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The Power of Simply Answering Questions with Marcus Sheridan

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Episode 34: The Power of Simply Answering Questions with Marcus Sheridan E34: THE POWER OF SIMPLY ANSWERING QUESTIONS WITH MARCUS SHERIDAN 00:00 Announcer: Welcome to the Neon Noise podcast. Your home for learning ways to attract more traffic to your websites, generate more leads, convert more leads into customers, and build stronger relationships with your customers. And now your hosts Justin Johnson and Ken Franzen. 00:18 Justin Johnson: Hey, hey, hey, Neon Noise nation. Welcome to the Neon Noise podcast, where we decode marketing and sales topics to help you grow your business. I am Justin and with me, I have my co- host, Ken. Ken, what's going on today? 00:31 Ken Franzen: Not too much, Justin. How are you doing yourself? 00:34 Justin Johnson: I am doing fantastic, thank you. I am extremely excited to talk to our featured guest today. He's got an awesome story, I can't wait to dive in. Today we have on Marcus Sheridan. He is called a web marketing guru by the New York Times. The story of how Marcus was able to save his swimming pool company, River Pools, from the economic crash of 2008 has been featured in multiple books, publications, and stories around the world. And it is also the inspiration for his newest book, "They Ask, You Answer," which is dubbed, "The number one marketing book to read in 2017" by Mashable. Today, Marcus has become a highly sought after global speaker and consultant in the digital sales and marketing space, working with hundreds of businesses and brands alike to become the most trusted voice in their industry while navigating the ultrafast rate of change occurring within consumers and buyers today. When Marcus isn't giving riveting and passion filled keynotes around the globe or consulting with businesses and brands, he generally finds himself on an adventure with his wife and four children. Awesome stuff. Without further ado, Marcus, welcome to Neon Noise. 01:50 Marcus Sheridan: Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be here. And hopefully I'll say something today that doesn't suck. [chuckle] 01:57 Justin Johnson: All right. We are gonna keep the suckiness out of this conversation. Good stuff. Hey, fill in the blanks on anything I may have missed and why don't you give us a little bit of background? www.neongoldfish.com/podcast www.neongoldfish.com E34: THE POWER OF SIMPLY ANSWERING QUESTIONS WITH MARCUS SHERIDAN 02:08 Marcus Sheridan: You hit it, man. I'm just a pool guy turned marketing guy. And if you want, I can tell the whole story. [laughter] 02:16 Marcus Sheridan: Or wherever you wanna go. You just tell me where you wanna go. 02:19 Justin Johnson: Awesome. 02:20 Ken Franzen: Well, I think you got a really unique story in... It's in the fall of 2008, I don't think we're gonna shed any light on your nose, it was a challenging time for just about everybody. 02:31 Marcus Sheridan: It was very difficult. 02:32 Justin Johnson: Yeah. 02:34 Ken Franzen: But it was a major pivot point for you. Let's set the table here a little bit with you telling us about where you were, what was going on, and how that moment in time or that time period itself transformed you or set you on the track to where you are today. 02:54 Marcus Sheridan: Well, we started the company River Pools in 2001, literally, out a back of a pick-up truck. And we're just trying to grow it, grinding, like everybody does when you start a little company like that. And things were okay up until 2008 when the economy collapsed. And within the first 48 hours of the crash we lost five deposits, people that said they were gonna get a pool, withdrew that deposit and say, "We just can't do it." So we lost about a quarter of a million dollars in business in the first 48 hours after the crash of Lehman Brothers, and all that stuff. Then over the coming months it just got worse and worse and by January of 2009, we really were looking at bankruptcy square in the face. www.neongoldfish.com/podcast www.neongoldfish.com E34: THE POWER OF SIMPLY ANSWERING QUESTIONS WITH MARCUS SHERIDAN 03:36 Marcus Sheridan: And I talked to three consultants, they all said, "You should probably just close your doors and file." But the issue was if I did that, I was gonna lose my home, my two business partners were gonna lose their homes. My 16 employees at the time were gonna lose their jobs. We basically had to figure out a way to generate more trust, more traffic, more leads, more sales than we'd ever done without really spending any money to do it. That's where we were. And that's when I started to read about the Internet and seeing all those fancy phrases like "inbound marketing," or "content marketing," or "digital blogging," etcetera. And really, what I heard in my mind as I read these technical phrases was, "Marcus, if you just obsess over the questions you get asked every single day by prospects and customers, and you're willing to address those on your website through text and video, you just might win." And so, that's when we embraced that philosophy that today, of course, I call "They Ask, You Answer." 04:26 Marcus Sheridan: And to make a long story really short, we did it so well that it became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world and saved the company, and we went on to start manufacturing fiberglass pools as well and now we have dealers around the country. And it's just been an amazing ride and I started writing about that about a year after we were doing it. We began and called it "The Sales Lion." It was just a personal blog at the time, but it grew into something of its own, and today I spend the majority of my time with The Sales Lion, with those activities, with the consulting, and speaking side of it, and just companies saying, "Hey, I want to be the most trusted voice in my space. I wanna be the Wikipedia of that thing that we do." And we try to help them achieve that. It's been awesome. 05:15 Ken Franzen: Great story, great story. So what was your activity like though when you said that you started answering questions, what was your activity like there that led to the increase in traffic? I'm guessing it was blog posts? 05:31 Marcus Sheridan: Yeah. We would consider it a blog post. Of course, we did it on the website through text and video. Literally, at first, I just brainstormed every single question I would get all the time. And there's plenty of those. There's probably at least a hundred of those. And then, whenever I would sit in the sales appointment, I would be first listening to... Instead of just trying to answer the question fast, I would think to myself, "Have I addressed that well on the website yet?" 06:01 Marcus Sheridan: And so that became our moniker, our philosophy. It turns out, we did a lot of things that nobody had ever done though. At the time, I wasn't thinking to myself, "This is gonna be the most innovative thing ever with content marketing." I was just thinking, "I gotta save my company." But to give you an example of a few of 'em, when we start the process of "They Ask, You Answer" about seven years ago, www.neongoldfish.com/podcast www.neongoldfish.com E34: THE POWER OF SIMPLY ANSWERING QUESTIONS WITH MARCUS SHERIDAN there wasn't a pool guy in the world that had addressed on their website, "How much does a pool cost?" [chuckle] Which is crazy. 06:28 Justin Johnson: That's what everybody wants. [chuckle] 06:29 Marcus Sheridan: That's what everybody wants, yet that's what most businesses refuse to talk about. Well, so that was one of the first pieces, "How much does the fiberglass pool cost?" And immediately it started to generate traffic, again, because nobody had answered the question ever. And to make a long story short, because we measure this stuff, and because we know the total number of leads we get, and where they come from, and what pages of the website they hit first, etcetera, etcetera, I know that that one single article that I wrote seven years ago, since the day it was written, has generated over $3.5 million in sales of swimming pools that I never would have had, had I not addressed the question. 07:05 Marcus Sheridan: Now, somebody that's hearing this right now, is probably thinking, "Well, I can't address cost and price on my website." Which is total bull. Of course, you can. Now, the reasons why businesses say they can't do it, is because number one, they say, "My competitors are gonna find out." Number two, they say, "I might scare 'em away." Number three, they say, "Well, every job is different. It depends. It's a customized solution." That's the same answer for every business. But the reality is this, if you or I go on a website right now as buyers and we're looking for cost and price and we can't find it, we do not stay.
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