Mike Connolly, CEO StrategiCopy: Helping Clients Attract & Close More Business

“When I say turn them into customers, that’s more than just making a sale today.”

As CEO of StrategiCopy, Mike Connolly creates and manages direct response marketing systems for fast-growing businesses so they can attract their ideal customers, put an iron fence around them and develop an abundant “herd” of customers for life.

He has co-created and manages marketing systems using blogs, social networking sites, newsletters, e-letters, video networks, articles, multi-media follow-up systems, direct mail, teleseminars, webinars and affiliate marketing. He’s an experienced teacher, trainer, and coach and loves sharing his passion for magnetic attraction strategies with high achieving business owners and entrepreneurs.

StrategiCopy primarily serves small to medium-sized businesses. We help them attract the type of customer they’re really most interested in finding out in the world and get found. We help them actually turn the virtual strangers into customers.

Mike Connolly, CEO StrategiCopy, Helping Clients Attract & Close More Business

I’m talking with Mike Connolly. We’re at Impact Hub in Boulder. He’s the CEO and Founder of StrategiCopy. He creates and manages direct response marketing systems for fast growing businesses so they can attract their ideal customers, put an iron fence around them, and develop an abundant herd of customers for life. Mike, thanks for taking the time.

Thanks for having me, Bob.

Let’s start out and talk a little bit about your business and who you serve.

StrategiCopy primarily serves small to medium-sized businesses. What we help them do is attract the type of customer that they’re most interested in finding out in the world and get found. From that point, we help them turn virtual strangers into customers. When I say turn them into customers, that’s more than just making a sale today, although that’s critical and we are very focused on creating sales. Ultimately, the idea is we want to create a lifetime relationship with that ideal client. What we do for our customers is we help them find their ideal clients, attract them, and then turn them into lifelong customers for their businesses.

How do you do that?

These days we have an incredible explosion of media. Media is just a way for people to relate to each other. I’m going to refer back to about 100 years ago just as a point in time. One of my mentors, Claude Hopkins, wrote a book called My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising. He wrote about how they successfully implemented marketing campaigns. Back then, it was very different than it is now. I want to talk about how they did it back then and compare it to how it is now because that will help us understand what it takes to be effective in today’s age with all of the media that we’ve got. We’ve got this explosion of media.

In Claude Hopkins’ day, how could you reach people? This was the turn of the century around the 1900s. You could send a letter out to people. You could put billboards up. We didn’t have radio, we didn’t have television, we didn’t have telephones even, let alone cell phones or smartphones. Social media and email wasn’t there. Those are all things that you did not have to work with. How did you succeed? I’ll share with you a story here about how Claude Hopkins succeeded for one of his clients as an example.

My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising

There was this little beer company called Schlitz and they had a problem in that they were about number five of all the beer manufacturers. Their product didn’t seem to be very different. Their challenge was why should people by Schlitz versus all of these other guys? Claude Hopkins went to their plant and looked at everything about it. He spent three days with their engineers and looked at every single thing about the plant. Then he came back and sat with the CEO of the company and he said, “This has been an amazing experience. I was especially impressed with the way that you guys have these rooms where the water run through over these glass panels and through all these pipes.” They clean their pipes three times a day. They drill for their wells hundreds of feet into the ground. They’re close to one of the Great Lakes, they could just take the water right out of the lake, but they want the purest water and all these things.

Claude said to the CEO, “Why aren’t you telling people what you do here?” The CEO said, “It’s what everybody else does.” Claude said, “But nobody else is talking about it.” That’s exactly what he did. He had a simple message that said, “The purest water.” He talked about the way that the company purified the water, purified their whole system, their bottles, and all of this stuff. Schlitz went from number five to number one or number two. The point being, you asked, “How do you do that?” How you do that is you’ve got all these media out there. The reality is the media is just a way for us to share stories with each other. The place you begin is you understand what it is that your company is doing that’s unique and who can most benefit from that.

Everybody’s pretty much familiar with USP.

USP, Unique Selling Proposition. What is it that differentiates you from the rest of the market? Once you’re able to identify the pain point or something that you can do for the exact type of person that you want to work with, you tell that story about how you do that. You want to also not get so focused in your own business that you don’t understand it from their point of view. The key is to look at it from your customer’s point of view, like the way that Claude Hopkins did with Schlitz. They looked at it from the customer’s point of view. The customer didn’t know about all these things until they pointed it out.

Who’s your most important client and what is it that you’re solving for them?

For StrategiCopy, our most important client is a provider of information. We tend to attract customers who either along with their service or as the virtual core of their service provide information for people, information providers. An example is one of my clients helps lawn and landscape companies have more profitable businesses. What would you guess is the average profit margin for a lawn and landscape company in this country that’s doing $2 million or $3 million a year in revenues?

40% to 45%.

It’s 2.3%. I was shocked when I heard that. That’s according to the national association. If a company is doing about $2 million, that’s the figure. What he does is he says, “There is a way to be more profitable in your company. We’re going to get you up to double digits.” He shows them how to do that. A lot of what I do is working with clients directly, but they tend to be what I call information marketers in the sense that they’re providing information as a service to their clients in a way that this coach helps his clients who were lawn and landscape companies develop more of a profitable business.

What about the professional service provider, is that a market that you serve as well?

It is indeed. An example is one of my clients. I have a client who’s a professional photographer. He realized pretty early on that although he had a passion for photography ever since he was a kid and he knew this was his thing and totally loved it, he had an early understanding that that wasn’t necessarily going to be a way to make a living. When he was in college, he sought out professors who could give not only the training that he needed to get a job in the real world but who would help him understand that he’d be a better photographer.

He was always finding ways of getting his photography in, at the same time he ended up taking on a job in a corporation that he had this scientific data role. He worked for a number of years in a company and photography was his side business. He was continually doing more and more photography and did a lot of sports events and got involved with politics. He’s in Washington, DC and was taking pictures of leaders there. He’s done Bush, Kerry, and all these others. He eventually realized that in his business as a photographer, doing pictures of babies and weddings and different gourmet foods or whatever, that wasn’t really where it was at.

By working with companies which harked back to his original thing, he understood what a corporate culture was like and that they needed photographers. We live in an age of social media. He now specializes in taking pictures for firms. He’ll do work with law firms, medical firms, stuff like that. Instead of doing a wedding, one gig for a whole day, he can go in and shoot 25, 40 head shots in a given company in a day. He’s got a very scalable business. We’re helping him grow from being a localized business there in Washington, DC to a national business.

He’s growing a network where he’s got contacts who will follow his protocols. He’s creating the systems that will create a service that works for the whole rest of the country. He takes his skills, his passion for photography and his ability to get incredible headshots and shares that with other people in other cities through the systems that he creates. The long and short of it is that’s just an example of a professional service provider that for some reason finds what I do for StrategiCopy as real beneficial.

Thinking about the discussion, my broad premise is there are misconceptions about copywriting and what you do and the benefits to companies. For one reason or another, many have had an advertising purveyor or whatever not turn out well. First off, what are the biggest misconceptions about copywriting and what you do that you run across?

Copywriting is a term that refers to creating a message and content that is primarily driven toward a direct response.

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I’ve given up at parties and networking events ever telling people, unless they know, what this term means. I’ve given up on saying, “I do copywriting or I’m a copywriter,” because generally the response is, “You mean like the little circle with a C thing? You’re doing legal documents.” Copywriting is a term that refers to creating a message and content that is primarily driven toward a direct response. In advertising, you’ve got spectrum of types of messaging that goes out in order to attract people to do business with your company. On one hand, you’ve got image and brand-driven type of advertising that goes on. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a message that asks for an order or ask for some response. It could just be a, “click immediately.” On the one hand, you’ve got the branding and the image-type advertising which is extremely difficult.

Be like Coca-Cola.

Chevy, and a lot of the ads that you see on the Super Bowl.

The direct would be like, “Do you want a copy of your family coat of arms? If so, click here.” That’s the individual direct response. You have both ends of, “Are you just trying to build a name or are you trying to get a sale?”

You’ll have something that you can measure on the one hand and something that’s extremely difficult to measure on the other hand. If you sold 300 coats of arms this week, you know that the message was effective; if you tell people Coke is the one.

Did your sales go up?

How do I know? That million dollars I spent for that app, did that do any good?

If you’re a business person with a budget of X and you spend on some campaign, you would like to think your revenue is greater than X. For a lot of folks, they spend X and have no idea whether X comes in or is measurable, or was it because of this or because of something else? For guys out there in the business community, my personal bias is that copywriting and this whole process is underappreciated and misunderstood, what value that it can bring to the table with clear measurable deliverables. With that, let’s go into some case studies. You’re kind enough to provide many of these. Fort Lauderdale Airport is one or you can pick what you would like.

I love the example that you pulled up. This is a real life example of the difference that a word can make. I came from a conference of direct response copywriters that’s provided by American Writers and Artists, Inc.

What is AWAI?

They are an information company that trains and provide support for both direct response copywriters and marketers. That conference took place in Delray Beach, Florida. I was on my way out to the airport. I walked out of the hotel lobby and saw a super shuttle there. I said to the driver, “Are you going to the airport?.” I may have said, “Are you going to the Fort Lauderdale airport?” I don’t remember at this point, but there was a little bit of a language thing going on and he said, “Yeah. Hop in.” I said, “How much is it?” He said, “It’s $27,” whatever it was. He took me to the airport. I got out of the super shuttle and he drove off and I realized I’m at the Palm Beach Airport. What a difference a word can make.

As another example of that, one of my mentors, Dan Kennedy, tells a story of an ad for a music service. It’s a piano lesson type service that came out years ago. The headline for the ad was “Put Music in Your Life.” In the process of sending out one of their mailings, a typo occurred in the mailing. All of a sudden, they noticed a 600% increase in their sales from this typo. Miraculously and fortunately for them, it increased sales. It was one letter that was wrong in this headline. “Put Music in Your Life” was what it was supposed to be. What would you guess made the difference?

I have no idea.

They put an S at the end of “put,” “Puts Music in Your Life.” The psychology of the thing is so different. “Put Music in Your Life,” if you think about it, that sounds like work. It’s like I’ve got to do that. That’s what your prospect is thinking. On the other hand, “Puts Music in Your Life” paints a whole different picture. We communicate through words, but those words create pictures in our minds. To get back to the question here of the case study, the Fort Lauderdale Airport is an example of what a difference a word can make. Not a business case per se, but that’s the type of thing that getting your content right, getting your message right can make a huge difference.

Let’s say that I’m one of your business clients. I come in with a particular problem. I have this, I’d like it to be discovered. I think I have good problem like all of you do. It’s that people don’t know you’re there, and so let me help them find you. Is there a case study that you can talk down that road?

I did a webinar for Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is a sales and marketing software primarily for small businesses. It helps small businesses get their sales and marketing done more easily. It frees up the owners to be able to have a little bit more time and yet increase their sales. This is a way that you can partner with a company to get found. I’m going to give you an example of how my company was able to do this as a case study.

A lot of people at Infusionsoft know me as a direct response copywriter. They know that that’s something that can help their customers and people who are interested in buying that software. One of the ways that they have found to be extremely effective in attracting customers is by creating valuable content that answers questions that their customers have. They’ve created a center or what they call a learning center on Infusionsoft’s website. If you go to Learn.Infusionsoft.com, you can explore topics on how to get found, how to convert customers, how to automate your business, all these things related to their software, but also solving problems for their clientele.

StrategiCopy: One of the ways that is extremely effective in attracting customers is by creating valuable content that answers their questions.

What they found is that people who are searching for solutions online, let’s say you type in, “How do I get found?” they would find an article in their learning center. That article then would lead to either opting in for a free report or, in the case that I’m about to share with you here, it would be an invitation to a webinar. Infusionsoft invited me to share some information with their audience on a webinar. The way that worked was people came searching for a solution, business owners are searching for a solution. They find the learning center on Infusionsoft. They get invited to a webinar, they sign up for the webinar. We had 400 people signed up. On the day of the webinar, we had 80 people showed up.

During the webinar, what happens is they’ve brought in a content expert, that happened to be me. In that process, they’re nurturing the people who have this problem that they can help solve. At the same time, they are introducing that client to me and my company. They’ve already been found. They’re now helping me get found. Maybe to answer the question directly, how do you get found and what would be one case study? That right there, the fact that they’ve got this content that they know that they can provide for their customers and they put it out there on the web in a way that people can easily find it, enabled them to bring in. My company and Infusionsoft are both already benefiting from the business from that particular webinar. It’s a three-step process and we’re already making sales from simply providing that content in a way that helps people.

I’m going to do a hypothetical. I’ve got a gimpy dog. I’m looking for a sleeve for an arthritic old bird dog. Let’s say on the manufacturer. I’ve now made an elbow brace for an arthritic bird dog to help her get her around. My dog likes it. A couple of other friends said, “I want that for my dog.” I go, “I’ve stumbled into a company.” I come to you and said, “I’ve got the world’s best arthritic dog elbow appliance. Can you help me find the audience for that?” What would be sequence of thoughts or steps that you might pursue with that?

One of the big mistakes that marketers and business owners often make is starting with the product. The questions that you ask are going to drive your success. The first question that often comes to mind for people is, “How can we sell this product?” I would suggest instead of thinking of that question say, “How can we solve a problem for somebody with this product? Who is that person? How do we find them? What’s their pain point? What are they looking for?” In this scenario, you’ve got a prosthetic.

It’s a dog sleeve.

We’re going to guess that if somebody has a problem that that solves, it’s probably not something that we need to interrupt their day for. It’s fairly likely that when they’re in a frame of mind to solve that problem and make a buying decision that they’ll be searching. Right there, we’ve distinguished between two types of audiences. Sometimes the very best way to attract your audience is to interrupt them and say, “You probably didn’t know that this exists.” On the other hand, if people are searching, then all we need to do is be there to answer their question. Google is one of the best ways to do that. We might presume that people would type in, “How do I help my gimpy dog get around?” People type in all kinds of things. Maybe the key phrase there is “arthritic dog leg” or something like that. What would be a phrase that you would type in?

That would likely be it, “arthritic dog joint.”

You can identify that. There are all kinds of tools out there, Google Keyword Planner and other tools that are a lot better ones than that, that will help you identify what are people searching for, what is your competition for that term, how many people are searching for it, and what are people paying for that term. That’s how Google stays in business is people pay Google when somebody clicks on that term on their ad. From that point, depending on how quickly you wanted to attract that person, you could simply create ads through Google’s AdWords program and say, “Got a dog with a gimpy leg? We have sleeves that will help your dog get around, be able to sleep better, and look a lot happier and won’t be such a droopy dog.”

You tell a story in those few words that you can do in Google AdWords, and whenever somebody then clicks on that, you pay Google whatever it is, $10 bucks, maybe $90 even, whatever is the value for you to do that. They would then go to a landing page. The landing page will say, “Yes, we’ve got these things. Here’s the price list. Here’s what to do next. Here’s your questions answered. You can call us if you want, or you can click here and simply order and we’ll deliver it within the next three days, guaranteed,” and so forth. That might be one process.

Another process that for a variety of reasons also makes a lot of sense is to, for online purposes, go with organic search. There’s paid search and then there’s organic search. When you look at any search page on Google, if you were to type in “gimpy dog leg,” you’re going to see the paid ads at the top and the bottom of that page that pulls up, but then in the middle you’ll see these other results that Google puts up. They’re clearly not advertisements. We all tend to feel like if we see a salesmen coming, we generally want to run the other way. It’s the same with advertising. The organic list or what we call the organic listings, the ones that are not paid ads, if we see that come up, we might go for that one first because we feel like we can trust it more. How do you get found on those is another question.

That’s the heart of what you do.

That’s the heart of search engine optimization. That is a long topic.

That’s a component. In the search engine optimization side, it has to do with the term that you were talking about. It has to do with how you tell the story, and features and benefits and pain points. Solution is what you do. I have an agenda in this podcast. I honestly think that copywriters and the folks that do this are the unsung wizards on the planet. They know how to use the English language like we were never taught in school. For the older guys, they probably know what LSMFT means, “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco,” which I grew up around as a kid. There are so many taglines that were written by copywriters. “Just do it,” we know who that is. “Melts in your mouth.” All of those. For the business owner, they spend a great deal of time on developing the product and understanding and trying to deliver it to the marketplace. My belief is that in many cases they fail to consider the benefit of solid copywriting.

If you’re providing a good service, if you’re providing a good product, then you have an obligation to get found.

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We touched on Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft automates the whole sequence of emails and responses and videos because your customer may not be ready to buy now, but they may over a series of education, like gimpy dog. “Here’s my gimpy dog before. Here’s my gimpy dog after. Here’s a picture and a video of my gimpy dog chasing birds around. My gimpy dog looks like she is now five years old instead of eleven.” They go, “I want my gimpy dog to look like your gimpy dog.”

They can see that whole transition and you tell the story, let’s say I have the skimpy dog sleeve, then it’s true and if you have your guarantees. For the customer and the business owner out there, my agenda in this podcast is make them aware or at least expose them if they’re not to the benefits of how you use the myriad of delivery points to prospective clients and people with your expertise, what you guys bring to the table. It’s not a small thing.

Let me give you an example of a company that’s used that whole process well, including automating all of these different messages. We do have so many media to take advantage of these days between print media, email, websites, telephone, all these things. I can’t tell you the exact details of who the company is so we’ll make up an example company here. It is very similar. Let’s say it’s Bob’s Detail Shop. What Bob does is he details out cars. He takes care of making them look beautiful. What this company did was they had a real problem. They ended up $50,000 in the hole and had to figure out some way through it. What they ended up doing was they started creating content, not sales literature, not talking about their product or their company per se, just talking about their audience, their ideal prospects, and the kind of problems they have. How do you take care of your car even after it had been out in a rainstorm? What if you had to drive through muddy road? What if there was a hailstorm? All these things.

What they did with the content was they had a series of short little articles that they would post in a weekly newsletter that was distributed to 36,000 businesses in the area. You would see them in a delicatessen or a restaurant, supermarket, these type of things, the free weekly things that you see. They now have this content going out on a regular basis and it’s easy to produce. You could look through your old emails that you’ve sent and probably find all kinds of things answering people’s questions. Once they had their content in place and that stream going, the next thing they did was they put up an opt-in form on their website. This is probably one of the biggest mistakes I see on companies’ websites. There’s this beautiful website that tells the visitor how wonderful they are, and then the visitor says, “Yes, I see they’re wonderful,” click, and they’re gone forever. That could have been a very expensive click. That could have been worth a lot to your company.

What you can do and what this company did was they created a lead magnet to attract people to exchange their contact information for a thing. They created a report, something along the lines of the five mistakes you absolutely must avoid if you want your car’s luster to last for the next five to ten years so that you can still have a gorgeous car, your Maserati sitting there parked in your garage. That enabled them to then build up their own list of people. People would find their website and say, ” I’ll give you my email in exchange for this report. I understand you’re going to be sending me some more information over time.”

They took that weekly content that they were delivering earlier and they now have a tip of the week that they can send out in their emails to keep the people that opted in interested. Occasionally, at the end of one of those emails or over the course of time, they might send out several emails. They will say, “By the way, we’re having a special this week. If you come down to our shop, we will provide for you 10% or 20% off or we’ll give you a special polish that you can take home to take care of your car with.” Now they’re starting to make sales. They’re turning what were non-customers into customers.

The greatest challenge today in marketing is turning a non-buyer into a buyer. That doesn’t mean that they have to be a high-ticket buyer. A buyer is a buyer. Even if they pay you a dollar, they’re now a buyer. The psychology has completely changed. One of the beauties of having your own email list is you can now send out these messages to people who even over email would say, “For $10, I’ll go for that.” They don’t even need to talk to you on the phone. Now they have the content. It’s going out in the newsletters. They’re getting some leads that way. They’re getting traffic to their website, there’s opting in. They’re building up their own email lists. They’ve got the content where they can send out these weekly messages to their list. It’s mostly content but on occasion, sales message.

From that point, what did they do next? Occasionally, some of those people will call and say, “I’d like you to do a complete detail job on my car.” That involves talking to a sales rep and maybe getting a quote. In that case, sometimes people will say on the spot, “Let’s do it.” Oftentimes, what happens is they may send a quote, the person might never call them back or they might not call back right away anyway. From that point, why did that person not call back? Maybe they got distracted. Maybe their kids were putting the cat in the microwave and they had to do something about it right away. They were not ready at that moment, but they would be ready at some point in time.

What this company did was they then had a series of automated emails that would go out that would knock down all of the dominoes that are in the way of that person making a buying decision. Was it because of price? Was it because this is not the right time for you? Was it because you didn’t understand how the process works? Was it because you didn’t understand what the value is, keeping your car in good condition and all of these things. They’ve got this automated campaign so that once that person doesn’t make a buying decision, that can automatically be going to work to nurture that prospect. Eventually what happens is a certain percentage of those prospects, about 85% as it turns out who maybe weren’t ready to buy today will eventually buy.

Microsoft said about 80% of those folks are not ready to buy on the first time through, and it takes six, eight, ten additional touches.

We know from sales that oftentimes it’s the company that continues to do the follow-up that gets the sale.

There’s a number of autoresponders, Infusionsoft being one of them, where you can set that sequence up and where once they enter, if you know what you’re doing in coding, which I certainly don’t, but if you did, it can take and send out a whole sequence that you don’t physically have to touch again.

It does it all. That’s the technology that we have. Infusionsoft does that. That’s the kind of technology we can take advantage of. Media, in and of itself, is these timed messages.

For me, my wife or daughter will be looking at a pair of boots of some description and will look if there is any other color, so I’ll look on my cell phone for the boot. The following week or so, I’m getting a whole array of ladies boots on my cell phone. If any of my friends look at it, they’ll go, “Bob, are you wearing ladies boots now?” You see that and that’s a function of a lot of the stuff that’s called what?

That’s retargeting. That retargeting is an automated process based on web pages that you visited. It can be done through Facebook or Google or other services. It also integrates with Infusionsoft. For instance, if somebody’s in the process of sending these retargeting ads, in your case, the boots, or in Bob’s case, somebody who visits his website doesn’t go for a detailed job, they might still see ads for that, plus they’ll be getting the emails. If somebody at the fifth email or the fifth ad does order the detail job for their car, we want them to stop getting those ads. We want it to be a friction-free experience. We don’t want to keep bombarding people. The automation enables you to do that so that once they do place the order, then the advertising stops.

StrategiCopy: The greatest challenge today in marketing is turning a non-buyer into a buyer.

The value of circling back to some of the value ad that you see from the storytelling side of the house, the automation is certainly there. Back to what we were talking about the value of the word or words or structure. Humans, being what we are, we respond to certain stimuli and the copywriter and the storyteller is speaking. To a lot of those folks, it speaks to them at the time. I’m not that conversant but I’ve been exposed a little bit from family members. First off, they may go, “How do I reach you?” Where do they find you on social media?

Facebook/StrategiCopy. You can look there. On Twitter, @StrategiCopy. You can Google StrategiCopy and you’ll find websites and other social media there as well. We have one of those company pages but they’re changing that all the time. Michael J. Connolly on LinkedIn.

We talked about misconceptions. In fact, you teach this as well, yes?

Yes. I have a class that I teach at Boulder Digital Arts on copywriting for the web. I feel like oftentimes I want to provide my clients with the understanding of how to be able to do this on their own or at the very least be able to identify good copywriting, good content, good messaging when they see it. Part of the work that I do with clients is I’ll be sharing with them information about that.

For the business owners going like, “I have no idea of the range of costs in going down this road might be.” If you were a smaller service provider, what type of budget should you consider and timeframe to even try to go down this road?

Understanding that businesses have budgets to work with, there are ways that you can stair-step the process, whereas you may have a little bit of an investment upfront, that should pay for itself. Marketing should never ever be an investment. It should have its own space in your financial plan, which is that you invest the money, you get that money back at some point in time. The beauty of direct response marketing is we can measure that and you can see, “Was this a winner or was it a loser?”

We offer services from very basic to less than $100 for a social media page optimization, to social media content writing where for $200 to $300 to $400 a month, we will create content for you on social media that drives traffic and awareness. That’s a term I use very cautiously because it’s hard to measure that. Nevertheless, on social media, there’s some value in that. It goes from less than $100 to start to a few hundred dollars a month. Depending on the value, if you have an average client value, let’s say you’re a surgeon or a chiropractor or an attorney, your value per client could easily be $5,000, $10,000, $50,000.

Financial planning. When you look at the value of acquiring a new client, then what we can do is we say, “How do we get you a new client?” Does that mean writing a landing page, a video script, creating a sequence, putting a webinar together for you with a whole marketing funnel around that? Then we look at if a new client is worth $50,000 to you and we can attract two or three of them per year, per month, per quarter, whatever it is, now we have an ability to say, “It’s worth putting together a marketing campaign to create that client for your business.” It can range up into the tens of thousands, my clients pay in those ranges. It’s always that you want to look at what’s the value at the end of the day. This is not an expense. This is not buying a car or a boat. This is buying something that’s going to return some money to your business.

That’s the measurement space. You do whatever discovery is necessary and do the homework to figure out what you’re after. If the lifetime value of a client is X, we’re going to spend some dollar figure. We can measure and show the output is greater than X over a certain period of time. If you spend $5,000 a month, then you’re going to measure to make sure that you’re netting more than $5,000 a month. That’s the measurement statistic. For many the notion is, “We spend a bunch of money and we have no way of knowing where it came from or if it came from this campaign.” In the social media space, that’s not the case anymore, is it?

Social media is definitely hard to quantify. There is what we call attribution. As an example, I’ve had clients come to me through LinkedIn. I’ve had clients who have said, “I’ve seen you on Facebook.” They may have also visited a webpage, they may have attended a webinar, they may have read a report. All of those things then contribute to, “This person is real. They feel like somebody that I’d like to do business with.” In that sense, social media can be directly attributable to a return on your investment.

The trick is it’s damn hard to measure what that is, with the one exception of sometimes people talk about Facebook advertising as social media. I look at that as paid advertising. It’s in a category of its own. With social media, there’s this other thing that needs to happen which is you need to provide an environment and a stream of content so that people recognize you, people see you, and then when they see your ad, your ad will be more effective because they can recognize that you exist and they have a little bit of a better feeling about it.

You mentioned that you had some offers for folks that perhaps might help them.

Go to StrategiCopy.com/25AutomationSecrets. What you’ll find there is an e-book that gives you blueprints for 25 different marketing campaigns that you can automate. These will typically be emails, videos, and things like that. It includes a variety of things from an appointment reminder sequence, a follow-up sequence that nurtures people from being not quite so sure they’re ready to buy your product to understanding all the benefits of your product and being ready to buy, a whole variety of things that if you were to implement all of those in your business, chances are, you probably have a production and fulfillment problem.

I was looking forward to visiting about what goes on in the copywriting space. Ogilvy was well-known and big in the day, the Merrill Lynches of the day with the ball from Wall Street to Main Street. Some of these timeless advertising pieces don’t go away. Human behavior hasn’t changed, at least I don’t think so. For folks, if they want to reach out to you, is there an email address that you would like for them to reach out to you at?

Mike@StrategiCopy.com is the best way to do that.

You want to look at what’s the value at the end of the day.

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What would your advice be to that business owner who’s going, “I don’t know if I should reach out or not?”

What I do is not for everyone, but if you’d like to find out more about what we do at StrategiCopy.com, I would certainly suggest visiting the website, reach out to me in person. I can send you specific answers to your questions. By all means, check us out on social media. We try to provide good information there that’s helpful for business owners who want to get found, who want to attract the type of clients who can benefit from products and services that they deliver.

Last thing, parting guidance of any kind?

If you’re providing a good service, if you’re providing a good product, then you have an obligation to get found. That’s my mission. That’s our mission at StrategiCopy. There’s so many good businesses out there, there’s so many good services that people could be benefiting from. If they don’t know about what you do, if they don’t know how to avail of that, then we’re letting them down. Let’s not let them down. Let’s get the word out.

I appreciate it. Thanks for your time.

Thank you, Bob.

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The post Mike Connolly, CEO StrategiCopy: Helping Clients Attract & Close More Business appeared first on My podcast website.

Tagged Bob Roark, business, business leaders, clients, marketing, mike connolly, StrategiCopy