of US-based writers. We have over a hundred that service all of our clients that create custom posts for our clients, so that they have daily content going out on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, or any combination of the above. Some of our clients will say, “Let's just do just LinkedIn.” Some say, just Facebook, depends where you want to focus.
Josh Turner:
But essentially when you combine all of this, when you've got, let's say you're prospecting on LinkedIn and you're getting lots of great connections there and then you're sending these personal email followups, and then they're seeing the content you're sharing out, on a really regular basis as well, you start to gain this overwhelming top of mind awareness. That content piece is really important because if you say, “I don't want to do all that, I just want to connect with people and start sending emails,” you'll get good results from that, but you'll get great results if you combine it with the content, because then the more familiar somebody is with your name and face, the more likely they are to respond favorably to you. There's a lot of social psychology studies that have been done that have proven that, over and over and over again. It's a 5-10x positive response if somebody is more familiar with you. So social media makes it easy to do that if you're putting stuff in front of people on a regular basis. So that's what we do.
Krista:
There's research too, that shows the more somebody sees you, the more likable you even become, even if they didn't like you to begin with, the more they're seeing you, the more likable you are, which I think, oh, that's pretty cool. So it's like, just keep showing up and then eventually they have to like you.
Josh Turner:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It really does work very well. Then, one of the cool things that happens is that many of our clients will come back to me and say, “Josh, this has really been amazing. When I'm out and about in town and going to meetings and stuff, people say to me that they're seeing my stuff all over the place,” and they feel great about it because they get this recognition and they feel like finally they have this like marketing thing kind of figured out, but also, they're not really spending much time to get that done. At the same time, not spending a lot of money to get it done because our system is really affordable. I mean, the whole system I just described with the automation of the messaging and the done for you content creation and the automated posting and all that, is $166 per month so really anybody can afford to do it.
Krista:
For unlimited contacts?
Josh Turner:
Unlimited contacts, yep, and 30 posts a month that we create. Yeah.
Krista:
So are the posts, is everyone getting the same post? So for example, are they the same posts or are they more specific towards the person?
Josh Turner:
It's specific to each client, yeah. So when you sign up, one of the very first things that we have you do is fill out a one page kind of onboarding strategy document, where we ask you some questions about your business and who your ideal prospects are and what kinds of things are they interested in and just to get a real feel for what's your business all about, how do you want to be positioning yourself and … who are your prospects? Then based on that information, then our writers then will really put the right content together that is going to be the right fit for all those things and-
Krista:
So they're personally writing the content?
Josh Turner:
Yeah. So it's not like they're writing unique blog posts for you. There's different ways we can approach it based on your preferences but like for example, a real estate agent in Denver, we might do a lot of curation as part of this, where we just find all sorts of different articles and content about what's happening in Denver right now, that just things that your prospects would be interested in. So it doesn't always have to be just like subject matter expertise specific to your thing-
Krista:
Yes, yes I get it. It's about-
Josh Turner:
Because a lot of times people will get tired of seeing that all the time anyway so it's good to have a balance, but some of our clients say, “You know what? I don't want to share out content from other people. I just only want my own stuff.” So we have ways that we can work with that as well.
Krista:
That's super affordable, $166 a month.
Josh Turner:
Yeah. I mean, we really figured out how to streamline it and make it efficient to create this content the way that we do it and it works really well. The whole purpose of it is like, let's create some really, really overwhelming, top of mind awareness so that all the prospecting and messaging, we're just pouring fuel on that fire by doing that. Then sometimes what happens is that some of the content really takes off, like we had a client that emailed us last week, who said that one of the posts we did for him had over 30,000 views and that can happen from time to time. It's really cool and a nice bonus when it does.
Krista:
Yeah, exactly. Hopefully, so this, like what you're speaking is what I teach, so it's like, I'm all about content and getting stuff out there and being top of mine and know, like, trust-
Josh Turner:
Yep.
Krista:
Especially with video, I'm a huge proponent of video, so if you do this and you add a video component to it, I'm sure, are you pushing your people to do video content, 'cause if they would do that, that would just be like rocket fuel to this process?
Josh Turner:
Anybody who is, so I'm a huge advocate of it. So if you're using video and you can integrate that into your messaging or into some of the social posts as well, like absolutely. Yeah. That would be fantastic. So that would fall into the category of obviously we won't create that video for you, but that would be a piece of content that our client would create and we would then just insert that into the posting schedule essentially.
Krista:
Gotcha. Okay. So I love what you're doing here. It's so affordable so if people want to learn more about this, Josh, about Connect 365, and I'm sure you walk everybody through it, can you tell us, how do they get in touch with you and where should we send them? Did you want to offer anything? What's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Josh Turner:
I think the best thing to do is just go to connect365.io and sign up for a free trial on our website. Or if it's not showing up as a free trial right now, sometimes we don't always offer that as an option. If it's not that, it's like $47 for your first month to try it or something like that. But the other thing that's really cool is that we have a really, really amazing customer success team and actual business coaches who, they're not just experts in how to set up the software, but they work with all of our clients on strategy and messaging and all of those things as well, so that if you're coming into this and you think big picture, like maybe this is something that could work for you, but you're not exactly sure how, get signed up because then you have access to our coaches and you can work with them and get their support through email, through Zoom workshops that we do, through hot seats that we do with our customers.
Josh Turner:
You can really get a lot of one-on-one support, to really craft a strategy that's just right for you. We do that because we know if we spend a little time working with you on the front end to get it right, then you'll be with us for a long time.
Krista:
Ooh. That's awesome. I love that. I'm not sure how you can afford to do all that, but it sounds amazing. You must have a huge team doing this with you and just a big network because you're offering a lot for such a low cost.
Josh Turner:
Yeah. I mean, we have a decent sized team. I mean, huge is kind of relative, but it's … really at the end of the day … our customer success team and our coaches, they work really, really hard and basically the way that it works is like, if we can just get it set up right, then there's not a whole lot of work on an ongoing basis. So we don't really have to usually provide that level of support to all of our customers. It's usually just those who are new.
Krista:
Yes.
Josh Turner:
[inaudible 00:15:44] Maybe within their first 30 days. So that's how we're able to do it essentially, because then once they get it up and running like that, usually people just kind of take off and run with it and don't need us as much anymore, but we're there if they do.
Krista:
Yeah.
Josh Turner:
So that's how we make it work.
Krista:
Well, I love it. This has been fun. I love when I can learn on something like this, I'm actually meeting with your team on Thursday so I'm going to go ahead and give it a trial run myself and see how it goes. I appreciate you being here. I know you're a busy man and I always ask everyone, Josh, if they could leave with just one thing, whether it's business or personal, what would the one piece of advice be?
Josh Turner:
I always say this. So if you listen to other podcasts of mine, this is a repeat, but … a mentor of mine, maybe 15 years ago, impressed upon me this saying, he always said, “It's a whole life,” and what he meant by that was that he kept seeing me working way too many hours. He was really telling me if you can take care of all the other things in life too, then the work that you do will be more impactful than if you're just constantly working all the time and neglecting your working out and nutrition and family and all that stuff. So it's taken me some time to get there but … now that I do that, I feel like I'm way more effective as a person and as a leader in the business, I should say. So that's what I would say to that, Krista.
Krista:
I love it. It's a whole life and I'm taking that same advice. It's been hard for me to get there too, but I'm getting there. I'm getting better and better at it and I feel better and I'm happier. It's hard when you're a workaholic and you love your work, but it's so important to do self-care. So Josh, thank you so much for being on here. I really appreciate it. Everyone, go to connect365.io and you can learn all about it and get either his free trial or his lower priced offer. Remember everyone, I really appreciate you taking this time with me. I know your time is precious, but implementation is key, not just learning. So go out there and implement, and I'll see you next time.
