How to Generate More Leads via Digital Visibility – In Just 7 Minutes with Ryan Cote

Resources/Links:

• Customized Digital Strategy Analysis: www.ballantinecom/theinvisible

Summary

Ryan Cote is the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a third-generation family-owned direct mail and digital marketing company which is a family-owned business started in 1966 by his great-uncle, Ryan now manages the growing digital marketing division.

In this episode, Ryan shares how you can make a splash and establish a strong presence through your marketing channels by having the right mix of marketing solutions that could help you boost your business.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:13 – Ryan’s ideal client: Ideal client for us is a small business owner that has no marketing people on staff.
• 01:18 – Problem he helps solve: It’s definitely a lack of leads.
• 02:57 – Typical symptoms people experience with that problem? They should have their site hooked into Google Analytics and Google Search Console, formerly called Webmaster Tools. And they’re just going to see a lack of traffic in there, very little visitors, very little impressions in Google, they’re not getting any leads. They should be tracking their phone calls but they are, they’re not getting any phone calls. So, it really is, it’s just a lack of activity across the board.
• 03:41 – Common mistakes people make when trying to solve that problem: They don’t really know who their target audiences. So, we always start every client engagement with, who do you sell to, why they buy from you, what resonates with them. So, they have not done that proper research. And without doing that research they just don’t know who exactly they’re speaking to. They might be, if they are trying something, they’re kind of just throwing things at the wall and see what sticks.
• 05:19 – Ryan’s Valuable Free Action(VFA): If they’re going to attempt to do the marketing themselves, they need to have an idea of what their audience is looking for, like what keywords they’re using.
• 06:54 – Ryan’s Valuable Free Resource(VFR): www.ballantinecom/theinvisible
• 07:24 – Q:’ How to improve your blog strategy? A: Take a look at content that’s doing really well and then add more content to that blog posts. Whenever we do that, we always see a spike in organic traffic.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“Take a look at content that's doing really well and then add more content to that blog posts. Whenever we do that, we always see a spike in organic traffic.” -@ballantinecorp Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland: 0:09 Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to yet another edition of Marketing The Invisible My name is Tom Poland, joined today by Ryan Cote. Ryan, a very, well, good day and welcome and where are you hanging out?

Ryan Cote: 0:21 Hey Tom, happy to be here. I’m from New Jersey.

Tom Poland: 0:24 New Jersey, USA, nuzzle into the armpit of New York. That’s a very famous New Jersey turnpike from Being John Malkovich. Anyway, enough of the movie and time zones. Ryan, as I said, very warm welcome. For those of you don’t know Ryan, he’s the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine. It’s a third-generation family-owned, direct mail and digital marketing company, started in 1966 by Ryan’s great uncle, Ryan, and Ryan now manages the growing digital marketing division. Ryan, thanks for rocking up again, once again, thank you. The title today is “How to Generate Leads Via Digital Visibility”. And Ryan’s going to tell us how to do that in just seven minutes. Ryan, our time starts now. Question number one, who is your ideal client?

Ryan Cote: 1:13 Yes. An ideal client for us is a small business owner that has no marketing people on staff. So, we essentially become their outsource marketing team, or they have one marketing person, and we become an extension of his or her team. And for them, obviously, sales are important, but it really comes down to leads, they need more leads. So, for example, we don’t typically work with like e-commerce or someone that needs brand awareness. It’s a contractor, it’s an auto dealership, it’s a manufacturer service business, and they need leads. That’s our typical ideal client.

Tom Poland: 1:45 Perfect. Thank you very much. So, I think you might have answered question number two already. What’s the problem you solved? But did you want to expand on that?

Ryan Cote: 1:54 Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely a lack of leads. But it also is a lack of just overall digital visibility, digital presence. Our typical client, they’re not doing anything digital marketing related, so they just have no visibility, or they don’t know where to start. And as a byproduct of that, they don’t have the visibility in the leads that they need.

Tom Poland: 2:09 Right. So, would you say you’re more about, you know, web presence as opposed to a website. A lot of people think it’s all about having a great website. But it’s probably more about actually getting found. And if you’re not noticed, you’re not going to get an inquiry. Right?

Ryan Cote: 2:22 Yeah, that’s exactly it. They typically have a website, they’re just not doing anything with it, or the websites not doing anything for them. So, we just run it through our engineer, our system, and then we help them, their visibility goes up, their leads go up. That’s what we do.

Tom Poland: 2:37 Beautiful. All right, thank you. So, question number three, just under five and a half minutes left. How would you describe the symptoms of someone who’s got this problem of not having enough leads? You’ve mentioned, for example, that they have a website, but no one’s visiting? How else would someone know? What are some of the symptoms that they would have that would say, Yeah, I need to have a look at Ballantine?

Ryan Cote: 2:57 Yeah, I mean, it’s really, so they should have their site hooked into Google Analytics and Google Search Console, formerly called Webmaster Tools. And they’re just going to see a lack of traffic in there, very little visitors, very little impressions in Google, they’re not getting any leads. They should be tracking their phone calls but they are, they’re not getting any phone calls. So, it really is, it’s just a lack of activity across the board.

Tom Poland: 3:17 It’s the lack of activity, and it sounds like the kind of like flying blind as well. They’re not measuring, monitoring, etc. Okay, thank you.

Ryan Cote: 3:24 Yeah.

Tom Poland:3:24 Question number four, four and a half minutes left. Before people find Ballantine, they’re going to be trying stuff. You’re probably not going to be the first people they’ve gone to. So, what are some of the common mistakes that you find that your clients, before they get to, that they’re making?

Ryan Cote: 3:41 Yeah. I mean, I think it starts off with they don’t really know who their target audiences. So, we always start every client engagement with, who do you sell to, why they buy from you, what resonates with them. So, they have not done that proper research. And without doing that research they just don’t know who exactly they’re speaking to. They might be, if they are trying something, they’re kind of just throwing things at the wall and see what sticks.

Tom Poland:4:02 Right.

Ryan Cote: 4:03 And then also, it’s, you know, our core here is really SEO and, well, I shouldn’t say our core if we’re doing all the services, but we always recommend clients start with SEO and PPC. So, all the time we see clients aren’t doing those two core services that we find generates a lot of leads, because someone has a tendency to buy, and they’re going to Google and they’re doing a search. So, it’s really the lack of that activity. And then it’s really not tracking on evaluating what they’re doing. So, we make it a habit of every quarter, we look at what we’re doing for clients, and we reevaluate because honestly, things work, things don’t, things change, and you just need to constantly look at things.

Tom Poland:4:37 Absolutely. Yeah. It’s a moving piece, isn’t it? And so, when you say starting with SEO, so it’s on site off-site. Oh, we are not going through all those details, but the core of it sounds like keyword research has to be done. And I guess, I can see you nodding your head if that’s the case, folks, don’t try and do this yourself. Because an SEO and SEO specialist, you probably get it wrong. And that will mean years and years and years of wasted time and wasted effort. So, I just wanted to reinforce that in such case people think they can jump off and would be one of the mistakes is trying to do your own keyword research and SEO specialist.

Tom Poland:5:07 So, question number five, two and a half minutes left, Ryan. What’s one valuable free action that an audience member could take that’s, not going to solve the whole problem, but take them a step closer towards solving it?

Ryan Cote: 5:19 Yeah, actually, it kind of piggybacks on what you just said Tom is. So maybe they don’t do the keyword research fully but they need to at least if they’re going to attempt to do the marketing themselves, they need to have an idea of what their audience is looking for, like what keywords they’re using. And so that first action is, I know you’re going to ask me for tool, and I’m going to tie the tool into the keyword research. But it’s still in the keyword research to identify because you might have an idea of what you think your customers are searching for. Maybe you’re creating a piece of blog content, you think you know what they’re searching for.

Tom Poland:5:46 Right.

Ryan Cote: 5:46 But there are tools out there that will tell you if you’re right or wrong and help you prioritize what the topic is based on the keywords.

Tom Poland: 5:53 Thank you. And tools like?

Ryan Cote: 5:56 So, yeah, I’ll give you a free tool. There’re paid tools, and there are free tools. And actually, this free tool I’m going to mention, no affiliation with them whatsoever, it’s just something that I find it is a really good tool, and they’re always investing in it is called Ubersuggest. It’s by a guy named Neil Patel.

Tom Poland: 6:10 Ubersuggest, Neil Patel, yes, a quality brand. So, a good place to start. But I’d still recommend that folks find themselves a specialist such as you to confirm what their findings are. Question number six, one and a half minutes left. One valuable free resource that we could direct people to that’s going to help them even more.

Ryan Cote: 6:25 So definitely Ubersuggest, but I would say also Google Search Console. So, hook your site up into Google Search Console and it’s going to give you a lot of data about your site. It goes beyond just SEO honestly, it tells you about your web speed, errors on your site. It gives you warnings if things are broken, but also it gives you a lot of valuable keyword data. So, once you hook your site into Google Search Console, it’s actually going to show you what keywords are driving traffic to your site.

Tom Poland: 6:49 Perfect.

Ryan Cote: 6:49 How many clicks you’re getting and how many impressions? So now you’re getting actual data for your site.

Tom Poland: 6:54 All right, super. And we should also mention www.ballantine, with a B-A-L-L-A-N-T-I-N-E, dot com/theinvisible. Quickly, we got 30 seconds left. Tell us about that in like five seconds and then the one question I should have asked you but didn’t.

Ryan Cote 7:10 So, on that page, we have a free offer for website analysis. I’ll take a look at your website and analyze it. SEO, social media, for free.

Tom Poland: 7:19 Definitely, have a click on that. 15 seconds left. What’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t.

Ryan Cote: 7:24 How to improve your blog strategy? And that would be, take a look at content that’s doing really well and then add more content to that blog posts. Whenever we do that, we always see a spike in organic traffic.

Tom Poland: 7:35 Perfect. Ryan Cote, thank you so much.

Ryan Cote: 7:36 Thank you.

Tom Poland: 7:39 Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.