Disclaimer: This article is not edited, pre-prepared, or embellished.

This series of posts and articles is called Marketing debates and are meant to be raw, off the cuff conversations about marketing topics.

It’s quite simple.

I post questions as polls on social media and the audience answers at scale.

Of course, I am assuming that most people would answer correctly based on the context of their life and business.

I am a firm believe that benchmark reports and most surveys and data are somewhat skewed.

What I love about this approach to gathering data around opinions, however, is that it is as close to real time as possible.

Most companies have to spend months, and some years, gathering answers, data, segmenting, analyzing etc., before they release reports.

This is asked, posted, answered and documented within 24 hours AND it’s left as a permanent post that people can continue to add to as they see fit.

ALL of that opening jargon to say, we are going to do this weekly so we as a community have a pulse on what’s in and what’s not.

When you see a marketing debate article (or the original questions on social media) you can trust that this community answers questions honestly and with the overall goal in mind that human 1-on-1 connection is how you grow a brand in a modern world.

We, at The Modern Marketer, will provide our $.02 on each topic to further the conversations.

Let’s go.

P.S. Most of these questions have hundreds of answers and as we continue to do this, those numbers will jump into the thousands really quick. (Just so you understand the growing sample size.)

Is Email Marketing still effective?

Audience answer:

Our take:

It’s not obsolete, yet.

Especially if you do it right.

Yes, of course it’s becoming more and more common that users primarily use social messaging and text messaging to communicate not only with friends and family, but with brands and organizations as well.

There are, however, plenty of aspects of marketing where email marketing is still more than relevant.

Here’s the catch…

We believe that if you’re doing email marketing in 2018 and beyond, it better be automation.

Automation will allow you to have nurturing touch points with the users coming into your brand so you can do a few things:

1. Have context with your messaging—putting the right messages in front of the right people at the right time. This allows you to avoid the dread “EMAIL BLAAASSSST” which essentially tells your audience they aren’t important enough to know what personally makes them, well…them.
2. Begin scoring leads—you need to segment your leads based on how they interact with your brand and ultimately determine who is a sales qualified lead and who is a marketing qualified lead.
3. Save you time—let’s be real, if you don’t know what marketing automation is, that’s step one. And a big step at that. If you do know what it is, you understand that to do it right, it requires a TON of upfront work—though it will save you thousands of hours and endless amounts of resources in the long run.

The reality is that every business has steps, processes and communication touch points that need to happen when a customer purchases a product or service from them. Most of the time, when lacking automation, this is done manually. Random phone calls, emails, scratch notes, customer profiles, or a combination of several software solutions that don’t talk to each other.

Having automation in place allows you to automate those repetitive process so you can nurture and segment leads and customers that come into your brand.

Our official vote: Yes, it’s still effective.

Do you need a website in 2018 and beyond to sell stuff?

Audience answer:

Our take:

It really depends on the variables.

Notice the question specifically says “…to sell stuff.”

The idea was to get people thinking about how accessible it is to come up with a brand, get content online, and sell stuff without a website.

This was BY FAR the most debated and answered question. Everyone had a rebuttal, on both sides.

We believe that depending on the variables, you may need one. But in most cases you don’t…

…to sell stuff, that is.

Sure, if you want to show that you have a presence and you want to build domain authority and tap into organic traffic because you’re at that stage in your business, then you do need a website. I.e. Many of my startup clients, historically, that were $1m and up in revenue definitely needed website. They didn’t need them to make the first million though. 

My biggest frustration with those that vote yes, is that most of them are romantic about websites and SEO.

I think the need for a website is very subjective and often prioritized for the wrong reasons.

I look at it from the standpoint of human behavior.

From a product standpoint, more and more humans are buying most of their goods from 2 places:

• social media
• large marketplaces (Amazon)

From a services standpoint, more and more humans are also buying their services from 2 places:

• social media
• large market places (Air BnB, Uber, etc. Not to mention most service industries have listing sites and marketplaces that business owners sell most of their accounts from.) 

And what’s interesting is more and more platforms like Instagram and FB are allowing direct selling from the site…for all things.

So, whether your goal is to get someone in contact with you (on the phone), fill out a form, learn more about your business, download something, etc (traditinally goals of your website) you can actually now do all of those things on social media.

And more effectively.

It my not feel as natural to you (the business owner or executive) but it is the most natural process for most users.

Where I think websites are more traditionally needed is with larger priced items or older demographics. Larger priced items being things like appliances, equipment, technology, transportation, etc., and older demographics tailoring to things like healthcare, and so on.

But if you add those variables up, that hardly makes up the majority of people online.

In fact, that’s a very small percentage of people online considering the maturing generations joining the workforce and having more and more purchasing power.

Our official vote: No, you don’t need one. However, we are writing a HUGE follow up piece on this to make sure we are very clear on this message.

Is SEO dying in a social evolving world?

Audience answer:

Our take:

Notice how we framed the question “…in a social evolving world.”

SEO isn’t dying.

How we think about SEO is dying.

SEO is just evolving.

Search engine optimization is just that—the optimizing of content within a search engine so it’s more discoverable to the right people.

By definition, it’s “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.”

Well, guess what?

Social platforms ARE mini search engines, firstly. Secondly, with the advancement of voice activated search queries, SEO is simply evolving.

No longer are we attempting to land the top spot on the SERPs to drive massive traffic to a site.

Now we are simply aiming to distribute a high level of quality, original content within the new environments of social media and marketplaces. That way when people interact on social media or purchase things in a marketplace, our brands, organizations, products and services are a part of the buyer journey.

Why?

So we control the attention throughout the buyer journey of:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Decision

Humans spend most of their time in the awareness and consideration stages of the journey, yet businesses spend most of their time optimization for the decision stage. What are we left with?

…law of averages.

And that’s not what SEO was intended for.

Our official vote: No, SEO isn’t dead, it’s evolving.

In terms of social media posting, what’s more important for building community?

Audience answer:

Our take:

There is clearly a misunderstanding here.

Building communities is something that The Modern Marketer’s foundation derives from.

It’s how I built my first business, my hundreds of client’s businesses, and the current endeavor of The Modern Marketer.

Quality should be a goal, incrementally.

But, without a shadow of a doubt, QUANTITY is the game.

This is where most brands are losing for 1 of 2 reasons:

1. They use quality as an excuse as to why they aren’t on social every day, why they aren’t creating content every day and why their brand(s) have little to no awareness.
2. People create for quality instead of impact. If they DO decide to create content, they try to make these immaculate pieces and then forget one MAJOR part. Distribution. If no one sees it, it doesn’t exist.

Don’t mistake quantity for the need to MAKE more. It’s the need to DISTRIBUTE what you have made, more.

That’s why we preach the concept of the Power 120. Creating a foundation of scrappy content that you distribute to your audience at scale.

More at bats, more wins, more conversations, more leads, customers, sales and advocates.

Quantity is the game.

The trick is that after you master quantity, you slowly increase the quality over time.

THINK ABOUT IT:

All of your favorite accounts and brands online are quantity of quality. Comedians, meme accounts, commentary, personalities, creatives, etc.

Some categories and industries naturally hold more quality than others (i.e. if a photographer posts a lot of content, it’s going to look quite a bit better than most because that’s also what they are selling.)

Not to mention almost EVERY VIRAL VIDEO you’ve ever seen on social media is not “quality.”

Our official vote: QUANTITY. Post more, create more, distribute more. Put in your 10,000 hours of creating and storytelling and eventually the quality will catch up.

What is a brand advocate?

A brand advocate is someone who will work for your brand by sharing positive sentiments with their communities about your brand.

Brand advocates are the people that scale your business.

The truth is that you can’t scale your business off of one sale. You need sale 2, 3, 4, 5 and beyond. You need depth to scale a business— value that goes far and beyond your product or service.

Having someone who spreads the word and culture of your business is far more valuable to scaling your business than a sale because that credibility, that referral, speaks louder and stronger than any company-led business promotional efforts do.

So how do you get people who can spread the word and culture of your business?

Let’s break it down.

Looking at the Bottom of the ACE Method

If you’ve been a part of this community for more than a week lol, you’ve likely heard about the ACE Method.

Most of the time we just talk about creating conversions.

We stop at the third section of the funnel.

But you can’t scale a business off of just one sale.

So you have your leads, you have your customer base, you have your loyal customer base, and then you have your brand advocates. How do you get people to the bottom of that funnel?

You have to identify the messaging that matches each groups of those people in your sales funnel:

1. Who are your qualified leads?
2. Who are the people that you’re going to convert into customers?
3. Out of those customers, who can I provide more value to and scale to create loyal customers?
4. Then out of those loyal customers, what kind of ecosystem, code, environment or relationship can I create to make brand advocates?

By brand advocates, we’re talking people you don’t have to pay for their loyalty. It’s just like that Drake line: “They give me loyalty and I don’t gotta pay for it.”

But don’t get it twisted.

Not everyone in your sales funnel can be brand advocates.

Not everyone can be loyal for free.

There’s a Difference between Customers and Brand Advocates

So what is the difference between a brand advocate and a regular customer? What’s the bottom line?

The bottom line is that customers get something they expect. They pay for that “something” and they get it. It’s just a transaction. But with brand advocates, it’s not a transaction— it’s a journey.

Brand advocates are the people who can journey with you and expand your voice bigger than yourself. If you can get other people in different walks of life to explain the same culture and the same message, the brand message becomes even stronger.

Here is what a brand advocate can offer you that a customer can’t:

• Accountability to the integrity of your products and services
• Attention that you wouldn’t normally be able to access
• Personal check-ins with you and your business
• Promotion of your business without asking anything in return
• Skills that you don’t have yourself
• Introductions to new places and new people
• Community around your brand

You can make a sale with a customer but you can’t scale your business with that customer like you can with a brand advocate.

But what does it take to bring someone down your sales funnel from the loyal customer base to the brand advocate? Do you need to push your product or service extra hard with these people to get them to want to advocate?

No, no, no. You cannot push a product or service and expect to get brand advocates.

Here’s why…

The Force Behind your Brand

The mistake people all too often make in trying to create brand advocates is that they think they have to convince these people to be die-hard fans of the product or service you’re selling.

And that’s just not the case.

Even if someone is advocating for what you’re selling, it’s not really the product or service that they’re advocating for.

No, seriously.

It’s not.

It’s the culture.

The people.

The vision.

What brand advocates are actually buying into with your brand is something much bigger than the product or service, than you, and even bigger than the business itself.

It’s all about that driving force behind every brand.

I learned this from my own business mentor back in Ohio with this example: Smucker’s went from just selling jams to selling nearly every product in your kitchen.

How?

Not from all the profits they made from selling jams. 

It’s because for so many years they have put an emphasis on their culture— a culture based on growth, clear communication and collaboration, and doing the right thing. Focusing on the core driver behind their products.

These are values that people can rally behind.

Jams are just the product, but their culture is their legacy.

That’s how Smucker’s has come to be recognized in FORTUNE Magazine’s annual listing of “100 Best Companies to Work for in the United States” for many years, even making #1 in 2004.

Smucker’s prioritizes its values over everything else to create brand advocates. Smucker’s puts value over everything.

If you ask me what I sell and I say: “I’m Derek Palizay and I sell marketing services,” I’m telling you the wrong thing. You have to think about what’s behind the product or service you’re selling.

Is it systems?

Is it selling people time?

Is it value based like Smucker’s?

Is it community?

Is it a methodology

Organization?

What’s the bigger picture? What is the driving force behind your brand? Whatever it is, it affects your messaging, your brand voice, and your image.

I can’t tell you what your driving force is, I can just tell you if it exists. When you look at a brand that’s investing beyond just the immediate ROI needs of their company, you can see it. You know culture when you see it.

Once you identify your driving force, you have to center all your marketing efforts around it. And then you have to find the right people to run with…

Finding Good People to Work With

Brand advocates can’t just be anybody.

The relationships you form with your brand advocates have to go deeper than anyone else who may come into your funnel.

To create a true brand advocate, your brand have to be able to create culture and value that’s so inspiring to that person that it helps them hit the next level in their own journey.

I’ve said it already, but I’m going to say it again: Brand advocates do not care about your product or service.

They care about your culture, your loyalty, your character, your higher purpose, your integrity. They care about how you inspire them, how your impact on them is so deep that they can’t resist not being a part of your brand.

Once you know your culture, your brand voice, and what you can bring to the table, you have to supplement it.

That also means making sure you have some kind of vetting process that you bring into your ecosystem, because only the right people, the people who are aligned with your culture and values, are going to help you grow.

You don’t need to hire skill, you need to hire loyalty and you can train skill.

If you invest into storytelling and documenting the journey, you get the inverse effect of people flocking to you— and the right people.

When you’re investing in content and value, your brand grows as a whole. Going to Upwork to find the type of person you want for that just isn’t going to work.

That’s not brand advocacy, that’s outsourcing.

Incubating your Brand Advocates

I’m speaking from tried and true experience when I say that having just five brand advocates trumps 300 people that follow you publicly. Having 10 brand advocates trumps 10,000 people that you think will grow your bottom line business.

The power that has come out of The Modern Marketer Network is truly amazing.

These are people I will roll with for the duration of my career. These are people I will speak on stage with, co-brand with, and share my book and knowledge with. They challenge me, and I challenge them.

This Network is my incubator for my brand advocates.

In order for you to nurture your own brand advocates, you have to find a tactical way to incubate them.

Whether that’s a private community, private email list, or private mastermind sessions, you have to actually deliver on that value, that family vibe, that cohesiveness.

You have to come up with some code.

Like The Modern Marketer, for example: value over everything. (yes, that’s the hand sign in the picture above “VOE”.)

We’ve created this code inside of our Network that allows our culture to be easily replicated across upbringings, backgrounds, levels of businesses, and experience levels.

People are rolling with a story that is bigger than themselves.

Yet one of the biggest challenges people who follow The Modern Marketer face is that they just can’t get people to care. Here’s what you need to do: go find three people in the next 30 days who can help you grow your business.

Then I encourage you, plead with you, to slow down your roll in marketing and incubate some brand advocates.

Conclusion

Brand advocacy is not about auxiliary salespeople that are happy enough about your product or service that they will talk it up for free. It’s about forming deeper connections with people based on something bigger than your product or service. It’s about creating a driving force that brings people together behind a common purpose.

Brand advocates are the ones who want to be on the front lines with you promoting your culture and values. And if you nurture these people, if you genuinely add inspiring value to their lives that helps them in some significant way on their own journey, you will have a lifetime of scalability.

Guys, it’s no secret: we put out all our best information on The Modern Marketer.

We preach Value Over Everything because we truly believe in providing value above any business agenda. People can be suspicious of that and wonder how the heck we make any money if we’re giving away our value for free.

You may even wonder yourself how creating content could possibly benefit your business or brand.

I get it, it’s different. I come from a sales background and I understand that there’s no point in doing something if it’s not going to be profitable for your business.

And that’s exactly why I’m such a huge advocate for content creation. Not because it makes profit, but because it’s a vehicle for profit. A necessary tool.

I’m about to break down why creating all this content and distributing it for free leads to profitability. It all comes down to context…

Content vs Context

So you probably understand that content carries the ideas that we as business leaders and entrepreneurs stand behind. This is the substance with which we conduct our business.

Whether you’re a service-based business or you sell products, you have to put your best information out there to establish your credibility. But here’s where the difference comes in between content and context.

Your content can be very helpful, inspirational, even game-changing. But what you can’t give away is how that content applies directly into an individual’s life.

You put your best content out there to get people to pay for the context.

You can’t just put your best context out there. It’s impossible. Because context isn’t the same for any two individuals. People want context specific to their lives, for their story. And they will pay to be able to understand how your content is relevant to them.

Your audience has problems, your content has solutions, but they want to know how your solutions will solve their specific problems.

Once you understand that, it becomes a lot easier to identify who your content is for. When you distribute that content on social platforms, the people who reach out to your for that context are your buyer persona. Knowing that buyer persona will reinforce your content strategy.

But know this: while context is what pays the bills, it all starts with content. You simply cannot have context to sell people without first providing the content. Build the credibility, build the connections, then you can sell the context.

The Best Calls-to-Action = Context

Ultimately when we write content for landing pages, we want people to be persuaded to take some sort of action towards the step of buying, right?

So many marketers publish content about the best words or phrases to use, the best sales copy, the best times to post, the best types of posts— as if there’s some universal answer to creating effective calls-to-action.

But the truth is there is no universal, one-size-fits-all solution for creating effective calls-to-action.

Every single person who will come across your content is an unique individual who is inspired and motivated by different things. Sure, there will be groups of people who are called to action by similar content, but you’ll never find a singular call-to-action to motivate everybody.

So what should you do to drive people to take action?

My advice to you is to treat your calls-to-action as if they’re normal interactions. It’s so easy to forget when we’re writing our content that we’re trying to persuade actual humans to take action.

Awhile back I ran into a guy at the supermarket who asked where I got my hat from (you all know I love my hats). We started chatting right there in the supermarket and ended up deciding to have coffee sometime to talk about entrepreneurship and business.

So we made a call-to-action for each other based on the interaction we just had in the supermarket. If there wasn’t any value there, no relevance— no context —it doesn’t matter which way I would have asked to have coffee because it wouldn’t have happened.

It’s the context that drives the action, and that context is created through connection. Had the guy not connected with me in the supermarket about my hat, there would be no connection, there would be no context.

This is why there’s no singular, universal solution to creating calls-to-action. People are called to action through context, through making an unique connection to your content.

Since there’s no way to create individual connections with every single person that fits your buyer persona, you have to constantly split test and refine your landing page content. 95% of my clients have extremely high clickthrough rates and conversions because I’m always split testing and refining.

It’s a process.

But there are plenty of tools out there to help you find what yields the best response from your audiences…

• Unbounce – a landing page creation service with overlays that feature specifically targeted calls-to-action
• Hotjar – a program that uses heat maps to visually represent users clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior, allowing you to understand what users want and care about on a page
• Crazy Egg – similar to Hotjar, a program that uses heat maps to show user activity, and additionally shows where the users come from and what they click the most
• ClickFunnels – a sales funnel creation service that streamlines the sales process online for users

It’s all about testing and adjusting until you can find the calls-to-action that resonate strongest with your audiences. Context is key.

Start thinking about your calls-to-action as attempts to make connections with people, rather than pushing someone to buy. Be patient with the process. Testing and refining your content takes time.

Doing Your Job AND Creating Content

So at this point you probably understand the important role that content plays in driving sales. It is a catalyst for context, an enzyme for connection.

Without content out there, you don’t have an out-stretched hand for a buyer to grab onto and make that connection. You don’t have that same opportunity to sell.

But how do you make the time to create content while doing your job? Growing your business means creating and distributing content, but how do you do that and serve your clients?

First you have to understand that creating content for content’s sake is not going to be helpful to you. You have to know why you’re creating content in the first place.

So before you begin to write, or record, or design, or edit, you have to be in the mindset of where you’re going rather than where you are. That’s an important piece of the puzzle.

There’s been many times where I’ve started to create content then stopped because I lost sight of why I was creating the content at all. It’s disheartening to get stuck like that, but it’s even more disheartening to put time and energy into creating content only for it to not be engaged with.

If you don’t know why you’re creating your content, if you don’t know the purpose behind it, your audience won’t know either.

I want to get to the point where 80% or more of my income is coming from writing and speaking. For me to do that, focusing on clients, to-do lists, working with employees and subcontractors, and expecting any result other than growing a client base is very naive.

The only way to grow your business from content creation is by intentionally scheduling time to make those things happen. There are times I will not accept new business, not have sales meetings, and not have execution time for clients, because I know I need to create content to get to where I’m going.

The only way you’ll have time for both your job and creating content is by making the time.

But it doesn’t have to be as tedious as you might think. You don’t always have to create content from the ground up because already have content from your interactions with people.

Repurpose your interactions. As a marketer and a consultant, I’m always having interactions with people— casual conversations, email exchanges, strategizing, phone calls, etc. 95% of my posts are from interactions that I’ve had, repurposed to fit the context of the platform.

Skim through your emails. Look through your texts. Flip through your journal. You have content there already, you just need to put it all together.

Conclusion

On the surface level, creating content may seem futile. But once you begin to understand that content is the foundation on which to not only build your business but make connections with people, the benefit becomes more clear.

Always be forward-thinking with your content and remember that your content should always be evolving to produce unique contexts for each of the people it resonates with. You can put all your best information out there, because people will come to you for the context.

That context, the connection, is what will sell. Not your product, not your service, but the context you can build from connection.