Brad Sugars Promoting Marcus Sheridan On UK Tour

You may have seen that ActionCOACH founder Brad Sugars has been on tour in the UK this week. You may have even been to one of his events like I did a few years back.  

Brad was an energetic and inspirational speaker and he managed to distill complicated concepts into easily digestible chunks. One area he really focused on was marketing and how small business should be concentrating heavily, & making the most of digital marketing to grow their businesses. 

Marcus Sheridan & ‘They Ask You Answer’

Brad has been talking marketing again this week and has been on tour in the UK with Marcus Sheridan the author of the book ‘They Ask You Answer’. Brad appears to be a big fan & is promoting the marketing techniques that Marcus sets out in his book. I get this, ‘They Ask You Answer’ is a really excellent book and after years working in Digital Marketing it is one of the best books I have read on the subject.

Inbound Marketing

‘They Ask You Answer’ basically promotes the idea of Inbound Marketing. This is where you create helpful, useful content on your website that answers potential clients questions and this content will in turn bring quality organic traffic to your site. This traffic is then converted into leads for your business by having valuable offers on your website that potential clients can access in return for their contact details. 

Inbound Marketing and the ‘They Ask You Answer’ philosophy is great. I was a committed HubSpot Partner for years and have seen it work for clients brilliantly… however…

The Problem With Inbound Marketing For SME’s

The problem with Inbound Marketing & Marcus Sheridan’s approach for SME’s is 2 fold:

• Time
  • Inbound Marketing is based on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) & SEO takes time. Months and months and years not weeks. 
  • Most SME’s do not have the luxury of time. They can’t invest the huge amounts of time & effort that Inbound Marketing takes to then have to wait years to see the results.
• Capacity & Skills
  • Inbound Marketing & SEO are based on content creation. This can be web pages, blog posts, infographics, video etc. & most small businesses don’t have the skills internally to create all this content.
  • Even if they do have the skills internally to create the large volumes of quality content required they don’t have the spare capacity.  Taking staff away from their core responsibilities just isn’t an option. 

Once clear example of this is video creation. Marcus Sheridan says creating video content should be a priority. He dedicates 13 chapters to it in his book and even recommends taking on an in house videographer. For most SME’s it just isn’t realistic to take on a full time videographer. Even hiring a freelancer or an agency is a huge investment in one element of Inbound marketing that MAY deliver sales sometime in the future and where the ROI isn’t totally clear.

The Solution

Digital Marketing can work brilliantly for SME’s but it needs to be the right kind of Digital Marketing. It needs to be quick to show results, it needs to be affordable and most importantly it needs to show a clear ROI within weeks not years. The solution is Google Ads. 

Google Ads allows SME’s to promote their products or services to potential customers in the actual moment that they are searching for them. Not next month or next year but right now. 

Correctly built and managed Google Ads campaigns can show B2B & B2C businesses an outstanding ROI and unlike other forms of marketing you can see all the data and the figures are crystal clear. You can easily measure & test to improve performance with Google Ads and do it quickly. 

Conclusion

I believe that business owners should read Marcus Sheridan’s ‘They Ask You Answer’ and start implementing Inbound Marketing techniques into their business. However this is a long term project and they shouldn’t expect results any time soon.

To start generating quality leads quickly, sustainably and profitably, business owners should also start running Google Ads campaigns as quickly as possible.