Hey everyone, I’m here today. I’m Janet Johnson here today with Kimmy, the social media puppet, of course. We have Kimmy.
Hi everybody!
And then we also have a special guest and his name is Josh Turner, welcome Josh.
Hey, thanks Janet, thanks for having me.
Absolutely! We’re honored to have you here. And we’re looking forward to talking today about how to generate leads to your business and grow your business using webinars. And it sounds like you really have a great background on this. But I want to do first is give a little bit of background and have Kimmy do it, give a little background about you Josh.
Okay.
Hey Josh, before we get started I have a question for you.
Yes.
Have you ever been interviewed by a puppet before?
I only do interviews with puppets, actually.
Ha!
No this is the first time.
We’re honored to have you on our show. Everybody I’d like to introduce you to Josh Turner. He’s the founder of Linked Selling, a B2B marketing firm specializing in fully outsourced lead generation campaigns as well as webinarli.com. And they specialize in webinar lead generation. His company represents clients in the United States, Canada, UK, Asia and Australia in a wide variety of industries. Josh’s company also operates LinkedUniversity.com, an online training program for LinkedIn Marketing as well as Webinar University where you can learn how to grow your business using webinars. He’s been featured in the Huffington Post, Miami Herald and many, many more national publications. So welcome to the show today Josh.
Thanks Kimmy. Good to be here.
Yeah thanks for coming on . Well first off I want to get started with mentioning, I will be looking this way quite a bit just to see if anybody’s commenting. We were setting up the comment tracker, all those Hangout people know how that works, I was new to it right now. So that’s why I’m looking over and I will be watching to anybody that’s commenting, feel free and I will be paying attention to that. So first off let’s talk about your how guys started with the webinar business, with teaching about webinars?
Yep, sure. So I first started using webinars for my business very early on as a way to simply generate more leads. And that was when my business, I was working out of the house as an outsourced CFO, working for other small businesses here in St. Louis. And I started playing around with using webinars to just spread the word and build brand awareness and generate some leads and position myself as an expert in what I was doing. And do that’s when I first really started realizing the poser of using webinars and at the same time I had also seen a lot of the big internet marketers out there doing a lot of amazing things with webinars. And fast forward a little bit to when the company changed and Linked Selling, we created about 2011, and started really focusing on helping businesses all around the world. Run lead generation campaign specifically within LinkedIn and in addition to utilizing LinkedIn to grow our business. One of the other, there’s really ride up there with LinkedIn in terms of sources of generating new leads for our business was webinars. And so between Linked Selling and our online training program Linked University, we quickly go tot the point where we were generating several thousand leads a month for our business using webinars. And so to answer your question a bit of a long winded way that’s kind of how we got started with it.
Oh great answer, I mean, it basically started because it was documented already that it worked.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean we put in the blood, sweat and tears and threw a lot of money down the toilet trying things that didn’t work and just years of grinding it out to really figure out a model that made sense. So that’s a big part of Webinarli is taking all our notes we build around how did we make all these webinar thing really worked and then helping our clients do that as well.
Now what kind of basis would you suggest for like what a Kimmy salon owner business be good for using webinars?What types would be best?
Probably not, no, I don’t think the salon owner, I don’t think Kimmy the puppet’s going to need, going to be using webinars. So if you’re, if well Kimmy, if you’re just really passionate about positioning yourself as a leader in your space, in your industry, then it could be something you want to look at. So let’s say for example though you are a salon owner and you got a really great model for running your business and you want to spread the word to other salon owners and position yourself kind of as expert in that space, then webinars would be a fantastic tool, right? Because you can use them to share content with your audience. It’s essentially like speaking in front of an audience of the most targeted prospects for your business and you know, there’s a lot of great things you can do to really scale it in huge way that you can never achieve with an in-person speaking event unless you have huge amounts of money, you know.
Well I think it would work really well if I get into coaching other salon owners on…
Exactly.
… how to build their salon. And so I can connect not just with customers but with clients that have salons and it’s a good collaboration tool.
Yes, absolutely, yeah. So those are the kinds of businesses and people that webinars make a lot of sense for it and it’s mostly if you’re going to be targeting other people within the business world, right? So for example there are B2C applications for it but certainly if you’re, if you own a retail establishment that’s not going to be the best fit. But if you’ve got a business where your customers are hanging out online and want to consume content online and you can find and target them in places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, via email, Google, those kinds of things then it can make a lot of sense.
Can you expand on that a little bit like how would let’s just use your example still that she wanted to talk to other salon owners. What would be the best way to target and find those other salon owners?
Sure. The first, there’s a few different things that I would do in that case and it would be probably a combination of Facebook and LinkedIn advertising combined with more organic outreach via LinkedIn and email. And maybe a little bit of Google ad words, too, for people that are typing things in like keywords related to salons and wanting to improve their businesses in some way, maybe marketing for salon owners and things like that. Or coaching for salon owners would be highly targeted. So you want to be in that space to within Facebook you can target based on all sorts of things like what do these people do, what kind of industries are they in, what kind of jobs do they have? So you can target salon owners on Facebook like that. Of course within LinkedIn you can target based on people’s titles and any other things that they are putting into their profiles. And so you can show ads to those people and so what’s the next step? What are those ads going to say? Well those ads are basically just speaking directly to them saying something like if you are a salon owner and you’re looking for some ideas to improve the performance of your business you need to attend our upcoming webinar where you’re going to learn boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then you’re bullet-pointing the things that you’re going to teach them on this free webinar. Then the ad’s going to send them to a landing page that’s going to reiterate what was said in the ad, provide a little bit more detail about who you are or why you’re qualified to talk about this topic and what they’re going to learn. Maybe throw in some bonuses they’ll get by attending. And then you’ve go the date and time of the webinar and you host the webinar. Give them a good content and at the end of the webinar, hopefully you’ve got an offer for either a product that they can buy right then and there in the info product world, that’s what you would do. Or if you’re more of if all you’re offering is coaching, which is fine, then you can position those services. So why we’re talking about how this funnel works, let me just go a little bit one step further, too, because in some cases people do webinars and get a lot of people on and I put the offer out there, told people about my services but I didn’t really get many people contacting me to take me up on the offer. And one of the things that we’ve seen work ridiculously well is picking up the phone and call people. So if you’re a coach that is teaching salon owners how to be a better business owners, how to grow their practice, how to grow their salon, clientele, how to be more efficient to improve their profitability, any of the things you might be teaching them as a coach in that space. Maybe your retainer for coaching clients could be anything, let’s just say it’s a $1000 a month and for that they get a few hours of your time, that kind of a scenario. If you can call the people that were on the webinar — they attended, heard the message and review the list of those people after the webinar, all right, then pick up the phone and give them a call. And if by doing that and reaching out to them and personally extending the offer, that’s how you’re going to start closing more business off of it. So if in the info product space such as our business Linked University, which we sell the program similar to a lot of internet marketers sell their training programs. We can sell directly off a webinars. In the high-priced services space it can be done but more people require a bit of a personal touch. You have to be able to willing to sell a little bit, too.
Well, and I do believe that in this age there’s so much technology and so much emphasis on online marketing that people are forgetting that people really like to talk to a real person. It might just do their discovery online, in information online but it is the person to person phone call or meeting that’s going to close those high end sales, for sure.
Yep. And if you dig in to some of the programs by some of the well-known marketers on the planet, I don’t need to name drop because they’re not even friends of mine, these are just things that I’ve learned by following them, that they are doing that. That’s how they are generating most of their business into their highest priced programs and it doesn’t mean that the guy at the top is making the calls. He might have somebody else on his team that’s calling on behalf of, at least making the first call, that maybe set up a short meeting with him to see if it makes sense. We do it in my company. We have two people in my company that are strictly responsible for working with new clients and bringing in new business into our company. And every week they have a quota of reaching out up to these many people that attended one of our webinars in the last few weeks. And that’s a great way to generate more business.
And what services do you like to use when you do your webinars?
Well we use GoToMeeting almost exclusively because it’s kind of the gold standard. People are used to it, it works well and it doesn’t fail us.
Very reliable, yep, I’ve used that myself.
It is. And there’s other options and early on when I was working on my house when I first started doing webinars, not that I was broke or anything but my budget was still, I wasn’t looking into spend a ton of money on stuff that I was trying for the first time and GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar a hundred dollars a month. I was thinking maybe there’s another option that’s not going to be so much that I can try out. I found a couple that were free and they were a disaster. They just didn’t work well, to the prospects and you’ve put all these time and energy in bringing to the webinar and you’re not putting your best foot forward when you have technical issues and the webinar platform doesn’t function properly. So and a minimum if you’re going to try and use something else, make sure you test it beforehand and practice…
Right.
And make sure that you’re comfortable with how it’s working. And, for lack of a better term, that it’s not junky. Because you don’t like your prospects thinking you’re junky.
I like junky. So what do you think about like those webinar systems that are with the Hangouts? I know that the Google Hangouts we talked about can have some issues to overcome but have you heard some of those systems?
Sure. It’s not, Google Hangouts keeps getting better and better and a lot of people like those systems because they come with a one time fee and there’s some other nice things built in to them and without naming names though I know there are some non-starters, if you will, from my business that make it not an option to use those. One of the more popular ones, there’s a delay time between the audio and the screen presentation. And as far as I know as of right now they have not fixed that and so that’s one we don’t use. On the other hand, it’s part of Webinar University we do each month, at least one webinar funnel break down where we go out and find a really smart marketer that do really creative things with webinars. We break down the whole funnel from the first ad we saw on Facebook that was promoting it thru the email sequence to the webinar itself, to the follow up sequence, to the sales pages. And one guy who’s doing a great job utilizing Google Hangouts is John Lee Dumas. And so if you want to see somebody that got the Google Hangout webinar thing figured out, he definitely does.
Yeah he does one every week, doesn’t he?
He does with his Podcasters’ Paradise workshops. I’ve taken a very close look at how he does all that and it’s very well done. So if you want to use Google Hangouts, I would look to what he is doing as the gold standard there. And one of the big buff is Google Hangouts and what you’ll see with what he does is that it allows you to interact with your audience at the level like we’re doing right now between Janet, Kimmy and I. Whereas GoToWebinar has a webcam component to it you can use but that is not their sweet spot. That’s not their core confidency. So if you want to be on video during your presentations and webinars, then look into what John’s doing and that could be a good fit for you.
Nice, that’s a really good opinion. Now…
Joshua…
Oh one real quick question because I want to go backwards.
Okay.
You were mentioning about calling afterwards so when a lot of people have opt in for webinars they have put a name and email. So I kind of like because most people are not collecting phone numbers. But your suggesting that we collect phone numbers also, correct?
Yes, yes, so I’m not. Yes and no, let me say that. So here’s the thing, you don’t want to ask for too much information because it turns people off, exactly what you were just saying Janet. And so one of the things that I’ve seen done very well is after you get their first name and email to get the opt in so they’re locked in. So the next thank you page have an option for them to enter their phone number and it might say something like hey, if you’d like a reminder sent to you via text before the webinar, enter your phone number here and we’ll do that for you. And that’s a good way to get those people to get you their number. So you’re not going to get all of them because you’re not requiring it but at the end of the day I want the opt ins whether I get the phone number or not. So for the prospects that seem good and I want to call these people but I don’t have their phone number well I’m going to have a virtual assistant overseas that’s working at a pretty modest rate, I’m going to have them go out based on the person’s name and email and find their phone number and that’s a very cheap and efficient way to then get your list appended with phone numbers, if you don’t have them already.
Good idea!
Great, great tip. Go ahead Kimmy.
Yeah, I just wanted to ask you I know you have another side of your business and that’s Linked Selling because that’s how Webinarli came about.
Yep.
And it’s focused on helping people grow their business using LinkedIn. Can you talk a little bit about webinars and how that play into that business or about Link Selling?
Sure, absolutely. Any business, I think that’s growing is going to have more than one trick up their sleeve. And that’s just, in a successful business that’s how a marketing mix. You know they call it a marketing mix because it’s not, if it’s just one thing they’d call it the marketing one thing, right? And so we have always been looking for what other things can we add our arsenal of things that we do to grow our business. And so in addition to the work we’re doing on LinkedIn, webinars quickly became one of the things that we realized we were good at and was generating great results for us. And so how it’s integrated with the other business is that we really, we use LinkedIn campaigns to promote webinars. We use webinars to promote services, it’s all kind of intertwined. I mean the whole ecosystem of the marketing that we do is kind of integrated in that kind of a way. And with the clients that we help that can be the case, too, because in the B2B world LinkedIn is where it’s at. And for our clients who are doing webinars LinkedIn is the primary place that we’re promoting their webinars. So that’s one of the key ways that the two work hand in hand together. If you go to LinkSelling.com you’ll see that our philosophy is that if you take the time to build the relationship with a prospect before you try and go for the sale, then your response rate will increase dramatically. That’s what we call our processes systematically building relationships to convert cold prospects into warm leads. And utilizing webinars and nurture campaigns is perfectly aligned with that philosophy. And the same thing applies to webinars in that if after a webinar you call somebody right away and say hey buy my coaching program, and you’ll think Josh said call them, that’s not the right approach. You want to nurture them and take time to position yourself properly to build the relationship before you do that. You know so specifically what does that mean? Well maybe after the webinar you’re not calling them that day. Maybe you build out a bit of an email nurture campaign to really position yourself the right way in front of these people so that it’s not until a few weeks later that you pick up the phone and call them. And by that point they know you got the goods. And they trust you, and you’ve really taken the time to position yourself as one of the good guys, if you will.
That’s awesome. And you know you’re doing this on behalf of your clients, correct? So this is a service you offer.
It is, yes. So for anyone who wants to know more about that go to Webernarli.com and how it’s done is different for every situation but for clients that feel like it makes sense for them there’s usually a model that we can use to try and help them get more out of webinar or start doing webinars for the firs time.
Now what do you say the benefits are for doing it themselves vs. hiring a company?
Well I’m sorry, what was the question again?
What would the benefits be of hiring a company vs. people just trying to do it themselves? Are there benefits, downfalls to it, pluses and minuses?
Sure. Yes so the downfall of doing it yourself and this is what we have heard time and time again from everybody we talk to is that I’m afraid that I’m going to put this webinar together and spend all this time building the powerpoint and trying to market it, everything and no one’s going to show up. Because most people don’t understand how to drive traffic to the landing pages to get targeted prospects to sign up so that enough of them actually attend. And that’s the thing that most businesses need most help with. Most people we talk to say I think I can create a presentation myself and oftentimes those say we’d like you guys to make me take a look at it, give us your thoughts. But we can handle creating it but we want you guys to set up the system and then to help us with the ongoing promotion and marketing of it so it’s worth putting in this time to do this webinar. A lot of people put webinars together and try to go through the effort of doing it and they’ll get a couple of people to show up and then just never do it again because it’s not worth the time at that point.
Uh-huh, uh-huh. That makes a lot of sense and something I think everybody can relate to. I’m sure people I’ve done webinars, including us, have had that situation where just absolutely, you know, it’s a hassle. And I do this job a lot, too, and it’s a hassle to a) not only be promoting, trying to get people there but in addition to creating that entire presentation and then after the fact that constant follow up to make sure that you, so I get what you’re saying. It’s a ton of work.
Sure, yeah.
And you can have streamline that time into it.
Yeah. And the other thing we help our clients do is that we take the work off their plate at a certain point because we never recommend that you just do a webinar and then that’s it. We always recommend that you build that webinar and do that first webinar that next webinar with a thought in mind that we’re going to put this thing on auto-pilot for you afterward so that it continues running in the background for you and generating new leads on an ongoing basis. And so for our company we have automated webinars running behind the scenes that target all sorts of different industries and have different topics and things like that. It would be impossible for me to deliver them all live all the time. And so that’s another huge benefit and whether or not you work with a company like mine to set that up I would highly recommend people think about things that way because it makes it so much more worth it when i becomes this marketing asset that’s working for you long term instead of we did this one webinar this one time.
How often to people do what you suggest businesses do these webinars?
How often would I suggest the business actually do a live webinar?
Uh-huh.
Every business has a different appetite for it. It really depends on their situation. We have some clients who will just do I, get it right and then automate the process so they don’t have to do it again until that webinar stops performing for them. Now ideally I would say if you could create a new one once every couple of months, then eventually you’re just going to have this machine on your hands and you’re going to be in a really great position which is essentially what we’ve done for our business and for the right clients what we can help them do.
Great answer, yeah. And out of curiosity I think people want to know because it is like we said, it is a lot of work. So we see that John Lee Dumas do a weekly one. So you know what I mean, we have from weekly to maybe quarterly. So it just depends on the business owner.
Yes.
Well and I think people just need to be patient and not expect immediate results. They need to be very consistent and continue to do that because that’s the key is a lot of people will try something once or twice and then they give up just before the ratings for massive success.
Well that’s true. Yep. You have to be willing to see it through. The first webinars that I did were not good. The first couple were very junky, let’s use that word again.
It’s a new word now, junky.
Everyone of them got a little better. If I would have hired somebody at that time to help do it right the first time, I would have been able to skip a lot of that learning curve. But you know if you’re going to do it yourself you have to be willing to put in the time to figure it all out. And the other thing I’d say about doing a weekly webinar like John Lee Dumas is that, what’s the right way to say it, he’s killing it with that program and those webinars. He’s very transparent with what his income is for his business. He’s got monthly income reports and when the funnel that he is using to drive memberships in his Podcaster’s Paradise program is generating somewhere in the neighborhood $200,000 a month in sales, it’s worth it to do the webinar every week. And so it just depends on your situation though. And so it becomes, you go to prioritize it. He had at some point saw this is working very well, let’s do them once a week. And let’s prioritize that over some other things that we can spend our time on but this is the thing that’s killing it for us. Everyone can have the time if you figure out where to prioritize.
Right, right. Definitely.
Exactly. Well we’d love to leave our audience with you’ve given us a ton of information let’s narrow it down into what they could do to get a, maybe they’ve never done a webinar before, what can they do in the next 24 hours that will take their webinar to the next level?
This is for someone who had a webinar currently or someone that hasn’t really got started yet?
Well let’s do two separate ones because some people have never done webinar because you’re right, it’s kind of like there’s that side that has never done a webinar and the people that are maybe tested webinars and do some.
Sure, sure. So if you’ve never done a webinar you want to start figuring it out if it makes sense for you. Boy there’s so many resources out there but I think the best thing to start doing is go find people in your space that you think are doing it well and watch they’re doing, okay? And maybe it doesn’t have to be a direct competitor, alright? But maybe it’s somebody in a parallel industry that’s selling a similar type of product. If you were a coach to the salon owner industry, whatever you call that, maybe go out and find another coach that targets a different type of business that you know is successful with webinars and watch what they do. And watch it from the standpoint of modeling your webinars along those lines and just taking best practices from those people and utilizing them yourself. That doesn’t mean copying and word for word, trying to mimic what they do. Because you need to be yourself at the same time. But it’s a powerful thing to piggy back on other people who are successfully doing things. And there’s a lot of people to talk about that stuff in business. And so I think actually whether you haven’t done webinars yet or are already doing them and trying to up your game, that is one of the best ways to continue improving. I mean, just the stuff I was talking about with John’s webinar. This interview is much about him as it is me but
I’m sure he’ll thank you for that.
But that same thing I’m watching webinars like his so we can continue improving and stay on the cutting edge to continue seeing what other smart people are doing with webinars and how can we integrate those smart things they’re doing into the campaigns we’re running for ourselves and our clients.
Great. Very good information and I hope everybody takes action and kind of moves their direction into using webinars some way or another. So I’m going to have Kimmy finish up.
Yeah, definitely we want to thank Josh Turner again for coming on the show. And Josh where can people connect with you? What’s the best place to connect and start engaging with you?
I mean there’s so many places we’re all supposed to be right now but just go to webinarli.com or LinkedSelling.com or look me up on LinkedIn, search for Josh Turner and you’ll know me when you see me there in the list.
Great. Well thank youj.
That’s awesome. We’ll have all the links and everything to our blog post
Great!
and we definitely appreciate your coming on the show today.
Well thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, thank you very much Josh.
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