About this podcast – Effective networking is no longer about selling, it’s about giving. To network successfully, marketers need to eliminate the pressure and stop looking at it from the perspective of a salesperson. In this podcast, we talk about the concept of synergy between digital and analog marketing activities such as personal networking and tradeshows.

About the Inbounders

Welcome to The Inbounders! A podcast for marketers and business leaders where we discuss the hiccups, headaches, and tricks of the marketing trade. With your hosts, Dan Duran and Tamara O-J. More on Inbound Marketing.

Go ahead, we welcome all feedback!

Transcript
(transcript accuracy: 86%)

[00:00:00] Hello hello. Hello.

[00:00:03] Hi, this is Dan Duran. Hi, I’m Tamara Johnson and this is our first podcast!

[00:00:13] So exciting. So yeah. How are you, Dan? I’m doing great. Good I’m doing good too. So for today’s podcast we have a really good question. Super interesting question but before we get into that. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you?

[00:00:31] Well, my name is Dan Duran and I am the CEO of actually two companies – Bwired Technologies, a very technological company that deals with creating software and mobile applications and the second company is more of an exciting type of company – Atomlabs, where we do inbound digital marketing. We excite customers for our customers!

[00:00:55] Okay great! So how your, just give us a little bit of background.

[00:01:04] Absolutely, so, I have 15 years of experience as a marketer, five years of which I’ve been completely focused on digital marketing. I have a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Business from Wilfrid Laurier University and I’m currently doing my MBA at the University of Illinois. I’m on my first year and I have one more year to go.
Congratulations! Thank you! Hard work there, eh. Yes, quite a bit of hard work but it pays off for sure.

[00:01:35] Okay awesome. So me, myself. Yes. Who are you, Tamera? I’m just sort of a Jackie of all Trades is what I like to call myself. So I do do a lot of different things. I have a bit of experience for sure in sales and marketing. I’m also a student and honestly I’m just super interested in this field of marketing, the world of business and sales. I’ve always taken an interest. It’s a wonderful field. Yeah it’s really cool stuff! So, I’m super excited to do this podcast with you. Thank you so much.

[00:02:09] I think you’ve got a lot of good information you can share. Exactly, and that’s the main thing. That’s why we are actually doing this podcast. I read considerably. I read at least two books a month and through my MBA, through all the stuff that I do, this is truly an outlet for me. I want to be able to share this with the world. I want to be able to educate. And that’s the main reason this this podcast was formed. The other reason is because I hate myself on camera.

[00:02:42] I really do. Yeah yeah.

[00:02:46] Welcome to the club, you’d say. So, it is so hard to talk in front of a camera without having a person in front of you. I have you in front of me so it’s easy to have a conversational touch but when I’m in front of a camera it just sucks! Yeah, I understand. Those are the skills that I have to polish. But I really like talking in the microphone. I don’t know, there’s something about radio or podcasting and being able to communicate orally that really strikes a chord with me and I absolutely love it. I know, we talked about this before we both really enjoy listening to podcasts , in general when we’re in the car and you’re driving somewhere.

[00:03:30] Usually our stations like the CBC or some kind of talk radio where people are talking about interesting stuff.

[00:03:37] So that’s what we’re going to do today and talk about something super interesting and relatable I think to a lot of marketers out there.

[00:03:43] Perfect. So let’s get right to it. What is the question?

[00:03:48] Right. So, I’ve gotten a lot of readers asking questions here and there about this particular topic. So, basically what we’re what’s been asked is whether digital marketing replaces traditional networking. Is there really a place for networking anymore?

[00:04:07] Oh yeah, that’s a very interesting question. Right. So, networking. I think the first thing that we have to do is define what is networking and what is digital marketing? So networking is basically an analog activity. So you have digital and you have analog. Things like trade shows where you’re meeting people at seminars or educating people at a University for example. Those are all analog activities. What I mean by analog is that they have a physicality to them. So you actually are able to be in their presence personally without without having to go into the Internet. Right. And there’s a sociability about it. We’re absolutely social. We’re human. And humans are social beings so our behavior and the way we are is as well. So analog allows us to to be social and to reach out to other people. You’re talking about that face to face.

[00:05:09] It’s actually a firm handshake, “Nice to meet you”, type of interaction.

[00:05:13] Exactly. So that’s that’s personal networking. The biggest in business to business networking activities revolve around conferences, trade shows, seminars. OK.

[00:05:28] Right.

[00:05:28] So now what is this digital marketing then? Digital marketing is basically reaching out to your customers through digital methods, through the Internet. So your Web site, blogs, search optimization, Google Analytics, and the words and everything that involves having that device right. It’s not personal but it’s effective and it’s very efficient in terms of cost effectiveness. It is cheaper to reach out and it is not social but it is reachable.

[00:06:05] So it has what’s called a “glocal” element that it can make big impacts on a larger audience because it transcends this this kind of confine that the analog world has. So you can reachthe masses. Yes, so I can see how this idea of digital marketing could now have

[00:06:29] People think that, it’s replacing the old ways It’s something where digital is just so big we’re saturated with things that are digital now.

[00:06:38] So what do you think with this question now that we’ve determined what is networking and what is digital marketing. Does digital marketing really replace the other; is the room for networking anywhere? Should marketers be even spending their time thinking about?

[00:06:52] Yes that’s a really tough question. But I would say, no, it does not replace networking. OK. I don’t think you should actually favor one for the other one. And I know that you know like for example personal networking and let’s say creating a tradeshow – OK let’s talk trade shows since you brought it up. Ok ok so trade shows. I’m a marketer. I’ve done many many trade shows and to be able to create this events, it’s very expensive. You’re talking about 20, 30, 50, 100 thousand dollars to be able to pull out a tradeshow. From creating the booth, designing the booth, shiping it, and all the logistics that goes into renting the booth, space, electricity. It’s a lot that goes into it, the time too right. There’s a lot of time. But the main problem the marketers have with trade shows is that you go out into the tradeshow; It’s only two or three days maybe a week. You collect some leads, through business cards. Yes. You know like badge scanning and all of those methods and then you bring home, your sales people brings home you know 200 300 500 leads. What typically happens? They go nowhere. Right. And that was my main pet peeve when I used to be a marketing manager of one of my old employers. We put all this effort and money into this trade shows and then we get a lot of leads but nobody follows up with them. They get lost. They don’t get converted, and then the efficiency or the performance of the trade show goes down in terms of marketing.

[00:08:42] Exactly. You know what is the reason for that? Well I know myself I’ve done a few trade shows in the past and things fizzle out and you wonder, geez maybe that trade show wasn’t good or maybe the sales staff didn’t do their job at the booth or you know what I mean? You think all these are the reasons. But really when it comes down to it…Why is that happening.? You’re here telling us that networking- it’s not obsolete anymore. There is value in that. How then with all these bad experiences?

[00:09:14] So I talked about what networking is and how its an analog activity.

[00:09:19] And
And I also talked about digital marketing which is a digital activity. There’s something called Synergy. OK. It’s all about synergy. You need to apply synergy. Basically you have one thing that performs one way and you have the other thing that performs in another way and you combine them together both things together to perform even better than them separately. Gotcha. So in the concept of synergy, digital and analog can work together in unison to create better performance for you. So I can give you an example. Yes please do, I was just going to ask you. OK explain what you mean. So for one of our clients we experienced a flash mob.

[00:10:08] Ok. So right in the trade show imagine this big manufacturing trade show. It’s kind of noisy. People are minding their own business. OK. And imagine all of a sudden you start hearing this drumming on one of the trade show booths and it’s just going crazy – “boom boom boom boom boom boom”. And there is a flash mob and everybody is looking at this flash mob. Right. Right. So it’s totally out of context. People are going crazy. I wouldn’t expect that to happen at a manufacturing trade show. Absolutely not. Exactly. So you know what. That trade show flash mob was videotaped. It was uploaded to YouTube right and uploaded to our clients blog, shared in social media and it went viral. Right now you have this element of digital in a physical world which created this glocal element that went viral and people started requesting information from my client. OK so there’s that synergy you’re talking about. That’s one small example. So for another example, a you collect a lot of leads from a trade show – let’s say 500 leads, you put it through.

[00:11:28] We work with a certified agency with a hubspot – which is the biggest the largest inbound marketing automated marketing tool or software in the world. Right. So we put through all those leads in the software and were able to connect with the clients through different activities. For example social media, our blog, landing pages, ads and all of the stuff with our clients email. Through the buyer’s journey, we’re bringing in these leads because…this is what you have to understand – People think that it’s all about selling right. So so they go to a trade show with a mentality of the ABC. I have to go in there and Always Be Closing.

[00:12:24] Abc Always Be Close. All right.

[00:12:27] And so they go there and they want to close the deal with customers on their products and so because you that’s what you think, you’re in there with that frame of mind.

[00:12:35]Your frame of mind. You know again typically is like OK I’m here to make the sales. That the end result being the sales.

[00:12:43] Exactly right. When the really at a trade show, that should not be the objective. Yes is something that needs to change. My motto for trade and for anything that I do is ABC again but it’s Always Be Connecting. Right. Right. So you go to trade shows to connect.

[00:13:02] Ok. So. So go into this sort of idea that now trade shows are networking. You’re saying that we need to take a different approach. Yes exactly.

[00:13:14] Yes. That’s the ticket. How we as business owners and marketers, we need to approach networking differently and that’s how you create this sort of effective synergy.

[00:13:26] Yes exactly. So Inbound marketing is all about educating people.

[00:13:37] It’s all about connecting with people, get them the information they need at the time they need it so they can come back to to you. Okay. And then they can they can become your customers. And beyond that, they don’t just become your customers, they become your fans. So that’s that’s the main purpose of Inbound Marketing. Very different. Exactly. OK so how do you do this? Let me just come back to it and then give you the whole picture of how this works. So let’s say you collect 500 leads right. You come back to your office. Yes. You process those leads through the software. Yes. And then if there is a bit more details about those leads. So for example if your salespeople are able to capture what companies they work for, what their main campaigns are, what kind of information they will like, things like that. You come back and when you process through the software you put them in your newsletters for example, right and you can serve them content and look for them in LinkedIn Facebook Instagram and different means right. So if you see that. And then this is about the buyer cycle. OK. They buyer’s journey as they say in Inbound. So the very first beginning of the buyer’s journey is awareness. They just found out about your company right. You’re not going to sell them on it.

[00:15:06] No

[00:15:08] I understand, it’s a discovery process. Absolutely. If one of those leads needs information. You know he’s he has this type of challenge you’re going to serve them content about that type of challenge.

[00:15:19] So you’re going to you’re going to strike those chords, getting them actually taking an interest in that that person like what their challenges are and what they’re about; you taking an interest in them. Exactly. And so the questions in the conversation, the connection you’re making with that person should center around trying to find out what’s going on with them, what are they struggling with in their business or etc..

[00:15:47] Exactly. So and this is where networking comes in. For example one of the things about networking is called calling cold, calling to generate a whole bunch of leads somehow and you have never talked to them, you have never spoken to an individual and then you start making cold calls.

[00:16:08] So that word always made me kind of laugh, like there’s a reason why it’s called cold calling.

[00:16:14] It’s very. It’s a cold thing.. Exactly.

[00:16:18] So what happens is, you’re trying to sell people by cold calling. Right. Right. And that’s not going to work because everybody hates telemarketers. Yes. Nobody likes telemarketers. But however if you have a networking activity like at trade show for example, and you collect leads and you’re able to connect with them afterwards – this is called lead nurturing. Do your lead nurturing through social media and through your Web site, blogs, and things like that, newsletters etc. You’re not cold calling. Right. Actually these leads are warm, they become warm. So when you call, It’s not gonna be cold calling is going to be warm.

[00:17:02] So yeah I can see how that’s completely different.

[00:17:05] You know what, three minutes makes a huge difference. Absolutely. So if you have three minutes – cold call somebody and they say” no I don’t want to talk to you”. Right. But imagine you turned that around and you call these people that you already touched base with at a trade show or through social media, through a download of an e-book download, whatever it is. And you call them just to say you know what – “Thank you, I just want to thank you for downloading my e-book. I notice that you did. Or meeting me of the trade issue and I just wanted to see if you need any anything from us or if you understand the e-book and if you have any questions?”
[00:17:44] So the beginning of the journey, this nice story you’re telling me is great and I keep going back to the beginning of this and you’re saying continue to network. Don’t throw networking out the window. You know the first meeting interaction you’re having with these people is face to face, is real life connection. So when you’ve got that lead, you’ve got that information from them and you go on with that, obviously that would be a warmth, a different type of communicating. You’ve already met. That to me stands out.

[00:18:21] Yes. So basically let me give you a couple of statistics. OK. So according to research done in the Harvard Business Review, 95% of people reported that face to face meetings are key in successfully building and maintaining long term relationships.

[00:18:41] Absolutely, that’s huge. That’s huge. I understand. Right. How is that not make sense. You know and I say you like to take it down to – Dan what about the people in your life, all your relationships? What are the strong ones? Exactly. The strong relations are the people you know, you’ve met.

[00:19:01] Right exactly. So here’s another statistic. Content readership. 68% of buyers will spend considerable time reading content published by a brand. Right. So right. So this goes back to what I was just talking about – Inbound. Yes. Being able to publish content that relates to your audience. So they get hooked. So you build an audience, you build fans. 68% is quite a bit. Yeah definitely. And then there’s another one, in terms of decision making, soonline buyers go through about 57% of the buying cycle on their own without needing to talk to a salesperson. They don’t need the sales shark there right in front of them trying to convince them to buy.

[00:20:00] Exactly so. Nobody likes to buy from sales people unless they build relationship with them. You know I got car dealership for example and I don’t like it. That’s right. I don’t like talking to those people right. Right. So I do my own homework. Yeah. And I do it online. Everybody goes to google, everybody searches, they try to find content so if you’re serving this content to the people that you found at the trade show or do you have some sort of connection with them through networking, they will look for your information online afterwards. So this is called Digital and analog mixed together.

[00:20:42] Gotcha. So the value is there in networking. Yeah and it’s not about the quick sell.

[00:20:50] It’s not about just trying to ABC your customers. It is building leads and nurturing your leads. So here’s the thing about. Inbound Marketing. There’s another important statistics – so customer acquisition right. That’s kind of like a fuzz word. You know you see it on Shark Tank. So what’s your “customer acquisition cost?”.

[00:21:15] Exactly. So what are we talking about here?

[00:21:20] Yes, so how much money in terms of marketing dollars does it take to get one person converted. Right. So it could be online for example, two dollars or three dollars. It could be ten dollars right – to be able to acquire one customer. Okay. So the average cost per lead drops about 80% after only five months of consistent inbound marketing. That’s huge 80%, that’s what’s amazing.

[00:21:49] Exactly. So basically what this is saying is that if you’re going for the kill at the trade show, if you’re going for the kill with all your marketing activities, you’re serving ads, you’re trying to get people to buy, you are hunting down the sales,

[00:22:07] It’s not going to work right. You need to nurture your leads, you need to serve them the content they want to read, you need to create fans out of your customers. That will decrease your average cost per lead by 80% in five months.

[00:22:27] So this is something that you believe in. I get the impression here that you actually believe in this synergy that you’re talking about. Exactly. Don’t necessarily drop these sort of traditional forms of marketing like networking, trade shows, face to face meetings. That’s important.

[00:22:48] Yes. You have to come up with that with different and creative ideas to be able to build excitability in your customers. This flash mob. It’s only piece of the pie. For example the same client have stickers with emojis for their their apps. And this is a manufacturing company and you can send emojis to your sweetheart using your iPhone or your Android. We also did a game for them.

[00:23:28] And it just blows my mind I got to say because again, this is not typically a company that I would ever associate that with. So you think here’s a manufacturing company- to me they don’t have a space really in the digital world. You know I feel like it’s just a bit of a boring thing. No offense to the manufacturing out there.

[00:23:48] You have to be able to to ride the waves as soon as they come out. So for example, the ice bucket challenge came out. We were the first ones to jump in with this client to to create this ice bucket challenge and publish it on YouTube and it became viral again. I mean you have to be kind of like in sync with what’s going on.

[00:24:17] So you got to be in that digital world for sure.

[00:24:21] Right. And at the same time you’re saying but you know what keep the connection, the face to face connections, the real life connections of people. They both work. They both work. OK. All right. Awesome I got to say, really good information. I hope all those out there that have these kinds of questions – like I said we had a few readers mulling and thinking about this issue – do I invest the time in the face to face, the networking, the trade shows etc.. You’re saying – Absolutely, and I will pay off.

[00:24:50] Yes it will pay off. Put them both together and make synergy with creative ideas. OK. So if you have any questions feel free to reach out, please anybody. So where can we reach you?

[00:25:09] Yeah you can go to Atom Labs.ca and you’ll find me there. Perfect. You can chat with me. You can go into any social media. Dan Duran – Twitter, Facebook. You’ll find me there, I’m pretty much everywhere.

[00:25:24] Yeah you are everywhere. OK great. So awesome. Thanks so much Dan. This is our first podcast. I hope you liked it.

[00:25:33] We tackled a really good question and I appreciate it so much.

[00:25:38] You know you were able to answer it so thoroughly. I hope I made a little bit of an effect and I was able to put things together in a good way. It makes sense.

[00:25:51] Yeah for sure. You convinced me. Absolutely. So yeah. Thanks again. And hopefully we’ll have another podcast coming soon. Are we doing one weekly?

[00:26:00] Yes I think we’re going to be doing two weekly.

[00:26:03] Ok. So stay tuned. Right. And thank you. Yeah thank you very much everybody for listening. Bye now.