Inbound Marketing Tactics for Musicians and Startups

hello everybody welcome thanks for joining us today got my second interview in a series here with a good friend of mine Brian Pennock hello brian is a founder of several companies in the music industry including the counter with counter rhythm group musicians desk reference and sound ster while making strides to elevate the music or musicians find their place within it Brian became an expert in inbound marketing so I'm gonna sit here and chat with Brian today

about all the things that he's learned he's got a lot of really tactical and information dense strategies for you guys to see and to share if I didn't pull those out of him throughout this conversation feel free to enter any comments or questions you have into the chat or into the ask a question feature at the bottom of the screen I'll be the liaison so to speak making sure that we answer those questions and I share

them with Brian he can address the things that you're asking in real time but this should be a pretty casual conversation Brian and I are good friends so it'll be be pretty simple and pretty comfortable I just know that he is a wealth of knowledge and I wanted to share that with you so for the extended bio because I know Brian is humble and won't brag about himself so I'll do it for him Brian is a

musician turned entrepreneur striving to build a more sustainable music industry after recording and touring with his own successful projects for over a decade he's focused his efforts on solving problems that he experienced as a musician and from where he could see the industry was heading with a counter rhythm group Brian has managed early-stage development companies for artists that have grown to have sustainable careers even multi-platinum status musicians desk reference his career management and learning platform has

helped artists and professionals develop strong foundations for their careers and they have started to make an impact in the educational world with sound stir his technology offers transparency and a pathways and modernizing the Performing Rights industry they aim to put more money into the pockets of songwriters and businesses alike and they offer a way for brands to connect with consumers at live events like never before he has experience in artist development management technology data and analytics

sponsorships and endorsements inbound marketing and promotions publicity and radio raising capital risk assessment and valuation networking professional team development performing rights organizations and more obviously quite an accomplished guy I'm excited to have Bryan here Bryan welcome thank you for joining us thank you so much for having me hopefully my mom heard that from a distance will be will be short or two shares recording with MS Pennock mrs. Bennett so how did you transition there's a couple

huge themes here one of them being music neither being marketing how did you transition from being a musician being in the music industry to really learning a lot of this practical tactical marketing strategy yeah I mean music by its nature obviously incorporates marketing in several different areas but specific specifically being a musician you're constantly generating content you're constantly marketing that content you're constantly trying to discover new audiences to stay engaged with that content so just you

know in a certain sense by default I became a marketer as you know many musicians do but I really took to scaling that out of the context of just my own career into working with other music companies you know when I transitioned from the performance to the business side and now I you know as I mentor and advise startups you know I've helped generate a path of sustainability utilizing specifically inbound marketing it's it's building great content

marketing that content to your audience and then focusing on the engagement of that content overall through lead generate lead generation you know SEO optimization and things like that but you know I really it was trial by fire and just cutting my teeth from practical experiences you know just to throw this out to the viewers I have I don't have any formal educational training when it comes to marketing I have some certifications through a CRM entity called

HubSpot which I'll reference you know several times throughout this but I was not you know again a marketing student you know I just found my way into marketing through my own personal experiences and then have transitioned to luckily building a career out of that are you at liberty to talk about any of the bands that you've been a part of or are affiliated with now I yeah sure as far as the bands that I was a

part of you know I just kind of sum it up by saying I was the one opening through all your favorite fans back in the early 2000s and well late 90s through early 2000s and early 2020 aughts but as far as my own projects unless you're specifically a fan of you know Warped Tour pop punk circa 2001 through 2004 maybe some indie pop you know he probably aren't too familiar with them but fortunately we've had some

music placed and some commercials and some movies and things like that as far as the projects that I have worked with on the business side most notably it was very fortunate my second client was an unknown Cincinnati band called walk the moon and you know they had done some regional and international touring at that point but you know through some of my work but mostly you know building out their larger team which you know I can

say nothing but great things about I've had some great experiences and I've taken those experiences and I've tried to standardize those into some working models to help other artists on an emerging and developmental front right now I'm currently focused working with a great NPR folk in the sitar based band called da da da WG y AWP yeah it's a whole confused sitar it's pretty wild but it works really well and then one of my other main

clients is an indie pop fan it's they're kind of like the Midwest surf band for for indie pots are called harbor that's the old English spelling har Bo you are and beyond that I do a lot of b2b works so I've worked with publicity firms management companies booking agents you know pretty much across the board you know entertainment law firms with a focus of sustainability the music industry is going through a great China change you know

whether it's from music licensing to you know artists development the the risk factor is very high for you know businesses to find talent early and develop them throughout that organic process and that way mostly falls on both the artists and their initial teams so my work that is spanned into working with startups because there's a lot of parallels between music and in startups is trying to find that or grow organic growth rate early on and hit

a point of proof-of-concept and help scale that up for continued growth that's awesome as you know I work with some artists of different trades as well and a common theme that I come across that I'd love to eat your take on is sort of a almost repulsion or you know to the idea of business when somebody is an artist the idea of themselves selling themselves so what about that prospect was not only okay with you but

interesting enough that you've really dove in and learned a lot first up I will say you know is somewhat of a disclaimer there are artists out there that are purely creating art for the sake of either the creation or the art itself that are not interested in monetary gain and I have the utmost respect for those individuals you know I am one that has chosen to have a path you know a the the for-profit path if

you will as opposed to the nonprofit you know I was fortunate to be a local musician scale that into a part-time career and then at certain points full-time career and then on the business side I've been working in the music industry on the business side for over seven years now as a full time position I again I appreciate those that create art for art I certainly don't challenge that it's it's a very sacred perspective that people

have and you know I will never force that change upon anyone but as so many musicians are interested in you know having a sustainable career you know from dollar one you have to really consider whether whether how far you want to take this and you're gonna have to make some ethical choices along the way you know success in my mind and many others is a relative term so success to one musician might be something on a

part-time level you know getting on the radio getting at a local regional publication then you have other artists that are looking to sell out Madison Square Garden and be on the cover of Rolling Stone and it's really about supporting whatever that ethical decision is from the artists you know I am personally more focused on artists that are going for longer long-term full-time careers but again it's really about respecting the initial ethical decision of the creator themselves

in you know bands bands are a business so absolutely if they're being treated as a business the the members of the band the founders they have to do some of these practices to get into marketing and selling to give themselves a chance but you say that's true absolutely I mean one of the things that I teach when I bring on early stage artists is the first thing literally one of the first things if they're not incorporated

as a business we do that then we go through you know operating in membership agreements we establish the parameters in which you know the actual contributing members of the business will operate versus those that are essentially just showing up and playing and there's nothing wrong with that but it's better to have some sort of hardline agreement internally and hopefully on paper as well before the cash comes into the equation you know an agreement in advance is

going to save you a lot of headache down the road so teaching that diligence when it comes to business when it comes to finances when it comes to marketing the earlier you can in state instill those values the more likely those artists will develop healthy practices and habits around that and that's gonna make all the difference especially when you start scaling up from in the case of an artist from like a beginner to a local and

then you make the job to a regional and national and then an international you know sustaining artists at the top of that level so and like any startup the team is probably going to be the ones who start doing the marketing and pushing things because they don't exactly have a huge marketing budget to bring in someone else to strategy so I assume that's how you got into this really to begin with yeah there's you know the

counter rhythm group was started as soon as I got off the road actually just before I got off the road it's really be a part-time servicing agency bridging the gap between like the bigger scale managers agents you know publicists radio agents things like that we wanted to help be that stepping stone discover the talent early help with this diligence as we just described through you know business finance marketing things like that and really show a proof

of concept but also show that there's scalability potential there so my job is to essentially come in and you know hope minimize the risk for any professionals that are looking to be a part of this team just is you know with startups that are looking to raise capital you know they're not going to throw money at any random idea and that's happening less and less you have to show some sort of proof of concept in some

cases build out your your Minimum Viable Product and show that initial customer traction so it's it's a long and dirty process you know I try to provide enough content materials and guidance for musicians you know at any stage of their career but it's just it's it's the natural way of the market it's the natural way based on capitalism you know the the that's Darwinism to a certain element you know the strongest will survive then it absolutely

plays into both the work with startups and also musicians so I know you've got a little bit of an intro to what inbound marketing is I'd love to hear sort of your definition help us lay the foundation for you know a lot of this discussion here of course yeah so I do have some slides I have a lot of slides that I'm not going to go through all of them so I would definitely keep this casual

as possible and any questions pop up I'd love to address those in real time inbound marketing is also known as content marketing and it's really utilizing content through well I'll tell you what I'm gonna pull up before we get into that I'm gonna go ahead and pull up start the slideshow so this is scaling it down but you know essentially there's two forms of marketing traditional or old school and then inbound is the newer version the

best way to describe inbound and inbound in a sense is attracting leads through engaging content and then helping qualify those leads through what's called the buyers journey which will show that here at a certain point but to frame this and give it a little context traditional sales is based on as you see here cold calls cold emails interruptive ads and it's more marketer centric and I would go as far as say that's actual more like sales

simpler because marketing sales have been extremely symbiotic relationship in in the context of say buying a car you know 25 years ago before the proliferation of the Internet if you went to a car lot and you know wanted to buy a car you would lean largely on the sales person to help qualify you you would tell them you know maybe a few things about you and what you were looking for but ultimately they were the main

point of influence and that's a key word here and that influence could lead you to a car that was legitimately you know the best option for you but that influence could also be tainted and the the salesperson could direct you towards a vehicle that maybe paid out a higher commission or something that they were trying to empty out on a lot but again the influence and and the the control to some extent fell on the marketer

or the salesperson side inbound marketing is the opposite it's actually the empowerment of the buyer or the customer in this case you know we'll get into things like SEO blogging and attraction but at the end of the day you know in that same scenario if you were looking to buy a car net bits of information you know mostly qualified information that's on the internet you're likely gonna do research in advance you're gonna know what specifically you're

looking for you're gonna you know possibly even shop when it comes to different prices you know different retailers and things like that the salesperson in that scenario should be much more supportive they should be listening to your needs they should be listening to your research helping you consider what's best but the the influence has come from the research that the buyer has done and this isn't obviously just for buying cars this is buying you know product

services online a man bound process is supporting the the customer and it's providing some qualified content through means of blogs video you know audio podcasts you know it's helping to position that content utilizing search engine optimization so you can more appropriately target specific customers based on their more specified needs and at the end of the day when the customer makes the the purchase the the conversion they are making the best decision they feel as possible and

they are utilizing influence that they have discovered even though you were the one behind the scenes doing the influence you usually bike on you know creating that content so hopefully that gives you some frame of reference I I don't have you on my screen J I don't know okay I can see it now so yeah inbound is influential marketing based largely on content but the main thing is it's empowering the customer so how prerequisite is the

idea of like patience in really putting a lot of time and to build some this content to do this you know I I write a daily blog and it's a lot of work so to somebody doing inbound marketing and they're and they're getting into content creation what exactly are they signing up for they're signing up for a lot and first off I'll give you props I read your your daily article you know literally every single day

it's one of the first things I do and the contents great it's always extremely relevant so if you haven't signed up for James email list and and I would highly recommend that as far as the content you know it really depends on how you're positioning yourself in the ecosystem if you are setting up the CRM the client relationship management system and you're building the content and you're also you know identifying your buyer personas and things like

that that's a lot on your plate and it's gonna take some time and the more effort you put in initially for you know diligence when it comes to preparing preparing the the overall marketing system that you're putting together your your strategy your plan of action the much more efficient it's going to run is time goes on if you're specifically just a content marketer who is building that content the more time in care not only in to

you put into building the content but also identifying your audience you know who's going to see this there's typically more than one different type of customer you know I typically see about three different customer segments and personas on average with companies that I work with but the more time you put into identifying those customers identifying where they're going to be seeing this content identifying how they're going to be consuming this content then you can consider things

like marketing funnels and automation that will really make for a much more efficient and again an automated process so you can literally run as I've done an entire marketing department you know utilizing something like a CRM like HubSpot but it takes a lot of work and if you have to build the content on top of that then it's gonna take some time to learn this but you know within six months of learning everything I could about

inbound and becoming certified through HubSpot you know we were already earning top SEO seeds and seeing a lot of returns when it comes to customer conversions from that that's awesome and so in that specific case were you saying that you had a lot of top SEO seeds do you think that was due to that specific company or opportunity or like the uniqueness of what they're putting out there or was that specifically just being really intentional upfront

and knowing some of the technical steps to take it was both you know it was absolutely a crash course I received my HubSpot certification in April of 2016 and I think by July of 2000 or August of 2016 is when we first started seeing some those top SEO seeds it was equal parts of what you just said you know knowing the market knowing the gaps in the market building quality content around that you know the the

timing of this specific market for context this was for sound stir you know my the company I work with it's music identification and then advertising and we really took time before the content marketing engine was quote-unquote turned on to study the the customers and identify those personas and know who specifically we would be targeting because this was you know business owners specifically venues and businesses that offered some sort of live music who were just music playing

in the background so everything from nightclubs bars to coffee shops grocery stores anything like that but we also had brands that we were trying to attract into our marketplace we had songwriters that we were trying to attract so we could discover where their music was being used and ultimately help them earn more accurate royalties for those performances and then we actually had performing rights organizations which was really unique and is still really unique because we are

trying to provide a very disruptive solution to the market but the Performing rights organizations you know from their initial standpoint or their competition but we're not really their competition we're actually trying to provide them a new modernized solution so while one of the customer segments would see us as a threat we saw it as a great opportunity and I absolutely incorporated that into my marketing strategy specifically with inbound and outbound links interesting so you're talking about

you just said links so I want to dig into that this is gonna be this gonna get super in the weeds I can tell I'm excited about it so none of this just to clarify nothing that's the none of the things you've talked about so far are involving like paid search or paid ads right with the strategy that my team developed with sound sir we we did some experimenting with some paid advertisements but specifically around our

top SEO seeds we did not do any paid marketing or paid advertising you know with like you know dedicated ads on the side or like Google you know Google Adwords or anything like that we certainly had the infrastructure set up and we did the research but we literally just the the term that I use for this which is now becoming very misappropriated and I might even be misappropriating at 7 point but as growth hacking I really

utilize content and a series of smaller strategies a part of a bigger plan and I growth hack that SEO position but at the end of the day I just really took time to study what our customers who our customers were what they were looking for how they consume content and then would appropriately put that content in front of them my reappropriation some of that content several times rightfully so and it helped our SEO position to the

point where I can show you one slide where the most common search around these rights organizations that we were trying to disrupt we became the number one organic seed when it came to a Google search so literally when these rights organizations have a customer that's googling something about them from kind of a negative perspective trying to figure out ways of not paying for music which you absolutely should do and it's the right and legal thing to

do but when the customers were trying to figure out a pain point of the the rights organizations when they organically googled something I was the first thing that came up for all three and that really helped leverage our SEO position not only for that individual content campaign but also several other you know subsidiary campaigns as well so when you're talking about the seed let's let's stick to that example when you're talking about that seed for SEO

is that on an article you publish that was very intentionally laden with keywords links or was I'm like a static okay so SEO again is search engine optimization it's where specifically Google is placing your your you you know your content and in the list of search results based on what's called a keyword and the keyword could be something that's shorter like outside of the context of the music industry the example that HubSpot specifically uses in their

training is shoes if say you are you know if I'm if I'm looking for running shoes for someone who's never ran you know a 5k I would look up you know beginning runner shoes you know male maybe highest-rated maybe starter something like that I'd add some different phrases behind that I'm not gonna go to Google and just type in shoes and expect my direct you know my preferred results to pop off the page at the same

time that keyword the very short keyword shoes has completely been commandeered when it comes to SEO placement largely through people purchasing advertisements around and advertising around those keywords so some of the smaller companies you know specifically startups which I absolutely try to support when possible they might instead of making shoes in general they might be making specifically shoes for people who have never ran a 5k for somebody for you know men and their mid-30s and they

might have really good marketing content to try to attract me to at least digest their content read their blogs watch their videos you know listen to maybe some audio clips that they have up checkout infographics look at case studies of other people who are in my position six months ago who have actually gone through and ran the 5k so if they know that I'm one of their target customers and they've identified my quote-unquote persona they could

have build content around that and then when it came to marketing that content they could have staged themselves so if somebody is looking for you know running shoes first time 5k male mid-30s I would be directed more specifically to that long tail keyword as opposed to just googling shoes so you know SEO optimization you know utilizing content for that placement it's absolutely possible but you have to put yourself in your customers shoes what specifically are they

looking for how refine can you get that customer persona and you know put yourself in their shoes and build content that's gonna attract them and that's getting into this sum of all parts SEO is a very complex thing but coming from somebody who barely knew what SEO stood for you know when I first got my HubSpot certification we really took the time to define our customers and build quality content around that that we knew they would

be interested in and started pushing that out organically through a few you know select distribution channels Facebook groups you know I did a lot of guest blogging for some other music industry entities and we started you know getting that traffic coming into our blog and then combined with inbound and outbound links I leveraged the position of the the SEO and you know luckily we ended up on top so let me let me see if I'm reading

between the lines correctly here tell me that this statement is true or not it sounds like when you're optimizing for SEO whether it's for these longtail keywords or whatever you're focusing and I kind of already asked this but let me just clarify you're focusing on written like blog content more than like the sales page content your blog content should be a part of what's helping to sell this there you know in our philosophy with sound store

and specifically go through the the inbound process there is a sales page there is a point when you actually do convert excuse me but that's much further down in the end the the process so what I'm doing is understanding what my customers are going to be searching for building content around those very specific long term I'm sorry long tail be warned searches and then having somebody search having us hi and the result and the this the

stat that I learned right around August 2016 and I'm sure it's changed you don't hold me to this but 60% of all google searches click on one of the top three non paid the links so if you go to and just google something randomly you might see an advertisement or two at the top some people go to those advertisements but 60% of traffic click on the top for the top three links you know one two or

three the remaining links you know number four through one thousand ten thousand hundred thousand only get forty percent of the traffic so the higher you are specifically if you get in one of those top three positions you're likely going to have traffic clicking through once they click through to likely a blog post or we had a lot of success with infographics with sound star at the end of that content and that content is trying to influence

and qualify it's kind of a balance of objective and subjective content at the end of that there's something called a call to action and that call to action is specifically going to take you click on that you know it's some sort of an offer you've read this blog now if you you know you've read a blog on I'll give you one specifically in the context of sound star if utilizing one of ours for one of our

blog posts for brands how can you better engage customers and attract customers it virt izing for live events so at the end of that blog you might be offered some sort of case study that's a download some sort of white paper you might be offered something just some sort of deliverable and you have to click this button that takes you to what's called a landing page that landing page just very specifically has the offer listed and

then has a sign up form so we're giving you this white page of this one sheet this case study this testimonial for free that's gonna help you in your research help you further down the funnel so to speak in your research and then we are gaining your email address and some basic information once you sign up for that form on the landing page you're taken to a thank you page which can either redirect you to another

offer can redirect you to another blog you can gain some additional information at that point but once you've gone and I should I'll tell you what let me let me show something real quick I'm going to show you the actual funnel his HubSpot states it I got might have passed it okay bearable with me for one second I'm trying to only highlight very select things here okay so marketing and sales funnels there's a lot more to

this but the very basic explanation is bringing somebody into a funnel what you're essentially trying to do is better qualify them as they go down different stages of the funnel and at the very bottom you're trying to convert them and with that conversion is after you have provided them specifically with regard to inbound quality content to help maximize not only the potential for the sale but also the opportunity behind the sale and that might be upselling

several different value propositions you know as opposed to just one specific good or service you know the companies that do the best of the ones that let their content qualify the consumer so when they are actually ready to purchase they essentially are just offering you know another form to fill out and insert your credit card so they're not actually doing the quote-unquote hard sell in addition to the ones that have several different value propositions services goods

things like that that they're offering as opposed to just one so the funnel is based around six stages you know as somebody Google's that the longtail keywords comes into our blog that's when they're at the prospect or visitor stage so they haven't given us any information yet we haven't gone through any stage of conversion once they click once they read through the article view the infographic whatever it is they see at the bottom there's that call

to action that's specifically saying we will give you this but we want something in return specifically your contact information your email when they sign up for that form that's when they become a lead and the lead is important because once they enter your CRM like a hub spot you know activecampaign salesforce there's several of them out there then you can set up an automation I don't want to go too far down that route but you can

basically continue to drip them content through emails I'm sure everyone watching is signed up for something they get some sort of will welcome a day or two later they get an additional email and their inbox that looks like somebody personally typed it to them but it's offering some additional context on what they signed up for or maybe another offer or something like that but that's when you get them to the lead stage when they've done some

form of conversion as you continue to drip them additional content you get in the balance of the middle of the funnel marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads so in this typical journey of the the the brand blog at the end of it we offer that white paper that white paper once they receive that white paper two days later they'll receive an offer for maybe a free webinar and that webinar is going to teach them how

they can specifically take some new forms of technology and apply to their current strategy when it comes to event advertising or how to better plan for you know new utilizing new technology for event advertising in in their next quarter or their next fiscal year or something like that when they sign up for this when they sign up for this webinar they enter typically into like a marketing qualified leads that means they're ingesting multiple pieces of marketing

content they're becoming more primed once they watch the webinar they might be offered a free consultation something like that so we actually get them on the phone we get some additional information that's when they become a sales qualified lead so again we're going further down the funnel making them more qualified once we get them on the phone as far as the you know after the blog after the white paper after them signing up for the second

form after them seeing the web you know webinar something like that and we actually have them on the phone for the for the free consultation that's when we explore all the opportunities so they might just be interested in one service that we're offering they might be interested in several different services they might be interested in setting up a one-time accounts where they you know sponsor one event they might be interested in sponsoring you know multiple events

over the course of a month or multiple venues over the course of a year something like that what I'm doing is exploring literally every opportunity I can to both help them you know earn more customers through event advertising but at the same time exploring all the all the ways that we can monetize them and we're at the point of converting to help you know for them to actually become a customer and and monetizing this relationship I've

exported all those opportunities I know what's best for them based on their initial research but also on all of the content that we've utilized to influence them to get them to this point and that's when the sale is much easier than you know just going through the cold-call process of the cold emails things like that again this individual or this company started this search what's called the buyers journey very early on before they even got to

you because they had a problem that they were trying to solve in this case it would be a brand who's better trying to connect and engage with live concert attendees or live event attendees that process is called the buyers journey and what we've done is just utilized content and offers to support them influence them get them them to the point where we can monetize them call them customer ourselves here's what I love about that point that

I think a lot of startups or people who are even just idea stage miss something that I learned through product management you essentially have three stages of people starting the buyers journey like there are people who don't even know they have a problem but you have to first be aware of a problem be searching for a solution and the third level is being dissatisfied with the solutions that you're finding so right you know your buyers journey

is at least starting when people are looking for a solution to their problem there are a lot of people who have ideas that the audience isn't even aware of the problem it may not be a problem but if you're starting with something that's pre buyers journey it's gonna be hard to convert them to a sale because you have to educate someone into starting the buyers journey right right and and when people are starting that initial search

they might not even realize that they have a problem is you just said so there's absolutely an educational component on top of that luckily we live in a world where content is so abundant and it's consumed so rapidly you know things like a headline can make or break the difference in a or like a header on you know what is something that you're advertising but also something that's being shared organically through an audience if you don't

get that headline right then you might not be able to captivate you know somebody a prospect to actually come in to your a prospect or a visitor I should say to come into your funnel and once they come in it it relies on the quality of your content which considers you know the actual customer what they're looking for so what we see is in that first stage when people are clicking around especially in the context of

something like the music industry you'll have musicians you'll have professionals that are essentially just clicking around to see kind of what's happening there's a great music resource called hype bot which it just fires off content it's essentially a bot that is you know generating articles of interest one article might be about social media you know 30 seconds later there's something that pops up about music licensing contingent upon how quality your headline is that might be enough

to get somebody to click on that article and start skimming through it or watch it or listen to it and hopefully through the process of quality you know engaging that individual through influential content at the end you have some sort of a call to action that's set up so in that process you have not only provided well you have helped them identify that there is a problem that they are seeking a solution and you've influenced them

to start seeking you as a means to into that actual solution they might not even know you're selling something at that point that's that that's the amazing thing when it comes to inbound marketing so when you're talking about a sales page earlier I honestly I don't like using that term because it seems like there's some sort of a hardline definition of you're gonna stop the process and sell to somebody when you can rely on your content

and the funnel itself to do the selling for you in selling in this case is you know selling is qualifying and qualifying is selling and you mentioned the buyers journey here which is very important just go over this very briefly you know the awareness stage the HubSpot example is the the personas saying I have a sore throat fever and I'm achy all over what's wrong with me they might go to Google and look that up there

they realize that there is a problem they haven't necessarily identified specifically what the problem is they just know that there is a problem not necessarily what the problem is the consideration stages when they return some of those initial results and they have identified you know I've strep throat I need to figure out what my options are so getting back to the the funnel itself and there's actually a handy little graphic of both of these side-by-side so

you can see it's color-coded here we go so look at this in perspective of the funnel that I just just referenced somebody Google's you know they have all of these symptoms they don't necessarily know what the problem is you know once they are in the consideration stage they have identified what the problem is now they're looking what their options are the next thing they're gonna do is naturally make a decision the correlation between the different stages

of the funnel you know it's right here and the awareness stage that's when somebody's poking around looking for qualified information they might take the first bite and sign up to receive something in exchange for some more qualified information in the consideration stage that's when you're really the middle of the funnel that conversion is extremely important because you're getting them from a marketing perspective to you know is there going to be some sort of hard conversion that

I can potentially monetize and then the decision is exploring you've kind of got them over the initial sales up and you're exploring all of the ways that you can potentially facilitate this relationship you can maximize the potential this relationship however you want to say it but this is a very important graphic right here this is great this is getting super tactical so I actually want to back up a little bit and go closer to you know

earlier you were talking about some of the early foundational stuff you're doing around buyer personas and figuring out how your position in the marketplace so let's say I am somebody with the products became and you just want my products if you want and I want to get into building this inbound lead machine where should I start start with your customers start with who specifically needs this product and who will be purchasing this good or the service

your buyer personas and I think this slide before okay so essentially a representation of your buyers we don't have to really go into this too much but you you want to pin point specifically demographics they patterns motivations and goals and again these buyers have a problem that you're trying to solve with your service or goods based solution you know it's we get really granular when we're building out our personas everything I mean each of each one

of our customer personas originally for sound store and the template that I use like you can go up to five pages per individual persona you know we fictitiously list out you know what kind of car these people drive what kind of technology they use are they a poor PC what kind of you know what's their annual salary are they married you know things like that to really get in the heads of these musicians and well for

all of our personas specifically musicians it's really interesting when you take and relate this to like stock imagery that you see mostly advertisements people see or based on stock photos either that they've they've hopefully purchased or they're using with some permission they've very likely are gonna be using some of them without permission that don't have a watermark but if you look at stock photography that is one of the easiest ways to start to influence so you

saw a big shift in the music industry about ten years ago or so and a lot of the stock images would have you would originally have people using PC based products about ten years ago everyone started using Apple products and the right thing to do is to have permission to use that imagery and if well the right thing to do is have permission to use that imagery we'll just leave it at that and hopefully that individual

has procured approval to use some of these specific products that are placed but now it's very rare that I would see somebody using something like a PC in the context of a music advertisement so what that stock image has done is essentially set the tone for if you're targeting these type of musicians if you're offering a good or service you know whether it's something brand brand new bright and shiny that no one has ever offered before

or if you're going up against a competitive landscape and you've done some research around those competitors in this simple for instance which this is getting really granular and you can even say nerdy if you want you would want to make sure that you're using Apple products that your app in some of those stock photos it goes way beyond that again it's just getting in the head of your persona because that might relate to a you know

if you have stock imagery with cars that people are driving or clothes that people are wearing you can utilize that kind of subconscious recognition when it comes to again developing your buyer personas but the most basic one that HubSpot lists out is you know if you're doing b2b marketing business-to-business identify who your customers role their company organization what goals are they trying to accomplish what challenges do they have they're watering holes going quote and their shopping

preferences but you can go way beyond this and again the better you know your customer the more the higher quality content you're going to be able to develop specifically for them you're gonna be able to understand their shopping sorry they're they're buying trends that will help position the overall funnel itself got it so okay so if I'm getting started and I want to build this machine get really granular and detailed about who my customer personas are

yeah yep that makes sense that sounds like typical you know idea validation customer discovery type of stuff okay so let's say I have three customer personas mm-hmm what next so well here there's an example on the screen with a sample Sally and I love personas they typically utilize alliteration but just to review this real quick you know it has her background it has you know she's married she has kids you know age demographic things like that

so and all of this is available I should say on HubSpot you know it's an amazing CRM I've been utilizing it for a few years there's you know certifications training resources so everything you're seeing here you can literally get from HubSpot so once you have those once you have those buyer personas established the next thing you would want to take a look at I'm gonna blast through this really quick is what type of content so kind

of getting to the next phase of the funnel you identify who's going to be looking for your solution how are you going to get them into your funnel content is the most important and the easiest way to bring people in whether that's paid or organic marketing content formats case studies videos and for graphics white papers things like this once you understand your buyer persona you can start building qualified content to specifically target them and once you

have content and sorry I'm going very faster because I know where we're getting towards last 15 to the hour we have leveraging content distribution so it can be your own website pages it can be business blogs whether it's something you run or something a third party runs like I said four sounds so I did a lot of guest blogging initially originally to get our name out obviously social media and then landing pages calls to action marketing

emails or things that you would use within the the structure of the marketing CRM and the CRM is the this massive platform that you can publish content to your web page you can publish your blog you can control your social media you build landing pages calls to action marketing emails so your CRM is kind of like the the umbrella over top of all of this so once you and I don't know how much further you want

me to go on this topic but we've touched a little bit with types of content we've touched with SEO we touched with the call to actions landing pages and Thank You pages and just to highlight you know at the end of the blog you can offer a free ebook you know here's your call to action you know here's your free ebook so again this would be at the at the bottom of a blog that somebody would

get to from googling or clicking on social media or some sort of organic link that was shared through an influencer or paste it posted you know to some website that there's qualified customers on already the call to action is going to bring them to the landing page the landing page is going to the call to action list the offer the landing page is the actual exchange of receiving the information from the customer in exchange for whatever

you're offering them the thank-you page is where you actually give them whatever it is whether it's a download whether it's a video and audio you can have an additional form over here whether that's to get secondary information from them beyond just first last name and email that might be their place of business their role their phone number of things like that you can push them to a different offer that also might be of interest that can

be you know a redirect to share to follow you on social media to share your blog with other that might be interested especially if you have like a referral program but the call to action landing page Thank You page this is how you get them from reading that content that they clicked on from Google search social media whatever to actually getting them into the lead position and then from the lead position you would essentially start that

process over but instead of them getting you know they could clink a click on a link for you know some other offer on a Google search or on social media but one of the most common ways is to utilize an email drip campaign or what's called an automation so once they've signed up for this form again two days later they might get an offer for that webinar or for this other piece of qualified content maybe the

first one was a download of a case study maybe this one is you know customer testimonials or how you would actually apply that case study for your own business something like that and then at the end of that process you might offer again that free consultation which would get them into the sales qualified position and you explore the opportunities and then you convert them to a customer I'm sorry I'm going through this very quickly but just

you know your phone strengths great yeah so I think a good use of the last ten minutes or so I would love to hear you know any I think you mentioned before our call that you had some like growth hacking tips or whatever you wanted to call it if you wanted to talk through some of those that you think are kind of easy to get started or a good place to start I think that would be

great yeah so I've got a slide already prepared here I can blast this pretty quick and I don't know if we have some questions that need to be answered or not so here is my complete secret recipe for you know the content that I built that helped us organically get those top seeds for SEO I try and I emphasize the word try because it's not always but I try to keep our blog specifically under a thousand

words each will use a great program that is available for free online called Hemingway and when you're writing content at first you will curse this thing you know and until you pass out or you're blue in the face but it's great because it helps you identify difficult rang language to read helps you identify a great level of language helps you remove any unnecessary language or especially any like confusing like you know past tense or things like

that so Hemingway is what I actually write all of my content in and I try to keep it at a 10th grade reading level that's just kind of a sweet spot that I did most of our customer personas are you know beyond a high school education on the Songwriters side some have some college some you know or have degrees some of them have none but 10th grade is kind of like a perfect minimum safety net inbound

and outbound links you know if somebody who has been doing this for longer so that I try to do 10 inbound and outbound they might think I'm absolutely crazy but that's kind of how we roast the top very quickly and inbound and outbound links basically when Google's scanning web sites as it does very often it's trying to see what content you have on your site what links you're linking to for off-site resources those are what's called

your outbound links I typically utilize larger entities that have better SEO positioning when it comes to the outbound links and then on the inbound that's what I'm referencing other links specifically to our content other you know blogs that I've done other offers that we have so it's pretty blatantly sprinkled in and you know when it comes to a good balance of inbound and outbound links I think HubSpot recommends like three to seven like I said I

try to stick to 10 but it's just going to help in the the overall SEO position you want to make sure you don't have 25 links just to your own website Google won't like that based on their algorithm or if you have a lot of links going to outbound resources but none going to your own internal links then it's honestly going to play against you when it comes to SEO and it's going to help prioritize those

outbound links more than your own so just having some sort of a balance there by weekly monthly we tried you know that format with sound steyr honestly we haven't been doing a lot in the way of blog content because it's shifted from marketing to business development but it a certain point we were releasing blogs you know every other week or once a month having some sort of consistency to the content you're putting out is extremely important

you want your audience to essentially be able to and dissipate when you're putting out content and then keyword emphasis taking those keywords that people are searching for and actually building those into the blog several times and then having those you know really sprinkled throughout is extremely important when it comes to SEO returns so understanding what my customer segments is gonna be searching for the ideal customer is going to be reading this content not only do I

position myself to gain top SEO traction on this individual blog but I also do that through several of my other blogs as well so I will actually reuse some of those keywords in different sets of content and this is like one of my absolute secrets obviously not too big of a secret because I'll shout it to anybody that's willing to listen but this is how we position not only individual blogs of ours but we've done it

with multiple blogs of ours and multiple pieces of content so it's not how we only gain SEO see top SEO seeds on individual pieces we've done it on a variety of pieces and that's one of my absolute secrets so take it take it and run with it so where do you how do you identify these keywords with regard to if you're if you're trying to rank for certain keywords how do you determine or plan for which

keywords you're trying to rank for once you've done the research on your buyer personas and made that connection between you know the problem the solutions that you're creating the problems that they have that should organically develop some of those and then once you have some ideas on that you can run it through Google Google Adwords they have some keyword research tools that you can essentially plug in keywords and see how expensive they are if you want

to advertise for them I always tell people to do a blind google search and just take some of these keywords and you know type them into Google and see what comes up and you'll probably and take do this with many many keywords and you probably gonna see some sort of a pattern to where there are certain companies you know likely competitors that have these top SEO seeds and they might be paying for them and if they

are then you might have to challenge and pay more than them but if it's pretty loosely structured you're not finding any consistency between you know in some sort of case study research then that means the the area when it comes to SEO is completely right for disruption and that's specifically what we did we saw with sound sir we saw that our customers had these problems they were looking for solutions once we came to the conclusion of

what these solutions were then we were essentially I don't like the word exploiting because it has a negative connotation but we are really putting a lot of fuel into those potential keywords and building a lot of blog content around that and I'll show you this last slide specifically with our top ranked blog so a rights organization is in place to collect money for songwriters and publishers when their music is used across radio TV digital which is

like Spotify Pandora and also general licensing so all bars nightclubs coffee shops these rights organizations unfortunately don't have a great relationship with the businesses that need to pay them there's three to five times as many businesses that should be paying these fees as compared to ones that actually do and remember this is a requirement and based on a u.s. copyright law that if you use music in a public setting you have to pay for it so

the businesses that need to pay music sometimes don't even know who these entities are they'll get letters in the mail that are essentially cease-and-desist that say we've identified you're playing music you need to pay for this music if you don't there can be fines upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per violation meaning per song so the first thing that bees the first thing that these customers are doing argue all these businesses are doing is

typing in you know the names of these organizations BMI ASCAP and SESAC into Google we realized that there was a gap in the market because the most common terminology associated with this research was finds or that they actually received one of these physical letters so I built one of our first major campaigns around this and you can check the SEO on your own but based on some you know recent research and this was posted probably you

know six nine months ago something like that when you type in the name of these billion dollar organizations with the word fine our small start-up is the first one that pops up so you've got all three of these my business got a letter from ASCAP BMI RC sac and then one that we changed the header on five things to know my business got a letter those are all my pieces of content so when the customers are

looking for a solution to these companies where they host substantial amounts of money they're not getting that solution necessarily right away from those organizations they're getting it because I growth tack SEO and I utilize key word emphasis and crosstalking between a lot of blogs that's fancy talk basically I gamified the system and I utilize growth hacking to position ourselves first and foremost and we did not pay for any one of these these this is all organic

return when it comes to SEO that's great so we have a couple minutes left and I want to ask one tactical question and then one non-technical question so let's see if we can make it happen are there any common mistakes that you find most people are making that are hurting them in terms of SEO or inbound in general that's a very loaded question there are I would say that that slide that I had up about consistency

of content utilizing an appropriate number typically a balanced number of like inbound and outbound links that's extremely important as well but in general just not understanding your customer and not building content that's specifically catered towards your customer that that's where most people fall short and also not having some sort of organization to the system utilizing a CRM utilizing automations drip campaigns things like that I mean there are amazing tools and resources some of them are extremely

expensive some of them you can do definitely on a budget you know down to like $50 a month it would take a lot of research you know to get yourself started to do something like that you know I do consulting there's a lot of other great individuals that do consulting many that can many that are much more qualified than me but I just I work on behalf of what I've done which is extremely disruptive very poignant

content that finds any gap any potential gaps in a market and again I don't like this term but essentially exploits that or maximizes the potential of that and the process is amazing because again I've ran entire marketing departments before just I've ran several at once just using a CRM and just having a plan but you know content consistency and just having some of these growth hacking secrets that I learned within six months and I'm sure if

I learned it you certainly can as well so nice is there anything that I didn't ask that you wished I would have asked her that you wanted to say um that's a great question uh no I mean this was a lot of content that we covered in a very short amount of time that presentation I'll be doing I have some other lectures coming up you know some specifically that I'll be doing that entire presentation it's 55

slides it's literally a minute a slide I blast through it it's very intense but the main thing with inbound inbound can help maximize the efficiency of your marketing department can really help you gain leverage gain new customers gain you know SEO position so if you think if anything that I've said is of interest even if there's one sentence that stood out absolutely do some research behind it see if it's right for you inbound you know it's

it a kind of a prime position in the market there are a lot of people whether it's you know agencies or individuals like myself that are offering this freelance assistance but it's absolutely worth exploring and it can make a world of difference and at the end of the day your customers are not blindly coming into your stores or they're not blindly you know finding your link online you have to do some work to leverage the position

to build the quality content so it's really adapting to what the market what the market is right now at all honesty so a lot of things to consider but hopefully this was beneficial to everyone out there this is great I didn't ask you this beforehand but as is there any type of offer or ask you and I make of anybody listening not specifically I mean you know I like I said I do inbound consulting you know

on a limited basis but if I can't do it I think there's somebody that can more than happy to make referrals I don't know if you want to send out my contact information after this so everyone has that I do have a slide with it but I know we're kind of right at the end here we can put it in a chat but can you also read out loud how people can contact you if they want

to get in contact with you yeah it's just Brian at the counter rhythm group calm but yeah I mean as far as an ask you know just really do do some research figure out what specifically where you're at in your journey if you do have goods or services that you're trying to go ahead and start selling you know try to think from an outside perspective try to think from your customers perspective and honestly that's not I'll

tell you what I'll give you a I'll give you a better address to hit me up specifically for marketing that's from one of my old lectures but but that is an active email address as well but I can send you something to launch out to everybody but you know no no no formal offers or anything like that but inbound is great absolutely use thank you absolutely consider it if any of this is resonated with you and

again I hope you learned something from this cool Brian thank you so much for sharing there was obviously a lot here that we could have continued to unpack so we may have to do a part two at some point are there any questions are we good or nothing that I didn't ask you already okay hopefully everyone's not screaming into the trashcan like wow man that was way too much of oneself and great that was great all

right thank you my thank you for adding soon I think is everybody Cheers