Sound Solutions: North Bank Audio Solutions

As I’ve shared before, you can easily leverage testimonials as powerful positioning tools in your business by asking your highest profile associates to vouch for you as well as offering testimonials to those you know with a large amount of visibility in your target market.

Now I’m sharing the anatomy of an effective testimonial. I’ll admit that while I already knew this formula, I pretty much just lifted it from the notes I took at Adam Urbanski’s “Attract Clients Like Crazy” bootcamp this month in Newport Beach California.

Here we go:

1. First share your name and website. Your company name can be included, but keep it brief. The main thing is you want to send them to a web page that is easy to spell (since many testimonials are in audio or video formats) and is relevant to those who will be listening. Make sure it has an opt-in box with an offer for something valuable to the folks who will see the testimonial.
2. Next, share a brief sentence about what you do. Focus on the benefits of your work rather than the process.
3. Now, share where you were before you worked with the person or company you are vouching for. This is the part where you “bring the pain”. Explain the problems you were having.
4. Explain the experience you had of the service or product you are giving a testimonial for. Again, don’t focus so much on the process, but on the value of the services received.
5. This is the most important part. Tell the audience the benefits and results you got from using the service or product. Be as specific as possible. Include numbers and examples if you can. Money speaks, so if you can include financial figures, that is ideal.
6. The last step is optional, but suggested. Include the “result of the result”. So, if a new program enabled you to make an extra $30,000 this year, explain what that will mean to you in human terms. For example, you can spend more time with your family and friends and take that exotic vacation you’ve always dreamed about without having to check your email once.

Follow this basic outline and you can’t fail. Another thing - when you’re meeting people you have worked with or think you might work with, get a photo together. Then, either of you give each other testimonials, you’ll have something to post with it as a credibility factor.

The last tip is… ALWAYS tell the truth. You will do a disservice to yourself, your prospects and the person you are giving a testimonial for if you make things up or fabricate any of the above.

Did I miss anything? Do you have any big testimonial stories, examples, wins or horror stories to share? Join the conversation by posting a comment below.

So, I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert on the topic of SEO, but I’m learning. I’ve stumbled upon a great tool that you should definitely take advantage of.

It’s HubSpot’s Website Grader. You simply input your website and it tells you what’s good and bad about your site, with suggestions on how to fix it.

I don’t buy into the idea that SEO is everything when it comes to online marketing, but it is a piece of the puzzle that should not be overlooked.

Once you have made some adjustments to your site based on the feedback from this tool, I suggest using Google’s very own solution: Google Webmaster Tools. It will tell you what’s wrong with your site, help you gleam important info about your site directly from Google’s database and share info about your site with Google.

I’m not asking this question from a political perspective in any sense. I am a Barack Obama supporter, but by no means do I assume that all or even most of the readers of my blog, listeners of my podcast, my clients and colleagues are.

What I do expect from you, regardless of your political sensibilities, is to learn from the success of his political campaign from a marketing perspective.

Here is a few of things I noticed and admired about his campaign from a marketing perspective. If you have anything to add to the list, please add a comment with your thoughts. I may come back and add more as I think of them.

1. The consistency of the message and the brand.
   Everything from catch phrases to the typeface he used to the color schemes and imagery. Take a look at any of his YouTube videos of campaign events. They all start off with the same, simple black background and white text.
2. Everything funneled back to Obama.
   Even though he had a team of people working for him, everything the campaign did came back to him. His campaign was uniquely unified.
3. He used many forms of media - both traditional and new:
   This is the first major political campaign to really focus on online marketing. Their new media tactics included email marketing, online video, social networking, blogging and podcasting. Their campaign efforts became viral and many of these new forms of media are quite inexpensive. Of course, they also employed traditional tactics of canvassing, TV, radio and print ads and phone banking.
4. He got his supporters involved:
   The Obama campaign’s biggest strength was in their humongous list of donors and volunteers. This can be partially attributed to his understanding of his target markets and how well his message resonated with them.

I’m sure I’ll think of dozens of things to add to this list, but feel free to help me out by posting comments on this post. You can also include what you learned from a marketing perspective from other political campaigns as well. Feel free to include things you learn to do as well as things you learned not to do.

I’ve recently been using the questions feature on linkedin.com to find out what people are struggling with when it comes to their audio and video in their businesses.

This week I had one particular response that I think exemplifies a lot of people’s concerns. They want to get into podcasting and things like that, but aren’t sure how to get started when on a tight budget.

My question:

What questions do you have about using audio or video in your marketing or product development efforts (info products, podcasts, online videos etc).

Linked In response:

I would like to know how with a limited budget my marketing team (i.e me!) could put together podcasts in house. I want to use this to market to customers (newsletter type format) and potential clients. I also work with a large channel partner and I need to keep their field sales abreast of our propositions.

My advice:

Hi Rik,

Podcasts are great because they hardly require a budget at all.

You can go as low tech and low price as recording with your phone on a free bridge line like http://freeaudioconferencing.com or as high tech as building a full recording studio in your office.

I would suggest starting off with your phone or a USB microphone (http://www.zzounds.com/a–993997/item–ALEUSBPODCASTMIC) and playing with the audio with Audacity (download the software for free at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/).

You can then publish your podcast with wordpress, a blogging utility. Either use wordpress.org and install on you own hosting account or simply use wordpress.com and have them host it for you. If you use wordpress.com, you’ll want to purchase two upgrades: custom domain and a hosting upgrade so you can have your own domain name and upload mp3 files. Either way, you can have this all for about $30-40 per year!

You’ll want to set up a feedburner.com account too. This helps you track who subscribes and gives you all sorts of cool tools.

Then, submit your feedburner feed url to directories using podpusher.com and submit to the iTunes directory by installing the free iTunes software and clicking on the “podcasts” button and entering your feed url from feedburner.

If any of the above makes your head spin, you can email me at caleb@northbankaudio.com and we can either set up a consultation or you can simply delegate the work to us so you can focus on your content.

I hope this helps!

Caleb Scoville
North Bank Audio Solutions
http://www.northbankaudio.com

If you host teleseminars, you are loosing money if you don’t have the recordings transcribed and repurposed into marketing materials and products.

Transcription is the conversion to text format. This is a very important step in an online marketing strategy. It is a way to take what you’ve recorded and brought it into a completely different medium.

I do not suggest doing this yourself. You can have an assistant do it if they’re familiar with this work. I suggest hiring a professional. It may seem pricey at first, but they can have it done in a couple days.

The main thing is that you want to find a transcriptionist who is familiar with teleseminars and can edit out your speech blemishes.

Another thing to look for is someone who can convert your teleseminar into an ebook. That’s something you can sell or give away on your site. It adds value. An ebook is a book in PDF format. If you deliver an hour-long teleseminar, it will be quite a few pages. If they format it right, it will be very flashy. It will add a lot of value to that recorded element you’re selling or giving away.

Here’s the most important thing. This doesn’t need to be something that your transcriptionist does. It’s something that someone on your team can do or you can do, if you have the time. You can harvest articles from your transcribed teleseminar.

Each teleseminar you record will be several pages long. You can find larger topics for each of those. You selected five to seven big ideas. Each one of those can usually be an article. There may be a little formatting you’ll need to do because you were just talking. You want to implement. You don’t need to necessarily make it perfect.

Each of those articles can be submitted to article portals online. This is one of the best ways to draw traffic to your site. Each of the big ideas is one article.

Here’s another tip if you’re using someone to edit your audio. It isn’t always necessary, but sometimes it is if you want to create an information product. You’ll want to have the audio transcribed first then highlight the portions you want deleted and send it to your audio editor.

The transcription can then be presented as a standalone or episodic element that you will re-purpose. When you submit articles they can be episodic. They can refer to Step 1 or Step 2.

It’s not always bad if it seems incomplete to have one article. You can refer people back to your site to find the others. You can say, “This is Step 1 of 5 in this series. Go to this site for the total.” You’re driving traffic to yourself. You’re teasing them with information.

As long as your information is good, even if it doesn’t make sense completely to give them one tip at a time, it will drive them back to the site. That is called “cognitive dissidence.” You’re giving them a little information, but not enough for them to be satisfied. You give them the solution by going back to your site.

Another important thing is to have your URL in the resource box. Most of the article portals do not allow you to have the URL in the actual text of the article. You need to make sure you have it formatted correctly in the resource box.

The URL you send them to should not necessarily be your branding site. It should be a squeeze or opt-in page where they can subscribe. The bait for the squeeze page can just be the entire audio and ebook of the same presentation.

The great thing about that is you give them a little piece of information. If they read it and went to your site, you already know they’re interested. If you give them the full article or the fully transcribed audio and the audio itself, you know that they will be interested. They will not feel cheated because they will get the whole thing.

The articles are usually 200 to 600 words long. The article portal sites are basically archived articles. People can republish those articles as long as they include the resource link.

It is really important that you allow people to do this. These people could be bloggers, publishers of ezines or print newsletters, or just doing research.

It’s a huge place where people can select free or cheap content to put on their website or ezine. A lot of people look for this because they don’t necessarily want to be the ones creating the content.

It’s also a great way to increase your search engine optimization because there is so much more content out there that’s getting spidered with your name and keywords in it. It’s an inexpensive way to gain web traffic and credibility.

Most of the sites are free. Obviously, you have to pay for labor to do that. It usually takes a couple of hours to submit to most of the important ones. You can do it yourself, but your time is valuable, so you don’t necessarily want to do that.

Another thing to consider is a press release. Sometimes when you are speaking, you might not actually have something that you’re able to publish to a press release, but they’re great for attaining media attention as well as traffic. Some of these articles will be able to be formatted and repurposed as a press release.

Another thing is an ezine, which is an episodic monthly, bi-weekly or weekly publication that is sent out via email. It’s a great place to repurpose the articles that you’ve already written. You can include a personal note, resource or link, but that article can be the content that you include in the ezine. You don’t necessarily have to be creating more content each time.