Intuitive Marketing Podcast

#10: Exploring Lead Generation For Your Business with SEO and Paid Ads

• Chelsea Fournier + Meg O'Neill • Season 1 • Episode 10

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Unlock the secrets to boosting your business’s online presence without relying solely on social media, as we bring you insights from Christopher Sill, our expert in lead generation and traffic. Ever wondered how SEO and paid ads could revolutionize your marketing strategy? Discover the transformative potential of these tools to make your business more discoverable and connect with a wider audience, even in a rapidly changing digital landscape influenced by AI and innovations like ChatGPT.

Christopher shares his two decades of digital marketing experience, revealing real-world examples like boosting leads for a handmade jewelry business by strategically using SEO and targeted ads. We dissect common pitfalls businesses face in navigating SEO and paid advertising, emphasizing the importance of truly understanding your target market. Through this enlightening discussion, learn how to track results and optimize your marketing campaigns to avoid costly mistakes and achieve sustainable growth.

Finally, we explore the magic of meaningful marketing versus quick fixes, stressing the value of aligning your efforts across platforms for long-term audience engagement. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting out, our conversation offers valuable guidance on selecting the right strategies and partnering with experienced professionals to scale your business. Don’t miss out on the upcoming milestone episode, where spontaneous insights often lead to the most engaging discussions. Subscribe now to stay ahead with the Intuitive Marketing Podcast.

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👉🏼 We can take a deep dive into your client journey or your visibility strategy and show you exactly what's working, what's not, and how to fix it. Ready for clarity and a plan that actually works book your audit today at www.intuitivebusinessbydesign.com/audit

👉🏼 Explore the services offered by our marketing agency Intuitive Marketing Collective and request a free Discovery Call to explore how we can support your business. Go to www.intuitivemarketingcollective.com

👉🏼 Follow the agency on Instagram to continue to conversation beyond the podcast @intuitivemarketingcollective

Want to connect more with the hosts?

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Follow Chelsea on Instagram @intuitivebusinessmentor...

Speaker 1:

Have you ever said to yourself I just want more people to find me without having to be on social media 24 seven? If yes, this episode is for you. Today I'm sitting down with Christopher Sill, the lead generation and traffic specialist we work with at the Intuitive Marketing Collective, to help you understand if you're ready to explore either SEO, which is search engine optimization, or paid ads to bring more targeted traffic to your offers and website. If it's been on your mind, I think you will be pleasantly surprised that it could be a lot more approachable than you were expecting.

Speaker 2:

Hey there friends.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Intuitive Marketing Podcast, where we ditch the bro marketing BS and bring you big sister vibes instead, I'm Meg, and this is Chelsea, your new biz besties. We met on TikTok in 2023. Fast forward to now and we have teamed up here to guide you through the wild world of marketing your business with heart and soul.

Speaker 2:

Are you feeling lost or overwhelmed, Maybe unsure of your next steps, but you have a big vision of where your coaching, healing, speaking or writing career could be in the next five years, Ten years. Don't worry, we've got your back. We'll help you tap into your intuition, build a brand that lights you up and leverage proven marketing strategies to grow towards a six or even seven-figure business in a way that won't make you cringe.

Speaker 1:

We're actually here to help you bring the magic back into your marketing.

Speaker 2:

Because marketing should feel good, not gross. Bring the magic back into your marketing.

Speaker 1:

Because marketing should feel good, not gross. Grab your favorite drink, get comfy and let's get started. Before we jump into the meat of today's episode and bring Christopher on, I want to just give a little context around why we're talking about finding new ways of driving traffic to your offers or generating new leads. So here at the agency Intuitive Marketing Collective, we are growing into a full-service agency for businesses and brands that want to really scale and expand sustainably, and part of that missing piece for many clients is how to solve this problem of getting more eyeballs on your work. And so the way that we teach the intuitive marketing framework is that there are five phases. It starts with clarity, you move to embodiment, magnetism, repetition and then finally expansion. Now I often caution people from focusing on the expansion type activities before the other phases have been developed and proven in your business, because, honestly, if you haven't proven that you can get someone in your warm market who already knows, likes and trusts you to buy an offer and have a good experience, then it's just getting more eyeballs is not really the solution. In fact, on episode five of this episode podcast, I talked about how you can identify if you have an offer problem, a messaging problem or a traffic problem. So if you're clear that your offers and messaging are working, it really is time to increase your traffic. But then how you do that opens up a whole new can of worms, if you will. So you can focus on growing your audience through an awareness platform like TikTok, or launch a YouTube channel, step into a campaign of getting booked on other people's podcasts there's so many different ways or you could start looking at more traditional advertising methods that get you in front of a target audience that wants what you have. So then, there are really two big questions to ask yourself if you're at this point in your business. One, which method of paid advertising is going to be most effective for you, and you might not know. And then two is who the heck can you trust in this space? Because it just seems like there's so many people saying they do SEO, they do ads. You can go on Fiverr, you can go on Upwork.

Speaker 1:

How do you know that the person that you're going to hire has your best interest in mind? So today I'm going to be chatting with Christopher Sill, who handles all of our in-house and client work around SEO and paid ads. He also happens to be one of my best friends. I wish we lived next door so that my husband and Chris and his wife we could all sit down and have dinner more often. I've known him, actually, since back in my lawyer days in Portland Maine. I remember sitting down and having some good entrepreneurial buddy chats at some of our favorite coffee shops in Portland. He's definitely someone who I trust I have that like and trust factor and he explains things in a way that my brain understands, when it comes to this, what can feel complicated? So, christopher, now that I've pumped you up, can you just share a little bit about your background and how you got into this work that you do now?

Speaker 3:

Sure, yeah, thanks for having me. Glad we could do this together. Yeah, yeah, I've been in the industry, the web development and digital marketing space. Oh gosh, probably 20 years now.

Speaker 1:

I was going to say, yeah, a little bit.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I have owned a couple of agencies and mainly focused on branding and where we would build out a brand to attract clients, but we really didn't use any traditional paid ads or SEO to generate traffic. And as I got a couple of years ago, as I got more in depth and looking for ways to help clients, I saw a real need and really saw a lot of misinformation out there about what SEO and PPC can do for people and what are the things that you, what are the things that you really need to have in place for it to be effective. And that's what I'm about. I'm. I love helping people find their people and that's my passion.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, and I think that makes sense, helping people find their people, because for all of the clients that we work with, if they have a good offer, there's someone who wants it right. There's someone who wants that method of coaching or therapy or crystals or different businesses that we work with. But it's like that constant feeling like you're banging your head against a wall, just posting, posting, but like how are new people going to actually find my business? And I think many businesses rely on that organic social media and email marketing and we do that at the agency. Having that in place is so good to make sure that you're building good relationships with the people already in your audience, but for an offer that's already finding some success, maybe you've launched to your email list or you've had some people buying off of social media. Like why might someone consider investing? Because, as small business owners, we all got to think about like where are we putting our money? So why would someone consider investing in SEO or paid advertising for their business?

Speaker 3:

That's a good question. To make it simple or give you a simple, quick answer organic social media and email are great because you got to nurture your audience. They can also grow your business. They're part of the puzzle in your marketing. Think of SEO or PPC ads as a way to tap into a bigger pool, and that's what we do.

Speaker 3:

We try to help people find. People are usually looking for your service, especially if you have a good service, and what we do is basically SEO will help you get found. When those people are searching on Google or search engines, and and paid ads let you put your offer right in front of them right away. So let's say you really want to build your email. A great way to build your email list is to use paid ads to bring your offer in front of those people. So whether they buy or they don't buy, you're still collecting an asset that you can use and nurture for when they're ready to buy, and then sometimes, most of the time, it's good for direct sales. So you're directly hitting a market and now you're not just relying on your small circle of contact.

Speaker 1:

I love that and I think it's so true Like we have our own buying and researching behaviors, right, If I want to learn how to do something or I want to find someone in my local area who offers something, I go to Google. If you just think about your normal behaviors, yes, there are probably segments of people who go to TikTok first or they go to YouTube first, but I think going to a search engine and ranking in the top like I'm sure everybody wants to be top number one listing, but even just like ranking towards the top that's got to be huge for you and then having the ads target people who are really looking for what you have.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and to add to that, we're on the cutting edge. The landscape of search is now changing, yeah, at astronomical rate. It's all about AI and large language models, not to be too technical, but chat, gpt is now becoming a search engine.

Speaker 2:

So what we?

Speaker 3:

do is we help businesses rank well in those spaces. So, whether you see Google and a lot of people are just now starting to ask questions about it. So now's the time, just a great opportunity to really structure what you have so that it gets picked up by things like chat, gpt.

Speaker 1:

So fascinating. Like everything is constantly changing, it is. It is so let's talk through like a real world example where you have used with a client SEO and or paid ads, maybe a mix to really boost leads for a client who already had a successful offer, and I think that's always key to be like something has been selling and now you're coming in and like pouring gas on the fire of getting more people to that thing. So let's talk through like a real world example so we can wrap our heads around it.

Speaker 3:

Sure. So we had a client selling handmade jewelry. They were doing well on Instagram, but they really wanted more leads, so we optimized their website for search terms like unique silver earrings, handmade jewelry gifts. They brought in a steady stream of organic traffic from Google. Then we ran targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram, showing their beautiful jewelry to people interested in similar brands and styles.

Speaker 3:

So that was like a real targeted approach, because we were running those ads to people that were already liked the style of the jewelry that they were making and, as a result, their leads tripled within three months and their sales went through. It was amazing.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing and how rewarding to see. Especially it's like an artisanal, like craftsmanship business, and then not that we have to get into the weeds of other types of specific examples. But I think that a lot of our listeners are their coaches, healers, like service providers, or maybe they are authors, and so they have different offers attached to their books and for so long I pictured all of these tactics, the paid ads, the SEO was only for like big box stores. But that's really not true. Is it like how, if I'm a, if I'm a listener and I'm saying, like I have an offer, but it doesn't sound, it's not a physical product, or like it's me, it's a package of working with me at sessions? Does that still work?

Speaker 3:

Oh, it does. It's so awesome because if you know how to use the tools and use them right and you have the right people helping you, they can find those people that are interested in what you have to offer. And it's gotten really technical, yeah, facebook, instagram, the ads platform. It's like rocket science and leave that to people like us. But think of it this way If you could have a brick and mortar store and you wanted to have it on Main Street but you couldn't afford you know the rent, but you could afford the rent on Main Street and you just wanted to advertise your product, you would increase traffic just by being in the right place and having location right, but with your ads.

Speaker 3:

There is ways to reach audiences that are not even be tapped into, and if they're interested in your product and your specialty service, we put them in front of your offer. And then that's where it's fun, because it's like people walking in your store oh, you're the new coffee shop or the new service provider down the street, and Sarah, my best friend, recommended you Right and then it just steamrolls, gains momentum, and then it's just rinse and repeat and then scale.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's amazing and I think, just from so many of our clients, we're just nervous to feel salesy.

Speaker 1:

And when someone has searched and found you and then maybe books a clarity call or fills out an application and they're like, oh my gosh, I found you.

Speaker 1:

This is so exciting, I didn't even know you existed, like it just puts a very different dynamic than oh, I'm just posting and posting and hoping that there is someone who wants what I have. And so I think, being able to do a mix of stay consistent with your social media so that it really can become this like building blocks of momentum, almost like a little ecosystem. I'm just picturing that sometimes, just as my consumer behavior, if I see an ad on Facebook, let's say, sometimes I'll click through and go find their website and then I'll go down to the bottom of their website and find their Instagram and then I'll go follow them on Instagram. I want to make sure they're present and still in business kind of thing like showing up and oh, then I can follow their stories and get to know them and see that they also have a kid. It all is just this ecosystem that someone could come into an ad or search on Google and you don't know what they're going to go do, even if they don't buy this second, but they're in your ecosystem now.

Speaker 3:

Oh, yes, time and after time, we have clients and projects that we do where, promoting their site on ads or in search, and they will become followers on the Facebook profiles or Instagram. Yeah, and I really encourage everyone to ask where they heard from you, and I love it when I hear. Just the other day, I found your website searching on Google. I followed you on Instagram. I've been watching you for three years and they signed up, so you got it Chelsea. That is exactly where. That's how it works.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so you don't know what they say. For a while they were saying like you needed 21 touches with someone before they're going to buy. I feel like it's just becoming more and more touches because some so many people's quote, unquote touches with your brand, all while they're scrolling at a stop sign and it's not like full captured attention and so the more places that people can be bumping into. I think also, when you really get into ads and when you, I know, when you guys are managing a client's account, that you can do a lot with, like retargeting their email list, so people who are on their email list can bump into special offers. Or someone who's visited a sales page but not purchased yet. And some people that I talk to have been like oh, I think I've run some ads, maybe I boosted a post, but that's really not like. The level of complexity and consumer behavior that you guys are able to target is like miles ahead from what I've ever been able to do just on my own tinkering.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's, I agree, and it's about consistency. And then having those places where, when you run an ads campaign, you're capitalizing on getting that data and possibly having them opt into your email list, becoming friends on your Instagram or following you, and then, consistently, those little touches, they get to know you and then they buy when they're ready. Yeah, I think that's why it's so important to be consistent.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I can look back. We're going to talk a little bit about mistakes that people can make and, I'll be honest, a mistake that I have made, gosh back when I was. I've had so many iterations and evolutions of offers and who I was helping over the 13 years that I've been in the online space and there was a period of time where I was doing a lot of training and like speaking on stages and running courses for people who are in the direct sales or network marketing space and I, through referrals, got connected with someone who was like the ads manager for five different of my friends who were in a mastermind and they started running some ads for me. But I was so hands-off Like I didn't really understand it. I was just crossing my fingers and hoping that the $900 a month I was spending between management and ad spend, I was really just seeing it as a wish and a hope.

Speaker 1:

I had not proven out the offer organically, and so I was really just seeing it as a wish and a hope. I had not proven out the offer organically, and so I was really just hoping that more eyeballs was going to be the solution. And so now that we use the framework that we do at the agency. I can look back and see some of those mistakes just with like kind eyes on myself and be like, oh, chelsea, that's just not going to work, like you can't expect it to solve the problems of what's happening on the messaging. So let's just talk through from your perspective. What are some common mistakes that businesses make when they're trying to implement SEO or paid ads, and how can they avoid them?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I would say one of the big mistakes that a lot of businesses make is not really understanding the target market.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And a lot of the times, with SEO or PP services. Everyone it seems to be in this industry really doesn't take the time to understand their business or who they're trying to reach. And if you get someone in that space to run your ads or do SEO, you definitely want to feel secure that they're going to help you and steer you in the right direction, to know and learn. Okay, if this is your target market and that might be multiple target markets, right, and ones might outperform the other, and but yeah, a lot of the times they'll just spend the money, try multiple different markets and then get no results because they weren't even close to matching up with.

Speaker 3:

Okay, these are the people you want to reach, but then all your messaging and your product really doesn't help solve their problem and what they're looking for, and it's really I say the term that all marketers sometimes ruin a lot of things. That's again one of my passions is just to open up and be transparent. This will work or it won't work, and you can look at these things and go all right. Another mistake would not be tracking results accountability. So if someone's running a campaign and at the end of the, let's say, there's a 30 day cycle of running ads, how did they perform? What did you really? Did you maximize the ad budget? Did? Did it? How much traffic did it bring in? Where's the bottleneck? Is it perform all of those different matrix? And again, it's always important to have accountability with the person that you're working with or the company and understand okay, what do we do next if this isn't working or what do we need to do to scale that?

Speaker 3:

or make it better, and I would say probably another one would be not optimizing consistently. So, for example, run boost posts, they're one offs, but then you're spending that same budget hoping for the best, and what we do is we go all right, we're going to actually spend that budget, we're going to get whatever success level we need, and then we're going to constantly monitor and make those adjustments so that we can reach more people and maximize that budget.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And these days it takes a lot of work to do that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I was just going to say so many business owners are wearing so many hats themselves and I will be honest, I have signed up for two separate ads, like courses. One was a membership style where you could log on and get your questions answered and they had all these tutorials on how to set stuff up. And I signed up with one with Emily Hirsch, who's like huge in the ad space now when she was first launching, and both times my ADHD brain was like I am going to master paid ads and this is going to be how I like scale everything and and the consistency like ADHD brain also was like dopamine hit over. I don't know how to do this and so I love.

Speaker 1:

What I'm really hearing from you is like the energy of partnership that you are, yes, doing the mechanics and the technical stuff that makes most of us business owners eyes glaze over, but there's also an element of just not treating people like a number and saying, okay, here's what we're seeing. You might want to go take a peek at the emails that are in the sequence firing off after people opt in, because if you're not getting as many sales as you want, what's happening on the back end? And so just from your 20 plus years of experience. It always gives me peace of mind, like whenever we talk about SEO and paid ads, I'm like we need to get started. For me, of course, the cobbler's children have no shoes and I keep being like Chris, we're ready to get started. Wait, no, I got distracted. But it just gives me peace of mind referring any of my clients to you and to your team because you see the whole picture.

Speaker 1:

I feel like there's a lot of people who could just sit down and be like self-taught ads people or self-taught maybe took a couple weekend courses on SEO but they don't have the big picture of how the whole marketing system works. So I guess I'm just putting a little feather in your cap that I think that's part of what attracts me to use your services and to refer to you is that you're not just treating like churning people through, which I think is part of the challenge, just real talk between you and me like part of the challenge. In this space. So many people have been quote, unquote burned by people who didn't really know what their. Oh, when you talk about your ideal audience slowing down to understand what type of person is going to buy hypnotherapy sessions versus you know a microdosing course. Versus like different things, it's not all just copy and paste. And do you see that in your space? Do you get jaded about how people are doing this?

Speaker 3:

in your space.

Speaker 3:

Do you get jaded about how people are doing this?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely, that's the short answer, but what I really see, one of the biggest issues is there seems to be hundreds of thousands of people buying courses on how to do ads or start a business to do ads. One difference is I've been an entrepreneur since I was 18 years old and have multiple businesses in a lot of different spaces and, at the end of the day, business is about people and along the way, you just start seeing those, how things connect, no matter what the industry. It's okay. These things make sense and that's why when people work with us and a part of this whole collective that we have is that everybody brings these experiences that they had and it's just so much better for the client or if they work with us, because what happens is we're using our collective knowledge and experience to help that person with what they're doing on their journey, and I do. I really believe that I'm looking at through the lens of business and how to apply these strategies to those businesses and I think a lot of.

Speaker 3:

unfortunately, there's a lot of people out there going just spend more money. It'll get you more business and that's not always the case.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, on just being that level of honesty, there's so many times that I'll end a sales conversation someone inquiring about some services and say I'm going to tell, are you open to me saying what I would do if I were you? Because I've been doing this long enough and sometimes the answer is I wouldn't hire us. I would go do some market research first and figure out your offer and decide if you like running group programs or if you prefer one-on-one sessions. Not everybody is at a place where just putting more eyeballs in front of it is going to be the solution. And you've raised a couple interesting points just about the future, how AI is coming into things, how the game is changing. And so, looking ahead, just from your perspective, what are some of the biggest trends in SEO and paid advertising that business owners should be aware of if they're going to start stepping into this in the next couple of months or years?

Speaker 3:

It's around AI.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, everything's changing, every niche.

Speaker 3:

It's all about AI, and it's also about where do your people hang out?

Speaker 3:

yeah if you're a young person, you're searching for products on tiktok yeah right, that's like the second biggest search engine over google, yeah, and now, with ai, ai is deciding who out there has the best answer for someone that is searching for what they're looking for. So what we have to do is be vigilant and get help and really understand. Okay, the product and service and the content that I'm producing needs to set a standard that these quick gimmick things and flash in the pan kind of marketing is just a waste of time. It's slow, is pro. It's okay to go slow, because if you had 100 people that really wanted to work with you, that would better be. That would be better than a thousand people that would only stay with you for a day, right.

Speaker 1:

Or just buy one. That's a really good point, yep, qualifying the right people.

Speaker 3:

And so, whether it's paid ads or SEO, I really do believe that we have to focus on the things that we need to do for our business that play into that space. As I said, a lot of the people now there's a trend that, instead of it's Google search, they're still going to be number one, but a lot of the times, there's a big audience on chat GBT. A lot of the times, there's a big audience on chat GPT and we were looking at a dentist the other day a dentist's office and in Atlanta, and it was three different keywords. We can run these predictive models in AI and say all right for these key phrases. How many times did chat GPT suggest that dentist? And so some were six out of 10 and some were one out of 10.

Speaker 3:

Right, so those are the things that we do and we start looking under the hood and going all right. So if you're a healer or coach and you're helping people with health and wellness, mind and body, you're helping people with health and wellness, mind and body. People go to search engines, but they're also going to other platforms. We just have to really align ourselves so that we can get in front of those people, right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's fascinating, yeah, and it's just to me. It's always so exciting. It's almost like magic when a campaign starts working, whether it's organic or paid Like. Somebody actually just came to my personal brand website recently and filled out the contact form. That's hey, if you can't find something you're looking for, let me know. And she was reaching out with some questions about my membership and so then we were able to email and she ended up signing up for the membership and to me that just feels like magic, like someone who I didn't know somehow found my website and now is in my membership and I get to serve her and get to know her business and that's so cool. And just seeing how search engine optimization, how ads bringing new people in front of you if they're the right targeted people, it just feels like this little token from the universe of no, you've actually been putting the work in to make this happen, but that's really. It's just such an amazing feeling and I know you love seeing that for your clients as well.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, oh, I love seeing that back at that earlier question of mistakes is you'll see in the industry a lot of SEO companies or the strategy is just to rank the wrong keywords. So they'll tell you hey, look at, we got you on top 10, but that top 10 only gets 10 searches a month and even if they found your website, they wouldn't be interested in your product.

Speaker 1:

And so that's the difference. It's like a vanity. Oh, we're number two for the search. That does nothing for us.

Speaker 3:

Exactly Traffic, but your engagement, there's no fails. So that's what's really important is to focus on that and get work with someone that can actually help you. All right, these keywords are those buyer keywords, or they have those help you. All right, these keywords are those buyer keywords, or they have those that best potential? Yeah, and that's where it's going. You have those are the things that you have to pay attention to.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing. Thank you for bringing this conversation just in a really approachable manner. And if you, if anybody's listening and wants to get on a consultation call with Christopher, what you can do is go to intuitive marketing collective dot com, go to services, fill out any of the little buttons that bring you to an application and check off that you want to learn more about SEO, paid ads, and we'll get you over to have a conversation with Chris to see if either would be a good fit. But thank you so much for being here today and just bringing this conversation to light. I hope it inspires people. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, thank you so much. This was so fun, cool. I love you. Yeah, I love the what you guys are doing and that's what we're about helping people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And that I really want to encourage people that if they were burned or they didn't have success, I'm here. Let's have a question, just have a time to meet and see why didn't it work and maybe figure out a different solution.

Speaker 1:

So I love that this is a wrap on another episode of the Intuitive Marketing Podcast. I hope this conversation really helps you think about the scalability of your business and maybe open your mind about the methods you can use to bring more leads and traffic to your offers and business. I know that over the next few months, as Christopher takes the lead on SEO and paid ads for the agency, we're going to be sharing behind the scenes over on our Instagram account and sharing some of what it's doing for our expansion. So make sure to come follow at Intuitive Marketing Collective and be in on that conversation. And next week, Meg and I will be back for a joint episode for episode number 10. It's a little bit of a wild card. We don't have the topic planned, which sometimes is where the juiciest, funnest conversations come in. So make sure to be subscribed to the podcast and you can grab next week's conversation as soon as it drops. Thank you so much for being here today, Chris.

Speaker 3:

Thank you.