TCC Podcast #318: Marketing Automation with Simon De Brito

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
Simon’s LinkedIn 
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Free month of Brain.FM
Episode 183
Episode 242
Episode 256

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Let’s talk a little bit about marketing automation. So as copywriters, we have the opportunity to work with a lot of different tools. Often we simply take care of the copy and then we hand over a copy document and let the client worry about getting into the right tools, whether that’s their email service provider or an automated social media content posting tool, or maybe even something more robust like Marketo or HubSpot. But other copywriters are taking the time to learn the ins and outs of these kinds of tools in order to bring greater expertise and strategic thinking to the table for their clients. They’re solving even bigger problems, which can be a pretty compelling competitive advantage. Our guest for today’s episode of the Copywriter Club podcast is marketing automation specialist Simon De Brito, and he shared a bit about how mastering these tools can make you a better marketer, whether you do it for your clients or for your own business. But before we get to the interview with Simon, let me first introduce my guest host for the day. He’s been on the podcast as an interview guest himself several different times. He’s been a guest host once before, and he’s the person who introduced me to Goo Goo Clusters and started my summer downfall with sugar. It’s Justin Blackman. Hey, Justin.

Justin Blackman:  I will happily take the blame for the Goo Goo Clusters. They are amazing. That was my favorite part of the Nashville event. Literally, that was the first thing I thought of when you guys said that you were going there.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, Goo Goo Clusters, I ate three bags of them. I’m glad they don’t sell them here. At least you have to really go looking for them. And yeah, it knocked me off of my no-sugar bandwagon, which I’m back on. No Goo Goo Clusters on the desk today. But yeah, they’re either the very most delicious thing in the world or the most evil thing in the world, or maybe both.

Justin Blackman:  I’m sure that there’s a marketing lesson in there about scarcity and urgency of, “Oh, I’m going down the airplane. I need to get one more bag because I’m not going to be able to get it anywhere else.” Yeah, it’s amazing. Every now and again, I’m here in Georgia. Every now and again, I’ll stumble on a gas station near the border by Tennessee that will have it in Georgia and it’ll feel like contraband. It’s like I can’t tell anyone about it and I’m just going to buy them all and hoard it and get really fat and love it.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, that’s my problem. That’s what I did and they’re delicious. But enough about Goo Goo Clusters. Before we jump into our interview, Simon, we do need to remind everybody, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Accelerator. That’s the program that will help you lay the foundation for a successful business. Whether you’ve been doing this copywriting thing for a while, maybe you’re rethinking your brand or changing your niche, or even if you’re just starting out, it’s a bit like earning a copywriting business degree. It covers everything that you need to know from figuring out your X factor to creating packages that your clients want to purchase, as well as things like pricing and nicheing and finding and managing clients and so much more. We’re opening the doors for new members very soon. So to make sure that you are on the notification list, go to thecopywriteraccelerator.com and just drop in your email there, and we will let you know. Justin, you were in, I think, the very first accelerator we ever ran.

Justin Blackman:  I was, yeah. I was in the beta round, and that’s when Kira held the gun to my head and made me write 10,000 headlines.

Rob Marsh:  So lots of good things can come from the accelerator. I mean, I didn’t intend to talk about this, but in some ways, it launched your business and you into the copywriting world.

Justin Blackman:  Not in some ways, in every way. Highly recommend it; big fan of that one. I actually still use some of the templates from there.

Rob Marsh:  So lots of really cool stuff there. We’ll be telling you more about it, but make sure you hear about it by going to thecopywriteraccelerator.com and get on the waitlist. Okay, so let’s get to our interview with Simon.

Kira Hug:  How did you end up as a marketing automation specialist?

Simon De Brito:  Yeah, so I started working in the US close to 10 years ago in a small startup company with around 20 people. And my goal there was to just recreate the whole marketing department. What I found most effective way was to create an inbound strategy. And inbound strategies, what you do is you create a lot of content so people can find you and then you can convert them with this content and then start nurturing them. So I start sending them more content to qualify them and send them to your sales team. So really using content as a key of the lead generation process. And so I started driving to really going into automation nurturing programs, which led me to my second job in a bigger company, but just really on the digital marketing side. Again, implementing an automation process and inbound process, creating all the workflows, the nurturing, really basing everything on content, content that brings value to the prospects. And now to my third company. We have a marketing department, we have a digital department, and in this department, I just focus on automating nurturing programs and helping generate leads and making sure they go to the right person and receive the right content.

Rob Marsh:  So Simon, I’m curious, a lot of our listeners are copywriters, but some of them may be thinking, “Oh, maybe the copywriting thing or the content thing isn’t quite right.” I’d actually like to get on the marketing side. What advice could you give somebody who wants a career path like the one that you just outlined, what kinds of things could they be doing in order to connect with marketers and really figure that kind of a career path out?

Simon De Brito:  Thinking about me, my main idea was, on the marketing side, thinking about conversion and thinking about how do I bring value to the person I’m trying to sell to? I’m not here to just spam people to just send just a lot of emails or things like that. So, it’s really thinking about, how do I bring value to the people? The value came with great content that’s really aligned to the persona that I’m going to talk to. And then from there, it’s just really pulling the thread on this and just keep creating more and more content and realizing how I’ve created one great piece of content, what’s the next big piece of content that can be very useful for my audience? Then what’s the third one? And then you just start creating a workflow of a suite of emails or a path that people can go down to and really better understand your product, your solution, and how you can fix their problem. So yeah, it’s really natural in a sense.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, it feels like it flowed for you. In addition to content writing though, are there other skills that they should be thinking about adding? Do they need to know a certain set of tools or do they need to dive more into strategy? Or is it just to get better at content, get better at solving the problems and it all serendipitously comes together?

Simon De Brito:  There are a lot of tools that will help you create your workflows, for example. So a workflow is when someone enters through one door and what type of content you send after and send after, because you don’t want to be… So for example, if we’re talking about tools, but imagine for an emailing program, you have to set up your email program every week or every two weeks or every month. That can become very time-consuming. What you want is something automated. So you set it one time, you set your five emails automated, and once a person enters through one content, they receive the next five pieces of content. So you can learn about automation tools. Mailchimp has one, HubSpot has one. I’m a big fan of HubSpot because you can really track conversions, KPIs and create very good sequences of emails.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. And I definitely want to talk about the tools that you use, but first can you just talk a little bit more about what you do today in your current role, just to give us a better idea of what that looks like? So maybe you can give us an example. I mean, you don’t have to walk us through an entire day, but just give us a couple of examples of how you spend your time. Are you working directly with clients? Are you focused on automations and managing a team? What does that look like?

Simon De Brito:  So right now, I’m in a scale-up company in Europe wanting to be really number one in the e-commerce sector. So a very fast-paced, very ambitious company, a large marketing team with different departments like product department, content department that creates just all the content, the blog articles, and then a digital team and a campaign activation team. So for example, the content team is going to create all the content, the blog article, the white papers. They’re going to say to the campaign team and the campaign team is like, “Okay, so I need to activate this market.” We’re in Europe, so maybe it’s going to be a campaign to the French market or the UK market. What’s the best tactic to do this and what are the nurturing programs that we can do, once they convert, to activate them? So my role is to get to that point. Okay, we have the first conversion through this piece of content. What happens next? What’s the second email? What’s the third email? What time do I send this lead to the sales team? Once you say to the sales team, what keeps going on in the background so we can keep nurturing them, teach them about our solution. So it’s all this automation program. It’s in between the marketing and the sales team and really making sure that the technology is following and it’s really happening.

Rob Marsh:  So as you think about your role and what you do, and obviously it starts with content, it starts with something that’s compelling. So I’m curious, how do you figure out what content is needed, and beyond that, how do you avoid just this slurry of terrible content out there that fills up all of our feeds and Google searches, and how do you create content that rises to the top, meets that need? Walk us through that process. Because I think personally, I’m not interested in creating bad content. I want to create great content, I want to be at the top, but it’s hard. In fact, it’s exceptionally hard.

Simon De Brito:  Absolutely, absolutely. And I don’t have the magical recipe for great content, but I think to me and to the team I work with, we start with three persona, identifying a persona and identifying where the persona is in the sales cycle. The sales cycle, there is three steps. This awareness where people are really trying to really just starting to understand that they have a problem, then there is consideration. They’re starting to really, “Okay, I have a problem now what can I do to fix this? Is there a solution out there that can help me fix this?” And then there is the decision part. “I want to make a decision. I want to purchase a solution to help me fix this problem. What’s the best product?”

So one phase, persona. The second is this awareness, consideration, decision. Based on that, you can create your content. For example, someone who has a problem with tracking their conversions on the program, you’re just going to have the first awareness content is like, “Okay, do you know how to track your leads? Do you know how to convert?” That’s something that’s going to start to interest you and start you asking, “Okay, yeah, no, actually I don’t know how to convert to speeds.” Second piece of content that’s going to help you be like, “Okay, well this is a solution that we’ve implemented for this and this customer, for example, you can learn more. Here’s how we do it with our product.” And the third one is really case studies, demos, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s really basing it on the persona, what problem you’re going to solve.

Kira Hug:  What is the ideal pace of this content and the workflow that you typically create to move people from awareness to consideration to decision? I guess it could depend on how many factors, but what do you think about that?

Simon De Brito:  It will depend on the manufacturer indeed, the industry, the type of product that you’re trying to sell. If you are in B2C, so business to consumers, you want to go a little faster because people tend to make more fast decisions when buying products. I mean, yeah, compared to B2B, business to business, where it is going to take a longer time, longer sales cycle, sometimes it’s two to three months depending on how much the solution you’re going to buy. If you’re going to spend $100,000 on the solution for example, you’re not going to make that decision in two days. So you expect a long sales cycle. In general still, I like the nurturing program or the workflow program to be around one email a week, basically in general as a general rule to just keep in the mind of the person and not expand them too much.

You just want to really be respectful of people’s time and you want to provide value so you can’t just be emailing them three times a day, it could be a little annoying for the person. Then the second one also, you can use intent to trigger those workflows at the right time. For example, if someone comes back to your website, maybe not right away, you can send an email, but the next day or something like that because they’ve thought about you, so maybe it could be a good time soon after to keep following up and keep having this conversation with the person.

Rob Marsh:  Let’s talk about some of the kinds of content that you might be sending. So if we’re talking about a weekly cadence, or maybe it’s twice a week or whatever you think your audience needs to hear, are you just sending email messages? Are you attaching case studies or white papers? Are you linking to blog posts? What does that look like? And maybe even could you step us through an example of what you might build out for a particular client?

Simon De Brito:  Yeah, that’s a very good question, and something that I even talked about too. There is, if you do it right, a scoring system in place. A scoring system is, for example, someone doesn’t know the resource, the first time you’re going to give them, for example, one point. If you send a second email and they open your email, one point is not going to be easy. Let’s say a resource is 10 points. They open your email, you want to give one point to the email because it’s an action, it’s not as valuable as a resource download, but it’s here in action, so the scoring is going higher and higher. If you link to another piece of content and then download that piece of content, then you add another 10 points. Now that’s 21 points. You keep sending emails, they don’t open, they don’t open, but the third email, fourth email, they open and you ask them to take a demo with you, demo check bot for the salespersons, that’s going to be 50 points.

And when they reach a certain point, now it’s time to send it to the salesperson. And as far as content, we are really trying to take them through the sales cycle. So if they come in the awareness, we’re going to try to send blog articles, we’re going to try to send market studies, things that are pretty generic about the market, the trends. Then when they get into the consideration phase, we’re going to send guides, things about that that can talk a little bit more about the product. Maybe a webinar there could be a good example too because it’s going to be a little more advanced in the sales process. They’re really trying to understand the solution or fix their pain points. And then the third one, the last one’s going to be really success stories with customers that you’ve had. You’re trying to really reassure them that your product is good, that you’ve had successful customers that have been working with you. So it’s more the reassurance step at this point.

Kira Hug: Can you talk more about the scoring system? I’ve heard about scoring systems, but it still feels, I don’t know, it’s just disconnected from what I do. So what is your team looking at? Are they reviewing it daily, weekly to see, “Okay, these people hit 100 points, we’ve got to send them an email right now.” How does it work on the backend?

Simon De Brito:  On the backend, everything is automated. Everything’s automated. I mentioned HubSpot earlier, so I use HubSpot for example. There’s other ones like Marketo for really large teams, but there are a lot of tools that are going to do the system which is automated. So I have workflows in place. So I have on one hand the scoring system. So for example, they download a resource, it’s 20 points. Another resource, another 20 points, and then a contact form is 100. When they reach a hundred, I have an email that’s being sent automatically to the sales team saying, “Hey, this person has reached 100 points, please call them.” For example, I use 100 points exactly in my things. For example, I give right away a hundred points to a contact form or a demo form, that allows me to make sure that all the contacts in the demo are sent straight to the sales team and all the content I know I need to nurture them until they reach this many points.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I mean you mentioned a couple of tools, Marketo and HubSpot, those are almost enterprise-level, they’re pretty expensive. There are some other tools, Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, Ontraport, they’re less expensive, maybe a few hundred dollars to maybe $1,000 a month depending on size of a list. They also allow point scoring, and we should probably mention this isn’t the thing that somebody can do out of their Gmail box. To do this manually in an Excel spreadsheet or whatever, probably not going to work. So it does take some sophisticated tools, but it seems like this is a skill set that a lot of copywriters could add to and basically provide this incredibly valuable service to their clients who, if they’re bringing in lots and lots of leads, they don’t know which leads are valuable, which ones are more value or hot or cold. And just adding this to a skill set feels really valuable. If you were adding somebody to your team, is that the skill that you’re looking for, somebody who understands this level of sophistication as far as putting together marketing programs? Or is it less important than other things?

Simon De Brito:  It depends on what role you’re hiring. If you’re looking at someone that really just wants to write content, it depends on the size of your team also. If you want someone that just writes great content that really understands the logic because there’s a real art between creating the right content to the right person and being able to touch an audience. That’s very, very complicated to do I feel like, because maybe I’m a little bit more on the technical side, but understanding what happens behind the content creation to me is super, super important. You’re not creating content just to create content just to pass time. You’re creating content because there’s an end goal, and in a business usually, it’s to have that conversion. If you don’t have that conversion in the first strike, just because it was a cold awareness type of content, you need to understand what it takes to bring them to the next level and turn a cold lead into a hard lead. So I wouldn’t necessarily look for someone that has the skill set, but someone that really understands a sales process and the marketing process and why we’re creating content for, and how it ties into the pipeline pretty much.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. And I guess this might be a question for both of you, but if I want to start offering this to my clients where I’m writing the content, writing the email copy, and I also am now handling the backend, all the automations, in order for me to improve that skill set, what is the best way to approach that? Because there are so many different platforms. So there’s HubSpot or do I go smaller? Is there one tool that if I master that tool, I can pretty much figure out all the other ones?

Simon De Brito:  I think the basic thing to me in nurturing is to understand the nurturing aspect. What’s a workflow? To me, that’s the number one skill set. You can do that with something as simple as I think Mailchimp has, and I think a lot of people have Mailchimp because it’s easy, you’re trying to build your list and you’re starting to send some emails. So I think Mailchimp, for example, is a nurturing marketing automation program where you can start creating sequences, workflows. So really understanding just how a workflow works. You create one great piece of content that you know is going to attract a lot of people, great. What’s happening behind them? How are you going to differentiate the people that just maybe were students or tech people versus the people that won’t want to actually take an action on your content?

And for that you could create workflows. For example, they don’t know this piece of content, you send three or four different emails and you see that at the end, $1,000 people downloaded the content, but 20 opened the last email or just like that. Maybe the 20 is something you need to look into because they’ve been following your process, they’ve been keeping opening your emails so they have an interest in your product or something that you’re offering. So even without the scoring for example, that could be one thing that could help you tell that someone’s interested in your product.

Rob Marsh:  So we were talking a little bit about this before we started recording, Simon, and I want to come back to this idea. One of the struggles that content writers have is they can’t always attach the work that they do to an actual cell. And in part, not entirely, but in part because of that, they often charge less than copywriters who are writing sales pages, sales emails and can basically say, “Hey, this page created X number of sales and X number of dollars, therefore my work is worth this.” How do you track and attach value to content so that if you create a new piece or your team creates a new piece, you know that is contributing to a sale. Or maybe conversely, it’s not getting any interest at all, and so now you know you need to create something different.

Simon De Brito:  Yeah, it’s again, back to your tech stack, really the tools that you’re going to use. And the best way to do this, try to find a way to really integrate the entire marketing to sales pipeline. So we’re going to use, for example, a software for marketing, a software for sales like a CRM. And both are tied together and they’re sending information back and forth so I know exactly when someone downloads a piece of content. If it turns into a cell six months later, I’m able to track that because I have this connection between the two systems. And a lot of these systems run on email addresses. So a contact, most of the time, almost always, is an email address.

So if you can see that you have this many people that downloaded the content based on this email address and you have this many people that had a sale, there is often a way to connect the two together because the email address is the key element that you’re going to find in both tech stack in both systems. So yeah, you’re able to do it, which is much easier than we were talking about earlier than when we’re just running on Google Analytics for example. All those tools that have a lot of data, but for very good reasons, they are anonymous and so you’re not able to track a conversion all the way to the end. So these automation platforms, these marketing tools and the sales tools really help you to connect the two together.

Kira Hug:  So to go back to the workflow, what are some mistakes that we could easily make, maybe mistakes that you’ve made or your team has made that we should try to avoid?

Simon De Brito:  That’s a good question. Lots of mistakes.

Rob Marsh:  Let’s talk about all of them.

Simon De Brito:  I don’t know if we have time. No, it’s really always a learning process. What is a big one? Or not necessarily a big one, but just the main one could be not thinking about connecting all your assets. And so you have people downloading one asset, but they don’t fall into your workflow. That could be a big one that you have thought about connecting one of the assets. You have all your nurturing programs, but you forget about another one or a third one, and those guys don’t receive your nurturing programs. And so they’re sleeping, they’re dormant, nobody touches them. You thought you had it already, but you forget to connect that one because you’ve done it for once. And that’s where it becomes complicated depending on the program you have. But if you have something automated and something manual, you’re always creating new content.

So technically you always have to maybe adjust the first list or the entry gate, let’s say, to your nurturing program. So that could be a pitfall. Another one also is to not update enough or often enough your workflow. Maybe if your workflow is talking about something that was created in 2019 with data from 2019, maybe that’s not relevant enough anymore to your audience. So regularly, I don’t say every day or every week or we’re trying to do something that’s automated. So that can last a long term, but maybe every six months or something like that, maybe try to just go back and look at your workflow and say, “Okay, is this still relevant? Should I get this content? Is there new content that I’ve created that is better than the one I’ve used?” And then the last one, I guess it’s not analyzing the KPIs. For example, you have one email that opens at 20, 30%, which is pretty good. And you have one that opens at 5% and then the third one opens again at 20, 30%. Maybe you need to look at the one at 5%. Is the content not good? Is your title not good? Is there something that you need to change? So that would be the main ones, I guess.

Rob Marsh:  Okay, Justin, so let’s go ahead and touch on just a few of the things that Simon has been talking about. First of all, what stood out to you in the first half of this conversation?

Justin Blackman:  I used to work in content marketing and not everybody has the same approach as Simon. A lot of times it’s like, all right, what are people going to want to read about? What can we do to bring clients to us? What can we do for us? How do we find people? What I love about Simon’s approach is, how can we create the most value? And he’s constantly looking for providing answers for people and he’s not teasing them. We’ve all gotten books, which are just a pitch in disguise. He’s not about that. He’s about providing value and demonstrating what they can do for clients rather than just teasing answers that are, “Click here for more.” He’s not talking about gating content. He’s talking about what does a client actually need, What does a customer need? How can we be of most service to them?

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I agree. I mean, he’s not creating content to create content. There’s that higher purpose. And I know we’re going to get to this a bit later, it’s starting with that persona of the client, but the real thing is that problem, the problem that they need to have solved. And I think obviously we know, most copywriters, that’s where we start with that problem. And then we need to jump in with the solution and then all of the social proof and all the things that we will add in. But oftentimes, clients start marketing from the, “Okay, I need to get my course out there. I need to get my vitamin supplement out there. People need to hear about this.” And so it’s all about them as opposed to the other way around. Yeah, it’s good that you picked up on that because I think that’s maybe the number one thing that we should start copywriting with is, “Hey, what’s the actual problem we’re solving, as opposed to what’s the thing we’re selling?”

Justin Blackman:  And he’s got some great information about the stages of awareness. I mean, we’re copywriters, so we know all about that. That’s what we talk about. That’s what we preach. What’s nice is that I think by providing more value, he’s able to create more content based on each individual stage and it just creates a whole world of resources for him. And there’s just fantastic value that’s not about what I can pitch, but what does my customer need? I really like that approach.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I agree. We also talked a bit about what makes good content and I’m going to throw this at you, Justin, because you write some killer emails. I love some of the messaging that you do. When you’re writing content, where do you start? What are you thinking about? Is it just whatever happens to be on TV that day, or how are you making sure that the content you create connects?

Justin Blackman:  Well, I’ve always got an overarching theme about brand voice or about writing with style and doing things a little bit differently and having it work. Sometimes it doesn’t, but I’ll talk about that too. But usually I’ll just get inspired by something that I see on TV or something that I’ve read or something funny. And I’ll just sleep on it for a little bit and then I’ll just start writing. I don’t always know where it’s going. Very often the first half of my emails get cut, they just wind up being just fluff because I don’t really know where it comes from. And then I’ll write something and it’ll connect and be like, “Ah, all right, here’s the lesson, here’s the real meat.” And then from there, it’s editing and tying it in a little bit. So the way that my content comes, it’s a little bit organic and a lot of editing.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. And when you were writing for clients, I know you don’t do that much anymore, but when you were doing that, was it the exact same process or were you starting from a place, like what Simon was talking about, “Okay, what is the thing that I can help them with today?”

Justin Blackman:  I think it was a little different. When I was writing for clients, I knew what I had to hit. There were certain beats that needed to be in it, and I laid those out in a framework and then I filled in the gaps in between. Nowadays it’s just free flow and I use unconscious competence to let the work shape itself. When it’s B2B or B2C, it’s definitely more deliberate. And I think that it’s important to mention certain things. You can’t just go willy-nilly, you have to hit certain things. There are benchmarks for the content, there’s a flow, maybe there’s external links that get brought in. So I believe in that world, it has to be pretty deliberate.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, your process I think is quite a bit like mine. I’ll start with an idea and just start writing. And oftentimes, I’ll have to rewrite my intro three or four times. I’m like, “Wait, that’s not going anywhere. Let’s back up.” That kind of a thing. But it’s always with the idea that we’re going to be talking about something helpful at the end. Usually when I’m writing for the copywriter club, it’s one of the programs or something that we can do there. But it’s not just selling the program, it’s got to teach something. It’s got to share something because most of the people who are reading aren’t going to join the program today, but it still needs to teach something or offer some value. I hate that you got to give value, offer value. That’s such a trite phrase now. But there’s truth to it. If all you do is promote, promote, promote, you can burn out your list, turn people off. So you’ve got to be doing something positive or valuable before you even get to the turn or have the right to send the next email, which might pitch.

Justin Blackman:  Yeah, I mean luckily, we’re in a world where we get to have a little bit more of our personality into it, and sometimes the value that you deliver is strictly entertainment. And that can be okay. In Simon’s world, it’s got to convert. So I think the way that he measures things is more deliberate and more tangible and definitely more strategic as he’s demonstrated and talked about. So maybe it’s not as fun, but the fact that you can track it directly to sales is really an amazing value that he brings.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, agreed. We also talked a little bit about scoring systems. Some of the tools that he mentioned have scoring systems or allow you to assign different points or values to things that your customers, your email readers, whatever are doing. And this is something that gets used a lot in enterprise situations. You may have literally thousands of leads coming in a month and you’ve got to be able to differentiate between those that are not that interested versus those that are interested. And so as Simon was describing, somebody opens an email, you give them a point or maybe five points, if they download and read a case study, maybe they get another 10 points. If they’re on a sales call at some point, maybe they get 50 points. And as you start to filter your client list by the number of points, it can start to tell you, okay, who are the people who are engaging, not just with your content, but with your business, with your brand? Who might be most likely to purchase something?

You can start to look at purchasers and the points that they have and start to see, okay, we know that if somebody joins this program, they did these five things first and funnels around those five things. Or you can look back and say, “Who are the other customers on our list who have done these five things that this might be a fit for?” So there’s all kinds of things that you can do with scoring systems. I think a lot of copywriters, because again, we focus on copy and not necessarily automation tools, we skip the opportunity to learn about some of this stuff or to be able to contribute to our client’s success with these kinds of things. I know, Justin, you’ve had some experience with some scoring systems, not necessarily from the building them standpoint, but from using the scores and seeing how that works in some of the businesses you’ve worked at. What was that like?

Justin Blackman:  Yeah, sure. When I worked at the hotel company, we had 14 different brands and we had loyalty programs. So we were literally able to see people’s scores based on how many points they had in their accounts. So there were the people that were above and beyond the 80/20 rule that the 80% of revenue is coming from 20 people. That holds true. It was that way for sure. And we were able to custom create the content for them. Sometimes we would literally send them one off emails written directly to them if they were high enough value because we understood the true value that they had. But also like Simon, not all scoring is weighted the same. Certain pieces of content are going to be far more valuable than other pieces. So it’s not just like if you open five emails, but if you click emails and you get more points, but if you click a specific email, you get double the amount of points. So I think what Simon does is really smart that he weighs it, so when a certain action happens, you get brought to the sales team and there are ways to jump the line and get involved in that. I was not involved in the weighting of the scores. I would love to know the science behind that to know exactly who’s ready to buy based on their actions rather than just guessing.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. I mean, it’s a skill and I think this is one place where a lot of copywriters could contribute more to their customer’s businesses. In fact, I mean, we could get to the point where we could actually help some of our customers who are using systems like ActiveCampaign, Infusionsoft, or Ontraport. They all allow some level of scoring and many of our clients have access to those tools, but they’re not using the scoring because they’re just using it to send out a bunch of emails. So there may be some strategic opportunities for the right copywriters to build some real serious products, valuable products that they can offer their clients just around lead scoring.

Justin Blackman:  Yeah, I mean, there’s so much there. Coming from a marketing background, ad agencies, we’re always talking about how many impressions an ad got. I mean, that could be if you have a billboard in New York City in Times Square, it’s millions per day, per week, I don’t know the exact math. But the fact is they’re counting people that are walking by it, never looking up. So that doesn’t really count for anything, but it’s a great number and it looks really good on a resume or a report to a client. What the scoring does is it actually shows you the real message, what’s actually happening, and there’s so much value in that.

Rob Marsh:  Absolutely. So as we’re talking about this, we were talking a little bit about the value of content and sometimes some content is more valuable than others. And I actually asked Simon about this in the interview about tracking the value of content because like I said to him, sales content is pretty easy. It’s like you click on the sales page, you buy the product, there’s almost a one to one click ratio there. But blog posts, case studies, white papers, all of that stuff, that’s that top of funnel content, sometimes is really difficult to tie to the next step or steps after that. Some of the tools that we were talking about can actually do that, the HubSpots, the Marketos of the world, but most of us aren’t using those tools. I’ve got thoughts about how we track the value of content. What do you do in your business? How do you know when something hits when it doesn’t hit, Justin?

Justin Blackman:  Very often I don’t. What’s funny is I’ve got some emails that I wrote months ago and I got a couple of responses like, “Oh, this is a great email. I really enjoyed that one,” and that’s it. It didn’t get clicks. Some of my emails don’t even have CTAs on it. But then I get some sales later on and I’ll reach out to the person. I was like, “Hey, just curious. What made you decide that now is the right time?” And they’re like, “Oh, it was actually that email that I got from you three months ago that made me know that I wanted to buy this. I was just waiting for the right time.” And that’s when I like, “Okay, now I’m going to put that in my welcome sequence.” I don’t have a great method for this. I really, really wish that I did. I love that Simon has it. I wish I had it for my business. It seems really scary and overwhelming to try to implement, but the fact is, I don’t have this stuff and I wish I did.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely ways to get back into it. And it takes a lot of data to do it, but if you know, say, the number of visitors to a website or the number of people who are getting to a particular asset, and then you also know at the end of the funnel how many are closing, you can start to back into that stuff. But it does take a lot of data and I think that’s why some of these tools are really important to get to know or if you’ve got access to them to use them. And while we’re talking about tools, one last thing before we’ll go back to the interview. There are so many out there, I just started making a short list. They’re the e