Aaron Hoos

If you are a financial advisor or real estate professional, a condition very similar to “the CSI effect” could be hindering your success.

WHAT IS THE CSI EFFECT?

The CSI effect is a problem faced by the justice system when juries place too much faith in fingerprints and DNA evidence. It’s called “the CSI effect” to suggest that forensic shows like CSI (and others) are tainting real-life juries by making them believe that forensic evidence is easy to obtain, can be processed by a lab in hours, and decisive beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt.

Although the CSI effect is just a hypothesis, it does raise the issue that today’s media might be making everyone an expert.

WHAT DOES THE CSI EFFECT HAVE TO DO WITH YOU?

You might not be prosecuting criminals but you might be impacted by the CSI effect anyway… or, at least something similar. Our prospective clients have access to all kinds of information — from us and from others; on TV and the web. There is no shortage to the information that they can access.

Unfortunately, it has made “amateur experts” out of many clients, turning naive homebuyers into superstar DIY real estate agents and untrained investors into the next Jim Cramer.

Let me be clear about something before you read any further: Savvy clients are good. I’m not proposing that financial and real estate professionals would be better off with clients who couldn’t tell their left hand from their right hand. The root of the problem is NOT that they have access to lots of information to make better decisions. Rather, the root of the problem is that they have no filter to help them navigate the complicated world of real estate or investing.

They’ve been empowered and informed but not equipped.

The result is: Real estate professionals are finding lots of people going the list-it-themselves route or are assuming that they are expert househunters. And financial advisors are finding lots of people who leave voicemails on the advisors’ office overnight because of some great stocks they found while browsing online.

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

This is tricky. You don’t want to belittle them by telling them that what they know is wrong, nor do you really want to validate that their unsorted knowledge is a replacement for your expertise.

What clients really need is structure. They need decision-making systems. They need rules. They need ways to synthesize their information. They need frames. They need order. They need taxonomies. They need context. They need the bigger picture.

Right now, your clients are looking at splotches of paint on canvas; you need to help them step back and see the entire painting.

Here are some ways to work with your clients to counter the CSI effect:

• When writing your blog, make sure you use categories (or some other sorting system) that make sense in the bigger picture.
• In all of your marketing, make sure to highlight that the one piece of information you’re expressing is a single cog in a giant piece of machinery.
• Prepare information, verbal and written responses, and proactive marketing to address the reality that some of your clients will tell you about something they saw on TV or the web that doesn’t mesh with what you do. (For example, a normally conservative investor tells a financial advisor about a speculative stock they just heard about from a friend on Facebook).
• If you’re looking for a great idea for your next downloadable document, consider a “big picture” ebook that your users can use to sort out the huge, unsorted mass of information available to them on the web.

I believe the CSI effect is real… and it’s affecting more than just the justice system. I think many of my financial and real estate clients are facing a similar situation.

But I also think that this is an opportunity for you! Rather than joining the ranks of real estate and financial advisors who ONLY give out unsorted, unfiltered information, why not become the professional who helps prospective clients MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL.

Testimonials are great tools to have for your sales funnel. You should collect them like a kid collects baseball cards (… do kids still collect baseball cards?). But are you using your testimonials effectively in your sales funnel? Or are they merely collecting dust and contributing nothing to your sales funnel?

Not all of your contacts in every stage are ready to hear a testimonial from a customer. Here’s why…

TWO STAGES IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL WHERE YOU SHOULDN’T USE TESTIMONIALS
A testimonial is basically an indication that someone has bought something from you and they were happy with it. While the “happy with it” part of the testimonial is good, implicit in that testimonial is the reality that they handed over their cash to receive the product or service. Unfortunately, that’s not something that your contacts in the Audience stage or Leads stage are ready to hear yet.

Contacts in your Audience stage or Leads stage are not making buying decisions. In the audience stage, they are only becoming aware of the problem or need. In the Leads stage they are only starting to realizing the severity of their problem or need and that you might have a solution to help them. Most of the time, Audience and Lead contacts don’t want to think about buying… and they ESPECIALLY don’t want to think about parting with their cash.

THE STAGE IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL WHERE YOU SHOULD USE TESTIMONIALS
It’s the people at the Prospect stage who need to hear or read your testimonials… and as many testimonials as you can give them without pissing them off! The people at the Prospect stage are starting to make a buying decision because they’re coming to terms with the fact that they have an acute problem and you have the solution for them. And although buyers want to believe that they are unique and special, they also find comfort in knowing that other people have the same problems as them and have found you to be the solution.

TWO MORE STAGES IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL WHERE YOU SHOULDN’T USE TESTIMONIALS
Once your contacts reach the Customer stage or the Evangelist stage, there is really no need to use testimonials anymore. After all, the positive experience that your Customer has with your product or service should be so good that you don’t need additional proof from other happy customers. Besides, your testimonials could actually harm you at the Customer or Evangelist level if they contain specific ROI numbers that your Customers and Evangelists compare their own results to. (“This testimonial says they received a 40% return on investment but I only received a 25% return… what gives?).

HOW TO USE TESTIMONIALS IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL
So, where should you put your testimonials in your sales funnel? Put them in the Prospect stage and pepper them liberally throughout that stage in your sales funnel. Make sure to include one or two testimonials in every printed communication, make them readily visible on your website or blog, add them to reports and whitepapers, include them in the footer of emails, and even construct content around them for blog posts and ezine articles. Don’t be afraid to send lots of testimonials to your contacts: For example, if you send a bonus report, include at least 1-2 pages of testimonials.

Here’s a bonus tip: Keep all of your sales funnels in one place and sort them. Content management systems might work for you; Evernote could be a good solution; or just use a spreadsheet with sorting functions that will allow you to find the most relevant ones quickly.

Here’s an extra bonus tip: When you convert a customer and they use a product or service from you, collect a testimonial. Make it a habit. Write yourself a reminder email or add it to a checklist as one of the last things you do before you cash their check and thank them for their business.

Testimonials are great… but only if they are making your sales funnel more successful.

No matter how good your business is, you’re bound to get some bad press at some point. It’s a part of business but wouldn’t be so bad… if it didn’t appear on the first page of a Google search result! Somehow, bad news or reviews seem magnetized to the very top of search results, and they remain stuck there as an obstacle to a fast-flowing sales funnel!

I’ve worked with several businesses and individuals who have bad press from their past lurking in Google search results, and we’ve rolled up our sleeves and dug in, trying to take back ownership of their reputation by taking back ownership of their top Google results. Here is the advice that I give them:

You essentially have 2 options:

• You can talk louder and more often than the bad news or reviews
• You can change the story completely

Both will take time and investment (sorry). I have seen both work and can’t say which one is better, although I suspect that the “better” one has to do with how quickly you need the content removed from search results about you and how flexible your prospects and customers are.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT OPTION ONE: TALK LOUDER AND MORE OFTEN
If you have some annoying news or reviews that aren’t budging from your Google search results, you will need to get more aggressive by talking louder and more often.

Identify the keyword that is the problem. Is it your name or your business’ name? Be certain that it’s the keywords that people are actually Googling to get to you. (If your name is Bob Smith but you have earned bunch of bad reviews about “Robert Smith” that don’t even show up when someone searches for you, then forget about trying to manage it… it’s not disrupting your sales funnel unless your contacts find it in some other way). But if it’s your name (or business name) that is causing the problem, and bad news is showing up on that word when people Google you, here’s how to talk louder and more often:

Own the word: Make sure you own the domain name of that keyword. If you can think of a few different websites, consider buying related domain names. For example, I might own AaronHoos.com, AaronHoos-publishing.com, AaronHoos-writing.com, AaronHoos-speaking.com, AaronHoos-consulting.com, etc., or AaronHoos.net, AaronHoos.org, AaronHoos.info, etc. You can’t just copy and paste the content from one site to another and you should endeavor to keep each site fresh. At the very least, start with one site that is exclusively your name or your business’ name, if at all possible.

Start a blog: Start a blog with that name in the URL. Blogger and Posterous are my favorites but there are several others. If you can manage content across all of them, then start a blog at several of them. (Make it easy on yourself by assigning a function to each blog. Maybe one blog is just a quick blog about books you’re reading and every blog post features another book. Maybe another blog is for casual posts about what’s going on in your life, and it’s tied to Flickr and Last.fm and Foursquare. Maybe another blog is your professional blog. Maybe another blog is where you post your favorite videos. Again, make sure your name is in the URLs: aaronhoos.blogspot.com and aaronhoos.posterous.com, for example.

Get social: Open a Twitter account. Use your name as the Twitter ID. Create a personal Facebook page and a business Facebook page. Change the URLs to your name. Create a LinkedIn profile and business profile (if applicable) and change the URLs to your name. Create a Foursquare page. Find other social media relevant to your niche and do the same. Get active on those sites… and own your name at each site AND make sure your privacy settings allow for being crawled by search engines and published to the web.

Post content at offsite content channels: Find 5 or more article publishing or distribution sites and get actively writing and publishing articles there. Use a combination of article distribution sites (ArticlesBase.com, Isnare.com, EzineArticles.com, etc.) and article publishing sites (Squidoo.com, HubPages.com, Suite101.com, Technorati.com, etc.)

Post news: Find an online news site that caters to your niche market and report the news in your industry or niche category.

Make your own news: Write a report – just something smallish like a 5-page PDF – and then write a series of press releases. Publish them at press release sites (and consider spending the $300+/- for a press release at PRWeb.com). Host the PDF on your site (where search engines can crawl it) but submit it to PDF search engines and ebook sites. (Scribd.com is my favorite).

Create profiles: There are several sites that allow you to create and/or manage a professional profile about yourself. They have various functions but include some of the following: GoogleProfiles, Twellow, PeoplePond, DandyID, just to name a few.

Post your resume: Create an online resume at resume sites. Depending on your industry, there might be industry-relevant sites that allow you to create a portfolio page. For a broad range of services, Guru and Elance are good examples.

And remember, the key here is to always use your name or business name (whatever the critical keyword is whose reputation you’re trying to “clean up” in Google) prominently – in the URL, the page title, subtitles, and content.

Once you’ve done all (or a majority) of these, you need to manage them: Cross link them, push RSS feeds from one to another, refresh your content, and add new content. Obviously it’s too much for anyone to do in a day or even a week, but it is manageable if you plan to write a blog every day, an article every week, a series of website refreshes every two weeks, and an update your profiles every month. Not everything has to change all the time but a good cross section of it should be refreshed regularly so that there is always something new being posted somewhere. In my opinion, there is no such thing as too much. If you can produce content – a lot of content – and that content is high quality and consistent, you will eventually claw back your reputation.

REPUTATION MANAGEMENT OPTION TWO: CHANGE THE STORY
If the above list of opportunities is too much time or effort, or if you have to move quickly and aren’t afraid of shedding a few of your prospects or clients along the way, simply change the story. Find a new, related keyword that you can use and start marketing with that one aggressively.

If you are Bob Smith and there is some bad press out there, start marketing yourself as Rob Smith, for example. If you don’t have a name you can shorten (like Aaron), switch to your initials or even a pen name or professional name. Lots of people use pen names or professional names, and not just for reputation management. If you are “Fast Web Designs,” change your name to something else and aim for another related keyword… “Quick Website Builders”.

SUMMARY AND ADDITIONAL RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT TIPS
The internet gives entrepreneurs an advantage and a disadvantage: The advantage is rapid deployment of marketing to quickly build and fill sales funnels with contacts. The disadvantage is rapid spread of news and reviews (which tends to more likely to be bad than good). Like any other asset, your online reputation needs to be monitored and managed carefully. And if you ever find bad news and reviews creeping onto the search results for your business, you can talk louder and more often or you can change the story.

I’m frequently asked by clients where they should concentrate their efforts while marketing their business. They know that the right content in the right channels can make a significant and positive impact on their business but there are so many choices!

Of course, every business is different but here are a few that I recommend frequently (in no particular order):

• Blogs
• Articles
• Twitter
• Press Releases
• Reports

I’ve found that a significant effort in each of these options can help to grow a business with better search engine optimization, better positioning, more traffic, and higher sales. I’ll briefly touch on each of these content channels and how to use them in your business.

CONTENT CHANNEL #1: BLOGS
I think there is no better value for your business than to have a blog that you post on regularly. A blog provides you with a direct voice to your consumers that seems more intimate than an article while also offering a way for them to communicate with you (through comments) around the stories you tell.

Furthermore, a blog is like a laboratory where you can share your thoughts and develop ideas, even if they are not fully thought-through.

Here’s how to grow your business with a blog:

• Make sure you have a branded blog (a blog with a .wordpress or .blogspot in the domain name is okay but not as good as one that is entirely yours).
• Try to post three times a week minimum.
• Keep posts between 250 and 1000 words, but an average of 400 to 500 is good to aim for.
• Develop a list of topics you want to write about so that you are never at a loss for what to say.
• Identify 3 keywords that are important to your business and make sure they are in nearly every blog.
• Don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through. People visit blogs to read blogs with the full understanding that they are one person’s take on a situation.
• Each week or month, stockpile a handful of blogs in your “drafts” folder that you can publish at a moment’s notice if you find that you do not have time that day.
• Avoid overtly selling in your blogs but a self-promotional link or advertisement in the footer or sidebar of your post is appropriate.

CONTENT CHANNEL #2: ARTICLES
Even though there are millions and millions of articles out there right now, there is still space for you. Articles continue to be a powerhouse traffic-driver for many businesses.

You can use articles to position yourself as a leading thinker in your industry. That will drive highly qualified traffic to your site.

Here’s how to grow your business with articles:

• Create a publishing calendar so that you have enough articles to publish 1 a week for 6 months to a year. If you can hire someone to write your articles, you may want to consider doing more (say, 1 a day). However, most people don’t have time to write 1 article a day without the help of a professional. (You’ve got other things to think about!)
• Aim to keep your articles between 450 and 600 words. Some articles are suitable to use words like “I” and “me” but many articles are best when they use a more neutral voice. This helps them to appear more credible. Save the “I” and “me” voice for your blog.
• If possible, prewrite and stockpile as many articles as you can so that you have some on hand for when you’re too busy. (This is frequently a marketing channel that is neglected when things get busy).
• Look around for highly trusted sites to publish your work on. Consider who the target audience is first, but don’t forget to take PageRank into consideration.
• Write content that is highly valuable to readers. One easy way to think of topics is to consider a question your audience has. Make that question your title and then respond to the question in the body of the article.
• Use the resource box to promote yourself.

CONTENT CHANNEL #3: TWITTER
Twitter really burst into the mainstream in 2009. Soon, business was being conducted in tweets of 140 characters or less. Twitter will continue its strong position in the market in the near future but now that the “honeymoon” period is over, users are forced to make sure that are doing the right things to be effective.

Here’s how to grow your business with Twitter:

• Remember that Twitter is a social network. People don’t want to be sold. They want to build relationships with others. Leave your hardselling techniques for your website and instead focus on sharing yourself with your followers.
• Twitter is a microblog so if you’re not sure what to write, just think of it as a blog… only smaller. It’s okay to talk about what you’re doing or where you’re going or a movie you just saw. Contemporary business does not separate business life and personal life but finds a balance between the two.
• Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to compress long domain names into manageable ones.
• You can keep your social engagement manageable by engaging with a small handful of people on a regular basis and with your broader network slightly less.
• Although most tweets should be written in the “here and now”, there is room for some pre-written tweets which can be scheduled to post later at HootSuite.
• While you shouldn’t sell on Twitter, you should make sure that your bio points people in the right direction so that when they are ready to buy from you, they can find you easily.

CONTENT CHANNEL #4: PRESS RELEASES
Press releases continue to be a solid producer of results and, thanks to the way the web has changed how we do business, press releases are now a channel that can be accessed by the media (just like they’ve always been) but also by consumers. Press releases provide a way to get into Google News rapidly and get relevant backlinks.

Here’s how to grow your business with press releases:

• Make sure that whatever you are writing about is newsworthy. Too many businesses write about non-newsworthy content and try to pass it off as a press release.
• Keep your press release to 400 – 600 words. Much longer than that and people simply won’t read it.
• Make sure you have some contact information inside your press release.
• A press release should be written from the point of view of a journalist (so you should refer to your business in the third person). However, be sure to include quotes in your press release and those can be in first person and are ideal to promote yourself.
• Don’t be afraid to spend money on distribution. Businesses frequently hire me to write press releases but then release them through a free service which is often less credible and very limited. PRWeb is the best service with paid distribution services between $80 and $360.
• Typical newscycles are a month or less. So consider publishing a press release each month about your subject.

CONTENT CHANNEL #5: WHITEPAPERS AND REPORTS
Reports or whitepapers are highly credible positioning documents that businesses can use to demonstrate thought-leadership on a subject. While some reports may not generate huge amounts of traffic or be solely responsible for a sale, they play a key role in driving more traffic and more sales by compelling people with their credibility. A business that wants to rapidly achieve the status of an authority on a topic should produce reports or whitepapers.

Here’s how to grow your business with whitepapers or reports:

• Create a publishing calendar and plan to produce at least one report every quarter or, better yet, one report every two weeks.
• Aim to publish reports that are at least 3 pages (not including a cover). However, reports of 5-20 pages are better. Reports of a hundred pages or more are not unheard of but will need to be extremely valuable for customers to read them. (After about 40 pages, you may want to consider breaking it up into 2 or 3 reports).
• Reports need to strike the balance between being thought-leadership pieces and being relevant for consumers. It’s okay to produce a report that anticipates trends a hundred years from now… as long as your business is also producing reports that address immediate needs.
• Good report topics should combine high quality information with high value applicability so that readers can apply what they’ve learned.
• While not always necessary, reports may be considered more authoritative if they have links and footnotes.

There are, of course, many other content channels out there. These are my favorite and I’ve seen them produce good results for clients. The important thing is not to adopt as many content channels as you can, but rather to find the right mix of content channels to reach your target audience.

I wanted to show my work and demonstrate the thought process that goes into content strategy. Here is simple content strategy “story” of one project I’m working on right now.

This project is ultimately a list-building whitepaper project. The client wants to build their list of newsletter subscribers and they intend to do that by asking site visitors to leave their email address in exchange for a whitepaper (which automatically subscribes them to the newsletter). So, we start by charting out a really basic project outline from start to finish.

STEP ONE: GENERATING LEADS
We start by deciding on the lead generation method, which is Google AdWords. The AdWords are actually written and ready to go, created for the client by another vendor…

Pretty simple and straightforward so far. There might be other traffic generating opportunities in the future but AdWords is a nice, measurable, highly-controllable tools.




STEP TWO: TURNING LEADS INTO PROSPECTS
By clicking the Google AdWords, the visitors will get to a website. It’s here that we reach our first “unknown”. The client already had web copy written but isn’t sure which site to post the content at. We could do a A/B split test but they aren’t decided yet and are considering one of two domains as options. One of their domains is brand new and would be dedicated to this project; the other domain has pre-existing content and this would be added as a new page to that site…

The plan here is for a long-form sales copy with a clear call to action at the end. The call to action would be something along the lines of “download your whitepaper here” with a place to insert their email address.




STEP THREE: POSITIONING TO THE PROSPECT
Next, we talk about what action they want their site visitors to take. No matter which of the 2 domain options they want their site to eventually reside at, the audience will ultimately be prompted to give their email address in exchange for a whitepaper…

The whitepaper would be emailed to them in a PDF file or text file and although it would be positioned as a whitepaper, the reality is that it is the first in a series of newsletters. You’ll note the text to the right of the whitepaper “box” that asks if the whitepaper should be accessible as a registered or unregistered asset. We’ve just decided to make it registered but may measure response and consider making it unregistered. By making it registered, we may reduce the number of people who are willing to give up their email to read it; by making it unregistered, we can increase the number of readers but reduce the number of people who will subscribe the newsletter after reading the whitepaper. It’s not an easy choice.




STEP FOUR: BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP
By providing their email for the opportunity to download the whitepaper, the audience is automatically subscribed to the newsletter, which has already been written…

In this case, newsletters would be spaced 2 weeks apart and would provide content that supports the content found in the whitepaper.




STEP FIVE: MONETIZATION/WHAT’S NEXT?
And it’s here that another big question has been raised: What’s next? The client initially wanted to send out a newsletter and assumed that was the last step. I disagreed and recommended a clearer “back-end” sales strategy. What products or services do they plan to sell? What action do they want their subscribers to take? And so we end up with…

This orange box is another “placeholder” to highlight a critical decision that must be made before we can move forward. Just having a growing list of subscribers isn’t good enough. You need to have a plan after. It might be that you want to present products and services to them or you want to increase web traffic or you want to increase calls to your office or you want them to click through to special offers from advertisers that you periodically send out.

Whatever is decided, this can inspire the newsletters to be revised to more appropriately present whatever the monetization action needs to be.

SUMMARY
From here we have a very strong direction to bring the project to a successful completion. We know exactly what decisions still need to be made, and we see the full process so we can make sure that all the content lines up exactly the way it is supposed to, to compel people to go from one step to the next.