Many businesses that sell through distributors face the same challenge - how to increase product sales when you have no direct relationship with the end customer? This week, my guest is Greg Linnemanstons, a Platinum level&nbsp;HubSpot&nbsp;partner and President of&nbsp;The Weidert Group, an inbound marketing agency located in Appleton, Wisconsin. Weidert Group has been a HubSpot partner since 2011 and specializes in B2B clients in the industrial space. In today’s interview, Greg is sharing the details of a campaign that was successful in creating demand amongst restaurateurs and other end customers for a wholesale pizza crust manufacturer. Check out the complete show notes below to learn more about how Weidert used content to reach both distributors and end customers, and the lessons you can take away from this campaign to improve your own inbound marketing results. &nbsp; The Campaign Alive and Kicking (A&amp;K) Pizza Crust&nbsp;has been a client of The Weidert Group for a little over a year and first reached out while in the process of acquiring another company. The founders of A&amp;K started out with a couple of pizzerias in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Their kids got involved in the business and they discovered that they could grow the business dramatically if they focused on just dough and crust. They know how to make pizza and they have a wonderful test kitchen. and their product offering has evolved quite a bit as a result. They recently introduced a wood fired crust and are able to produce those at plant quantities. A&amp;K's traditional business had involved the production of par-baked crusts for frozen pizza. At the time, they were selling to companies that did contract manufacturing for clients like Walmart, Kroger etc. and&nbsp;inbound marketing&nbsp;wasn’t a great strategy for that business because the potential customer pool was small and competition very limited. Everyone pretty much knew everyone else in the industry. The acquisition changed all of this. The new business that A&amp;K acquired is a pizza dough company primarily focused on food service, which is a dramatically different marketplace comprised of hundreds of thousands of independent operators as well as small chains, all buying through distributors. It's a very unconcentrated market that is absolutely primed for an inbound marketing approach. A&amp;K approached Weidert Group looking for a complete website overhaul and a marketing strategy that would attract restaurant operators to the site and build leads that they could take to distributors. Audience The A&amp;K team had two audiences it wanted to reach:  Food service distributors; and Restaurant operators (who almost all buy through local or regional food service distributors) and other businesses (such as bowling alleys, etc.) that sell pizza.  To better understand the target audience, the Weidert team began by interviewing all of the customer-facing team members in A&amp;K as well as a handful of the company’s customers. Through this process, they learned that restaurant operators function on a shoestring budget and therefore are often scrambling to get answers to pressing questions around menu development, pricing, ingredient choices, etc. Because many pizzeria operators are not experienced restaurateurs, they rely on distributors for help, however the distributors themselves can’t possibly be experts on everything that an operator needs to know. The Weidert team identified this information gap and &nbsp;quickly concluded that there was an opportunity to be the voice for the restaurant operator - the person who is the expert on how to establish, operate and optimize a pizzeria for growth and profitability. Although A&amp;K sells through distributors, the objective of the campaign was to attract restaurant operators as primary traffic to the website. As a result, the strategy created by Weidert focused on content that was helpful to restaurant owners and would encourage them to take...

Ep. 2: Fueling Demand Generation in Food Service Featuring Greg Linnemanstons

This week on&nbsp;The Inbound Success Podcast&nbsp;I’m excited to interview&nbsp;Stephanie Casstevens, Marketing Manager with&nbsp;Label Insight&nbsp;in Chicago. Stephanie is a&nbsp;HubSpot&nbsp;power user and&nbsp;inbound marketing&nbsp;expert who has worked both in-house and on the agency side and currently serves as a Leader of the&nbsp;Chicago HubSpot User Group. Label Insight&nbsp;was founded with the mission of promoting transparency in the food and product industries. The company’s cloud-based product data engine enables brands and retailers to transform basic product data into smart attributes, providing a deep understanding of their product set. Before joining Label Insight, Stephanie worked at an inbound marketing agency and was the Content Marketing Leader at&nbsp;MedPro Disposal. One of her notable accomplishments is that she has every single HubSpot certification available (a big deal given the large number of certifications that HubSpot offers!). Fun fact:&nbsp;Stephanie was the winner of a HubSpot-branded beach cruiser at the 2016 HubSpot partner day. Check out her cool ride…  The Inbound Marketing Campaign At the time Stephanie began working as the Content Leader for MedPro Disposal, the company had never done any inbound marketing. MedPro specializes in medical waste disposal and while this might be considered a “boring industry” by some, Stephanie felt it had a lot of potential for content creation and was especially excited that it is in an industry that hasn’t aggressively adopted&nbsp;content marketing&nbsp;as an approach. Initially, the company’s primary target audience was physicians who lead medical practices or clinics, as well as key decision makers at other facilities that generate medical waste, such as directors at funeral homes. This audience is notoriously hard to reach. They’re not on social media and rarely give out their email addresses, and their busy schedules leave little time for practice management and meetings with vendors. In addition to targeting a difficult-to-reach audience, MedPro had to overcome the fact that the vast majority of its target audience was already purchasing medical waste disposal services from another source. To be an operating hospital, medical facility, funeral home, etc, you are required by law to have a medical waste disposal solution in place, so prospective clients aren’t generally interested in solving a problem they already feel they have solved and unseating an incumbent provider can be a big challenge. When Stephanie began working on the campaign, there were a number of macro-level changes occurring that had wide reaching implications for the medical community including changes in HIPAA regulations, the Ebola outbreak, and updates to compliance regulations. Initially, MedPro’s focus was on trying to figure out how to help doctors solve the challenges associated with these changes, but they quickly realized they were never going to get the doctor’s attention. Instead, what they COULD do was get the attention of the Office Manager or the administrative staff at the medical practice/clinic. From the other campaigns MedPro had executed, they knew that they had to create content that would provide value to the administrative personnel but also make them look great in front of their boss (the physician). One of the big problems that medical clinics were dealing with was patient no shows - a costly issue due to the time it takes to reschedule appointments and the gaps it leaves in the physician's’ daily schedule. To address the issue of no shows, MedPro developed a&nbsp;Patient Appointment Policy Template&nbsp;that helps medical practices establish clear guidelines for patients relating to appointment cancellation. The template is a document that patients sign acknowledging that appointments have to be cancelled with 48 hours notice or they are responsible for paying a fee. Anyone who downloaded the template also got a guide to using...

Ep. 3: From Product Centric to Audience Centric Marketing Featuring Stephanie Casstevens

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, my guest is none other than Bob Ruffolo, the Founder and CEO of&nbsp;IMPACT. The funny thing about this episode is that it was recorded before&nbsp;I joined IMPACT&nbsp;and before any of us knew that this would be an IMPACT podcast. For those who are finding the podcast for the first time, IMPACT is a Connecticut-based inbound marketing agency and top tier&nbsp;HubSpot diamond level partner. As an agency, we’re very heavily focused on the marketing leader of the organization and our services are design to help them overcome the common pain points that all marketing leaders go through, like “Is my strategy right?” “What are my peers doing that's working?” “How do I start implementing video?” Here at IMPACT, we use ourselves as a laboratory and test new strategies and tactics on our own marketing first. Having a full time agency marketing team has been key to our ability to to do this and Ramona, our Content Marketing Manager, has done a great job of making sure we can follow through on our commitment to content creation. Today,&nbsp;our blog&nbsp;forms the core of the company’s marketing and lead generation strategy. In this episode, Bob talks about how IMPACT used conversion rate optimization principles to&nbsp;redesign the layout of our blog&nbsp;and dramatically grow blog subscribers, visitor traffic, and blog-driven lead conversions. Background One of IMPACT’s core values is helpfulness and our purpose as a company is to help people and their organizations to succeed. Bob and the team use that as a litmus test for everything that IMPACT does and to this end, he really felt that the company's blog content is a key part of how we help our audience. For this reason, the company has always taken an aggressive approach to content creation, publishing at least two blogs a day. This strategy has paid off and a year and a half ago, prior to updating the blog layout, IMPACT was already getting about 80,000 unique visitors to the site per month, and had a good base of about 10,000 to 15,000 subscribers. Whereas IMPACT used to think of itself as competing with other inbound marketing agencies, whether it be&nbsp;Kuno Creative&nbsp;or&nbsp;New Breed Marketing, many of which are doing a very good job, they now see themselves as competing with&nbsp;Conversion XL,&nbsp;Social Media Examiner,&nbsp;Content Marketing Institute, and to a certain extent&nbsp;HubSpot. These sites draw much larger audiences, and they're very niche in what they're focused on. That's the direction Bob is going with the IMPACT brand, with a focus on serving the needs of marketing leadership. Optimizing the IMPACT Blog When IMPACT adjusted its audience focus and future vision, the first thing they did was develop a strategy for scaling website traffic and conversions. They used&nbsp;a process developed by Conversion XL&nbsp;that maps out six types of research you can do on your website. The IMPACT team went through all six steps of the Conversion XL research model, including looking at&nbsp;Google Analytics, data in the company’s&nbsp;HubSpot&nbsp;portal, data from&nbsp;Hotjar&nbsp;(including click maps and scroll maps and individual session recordings) and&nbsp;User Testing. This was all done in an effort to identify areas for improvement for IMPACT’s website. With the initial research complete, IMPACT carried out a series of experiments - five or six per month - on the blog. For each of these, they created a hypothesis and set up some type of test. Sometimes the team would use&nbsp;Optimizely&nbsp;for the test and sometimes they would just make a change and seeing if it worked. If it didn’t, they would simply revert it back or change some messaging. Some of the specific changes that IMPACT made to their blog included:  Pop ups:&nbsp;The team tested different types of&nbsp;popups&nbsp;(exit intent, mobile, slide-in) as well as variations in pop up messaging and timing. The blog currently has...

Ep. 4: Conversion Rate Optimizing a Blog Featuring Bob Ruffolo

Most businesses build websites to promote their offerings, but for my guest this week, websites are his business. Anthony Sarandrea is the Founder and CEO of SiteFlood.com and a serial entrepreneur who has successfully built and monetized a portfolio of websites without ever raising outside funds. His secret? Rock solid SEO, user-centric content, and an aggressively optimized Facebook ads strategy.&nbsp; In this episode, Anthony shares with me how he used this strategy to grow&nbsp;pocketyourdollars.com&nbsp;from zero to over $1 million in less than a year. Listen to the episode here, or read the transcript (below), to learn more about Anthony's process. This week on&nbsp;The Inbound Success Podcast, my guest is&nbsp;Anthony Sarandrea, the CEO and Founder of&nbsp;SiteFlood. Here’s what Anthony and I discussed on this week’s show: Kathleen Booth (host):&nbsp;Hi! My name is Kathleen Booth, and you are listening to the Inbound Success Podcast. Today my guest is Anthony Sarandrea, and he is the CEO and founder of&nbsp;SiteFlood. I am so excited to have him here today because he is one of&nbsp;Inc. magazine's top branding and marketing experts to look out for in 2017, as well as Entrepreneur magazine's Five Marketing Trends Business Owners You Should Know in 2016. So, lots of recognition from top marketing publications, top business publications, and Anthony was actually recommended to me by another guest, and I was fascinated to read his bio. I'm going to actually let him tell you a little bit more about himself, so welcome, Anthony, and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Anthony Sarandrea (guest):&nbsp;Thanks, Kathleen. Excited to be here. I run a full-service digital marketing agency, and we specialize in inbound marketing, SEO, and paid ads as well, too. What makes us a little different is, the same people that are working on clients' work also work on my internal brands and internal sites, so they manage my ad dollars, out-of-pockets, they're creating the content for my SEO sites that I actually own with partners of mine as well, too, and work to monetize and drive traffic to the sites, things like that. So, we put the same resources to work for our in brands as we do as clients as well. Kathleen:&nbsp;And can you talk a little bit about all of the different properties you own? Because one of the things that I think is interesting about you, as opposed to some of the other guests I've had ... I've had people that are agency people, and I've had people that that are in-house marketers, but not many that cross over. As you alluded to just now, you do a lot of work for clients, but you actually have an extremely robust marketing and advertising program for quite a few web properties that you own. Anthony:&nbsp;This is correct. Thank you for saying that. We own sites in anywhere from the health niche, so&nbsp;secretmenus.com, to the financial niche, which I think is what we wanted to talk about today, which are basically helping people get out of debt, fix their credit. Student loan debt is a huge problem in our country, and it's something we sought out to do with&nbsp;Student Wallet&nbsp;or Scholarships For Students, as well as finding ways to help take people down the buyer's journey. You know, we can dive a little bit deeper there, but I think today, specifically, I'd love to talk about how&nbsp;pocketyourdollars.com&nbsp;is one of our good properties in the financial space that has a great branding community, that drives a lot of inbound success, so would be happy to touch on that more. Kathleen:&nbsp;Tell me a little bit about that site, and who the audience is, and what the objective is there. Anthony:&nbsp;Great, great questions. So,&nbsp;pocketyourdollars.com. I think a lot of companies start with what you're selling and then work backwards, or vice versa, and we like to work backwards. So, at the end of the day, is we're connecting people to providers that can help with debt consolidation,...

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