Dennis Yu

Would you pay $3,000 a month to rent a $20,000 car?

Blog, B2B Marketing, content marketing, Digital Marketing, marketing, search engine marketing /

So my buddy, Marko Sipila approached me and said, that service-based businesses should own their marketing. And I said that’s crazy. I don’t want to have to learn how to do digital marketing and all this complex SEO, WordPress, Facebook ads, and stuff like that. But then consider this, would you pay $3, 000 a month to rent a car that you could buy for $20, 000? And what if that mechanic maybe wasn’t so crooked and was trying to show you what it takes to fix the car, to maintain your car, that once you buy the car all you have to do is do an oil change every here and there as long as it’s a good quality car. Wouldn’t that change things? And what if someone created a guide on how you could own your marketing so that instead of that crooked used car salesperson telling you what you need or how it’s so complicated and you would never want to touch anything with the engine and all that? That’s a used car salesperson. They don’t even know how to work on the car themselves anyway. He’s just a salesperson in the front trying to say whatever. To confuse you so that you’ll continue to pay $3, 000 a month for a car that he bought from someone else that he doesn’t even know anything about and there are mechanics in the back that maybe he outsources the stuff to. You realize that a car salesperson doesn’t know more about cars than you do. So now I believe with accountability, we should all be able to own our own marketing. And the first step is having control of your assets. For example, having control of your ad accounts and so on.

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What a Billionaire Told Me About Charging Clients (Most People Miss This! Don’t Miss it too!)

Leave a Comment / B2B Marketing, Business, Sales /

After years of experience working with clients all over the world, it was when I met a billionaire friend that made me realise something most people miss… A billionaire friend told me not to charge by the hour or the month. Yes, I know this is weird because it’s what most do. But the truth is if you want to stand out as an agency or consultant, measure and charge by business results. The business results will be a reward in its own right growing your authority, but this shift can be the difference between succeeding and not. The level of incompetence among marketing agencies is astronomical. So many marketing agencies overpromise and underdeliver. There is a big difference between saying you can do something and actually doing what you say. So to talk about business results, whether or not you can deliver, is what drives sales. The only way to drive sales is to drive leads. Demonstrate you have a detailed process you follow and emphatically state you don’t do what’s not in a process. Don’t say you do everything and serve everyone, big or small. Don’t say you’re affordable and serve small businesses. Even if you’re desperate for business, if you get cheap and cut corners, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot by attracting nightmare clients that even pros wouldn’t be able to make happy. Nightmare clients are exactly that, a nightmare. The more you say what you don’t do, the more confidence your clients have in what you say you do well. Relationships with clients when you first start out are fragile things, but when you have the self-respect to admit things you can not do it displays your dignity towards your client. It’s crucial that you and your business/agency don’t seem too good to be true. When you start with their financial goals and tie your effort to them, you shift from an expense to a profit center. Then it doesn’t matter what your fees are. Your goal is not to reduce your fees, but to increase their profit— probably from your efforts.

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B2B Marketers rejoice: Facebook ads now break out workplaces, job titles, industries, and office type

Leave a Comment / B2B Marketing, Facebook Advertising /

Did you see this today? It’s in the ads manager. You used to have just workplace targeting. But now it’s expanded into 4 categories with subcategories. Look at office type, for example. If you’re selling enterprise software, like Marketo, you’d want to choose “corporation”. But if you’re selling marketing automation software to small businesses, you’d choose “small office” or “home office”. This is super cool for B2B marketers. Take any of your already performing ads and duplicate them, filtering down by these work categories. We did have job title targets before, embedded in precise interest targets. But now it’s in its own bucket. And now that it is, we can do combination targeting, which wasn’t possible before. If you’ve always wanted to filter down by people who are marketing managers AND are high income AND like Eloqua, now it’s possible. Before, you could only target folks who like Eloqua OR are marketing managers, which might be too big an audience. For the ad geeks, feast yourselves on boolean logic here. For the rest of us, continue to use workplace and job title targets to make sure you’re influencing the influencers, such as the press and industry folks. Here’s a fun example: We co-presented with Marketo at Marketo Summit on how Marketo drives leads using Facebook We posted it on our blog and then ran ads targeting people who work at Marketo. Less than 1,000 folks, but they’re all high quality. Of course, we can target folks who like Marketo And target folks who have job titles of “digital marketing” and “chief marketing office”, filtering by corporations: We might even target folks who work at Eloqua, like Eloqua, work at Forrester, like Forrester, and so forth. And to think that some people say that B2B lead gen via Facebook isn’t possible? Hey, that’s more traffic for the rest of us!

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