Content-Led Growth Strategies

Today we discuss how Content-Led Growth can increase your lead generation by up to 300% with insights from Michael Marchese, the founder and CEO of Tempesta Media. Discover how a 20-year-old insurance company overcame the challenges of transitioning from outdated marketing strategies to a vibrant digital presence. Michael shares the transformative journey of crafting a content-led customer acquisition strategy that not only breathed new life into the company’s online identity but also paved the way for a lucrative acquisition. Get ready to learn how adapting to evolving search engine algorithms and user behaviors is critical for any business looking to thrive in today's digital landscape.

We discuss the role of AI in reshaping marketing strategies, shifting from traditional push-based methods to dynamic pull-based tactics. Explore how AI is empowering small businesses to efficiently meet growing customer demands, especially in areas like customer service and appointment setting. However, we caution against relying solely on generative AI for content creation due to potential pitfalls and risks. Instead, Michael recommends strategies leveraging AI as a supportive tool to enhance productivity and content quality.

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Transcript

Increasing Lead Generation With Content"

Eric Eden 0:00

Welcome to today's episode. Today we have a great topic. We're talking about how marketers can increase their lead generation by up to 300%, and we have a great guest who's done this, who's going to talk us through it, Michael. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. Thanks for having me on. So why don't we start out by you just taking a minute or two to explain a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Michael Marchese 0:28

Sure, I've been involved with the marketing, internet and technology industries of the Internet Advertising Bureau Committee back in the 90s, helped set up the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Association in 2000. Worked very heavily on analytics, ai and am currently the founder and CEO of Tempesta Media. We're one of the leaders in content-led customer acquisition one of the leaders in content-led customer acquisition.

Eric Eden 1:07

I think content-led acquisition is something that almost every marketer I talk to is interested in knowing how to do it better, how to take it to the next level. We're ready to be inspired, so why don't we start off by you sharing a story about some of the best things that you've done in that area?

Michael Marchese 1:24

Absolutely. We've worked with over 400 customers across the United States, canada and other parts of the Western Hemisphere and really what we focus on is, as the name implied, customer-led content acquisition. So companies come to us in the business services, financial services and similar industries to help drive lead generation and revenue, and the most recent example that I think would really be interesting to everyone here is we had a company that approached us that had been in business for well over 20 years. They were in the insurance space and they had traditionally relied on offline marketing to be able to drive the results, to get new policies in place and to be able to go and get renewals.

Michael Marchese 2:11

Challenge was is when COVID came around, they were really struggling. A lot of the things that they had done previously, a lot of the channels that they had used, no longer were valuable. They weren't getting the return, they weren't getting the new policies that were coming in and, even worse, they had not invested in any of their digital presence, and they were in a situation that if they couldn't turn it around quickly, they would be out of business. And so, with that emergency and that desperate situation, we stepped in and started to take a look at what their overall strategy would be. We put together a program that not only turned it around but also led to a 300% increase in leads. That company was able then to number one, turn themselves around, get successful and then ultimately be bought out by another company at a great valuation. The net of it was it was pretty heartwarming to see. It was a lot of work, but we were able to get it done using exclusively organic digital media channels.

Eric Eden 3:16

Wow, that's a great outcome. What was the hardest thing about helping them do that?

Michael Marchese 3:23

Most companies, at least today, have either a website or some sort of social media presence, or both. This company had invested years ago, and they're actually one of the early adopters in their area of website and search engine optimization and other types of marketing on the digital side, but what ended up happening is they basically did an initial investment of it 10 years ago and then didn't touch it thereafter, and so everything that they had in place was antiquated. But, even worse, because of the tactics they did 10 years ago, they're no longer considered acceptable by the search engines, and so their site had been penalized. And for all those people that are not familiar with that, that basically means that the search engines review what you're doing to be able to get visibility in their search engines, and if the tactics you're taking are not considered ethical or even legal, they will either block your site from showing up in the search results or they will go and what they call delist you, so essentially move you out of any of the results altogether and ban you from even showing up, which can kill a company overnight.

Michael Marchese 4:35

For this company, that was where they're at. They had a website that hadn't been updated in 10 years, that had an architecture that was not compatible with how people use things today. Just think about this for a moment Today, no one can live without their smartphone. You have that, you go and search the internet on your smartphone, you call people on your smartphone, you book appointments. You do all these things today.

Michael Marchese 4:59

That 10 years ago it wasn't as common as it is now, and so their entire site was based on an old architecture that was primarily geared towards, or exclusively geared towards, desktop users, and so 60% of their audience was coming to their site and leaving right off the bat.

Michael Marchese 5:19

Their site wasn't indexable on many areas of search engines, so they weren't getting visibility over there. And then the content that they had was either very, very outdated and no longer up to code in their industry, or compliant in their industry, which is bad as it is, but, even worse, some of it we had detected as being plagiarized. So that was actually one of the root causes of why they were ultimately penalized by the search engines. And so here we are walking into this situation, and the CEO is in a horrible situation. He is about to lose one of his partners, and he is in a position right now where his leads are drying up faster than he can recover, and the original channels that they used, which was direct mail, networking events and other stuff people didn't do anymore. That is the situation we walked into.

Eric Eden 6:16

Yeah, I think, especially with the search engines, like you're saying, it's always evolving and it's not something you can just set it up and forget it. You really have to keep it up to date over time and you have to make these sorts of changes like make sure it's mobile responsive and that you're adding new relevant content. Those are some of the hundreds of variables that the search engines are looking at to see if you're relevant or not and also if they're going to ban you. I mean, that's just a horrible place to be, like you were saying. So I think that they're evolving their rules all the time. Just even the last couple updates in the last year, like the helpful content update, has really penalized a lot of people who weren't living the dream and keeping stuff up to date right.

Michael Marchese 7:08

Yeah, and I think that's a really good point, eric. If you kind of look back just the last year, if we look at Google alone, they've had about a half dozen major algorithm updates, which is how they go about determining what should show up in the search results based on what you type. That's a lot by any standard, let alone for the average business person who's focused on driving their business forward. They're not the people that are sitting there in the weeds with this. I think that's probably one of the most important takeaways for your audience is that five or even 10 or even five years ago, you can do one marketing manager, if you will within a company or marketing specialist could do an adequate job of managing different or and executing different digital marketing programs like a Google paid program or a Facebook program or a content marketing or social media. They weren't that sophisticated five ten years ago.

Michael Marchese 8:08

Now you fast forward to today and because there's so much competition in these areas and there's so much saturation in terms of the noise and marketing materials and everything going on out there, the level of sophistication and the advancement of technology that companies have to make to really effectively compete in these areas is an order of magnitude more than what it was before, like insurance or financial services or automotive or others that you have a lot of competitors and you're somewhat commoditized.

Michael Marchese 8:52

In that or at least companies are somewhat commoditized you cannot compete anymore without having that tech layer that goes with it. Marketing technology is probably the biggest thing that's happened to the marketing industry in the last 50 years. I put it right up there with the rollout of the internet and now the upcoming rollout of AI. Those are probably the three most important things that are affecting everyone and frankly, I think that a lot of companies, a lot of small and mid-sized businesses, will be out of business in the next five years if they don't rapidly adapt mid-sized businesses will be out of business in the next five years if they don't rapidly adapt.

Eric Eden 9:34

Yeah, I agree with that and I think there's a lot to absorb. One example that brings it to life for people when I talk about this is that Google, in particular, has changed the search algorithms in such a way that they favor putting videos at the top of the search results that meet the search criteria. So one flavor of content that people need to create that wasn't as prevalent let's call it, you know, five, even five years ago, is videos. And people are like why do I need to create videos? And I said because the videos are showing above a lot of other organic search results. So, in terms of like, using great content to create leads, I think people even have to think about the format of like blog versus, you know, youtube videos as an example, and this really stretches people's resources, imagination in some ways, because the game is literally changing, like you said, right.

Michael Marchese 10:30

But it's not something impossible to overcome and that's probably the key message for your audience that I think needs to be the takeaway it can be done. We generated those results for that customer within 12 months. A couple of things that I'd recommend for your audience to take a look at is just some basic checkboxes. To kind of get going in the right direction would be first, a lot of you may have just a Facebook page that represents your company. Especially with a lot of the small businesses out there, that is not adequate. A significant portion of your target audience does not use Facebook on a commercial basis. They may use it just for pure social or not even at all. On that, you need to have your website. Your website needs to be the center of your marketing program, not delegating it to Facebook or LinkedIn. You need those pages, but they ultimately should reference back to your own website. You do that. You're in control.

Michael Marchese 11:30

The second thing that I would say right now is that everything has changed from what I call push-based marketing to pool-based marketing. So for people that are Gen X or baby boomer, we're used to having ads thrown at us from all over the place, whether it be on TV or whether it be on the Internet or what have you. Those are advertisers that are pushing the information and pushing the advertisements to us. For younger generations generally Gen X and younger they favor what's called pull-based advertising, where they go out and seek what they want. They go and look for the various pieces of information on that end and are completely blind to advertising being pushed to them. So the ways, very easy ways, for companies to be able to take advantage of this paradigm shift is to move into things like content marketing, social media marketing, network-based marketing, like group-based marketing within social networks. These are things that are considered hold-based advertising that can have a huge impact.

Michael Marchese 12:40

Customers, prospective customers, also want to be educated. They are no longer needing to talk to someone to go make their decisions. They want an answer right now that meets their criteria and then they will make that purchase decision. Many companies are still not set up to be able to rapidly answer those questions and take that order, whether it be taking the order online or answering the questions and I think this is probably where AI is going to fit in the best over the next year or answering the questions and I think this is probably where AI is going to fit in the best over the next year or two.

Michael Marchese 13:13

As a small business, you just don't have the resources to do all these things, and I think this is where AI can help you, by actually moving to an AI receptionist, for example, that can quickly get you there. We work with, for example, a lot of companies in the building trades industry. They're on jobs. They don't have time to sit there and sit at a desk answering the phone all day to get new jobs and orders. They need someone to go do that for them. This is where I think AI-based support and receptionists can be able to fill that gap and help them out. Those would be the three actionable takeaways I'd recommend to your audience ways I'd recommend to your audience.

Eric Eden 13:50

I agree a thousand percent. I think these are good insights about how to meet this moment. Rise up to the challenge, if you will. On the one related to AI, can we drill in on that just a little bit? What best practices do you recommend people use with AI to help them double or triple the amount of business they're getting?

Michael Marchese 14:14

Absolutely. Let me start with what not to do. Do not try to use generative AI to automatically create social and other content for yourself. If you leave that to the systems to do it, not only are you going to end up with bad content that's not accurate or in any depth whatsoever, it may also open up your company to any legal liability. You always need to be able to marry this technology with experts. It's one of the things. We've been involved with AI since 2019, so it's not something new for us. There are benefits for AI since 2019, so it's not something new for us. There are benefits for AI so, for example, helping you come up with topic ideas, being able to help you with some of the initial that goes with it. Helping you structure A great company out there is called Grammarly.

Michael Marchese 15:01

They do an excellent job of basic spelling and grammar checking so that you can produce better content. They use AI to be able to help you write better on that end. So I think these are good tools that you can produce better content. They use AI to be able to help you write better on that end. So I think these are good tools that you can use.

Michael Marchese 15:13

There are tools that are emerging that you will see in the forefront here over the next six to nine months, which is what I'd call AI support or AI receptionist or AI sales development representatives, where they'll do a lot of the legwork for you on behalf of those prospects and customers. That's a perfect use of AI, and then once it gets escalated beyond a certain point, then it can go over to you Like, hey, I'm ready to buy. Or hey, I have some very complex questions, or hey, this is something that AI can't do. That allows you to get more effective use of your time and, at the same time, meeting this 24 by 7 demand you have with a lot of prospective customers. I think those would probably be the biggest things I'd see in AI over the next six to nine months.

Eric Eden 16:00

I agree with those things. Chat GPT, for example, is a great research buddy. It's not a great agent to do things on your behalf today in terms of creating content that's finished, but it's a great research buddy, like you said, for coming up with ideas, suggesting content, giving you ideas that you can verify. I think in my experience it's getting things about 70% of the way there. So that's helpful as long as you realize that it's helping you get things 70% of the way there and you have time to put 30% into it.

Eric Eden 16:34

You can't just take what it gives you and publish it, and for me what that means is a lot of times, if I want to use it to help me generate something anything from an email to a piece of content it's like I need to do at least three, four, five drafts of it to get it there, just like I would if I was doing it without AI.

Eric Eden 16:54

So as long as people, I think, take that approach, it can be helpful in productivity and content marketing. But I think the definite case you said is it's an amazing research buddy, but even then you still have to verify the facts. But it does help you punch above your weight if you have the right mindset about it, like you were saying, and I think that I'm very excited about AI agents eventually being able to do that appointment setting role. I think that it's not quite there yet, but I agree with you definitely the next year or two it's going to get there. When I've demoed some of the ChatGPT voice for 4.0, I'm like, wow, that is better than a lot of SDR appointments that are folks that I've worked with, but it still has some challenges. So I think people should be watching it because it can be revolutionary in a pretty short window. Like you were saying, this revolution is happening really quickly, right?

Michael Marchese 17:56

Wait till we get to 2026, when your prospective customers are sending their own agents out to talk with your AI to be able to go and research products that they're trying to buy?

Eric Eden 18:06

People just send their avatars to meetings instead of going themselves.

Michael Marchese 18:12

Absolutely.

Eric Eden 18:13

Crazy times ahead. Well, any other insights you wanted to share about how people can grow their business through a content-driven lead generation that we haven't talked about so far?

Michael Marchese 18:28

driven lead generation that we haven't talked about so far. I'll leave you and your audience, eric, with just a couple things. One multi-format content is the key to the game here. I think you started to touch on that earlier, eric, with video. Video is just one component. Being able to incorporate social proof, graphs, images, podcasts, transcriptions anything that's going to add value to help your audience better be educated on what it is that you offer and how you differentiate it. We're past the era of taglines and catchy slogans. People really want to know the details and if you don't provide it, they're going to move on to the next vendor to know the details, and if you don't provide it, they're going to move on to the next vendor.

Eric Eden 19:17

That's great advice. Well, I'm going to link to your website in the show notes so if people like to get in touch, they can chat more with you about this very interesting topic. There's a lot to dig into, but I really appreciate you joining us today and sharing your story and these insights on the trends and where things are going. We really appreciate it.

Michael Marchese 19:37

Thank you, Eric. It's a pleasure to be able to be on your show and please be sure to check us out at TempestaMediacom.