Bonus Episode: The Marketing Magic of Answering Customer Questions

Introduction:

This week, in a special bonus episode, Marcus Sheridan talks about the revolutionary strategy that he used to save his pool-building business during the Great Recession and that he’s been sharing ever since. That strategy is to volunteer answers to the questions your customers always ask—especially the questions you’ve been taught not to answer, at least not until you absolutely have to, such as those about pricing and potential problems with your product or service and who your best competitors might be. In this conversation, Sheridan also explains how to implement a content marketing strategy, why he isn’t a big proponent of social media, and what most business owners get wrong about marketing.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Marcus Sheridan is founder of Impact and author of They Ask, You Answer.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word Productions.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Marcus, welcome.

Marcus Sheridan:
Loren, it’s so great to be with you, because we’ve got a rich history, you and I. So this is awesome.

Loren Feldman:
Let’s go back to that story that first brought us together. This was in the Great Recession, you were running a pool building business that was struggling. I guess not everybody felt they needed a pool in the middle of the Great Recession.

Marcus Sheridan:
It was really bad. I can remember the day Lehman Brothers crashed. And within 48 hours, we lost about a quarter of a million dollars in business, and then it got worse and worse. And by January of 2009, I definitely thought we were gonna file bankruptcy.

Loren Feldman:
So what did you do?

Marcus Sheridan:
The beauty of pain is it forces us to look outside of what we’ve always done and stretch ourselves. And so that was when I started to read more about the internet online—things like inbound marketing, content marketing, social media, blogging. And what I heard in my simple, pool-guy mind was, “You know, Marcus, if you just obsess over your customers’ questions, worries, fears, issues, concerns, and you’re willing to address those questions on your website through text, through video, you might save your business.”

So I said, “Well, shoot. I mean, there’s one thing I can do, is I can listen well. And I can address those questions on our website.” So I called the strategy “they ask, you answer,” gave it a simple phrase, if you will. And one night, I can recall very well, Loren. I sat at my kitchen table and I brainstormed all the questions that I’d gotten over the years about, in my case, fiberglass swimming pools. And I came up with I think it was like a couple hundred questions. And then one by one, every single night for the next two years, I was answering those questions through an article on the website.

Loren Feldman:
You wrote a blog post every night for two years?

Marcus Sheridan:
I think it was about two years, yeah. And you know, it was one of those things. What happened was, I went to my wife, and I said, “I think we’re gonna lose the business. I’ve got this idea as to how to save it, but I’m gonna have to stay up late to do this.” And she said, “Whatever you think you need to do to save the company.” And she says, to this day, she can recall the sound of the keys coming from the kitchen, and that was almost relaxing to her—just hearing the slapping of the keys—because she knew I was hopefully making some progress. And we certainly made progress, because we would become, within a relatively short order, the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world. And we never looked back.

Loren Feldman:
Let’s talk about that. You did that, as I recall, because you addressed questions that normally don’t get addressed, starting with price. You had been taught, I assume, as many salespeople are, to put off that conversation as long as possible. Correct?

Marcus Sheridan:
Yeah, in fact, what I later found is there’s five fundamental subjects that consumers and buyers are obsessed with, that we love to research, that we feel like we need to know before we reach out to a company. And yet these five subjects, businesses don’t like to talk about. And so anybody that’s looking to develop a content strategy that actually works, that’s going to help you with sales, it’s gonna help you with leads, it’s gonna get you way more traffic, the whole nine, they need to lean into these—what we call the Big Five. And what are they?

Number one: cost/price questions. That’s number one. Number two: problems or negative questions. In other words, how could this go wrong? Because it just so happens, Loren, when we get really serious about buying something, we tend to want to research: How could it blow up in our face? Number three: comparison-based questions. Think about how many times you go online and compare one thing versus another. Number four: review-based questions. What’s everybody saying about it? And finally, number five: “best” questions—best, most, top, least—all these extreme questions that we ask. We love to search those types of phrases online.

So those are what we call the Big Five, and companies don’t want to talk about them. Consumers want to talk about them. And so if you want to become the voice of trust in your space, you lean into them. And cost is the foremost. And as we’ve seen, still to this day, when I meet with any audience, generally speaking, less than 10 percent of audiences—especially if they’re business-to-business, service-based businesses—have clearly talked about cost and price on a website.

Now, before everybody sits here and says, “There’s no way I can do this.” Hear me out. Because there is a way. We’ve got the data. It’s empirical. It’s inarguable by this point. But here’s what matters, what you’ve got to understand: As consumers, when we cannot find costs and price information on a website, we get very annoyed. We get very frustrated. We do not stay very long at all.

Now, businesses justify this. We justify it for three main reasons. Number one, we say, “Every job is different. It’s very customized. We have a very bespoke solution,” whatever that thing is. “It varies. It depends.” Okay, so that’s the first reason, they say.

Number two, they say, “Well, I don’t want my competitors to find out.” Number three, they say, “Well, we tend to be more expensive, and if we’re more expensive, we just may scare them away,” which in reality, that doesn’t scare us away. Great education doesn’t scare us away. What scares us away online is when somebody doesn’t want to talk about the thing. That’s what scares us away. That’s what bothers us. And so all of these can be overcome simply by doing the following: Everybody should produce pages and videos on your site—one for each major product or service that you sell. So if you sell six main services for your business, you should have six different pages or videos, or both, that really help the marketplace understand cost/price for that thing.

Now, here are the five components of a cost/price page for everybody who’s listening to this right now. Number one, what drives the cost of that product or service up? Number two, what drives the cost of that product or service down? Number three, why are some companies so expensive? Number four, why are some companies so cheap? And finally, number five, where do you fall? In other words, your company, where do you roughly fall in what was just described? If you do not define these things, they will learn what defines value elsewhere. And if we do not talk about these things and don’t give them at least a feel for what we are—because you see, Loren, we don’t have to give the exact price, but we do have to be willing to give them a feel. Because if we don’t give them a feel, they’re going to get that answer from somewhere else, and that’s who they’re probably going to give their business.

Furthermore, when we do not talk about cost and price—and other subjects too, but major decision component subjects—when we do not address these things, we allow ignorance to exist in the marketplace. And when ignorance exists, and somebody’s researching a product or service or whatever, and they’re saying, “Okay, I’m looking at this company, this company. Hmm.” Well, when they don’t know the difference, they end up choosing the cheapest one. That’s called commoditization. And so what commoditizes an industry, a product, a service is ignorance being allowed to exist in a marketplace. That’s what happens. And so our goal as educators, as teachers—some people call it marketing, but I see it very differently—our goal is that we de-commoditize through education.

And I’ve got the numbers. I mean, my company alone, we produced that first cost/price article for a swimming pool company in 2009: “How Much Does a Fiberglass Pool Cost?” It has now generated over $25 million in sales for the company. $25 million in sales have come from one little article that took me 45 minutes to write on my kitchen table.

Loren Feldman:
And you just gave a range for what it typically cost for a pool.

Marcus Sheridan:
Yeah, I didn’t say exactly what it is, because like everybody else, it depends. But I could explain all those factors I talked about. I could give ranges. I could say, “For a simple job, you’re going to be in this range. For a more complex job, you’re going to be in this range.” If you’re listening to this right now, go online and type in, “How much does a fiberglass pool cost?” And find the River Pools article. It’s gonna be the first one or two that you see. And then you can read all about it.

Loren Feldman:
One of those other five elements that you mentioned is talking about strengths and weaknesses—you use different words—

Marcus Sheridan:
Pros and cons—it actually ends up falling under a few different ones. It can fall into problems, it can fall into reviews, it really just depends on how you use it.

Loren Feldman:
But you’re talking about acknowledging in a blog post on your own site that there are some cons for your product.

Marcus Sheridan:
Yeah, you’re foolish if you don’t. Look, every industry has perceived—sometimes real, sometimes imagined—negatives. And what’s so fascinating, Loren, it’s not until we’re serious about buying something that we actually research the negatives. You don’t go research, “What are the problems with a fiberglass pool?” unless you’re really serious about potentially buying a fiberglass pool. That’s when we research it, right? So you just take fiberglass pools as an example, what we were selling at the time. And listen, if you’re hearing this right now, just put your thing in its place. It’s B2B, B2C, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same jam.

You’re not different. You’re not special. You’re not unique. We’re all in the same business. It’s the business of trust. And what this system does—they ask, you answer—that you’re listening to you right now, it shows you, if you really lean into it, how you can become the most trusted voice in your space, bar none. Everybody who does this the right way ends up becoming that voice. That’s what we’re talking about right now.

And so in our case, when it comes to things like problems, we used to get asked all the time: “So, what are the problems of fiberglass pools? Do fiberglass pools pop out of the ground? Are fiberglass pools ugly? Are fiberglass pools cheap? Do fiberglass pools crack?” These are all negative-based questions, perceived negatives, but they’re only asked by those who are serious about a fiberglass pool. So again, I have a choice. I can address those on my website online. Or I can ignore them and act like they don’t exist and be the ostrich with my head in the sand, like the problem is going to go away or something when we know it’s not going to go away.

Loren Feldman:
So let me address one more, and this is the one that really stops people when I tell your story. And that is, you also did a blog post in which you talked about all the best pool builders in your region. And you did it, I gather to the best of your ability, objectively. You talked about their strengths as you actually perceived them, and you didn’t include your company on the list. I tell that to business owners, and their first reaction is, “That’s insane.”

Marcus Sheridan:
Yeah, “He’s nuts.” So let me explain the background. So I did this in multiple areas where we do work—and once you hear this out, folks, it will make sense. Now whether or not you do it, it’s going to be your call. But I can tell you, when companies do this, they’re just shocked at how effective it is. So one night, I was in Richmond, Virginia. This was still selling pools back in the day. And this couple said to me, “Marcus, we like you. We think we want to get this pool from you. But if we don’t get this pool from you, is there anybody else who you might recommend?”

And I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, gosh, I hate this question. Because it probably means they’re not going to buy tonight.” And they didn’t buy. They were still looking. And then I had a long drive home. I’m sitting there stewing, like always, right? And thinking, “Well, they asked the question,” which means: What’s the philosophy? I’ve got to answer it. “They ask, you answer.” So I went home that night, and I wrote an article that is, “Who Are the Best Pool Builders in Richmond, Virginia?” And I came up with a list of five of the best pool builders in Richmond, Virginia, and in no particular order, I listed the five. And you say, “How did you choose the five?” I chose the five based on the five who I lost the most deals to over the course of the time I’ve been in business. That’s how I chose the five.

Now here’s what’s interesting. By the way, if you’re listening to this right now, go search “best pool builders, Richmond, Virginia.” You’re still gonna see it. It’s gonna be one of the first ones that pops up. Now, here’s what’s powerful: If you go online, you search that today, it’s one of the first you’re gonna find. Probably in most cases, it’s like one or two. And you’re gonna be introduced to me, right? Now, people say, “Well, why didn’t you include yourself?” Well, let’s look at it like this. Number one, if they’re reading the article, where are they? They’re on my website. I’m winning, I’m winning. Number two, if I create a best of list and then put myself on said list, I lose credibility, and everything we do is based on trust and what engenders more trust. So no, no, no, I’m not on the list.

But once again, when you read it, you get a sense for things. Because if you read it, you’re going to see how I’m going to start off. I’m going to talk about, “You know, we’re in Richmond, Virginia all the time. Hundreds of customers trust us to bring us into their home. And we give them quotes for pools. And they often ask us, ‘Who are some of the other builder competitors we have in the area?’ And because we want you to be educated, here’s a list of five of the pool companies that have a solid in-ground, pool-building history in the Richmond area.” And then I came up with the list of five. So inherently, the person picks up on, “Okay, here’s this other company.”

And here’s what’s crazy about it. Today, if you go online, and you search for things like “reviews, Pla-Mor Pools, Richmond, Virginia,”—so Pla-Mor Pools is one of the first companies I put on the list, and they’re out of Mechanicsville, Virginia, right out of the Richmond area, and I lost a lot of deals to them over the course of time. So that’s why they were on the list. All right, they’ve had a solid history. And so one time, I had this lady reach out to me—this shows you how powerful and effective this is—and said, “Just the craziest thing happened: Marcus, I was this close to signing a contract with Play-Mor Pools, but before I signed that contract with Play-Mor, I decided to go online and research their company. And as I was researching their company, I stumbled across this article that you guys had written. I said, ‘My goodness, these guys are so honest. I should probably call them too.’”

And of course, you know what happened, because otherwise I wouldn’t be telling you the story, right? So she ended up buying a pool, all because she was vetting my competitor. And she found us all because I was willing to talk about the competition. Now, we’d never say anything negative about the competition. We don’t do that. But we do address every question, because we know if we don’t, we’re going to be left out in the cold.

Loren Feldman:
Do you think that works for you because pools happen to be a business where people do get multiple estimates, so it makes sense? But maybe that strategy would make less sense for somebody who runs a different kind of business, where it’s more of a buy or not buy?

Marcus Sheridan:
I mean, look at it: “best Mexican restaurants, New York City.” That’s a very, very commonly searched phrase. Or “Italian restaurants, New York City.” That’s very common. “Best HubSpot partners,”that’s a very common search that people do in the B2B space. “Best video marketing agencies,” a very common search. So I’ve not seen very many exceptions to this. Are there some? There’s probably a few. But we prolifically search “best of”—“best divorce attorneys, Cambridge, Massachusetts.” I mean, this is what people do.

And so our choice is, we can inject ourselves in those conversations. Or we can sit there and say, “Ah, it drives me crazy that Angie’s List controls these conversations,” and “Oh, it drives me crazy that the Better Business Bureau controls these conversations.” Well, guess what, Sherlock? They were the ones that were thinking like the buyer. The essence of, “they ask, you answer” is you’re so in tune with the way the buyer, the consumer, is searching, that you don’t have anything that’s off the table. In fact, if they’re searching, you want to lean into it big time.

Let me give you another example. My agency, called Impact, is one of the top HubSpot partners out there. Well, because people come off the HubSpot directory, they see other agencies and they just call like three or four agencies real quick that they see on the directory that are recommended by HubSpot. So two of the ones that they see next to our name are New Breed and the other one is SmartBug.

So you got these two major competitors of ours. So we’ve got an article, “Impact vs. New Breed vs. SmartBug: Which Is the Best Inbound Agency for Me?” So we very, very blatantly compare ourselves with other agencies in our space. Why? Because we get asked the question all the time. Why would I not publish it? Now, again, I don’t inject opinion. I don’t say anything negative. I just state the facts. “Hey, listen, if you’re looking for this, this, and this, we’re probably not the best fit for you. You should go to this company. But if you’re looking for x, y, and z, then you should probably contact Impact.” It’s very matter of fact, and it’s almost disconnected from outcome. A lot of people screw this up, Loren. You can look at somebody’s content online, and oftentimes, immediately tell they’re biased, and that they’re trying to skew you one way. Power comes when you communicate and teach in such a way that you’re very nonchalant, disconnected with what they decide. You’re just trying to offer a great communicative experience where they really feel like they’ve learned.

So if I’m talking about the pros and cons of fiberglass pools, I don’t want to write an article or a video that says, “Why you should choose fiberglass over concrete.” That’s so dumb. You can tell that I’m biased. That doesn’t work. It’s not what the marketplace wants. So the title should be something like “Fiberglass vs. Concrete Pools: Which is the Best Choice for Me?” What is the best pool for your backyard? These are the questions that people want to know. And then if I’m going to produce that video or that article, I need to say it in a way that’s very disarming, that immediately causes the person to lean in and say, “Man, I can’t believe you said it that way. It’s so honest. It’s so refreshing.”

So it sounds something like this. You might say, “You know, one of the questions we get here at River Pools all the time is, ‘Marcus, be honest, tell me: Why should I choose fiberglass?’ But the truth is, you shouldn’t always choose a fiberglass pool. In fact, there are times when you should choose concrete. So what this video is going to do, it’s going to explain to you the pros and the cons of both types of pools. And hopefully by the end, you’ll be able to decide which is the best choice for you.”

Now, here’s the thing, Loren: how many brands talk like that online? 1 percent! Very, very few. That’s the way I communicate. That’s the way anybody I work with communicates. That’s doing “they ask, you answer.” That gets it, because it’s empowering. Because the moment you say what you’re not, that’s the moment that you become dramatically more attractive to those who you are a good fit for.

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Loren Feldman:
How did you first know that you’d turned things around at the pool business?

Marcus Sheridan:
I started to see a clear uptick. Certain things were happening. People started calling me and saying, “Hey, thank you for answering that question. Finally, somebody was willing to address that.” It was like I was just getting these, “Your website, I’ve just learned so much from you guys. It just drives me crazy, this industry, that nobody’s willing to talk about this. But you guys…”

Loren Feldman:
Was the economy still bad?

Marcus Sheridan:
The economy was still bad. Within six months, I was like, “Oh my goodness, I’m onto it. This is on!” I was clearly seeing it, and I saw immediately. The cost article I did early on, that immediately started to take off. I was like, “Son of a gun.” And then over time, I started just looking at all the data. I’m like, “Oh, there’s a pattern here.” That’s where the big five came from.

Loren Feldman:
That was 10 years ago, at least.

Marcus Sheridan:
Yeah.

Loren Feldman:
Would it still work today? Would you do the same thing the same way?

Marcus Sheridan:
So all right, when somebody says, “Does this still work?” I always want to establish a baseline foundation of how we’ve got to see the world of business, sales, and marketing. So if I came to anybody who’s listening to this right now, and I said, “Is trust going to be fundamental to your business in 5, 10, 15 years?” What would you say? Most people are going to say, “Absolutely, of course.” If I said, “Is teaching your customers—in other words, making sure they get their questions answered, their concerns alleviated—is that going to be fundamental to your success in 5, 10, 15 years?” They’re gonna say, “Absolutely.” Now, if I said to somebody, “Is Facebook going to be fundamental to your business in 10 years?” What do they say? They’re probably thinking, “I have no idea.” And that’s because Facebook is a platform. It was born at one point, and it’s gonna die. Thank goodness when it does.

But if you look at trust, it wasn’t born. It just is. It’s a principle. And so we want to build strategies and business around principles, not around platforms. Because platforms, you might leverage them and use them for a period of time. But eventually they’re going to go the way of the dinosaur. That’s just how it works. They’re cyclical. And so if we look at it from a trust basis, then you can say, “Okay, well answering your customers’ questions and being seen as a teacher in your space and the voice of trust in your space, is that going to work in 10 years?” The answer is, “100 percent yes.” If websites still exist in 10-20 years, will the people come there and want to be satiated? Will they want to get all the answers to the questions and fears alleviated on your website? Absolutely, they’re going to want to be. So we know that’s not going to go away.

Now, the only thing that’s gotten harder in 10 years, Loren, is there’s more content. So if there’s more content, what that means is it’s harder to rank for things like search, in Google search. Now, it’s a million times worth it, for a variety of reasons. Because if you look at they-ask-you-answer stock content, the beauty of it is this: It roots you in the questions that your sales team is getting every day. And so you produce this content, your sales teams can leverage it throughout the sales process, and now all of a sudden, we can shorten sales cycles while increasing closing rates. Very, very powerful. And so, sure, Google takes a little bit more time to give you some of that love, but outside of that even, it’s still so, so worth it.

Loren Feldman:
Did you do all the writing for those posts yourself?

Marcus Sheridan:
I have very strong opinions about doing this yourself versus outsourcing it. Very strong opinions, because I’ve got data, and data is a lot like the scale after Thanksgiving. You’ve got to face reality. And so for anybody’s listening to this, can anybody show me an individual company that became the foremost leader of their space by outsourcing all of their content? Rarely ever do you see someone become the foremost leader by outsourcing all their content. I’m not talking about, like, WebMD here. That’s like an online forum almost, is what WebMD is. But what I’m talking about is, you take a River Pools, and what’s cool about “they ask, you answer,” of course, is now we’ve got so many case studies of companies that have had crazy success, literally becoming the most trafficked website in their entire industry. The commonality between all of them is in-house ownership of content production.

So the companies that get great with video are the ones that are not using outside video production companies. The companies that get great with content, social, are the ones that are not outsourcing it to somebody else. They’ve got somebody in-house who’s holding the paintbrush. A lot of these organizations are using someone who’s holding the paintbrush, and they’re telling that person what to paint? Like, get out of here. You’re not going to create a masterpiece like that. You’re going to be limited.

If you take video, for example, which is just absolutely huge, of course. We all know it’s huge, whether you’re doing it or not, whether you like it or not, doesn’t matter. It’s huge. And so when we look at video, video takes time as a company to learn. You don’t get video in a minute. You’ve got to crawl, and then you’ve got to walk and fall down, and then eventually you start to get good. Well guess what? When you’re outsourcing it, you don’t get those learned skills. You just keep tripping over and over again. It’s very, very frustrating oftentimes. And the best companies are producing a lot of content. We’re not talking about a little bit of content. They’re producing a lot of content—good content—but it’s a lot of content.

Loren Feldman:
I think that’s hard advice to take if you’re a company that does nothing related to content and suddenly you’re looking at trying to develop expertise in an area where you have no comfort whatsoever. Even in those situations you suggest that—

Marcus Sheridan:
I don’t think so, Loren. So let’s give you an example. Right now, my agency’s working with about 80 different clients. Every single one has an in-house content writer, and about 75 percent have an in-house videographer. These companies are mostly between $3 million and $50 million, the majority. And here’s the thing: everybody listening to this is in an industry that has many questions surrounding that thing that you sell. And so because there are questions that surround it, there are a billion searches that are happening online about that thing. Are you a part of that conversation right now?

Now, sometimes people say, “Well, we’re too small to hire a content writer.” Yeah, sure. Then you’re like me, and you just sleep less for two straight years, and you get it done. This is why I don’t have passion, or much empathy—better stated—for those who say, “I don’t have the time.” Because generally speaking, when we say we don’t have the time, what we’re saying is, “I don’t value that as much as I value some other things.” Or, “I don’t believe in it as much as I believe in other things.” Anybody who knows my schedule would say, “He clearly didn’t have time.” I mean, I was working 55-60 hours a week with my swimming pool company, like a crazy man. But you know, 11 o’clock at night, I’m slapping keys. Why? Because I needed to save my business.

I can’t afford to hire a content writer, and so I ended up being the writer. And I kind of learned how to write—the process, to be frank with you. And so the point is, I believe this is available to anybody, especially with the advent of video, because video makes the best writers really, really good communicators. Because most people, if I say to you, “Are you a good writer?” “I don’t know.” “Are you good with people?” “Yeah, I’m pretty good with people.” And so if you’re good with people, you can be great on video, period, end of discussion.

Loren Feldman:
Do you have to just know how to write the content or produce the video? Or do you also have to know what to do on social media?

Marcus Sheridan:
I don’t think you have to be great with social. In fact, if you do social, I think you should just do one platform. Just one, and lean into it. Like for example, I’m just on LinkedIn. Me, personally. I’m not on Facebook. I’m not on Instagram. I’m just on LinkedIn. Why? Because I want to be great in one one place. As Jim Collins would say, it’s my “hedgehog concept” to be really good on one thing.

Now, with River Pools, we started off, and we were just producing textual content at first, and we started to dominate. And then I started producing videos. We started to dominate. It wasn’t for six or seven years, Loren, that I did social media. And still to this day—because I don’t consider YouTube social media, some people might, I consider it just a video search engine like Google—to this day, we’re just not really that big on social because the fruit is greater elsewhere. And that doesn’t mean that the fruit is greater elsewhere for someone who’s listening to this. For some listeners, it might be on social, but I’m not a big fan of rented land. I’d rather plant the field on my own property.

Loren Feldman:
It sounds like you occasionally run into some skepticism when you are trying to pitch these ideas to your potential clients.

Marcus Sheridan:
You do. Now, I’m pretty proficient at helping people see the full picture so that they say, “You know what, this makes a ton of sense.” That being said, you’re always going to have naysayers. Let me give you the most perfect example, Loren. Before I started teaching the world “they ask, you answer,” I taught the swimming pool industry. And so I taught a bunch of workshops in the pool industry about all I had done, to literally competitors down the street. And I once really did a study on, “Okay, I’ve taught maybe a thousand swimming pool companies. How many of the thousand had even done ‘they ask, you answer’ half as well as we had done it at River Pools?” The answer is one, one company out of probably a thousand. Why? Because you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Loren Feldman:
What stops people? What keeps them from following through?

Marcus Sheridan:
Well, I think there are a couple of things. It’s the law of the harvest. There’s a reason why most people can never be farmers. They just want to go to the store and buy it. They’re not going to take the time to plant the seed, nourish the crop, and continue to tend to the field until they are able to reap the benefits. That’s the law of the harvest. It’s been around since the beginning of time. Many people don’t want to adhere to that particular law. And so they don’t experience the fruits of the gains.

As a business owner, you can sit there and say, “Okay, I can get really quick returns by doing a pay-per-click campaign. Or I can get returns that are not immediate.” With, let’s say, “they ask, you answer” or content marketing, whatever you want to call it. Okay, yeah, sure. I mean, that’s very, very short sighted.

Then there’s the reason of—I think it’s a terrible reason—thought leadership is hard. And what I mean by that, Loren, is when you become a thought leader of your space—and you will if you do “they ask, you answer”—you’re going to talk about things that nobody in your space has ever talked about. And that is just going to rub your competitors the wrong way. I still get attacked all the time by really jealous companies in the swimming pool industry.

Loren Feldman:
Attacked for what?

Marcus Sheridan:
Attacked for dominating. Like, we dominate.

Loren Feldman:
Well, they don’t say, Marcus, how dare you dominate? What do they say?

Marcus Sheridan:
“What makes you an expert to be able to say that?” And I’m not saying you intentionally ruffle anybody’s feathers. But leaders, they lead for a reason. You get put in the spotlight by this. Some people, for whatever reason, they just can’t hack that. It’s so sad, but it’s true.

Loren Feldman:
I have some empathy for business owners, when it comes to dealing with marketing. I feel like I meet so many who seem almost paralyzed because they just aren’t sure what steps to take. They don’t know whether to outsource their work to a firm. They don’t know whether to try to hire someone internally to handle marketing. They try both. There’s always a guru around the corner who is promising to get them to the top of the Google rankings. They try it. It never works out quite the way they would like it to. They just don’t know who to trust. Do you run into that? And what do you tell people?

Marcus Sheridan:
There’s no question. There’s a lot of people who are very jaded. So let me give a simple answer: The first thing they need to do is read They Ask, You Answer, because you can’t be aloof, and you can’t be a dope when it comes to digital sales and marketing. Because you’re a business owner now, and just like you can’t be aloof to accounting best practices—because we’re talking about your financial well-being, so there’s never an excuse. So you don’t have to be the implementer, but you have to be aware of it. That’s number one.

Then number two, what you need to do, is most people need to hire a recent journalist graduate. That’s what they need to do. There are so many recent journalism graduates out there who can write. They can edit. They can interview. But they can’t get a job right now. And you know, it’s like they’re living in their parents’ basement because they’ve got a set of skills, and they don’t know what to do with them at this point. And then there are a lot of people who have been in the journalism space for a long time that are looking for their next gig. And there’s plenty of opportunity for those folks as well.

And so there’s a glut of potential writers who could be producing content for your website. I call them “content managers,” which by the way, if you go online, and you search “how to hire a content manager” and then “Impact,” you’ll see the most amazing plethora of content you’ve ever seen on how to interview a content manager: what to look for, how to hire one, how to train one. It’s all there.

Loren Feldman:
Do you focus on a particular type of company or industry with Impact?

Marcus Sheridan:
Well, I tend to focus on companies that have sales teams. I love those that have somewhat of a sales process. “They ask, you answer” can work for anybody. It can work for e-commerce companies. A lot of e-commerce, by the way, is done wrong, because you just put pricing, but you don’t explain why things cost what they do. And so e-commerce needs “they ask, you answer” bad. But generally speaking, anytime there’s a sales process, we’re interested. They do tend to be companies that are five to 50 million. Why that number? Well, if they’re five to 50 million, they can afford to get a content manager, a videographer in most cases, especially once they catch the vision.

But once they get past 50 million, you start to find it’s like lots of red tape. And suddenly you get stupid attorneys within the company or the board member this or that, and they overthink things. And they become Goliath in the land of slowness, because you’ve got too much armor. Whereas I love working with digital David’s that make their own rules, and they play by their own rules, and they’re not sitting there getting caught up in red tape.

And somebody says, “You can’t say that in your cost article because you never know, you could get sued.” You could get sued about anything these days. I mean, give me a break already. And so if you based every decision on, “You might get sued,” you’ll never open a restaurant. I’m going to tell you that right now. You’re never going into business. I’m gonna tell you right now. You better not get in your car. So it’s a dumb reason not to do things. Obviously, I’m a little bit passionate about that.

Loren Feldman:
I sense that. Do you have any case studies that are as amazing as I think your pool business case study is?

Marcus Sheridan:
One of the coolest ever is Yale Appliance. They’re a kitchen appliance retailer in Boston, Massachusetts. They became the most trafficked appliance retailer in America through “they ask, you answer.” If you get a chance, go to them. If anybody’s researched kitchen appliances, you’ve probably stumbled across their site, but it’s yaleappliance.com. I could go on and on about them.

Loren Feldman:
Give us a hint. What did they figure out?

Marcus Sheridan:
So let me give you an example of one of the articles that they did that’s so freakin’ ballsy, just amazing. Their team, they would get asked all the time, “So what are the least serviced appliance brands that you sell?” Classic question, right? So Steve said—the owner, Steve Sheinkopf—”All right, well, people want to know. I’m gonna answer the question. They ask, we answer—we believe it.” So he produced, “What are the most reliable, least serviced appliance brands of—let’s call it—2022?” He does this yearly now. So “What Are the Most Reliable, Least Serviced Appliance Brands?”

And then what he did—this is what’s so friggin’ glorious—he took all the appliance brands that he sells, he took the total number of units he sold for each one of the brands, the total service calls that he’s run for each one of those brands, and therefore, he shows you the least serviced by percentage brand that he sells. And then one by one, he gets to the point where he shows you the most serviced brand that he sells.

That’s awesome. Because any retailer would look at that and say, “Oh, I could never do that, because I don’t want to piss off the vendor,” right? “I don’t want to make Kitchenaid upset,” or whomever the brand is. Steve was like, “My customer is my customer.” And so when the vendors complained to Steve about him putting factual information out there—

Loren Feldman:
Which they did, I assume.

Marcus Sheridan:
They did. A few of them did. Steve said, as you might imagine, “Well, I guess you’re just gonna have to do better next year, won’t you?” And that article, to this day, Loren—this is going to blow you away—it gets read 50,000 times a month for about four straight years running.

Loren Feldman:
And can he tie that to business generation?

Marcus Sheridan:
Millions in revenue. Millions. He says he does at least $15 million to $20 million in revenue coming off of the website each year. In other words, somebody who converted, was a lead, came into the store and bought, does somewhere around $15 million to $20 million a year.

Loren Feldman:
What effect did COVID have on your agency?

Marcus Sheridan:
We had a little bit of a dip with our marketing agency. My swimming pool company, as I predicted, went down for the first 30 days and then had the most sales we’ve ever had in the history of the industry. More demand than we’ve ever had.

Loren Feldman:
You don’t run it anymore on a day-to-day, right? You just have an ownership stake?

Marcus Sheridan:
That’s right. That’s right. One thing that’s interesting that happened with COVID, though—and this is classic, because again, strain and pain leads to innovation. For years, I’d been telling my sales team, “Guys, why don’t you just meet with the prospect over video before you go to their home?” They’re like, “No, we want to go to the home, because this is the way we’ve done it.” And like, “I think you’re being inefficient.” And of course, once COVID hit, they started meeting first over video, and they realized, “Oh my gosh, we can do, instead of two or maybe three appointments in a day, we can do six, seven, or eight appointments in a day. And we can eat dinner with our families.” And so now everybody says, “I’m never going to go back to the way we used to do it, Marcus.” I’m like, “You know, why does it take us getting hit over the head?” But that’s how life works.

Loren Feldman:
Marcus Sheridan, thank you so much for taking this time. Really a pleasure.

Marcus Sheridan:
Mine as well, Loren. Thank you.