Ep. 185: Get big ROI on a small budget with a webinar funnel Ft. Elias Zepeda

Inbound Success Podcast

Want to get better results from your webinar? Elias Zepeda has developed a webinar funnel that generates big ROI for his small business clients.

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Need Clients Now founder Elias Zepeda breaks down the webinar marketing strategy he has used time and time again to generate new leads and revenue for his clients.

What makes Elias's webinar strategy so successful is his omnichannel approach that incorporates more than just email and pay per click marketing.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to get all the details on the strategy and learn how you, too, can get better results from webinars.

Resources from this episode:

• Visit the Need Clients Now website
• Email Elias at [e-mail]

Transcript

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Elias Zepeda from Need Clients Now. Welcome to the podcast Elias.

Elias (00:22): Thank you so much. So happy to be here, looking forward to it.

Kathleen (00:25): Yeah, this should be fun. I'm excited to chat with you about some of the different ways you help your clients get better inbound marketing results. But before we get into that, tell my audience a little bit about you and your story and how you wound up doing what you're doing today and what Need Clients Now does.

Elias (00:45): Awesome. Happy to do so. I started my agency at a very young age. I was 20, 21 years old. And I I happened to just get into it by luck. I was initially first working as a manager for a marketing company and we were doing a marketing for a large newspaper newspaper conglomerate and the West coast. And and I was worked as a manager for nine months at a very young age. And by luck the contractor, our client offered me my own contract to become a contractor. And so what that entailed, I had to hire, train and develop a marketing slash sales team to sell newspaper subscriptions. And this is quite some time ago, of course, but that was my first entry into, into the marketing world. And I, and I did that for four years.

Elias (01:42): I had that contract for about three years and I learned so much because what we did is we set up booths and we had a sales team that was giving away offers and incentives in exchange for getting people to, to subscribe to the newspaper. So we had a lot of promotions, giveaways, incentives, and, and that type of stuff. And so that was kind of my first entry into, into the marketing world and through that contract, because we had our activations at football games, basketball games all different types of expos. So we were essentially representing, you know, the newspapers. So we had the ability to do a lot of media trades. We would we would give out, you know, 10, 20, 30, $50,000 worth of ads and exchange of having a booth depending how long of, you know, of an event it was, if it was a fair, if it was a multi-day expo, if it was a season for the football or basketball game and so forth.

Elias (02:41): And so that was my first client many, many moons ago, and through networking and through being at so many events, that's how I, I spiraled into my second client and third client and fourth client just by actively networking because I was out and about at all times, managing the teams. And so we initially started as an experiential event marketing company and, and then we transitioned into digital marketing. So when I would tell you know, business owners, friends, colleagues, clients, that we were a marketing company you know, this is around the time that newspapers started losing its popularity and digital marketing, social media started being introduced into the world. And so they would ask you know, do you do any Google ads or, you know, how can you do leads or, you know what else can you offer? And so I essentially immersed myself into, into the world of digital marketing, into the world of inbound marketing.

Elias (03:39): And, and that's essentially when we started pivoting from an experiential agency into, into a, an inbound agency. And that's kind of how, how it all started. And so today you know, need clients. Now, what we do is we build sales funnels for, for small and medium-sized businesses, and that's what we do. And so what that entails is a fully done for you service, where we're generating the lead we're advertising on social media, and we are essentially building the whole a done for you aspect of the customer journey. And that's really what we're doing. And I'm extremely passionate about it, especially now that we're working with smaller businesses because it truly makes a difference when you produce the right customer journey, the right strategy. It makes a really big difference in the lives of the business and the business owner. And so that's kind of where we're at today.

Kathleen (04:29): Yeah, for sure. This is a tough time for a lot of small business owners. And I know you work with some businesses and some industries that are, have been hit particularly hard by the things that have been going on in the last year. And you know, that's one of the reasons I was excited to talk to you because it's easy to host a podcast like this and talk to a lot of marketers, have really big budgets and are from big companies that are venture capital backed. It's entirely another thing to be a marketer at, or for a company that has a smaller budget. That's really struggling, you know, and for whom these kinds of increases in sales really are meaningful on a personal level. And I was a small business owner, and so I have a soft spot in my heart for anybody who has the guts and the work ethic to start and run a business of their own.

Kathleen (05:27): So very, it's an issue very close to my heart. And I think with COVID, it's really just underscored how important it is for us to all support small businesses. So that was one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you because you ha you do just that you help smaller businesses fill their sales pipelines and you do it in a way that doesn't require a tremendous budget. You know, or lots of fancy tools. I think from what I've heard, it's very accessible. It's very doable and it's very repeatable for anybody out there who's listening. And so I'm going to think of this episode as my gift to small business owners out there who are looking for a way to try some new tactics in order to bring business in the door. Now with that as the kind of table setting for our conversation, I should say one of the strategies that you've used successfully to do just that is webinars.

Kathleen (06:21): And I feel like people hear the word webinar these days and they roll their eyes because they're like, Oh, webinars. We're also tired of them. We spend all of our life on zoom. Nobody wants to go to another webinar. Webinars are so like 1990s, you know there's a lot of poo-pooing around webinars, but the reality is they can still work if done well, and they are working for you. And you have a webinar funnel that you've used with a number of clients successfully. So I would love it if you could just maybe start by explaining the types of clients you work with and where webinars fit in their overall strategy.

Elias (07:07): Absolutely. Right now we work with a handful of, of industries and niches. And one of those industries is beauty academies. You know, which is quite interesting because that's not absolutely these are academies. These are institutions and organizations that train others. It's, you know, it's a business and they train others on learning the craft so that they can essentially start their own business. So when it comes to the beauty industry, you have your service providers, these, your lash artists, you're microblading artists, you're microneedling, and many, many dozens of beauty procedures that are out there in today's you know, marketplace. And then you have the academies, those that teach the individuals so that they start their own business. And that's one of the industries that we specialize in is working with these beauty academies and, you know, back to the whole COVID thing.

Elias (07:57): You know, most of the academies, we have a lot of clients on the West coast. And you know, COVID, you know, hit that area specifically in Southern California very hard. And so our clients at that time, they were, they were quite scared because they weren't able to hold classes. They weren't able to, to fulfill the service and, and this specific funnel that we're going to dive right into, it made a huge impact because they were still able to, to generate revenue when collect deposits for future dates. And so it's something I'm very proud, proud of because our clients were scared. You know, these are these, these are small local businesses and they didn't know what was going to happen. And they didn't know how long of a pause they needed to take and how they were going to continue paying their employees.

Elias (08:44): It was a scary time for them. And so I'm very proud that we were able to successfully execute this webinar campaign for them. And, and you're right, you know, we have done webinars, we've attended webinars and we see it all out there, but you'd be surprised. There are so many industries where to them, they have never attended a webinar. They have never produced a webinar. And so for them, it's a whole different ball game of like, understanding how was this delivered? How can I generate revenue and so forth? And so I'm sure many of the listeners here are familiar with a webinar, but for maybe a small percentage that are not really familiar, it's an incredible opportunity for you to really deliver your message. And so for those complex industries where you can't really just get the message across and just, you know, a minute or five minutes, you really need a longer time to really get out the benefits and explain how it works and present your offer.

Elias (09:45): That's when the webinar works extremely, extremely well for, you know, and so the biz-op industry career ops and, and the beauty industry is it's a perfect campaign because the people that are getting into the industry, they have lots of questions. And on the webinar, you have the opportunity specifically live webinars. We prefer live webinars over prerecorded. But you have the ability to really present your personality. You have the ability to, to answer questions and then take the attendees through, you know, through a journey that explains the benefit of what you're doing and, and essentially indoctrinates them. And towards the end of the webinar, those that are really interested are able to take action and they're able to, to, you know, to take the next step. And so for, for these academies, it's, it's something that works extremely extremely well. And I'm happy to share some numbers.

Kathleen (10:36): Yeah. And you have a, like a true Omni channel approach to webinar marketing. I think a lot of the companies and marketers I talk to often rely heavily on a combination of like email and maybe pay-per-click advertising or organic social to draw in their webinar attendees, but I think you've taken it, you know, a step or two further. So I'm excited to, to hear more about that.

Elias (11:00): Absolutely. Some of these clients have a very small list, less than 20,000, less than 10,000. And so what we do for top of funnel is we're advertising. And so for that particular industry, Instagram and Facebook work extremely well for top of funnel. So that's, that's the top of funnel is we are putting out an ad that says register now to learn XYZ, right? So that's an example of one of our creatives with a nice image and so forth. So that's top of funnel, people are browsing. Our target audience that we're targeting is, is spending time on social media, many hours a day that we've seen,

Kathleen (11:37): And this is really a B2C webinar, right? Like you're going after sort of the individual person who would, might sign up and come, which is interesting because that's the other thing that's different is that I think every other time we've talked about webinars on this podcast, it's been B2B.

Elias (11:51): Yeah, absolutely. These are, these are consumers. These are nurses, you know these are, these are you know, professionals. These are primarily women that get into this, into this specific industry. But these are consumers that see an ad on Instagram and and they're registering for, for, you know, for the webinar to learn a little more of, of, of the industry and, and, and just learning a little more about it. So that's the top of funnel. And so our first kind of KPI is seeing how many, you know, registrations were able to get. And so for some of these local academies, and we do work with academies as well, they have multi locations and different cities across the country, but let's use a local Academy as an example. We're able to get hundreds of registrations through Facebook or Instagram ads. And that works extremely well. On average, our cost per registration is between four and $6. And so we're able to get you know, hundreds, depending on the client's budget, you know, but we're able to get people to register for the webinar. So that's our first KPIs.

Kathleen (12:57): And how are you, how are you targeting those ads? Because like, I imagine you could theoretically go out to a very broad audience.

Elias (13:05): Absolutely. So we target based off of all the parameters that Facebook and Instagram allow. So pages you know, pages that they follow those that are interested in beauty, interested in the specific procedure. So so our media buying team essentially goes from either general or, or, or really segmented a bunch. It depends on the city. So some, a city like Los Angeles, Orange County is going to have more interest than, than a smaller city. And, you know, toll says that example. So, so yeah, we're targeting off of pages they follow and just general interests based off of the, the procedure that we're presenting. So that's top of funnel. And then our second KPI, once we get those registrations is the objective is to get as many people to attend, right? So we want a lot of people to listen to the message, because we know that those that listened to the message, a percentage of them are going to be interested in converting.

Kathleen (14:11): That's a good point because that is, that does tend to be the real problem with webinars is lots of people register, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to show up. And so how you get them to actually show up is where the magic happens. I think

Elias (14:26): Absolutely. It's, it's very important. You'd be surprised, lots of marketers. They strictly just rely on email, but as we know, email on a good day, depending on your industry is going to generate maybe 20, 30% on a good day open rate. Right. but so what we do is in terms of the omni-channel approach is we want to not only send an email reminder of course, but we also want to send a text message reminder, of course, these are opting in, of course, and then we also want to send a ringless voicemail. So having those three different, different touch points of sending them reminders of when the webinar is, is really important, we take it a step further too. So not only are we sending reminders immediately once they register, they get a message and then a day before, and then the morning of, and then a message 10 minutes before the webinars.

Elias (15:18): So we have found that that's the sweet spot. It doesn't really annoy people because they really want to attend. They're registering for it voluntarily, and they want to show up. And so these reminders are incredibly helpful and having the text message and having the ringless voicemail, it's so important because, you know, you can't just rely on email. You need to have those multiple touch points and the different platforms to, to remind the audience. And so that's, that's our second KPI is what percentage are going to be attending. And right now we're seeing between 30 and 40% you know, attendance from cold traffic, which, which is good.

Kathleen (15:56): Yeah. Now what platform do you use for texting and ringless voicemail?

Elias (16:04): We use Twilio. So it integrates with a lot of the CRMs that our clients are using. So the, for, for these local businesses, the CRM that we're implementing is called go high level. And it's, it's really has been increasing in popularity over the past couple of years and the industry that, that we're in. And we like it because it has the ability to control all of the messaging within the CRM. We're able to listen to the call recordings, we're able to see the Facebook messages and the emails and everything is just bundled in, in that platform. So we use Twilio to connect it and then for ringless voicemails I will have to get back to you.

Kathleen (16:46): Oh, that's okay. I'm always just curious about these things.

Elias (16:50): It's very inexpensive. And that's a great part. So on a, on a local campaign you know, I mentioned the, the webinar registration you know, four to six dollars, but the, when it comes to the ringless voicemails, it's so inexpensive a client will spend less than like $30. It's like 0.0, zero, zero 6 cents. And so it's, it's very minimal cost for you to have the opportunity for someone to get a voicemail that says, Hey, you know, just a reminder, we have this webinar today that you registered for. I'm really excited to have you there. Right? So it's also about the messaging as well, has to be really positive. And you have to show that excitement through, through the email, through the text message or through the voicemail. And that's the, that's the difference on the voicemail. You're actually hearing their voice. So you can, you can really implement that tonality and little things like that. They really make a difference.

Kathleen (17:37): And so a couple of questions on that. Do you have your clients record the voicemail? So that it's the same person they're going to be hearing from on the webinar? Basically

Elias (17:45): Very important. Absolutely. Absolutely. We help them out. We write a script or we'll write an outline you know, and these, these voicemails, they're, you know, they're 45 seconds or a minute max, right? People don't want to listen to a long voicemail, especially if it's sent directly to their phone, that's what a ringless voicemail is. It's, you don't get a call or just send directly to your voicemail. So these messages are recorded by the person presenting, and that's very important cause that's that's typically most of the time, the people that are in them that they're buying from. So, and then that the same person that they're seeing deliver the presentation. So it's more you know, more of the face touch points that, that the, that the prospect is able to see, but the client is delivering the voicemail of course

Kathleen (18:32): Way. And this might be a dumb question. But is there any way to get any analytics back on ringless voicemail? Like, well, you know, if somebody listened to it?

Elias (18:43): Yeah, and most of these platforms they provide they provide analytics. So they'll show the delivery rate, right? Sometimes as we all know, with, when it comes to advertising on social media people, there's a percentage of people that are giving, you know, fake numbers and so forth. And so there are analytics that show you know, the delivery rate. And then also sometimes you're able to also assess if that person ends up calling back that number. And so what happens if they call back? Well, it depends on the platform that you're using, but it can connect directly to a call that you afforded. So so it depends on the platform.

Kathleen (19:23): Oh, that's smart. So you send out all these reminders you have about between 30 and 40% of people who show up and then talk to me about what the actual webinar itself is like, because this is the other area where I feel like there's, it's like ripe for screwing up. If you're, if you're too salesy, it can be a huge turnoff. But you obviously, especially in the case of, you're talking about you, you want to have some kind of a pitch because you're trying to turn this into business. So how do you coach your clients and work with them on structuring the webinars so that it, it gets the results you're looking for, but also delivers value to the attendee?

Elias (20:03): Absolutely. So it's, there's a formula, you know, you're, you have to deliver value on these webinars. No one wants to attend a webinar where it's entirely just a pitch, a pitch. That's not fun for people, right? And so obviously there has to be some congruency between what the ad is saying, what they're registering for and so forth. But the formula that we adapt really encompasses providing as much value as possible. And that formula includes edifying the, the speaker, you know, so, so there's a couple slides that, that, that give background on the speaker, her training, his, or her training and you know, results that they've generated. So there's a whole formula to it. It really is 90 value. And then I mentioned that these are live webinars, so there's questions, there's engagement, and that's what makes the webinars fun because they're live.

Elias (20:56): So you can ask questions like, Hey, where are you? You know, where are, you know, coming in from, or press one. Like, those are the best webinars when you're really engaging with the audience. And that's why live webinars convert more than prerecorded ones, but, you know, the formula entails edifying, the speaker providing value, and that value is so helpful because it also demonstrate your demonstrates your knowledge of the, of the industry and also demonstrates your expertise, right? And so a lot of value that we're presenting and teaching something, right. Teaching the benefits of the industry we're going to sprinkle in testimonials. That's obviously very important to show you know, to, to show social proof. And then so I'd say 90% value driven and information driven. And then towards the end of the webinar, there's going to be an irresistible offer, right?

Elias (21:46): And so that's how it works. There has to be a true irresistible offer that is only offered to the people that are, that are really making the time investment to join on the webinars. So there's a special discount. There are bonuses offered, but that's how we're able to get people to convert is by taking them through that journey. And this journey is about an hour long. And sometimes depending on how many questions the audience has, it can be an hour 20, an hour, 30 minutes long, but we've found that an hour is kind of the sweet spot for this particular industry. But that's typically the framework of how the webinar works. You have to provide as much value, edify the speaker, sprinkle in testimonials, teach and demonstrate your expertise and your authority, and then present you know, the irresistible offer and have people take action.

Elias (22:32): And that's, and that's how these clients are able to generate revenue. So let's look at the numbers on a high level. If we are getting, let's say a hundred you know, attendees you know, Oh, a hundred attendees, and let's say we have 40 40% show up rate. So that's 40 people that are showing up. We typically see a 10% conversion. And these offers from these clients we're working with are three, four, $5,000 for three, four or five day events. So it's very lucrative for these small businesses. And so if we're doing the math okay directly, we have, you know, 40, 40 people that are attending and, you know, 10% of that, that's, you know, that's for, you know, conversions you know, initially from the webinar and if it's you know four or $5,000 a course, right, we're talking about 20, $20,000. And so that may not seem like a lot for, for, for large, large budget, but for these small businesses based off of their, their student acquisition costs and based off of their numbers and their marketing budgets, it's a game changer. And what we do is we repeat the process. We can do two live webinars per month, three live webinars. And so that type of revenue that you're bringing in it makes a huge impact.

Kathleen (23:53): So let's talk about a couple of the nitty gritty details on the webinars. Do you have your clients use slides? Is it just a person talking? What does that look like? What is that experience like?

Elias (24:06): We are designing the slides for them. And so we have found that, that, especially in this industry, it's a very aesthetic based industry. You know, having high quality design makes a big impact, and it's a lot of work. It's labor intensiveness where my design team, because some of these presentations can be 80, 90 pages. And so we're designing each page, we're customizing each page and then we're also helping them out with the script. And so it's a, it's a PDF or a PowerPoint that they're presenting and they're going page by page by page. And then in certain areas within the webinar, they're answering questions and engaging and so forth, but that's typically how it works. It's a, it's a nicely designed professionally designed presentation. And how long did the webinars last about an hour? We've seen the sweet spot be an hour and that can, you know, that's give or take some of them depending on the number of questions. If you have a larger audience, we have done webinars. We've had hundreds, you know, and over a thousand people attend the webinars. And so depending on the number of questions that you're allocating you know, the webinars can be much longer than that. It can be an hour and a half. It can be an hour 40 minutes an hour, 20 minutes, but we, we, we found that an hour is kind of the sweet spot for, for really getting the message across and, and really presenting the offer strategically and carefully.

Kathleen (25:27): And what platform webinar platform are you using with them?

Elias (25:32): The one, the webinar platform of choice for using is Click Meeting. And there's so many, you know, we're, we're vendor agnostic. So the reason we like this one it's, it's it's low price. And also what's most important in what we're doing is being able to obviously have analytics, but also we have the ability to drop the link. That's how we're getting people to actually click during the last 10% of the webinar. When, when they're presenting an offer, we're dropping a link, right, where we're showing it, and they're, the prospects are clicking that link to the sales page that has, you know, the countdown, it has the headline, the call to action, and it essentially illustrates all that they're getting with that irresistible offer that we talked about. And so that's just the platform that we're using, but there are so many that, that, that have similar features.

Kathleen (26:21): Yeah. There definitely are a lot now you're working with these clients, I'm assuming in many cases, you know, these are businesses that up until recently probably did everything in person, you know, or, or, you know, they sent mail or they used the phone, but they're not, these are not businesses that typically do webinars. So for many of these people, it's going to be their first time running one. How do you coach them on, you know, what it means to be a good webinar host? Like I assume that many of them are nervous, right?

Elias (26:54): Absolutely. Some of them, some of them are very nervous and we do rehearsals. We have them send you know, after the coaching, we have them send us videos. So they're rehearsing to me and my team, and they're sending us prerecorded videos. We have them practice with their friends and family before the live webinar. So it depends some of these clients, because they're in a, in the industry in the beauty industry, they're very comfortable being on camera and they've, some of them have had many speaking engagements. So it depends, some clients are more nervous than others, but we're going to help coach them. And then really the presentation is really helping them as much as possible. They're really talking about themselves, they're sharing their story, they're sharing about something that, that they have lots of experience with. So that part's easy. You know, the hard part for some of these clients is really the pitch going into how do you, how do you get people to actually sign up and how do you, you know,

Kathleen (27:50): Yeah. What makes for an irresistible offer because you used that term a few times. So I'd love to hear kind of in your mind, what's the formula for that?

Elias (27:59): Well, people love discounts, right? So that, that, that's, that's, you know, topic number one. So if, if this course is, let's say, you know, $5,000 and they're able to get it for 45 or 4,300 of they're able to save 500, 700 or even a thousand dollars, that's, that's, that's a huge part of the irresistible offer. So a price discount, that's really going to motivate people to take action now. And then scarcity too, this is only limited for the first 15 people that take action. So scarcity, and then the bonuses that, that makes a huge difference as well. So some of these bonuses can be, you're going to get a one-on-one with me, or you're going to get this, this, this course, you know, so we work directly with the client to, to really understand what is this target audience want? How can we make it an irresistible offer and what can we add to sweeten the deal? And that's how you're able to take people and to get people to convert the discount, the scarcity, the the whole webinar format, and then the, the bonuses. That's really what makes people you know, triggers or impulse.

Kathleen (29:05): Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love that. So, so talk me through, if I'm listening to this and I'm a small business and I'm thinking, gosh, I don't know if I could do this. Like, it sounds expensive. Well, talk me through, like, what kind of a budget do I need to have to do something like this? Cause you've mentioned a few tools and then the fact that there are low cost, but like, what does it really take to pull this off?

Elias (29:27): Yeah. Well, first of all you need to assess is, is a webinar, really the right type of strategy for my business, right? So if you're selling, let's say, t-shirts, it's not going to work. What are you going to talk about for an hour show a t-shirt right. Get people to purchase. And it's, so it has to be you know, the right, the right type of client, it has to, it has to be a product or a service. That's thousands of dollars. If it's less than a thousand dollars, it's not going to be worth your time, putting all the effort and, you know, presenting that offer to too many people. And, and that's kind of the game changer with these clients is like previously, before they start working with us, they're, they're, they're pitching one to one, like you said, you know, they're working with referrals, they may have done some ads before.

Elias (30:10): Right. But they're still having to them or their team. They're having to contact these individuals on a one-to-one basis. And the webinar, the reason it's so amazing. And we love it is because you're, you're, you're presenting one too many. And so that's a big game changer. So those that are considering doing a webinar, they have to have the right price point. So the sweet spot that we've found is, you know, two to $5,000, anything higher than that is going to be a longer sales cycle and anything lower than that just doesn't make fiscal sense. Right. and then and then in terms of dialing in your numbers, when you're running ads for that industry, like I said, we see four to six you know, our, our, our cost per registration, but in a different industry, it may be a lot higher than that, depending on the competitiveness to it. So you need to first first gauge you know, the level of interest from, from that audience and then the topic. And there are so many factors that go into it, but you know, these, these clients that the ROI that they're generating is pretty significant they're spending you know, they're spending less than $2,500 in ad costs and then softwares and tools. And many of them are making you know, 20, 30, 30, $5,000 per webinars. So it's a, it's a huge ROI.

Kathleen (31:24): Great. And are the tools that you're using. I mean, some people who listened to this might be like, I want to hire Elias and his firm to do this for me. And others might be like, I want to do this for myself. So the tools that you use are they easy enough for anyone to, to use, to program, to set up or do you really need specialized expertise?

Elias (31:45): Most of these tools are very, they're very user-friendly. I think it's, it's, it's, it's certainly very possible for you to go out and try your first webinar. One of my recommendations would be you don't need to have a platform. You can test out a webinar. Why don't you test it out on a Facebook live or Instagram live, that's a mini webinar. Right. And right now people are talking about what's that app, that clubhouse that's right. That's right. Everybody's addicted to it. Right. House. And, and they're saying like, some of these people are really leveraging clubhouse because it's kind of like an audio webinar. And so I know some of these people that are on it that are getting lots of coaching and consulting clients by delivering value and that's, you know, similar to webinars. So you don't need to have those tools specifically just to get started. And I think that'd be a great practice for you to go on to Facebook, live Instagram live, and and then present, you know, present your offer, present your story. And that's kinda what it, what it's all about.

Kathleen (32:46): Yeah. That's great. I mean, you're right. There are so many platforms where you can test these things and like at no cost and clubhouse certainly is the wild West right now. So a worth a shot if you have an invite and if you have an iPhone, because it does not currently work on Android, although they're working on that, I hear

Elias (33:01): I was on an earlier vanilla ice was on yesterday, like Tiffany you know, hot dish and, and like, you have all these it is like the wild wild West, but right now is a really interesting time because you know, it hasn't been like broken in yet right now. It's still very new and it's really interesting. And if you joined the right room, you can get a lot of Valley from men. So it's really interesting.

Kathleen (33:26): That's great. Well let's shift gears for a minute and there's two questions. I always ask all of my guests. And I'm curious to hear what you have to say. The first is, of course, we talk all about inbound marketing on this podcast, and I'm curious if there's a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound.

Elias (33:46): I think HubSpot does a phenomenal job. And you know, I, I, when I get their emails, they're always interesting to me as a marketer because I'm their target audience, you know, they, they but I think in my opinion, they're kind of, you know, the Kings of inbound specifically their content the way that they frame their content just makes me specifically want to download. And even though I'm already on their lists, you know, it really makes me want to want to consume the content. So I think whoever's responsible for their content or the team has been doing a great job at really understanding their target audience. But

Kathleen (34:24): Yeah, they, they undoubtedly set a very high bar. Second question is, you know, the pain point I hear from a lot of marketers is that digital marketing changes so quickly. And it's really tough to keep up with all of it. So how do you personally keep up to date?

Elias (34:45): I'm always learning, I'm always learning. So in, in the beginning of my career, I was, I was, I immersed myself and, and joining webinars and forums at the time and so forth. And that really hasn't stopped. You know, I'm a lapsed subscriber to digitalmarketer.com. I'm a big fan of, of the movement that they have in the community that they've built. But, you know, it can be from subscriptions and courses that I purchased or it can be something like clubhouse that we were just talking about. Right. You can get some value from it, depending on the room and the topic and so forth. And so I think it's very important to, to, to really, you know, stay on trend and to always be a student, essentially.

Kathleen (35:27): Yeah, absolutely. Any particular places other than digital marketer that you like to get your information

Elias (35:34): Well, HubSpot you know, HubSpot again, Digital Marketer you know, one of, one of my favorite, you know, marketers is the founder of Click Funnels and he has a great community in Facebook groups is, is amazing another amazing research and social platform. So I, I think it's undervalued as far as, you know, Facebook groups are concerned, but you can join a group that's specific to sales, marketing inbound, right? And so if the group is being curated and managed correctly, you can get a lot of value from it. So so really I get my info from various different platforms in different organizations.

Kathleen (36:13): That's great. Well, I totally agree about groups. Both Facebook and Slack groups, I get a tremendous amount of value out of all right. Well, that brings us to the end of our time. And so before we wrap up, if somebody wants to learn more about Need Clients Now, or wants to connect with you, or has a question about what you talked about today, what is the best way for them to do that?

Elias (36:33): You can visit our website, it's www.needclientsnow.com. You can also email me. It's Elias, [e-mail] or you can message them on Instagram. I love talking to fellow marketers and I love answering questions. And if you want to join one of our webinars for one of our clients, I'm happy to invite you to that as well.

Kathleen (36:54): Oh, I love that. That's a great offer. Well, you know, I just want to say before we finish that, I appreciate the work you're doing, because like we said, in the very beginning, it's so important right now for us to support small businesses and to do whatever we can do, whether that's as marketers or as, you know, consumers who go out and shop and use our shop and spend our dollars, you know, with, with local businesses, et cetera. It's so, so important so that when we hopefully come out of this pandemic, that has felt like it has lasted forever. All of those businesses that we love will still be there. And so thank you for, for doing what you do.

Elias (37:29): Oh, you're welcome. This has been a pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity.

Kathleen (37:33): And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, or you learned something new, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. That's how we get found by more listeners. And of course, if you know someone else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. Thank you so much, Elias. This was great.

Elias (37:58): Thank you.