Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:00.907)
If you're a seven to eight figure B2B company struggling to convert attention into customers, then our guest, Alex Sheridan, the founder of Impax Marketing is going to give you a simple win you can implement today. A big welcome to the show, Alex, excited to have you here.
Alex Sheridan (00:16.802)
be here Adam. Thank you.
Adam O'Leary (00:17.763)
Awesome, man. So I want you to explain, so why do you believe most companies struggle with turning attention into customers?
Alex Sheridan (00:27.214)
I think there's two things that we see. Number one, they're working with a marketing agency and trying to outsource all of their content. And typically what that looks like is, you know, we come into a company and work with them. It's, yeah, we've been working with a marketing agency for the past 12 months, 24 months, and they're checking the boxes, man. They're putting out content, but it's like announcement post. It's, we're at a conference. It's a chat should be T written posts with 24 skyrocket emojis that everyone knows they didn't write it. And so the content just sucks, man. Like that's, that's the brutally honest truth. The content is just not good.
The second thing is they don't have an agency, they're trying to do it in house, but they've never learned the skills, nor do they have the strategy or probably the systems, as the three Cs as I call it, strategy, systems, and skills, that it takes to actually create content that drives not only attention, but engagement and then conversion into clients. So there's usually like a...
philosophical gap and they're hiring somebody to do it all and they don't want to look at it that just doesn't work or there's a system skills and strategy gap.
Adam O'Leary (01:27.841)
That's awesome. So when you go ahead and start working with clients, what's kind of a process that you would walk somebody through in order to create this content?
Alex Sheridan (01:35.79)
So we have a five step proprietary process called the infinite client systems. So, but you can follow this at home. You don't have to work with us to follow, to follow this advice. The first one is you want to do your brand strategy and positioning. So you want to say, what is our unique opinion point of view narrative that we're bringing to the marketplace, right? If I'm doing marketing and I say, I'm a marketing company, we can build brand, we can drive revenue. Great. Every other company can say that there's a million companies that also say that.
So instead I look at a company and say, well, what can we do that's different than anyone else? What do we offer that's unique than anyone else? So positioning your company as different, not just a little bit better. That's one thing the company should be looking at doing. Second thing, then step two is we go to content strategy and systems. And so then we're saying, all right, based on our positioning and our brand strategy now, where do we feel like it would be the best bang for our buck to create content? What channels, what mediums?
How do we build a content ecosystem that all ties together into one cohesive effort versus we're doing some LinkedIn posts here, we do a newsletter twice a week, you know, it's usually just all over the place. And then we build systems on the backend. Third thing is we look at building an in-house content team. And so for a lot of companies that could look like a video editor in the Philippines that just does content for them and maybe they got a marketing coordinator in-house already. And then...
It could be hiring somebody in person, W2, contractor, whatever that looks like, but hey, we need the right team in place. We've got the system, the strategy, now we need the team. Four step is building skills and coaching and developing that team. So back to what I said earlier, great, you got a great team, you got a strategy even, maybe you even got a system, but does your team have the right content fundamentals and skills to be able to take that and execute on it actually get results? And then the fifth step is just scaling our efforts and driving revenue.
Adam O'Leary (03:23.469)
Super cool. Okay, so when we look at brand strategy, let's kind of just walk through these, I guess, one by one. When we look at the brand strategy side, what is the biggest mistake that you see companies making on brand strategy?
Alex Sheridan (03:36.172)
If you go to a company's website, one of the biggest mistakes they have there is it's either unclear as to what they do or it's clear, but there's no brand story. So when we look at a brand and Donald Miller wrote a great book called Story Brand, I'd recommend anyone go read that right now. It's a great book. And the philosophy there is that you need to treat your brand like a story. And the story isn't, hey, I'm Alex with Impact's Marketing. We're the best company ever. We're...
this and that, we're great and you should work with us, we're the number one in this industry. That's positioning your company as the hero. What we want to do is position the client as the hero. Because if we're the hero in the story and the client comes walking up, what's their role in the story? If I'm Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and you're a client of mine, I'm Luke, dude. I'm the champ, I'm the guy, I'm the go-to, I'm the hero. So the client's like, well then what am I?
Instead, what we want to do is position us as the guide in the story, like the Obi-Wan Kenobi. And we want to help young Luke become a Jedi. And that's more empowering and exciting for a customer. So I would encourage anyone listening, look at your brand. And I'm using like a website as a place where your brand kind of shows up for a lot of people, but it could be the website, it could be the social content. Are we telling a story? And is there a main character? Is there a guide? Is there a hero? Is there a, you know, villain in the story? What are we going against?
In our case, it's outsourcing all of your content to an agency. That's our villain. So that creates a really powerful narrative to build your content strategy off of. And if you don't have that, it's not that you can't do it, but it's just tougher because you don't have that story that you're bringing to the marketplace.
Adam O'Leary (05:14.955)
Absolutely, so once we know who our villain is and we've positioned our client as the hero, how do you then start going ahead and start looking at the content strategy piece? Like you were talking about how, for example, people will go ahead and say, okay, two LinkedIn posts over here, over here, and it's kind of random, but how do we actually bring this into a content ecosystem?
Alex Sheridan (05:31.126)
Mm-hmm.
Alex Sheridan (05:36.578)
The first step is you got to know your customer at a very deep level. And it's not just like, we target B2B companies doing anywhere from three to 50 million. That's certainly part of it. That's the demographics. But what are the psychographics? And I'll give you a really good example personally is over the last few months, I've really, really this year has taught, I've learned a lot this year. There's been some great ups. There's been some highly big challenges too, as most of us have had. But one of the big things I learned is that
the CEOs and founders that I'm looking to attract the seven, eight figure B2B companies. I have to know that their psychology, our best customers are the ones where the CEO and founders want to be the face of the brand. They want to get on camera. They have a message they wanna share. They have insights. They like hopping on a stage. They believe that their company should be a media company first and then everything else second pretty much. Because if you don't have the attention.
and the influence, what do you really have? It doesn't matter how good your product or service is if you can't get in front of people. So before I'd try to go with like a company that's like, yeah, the CEO is like, yeah, we want to improve our marketing. I don't really want to be involved in it. And it's like knowing that, that's not my customer. That's not my best customer. That's not my dream client. So like really drilling that down and then, you know, to answer the question further, then it becomes, okay, well, if we know the dream client really now.
like we truly know their pains or insecurities, their deepest desires, whatever it might be. Then we just got to say, where are they? What sandbox did they play in? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they consuming podcasts? Do they check their email or are they a texter? Are they on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or whatever they're on? And then it's just building an ecosystem around that to say, how do we not just do a bunch of random things, but how do we build it all together as one cohesive strategy?
But that's how I think about forming that.
Adam O'Leary (07:28.483)
That's awesome. Okay, so once we kind of have that strategy, how do we go about building that in-house team?
Alex Sheridan (07:34.446)
then it really depends on where that company is at specifically. So if you already have a marketing manager, a marketing coordinator, you have somebody that does marketing inside your company, there may not be a ton of things to add. You may not need to add anybody, right? Or maybe you're a founder and you've got a very small team and you just want to set up your own operation and then maybe you've got a video editor in the Philippines, right? So it could be anywhere from, I mean, I have one client that's an eight figure business.
They have a marketing coordinator. They have a content director. They have the founder who does the camera. He's on camera, obviously, as the talent and building his brand. He's doing a phenomenal job. They have somebody he has a videographer filming him. He has seven video editors across his different practices. That's like the we're going all in on this thing and he's blowing up as we speak and we'll continue to over the next, you know, five to 10 years. But that's that's.
I would say that's kind of the outlier. That's someone that's going all in. We love those companies and those founders. But for a lot of people, it's like, yes, it's, hey, do we need a video editor? Maybe we need a social media manager to hire. Maybe we have somebody in-house that we can leverage. So I was like, who do you have now? And then based on that, can we train and coach that person up to speed? Or do we need to add other people based on the goals that we want to hit?
Adam O'Leary (08:49.443)
That's awesome. Okay, so once we build that team in place, the next part's the skills and coaching and things like this. What have you seen as been the biggest challenge, I guess?
or I guess when a team comes in, what's the biggest challenge that you've seen when it comes to somebody trying to implement on their own? Right, because when I think of coaching, right, there's always this challenge of like, okay, you have this process that's done, but can I actually go ahead and implement this? Like, am I realistically able to do so? Have you experienced clients that you've worked with that have kind of had that challenge and how did you overcome that?
Alex Sheridan (09:23.938)
Yeah, I think the biggest.
when I come into a company, the biggest problem that we're trying to overcome from a content standpoint is that they're obsessed with trying to put out content that shows their company and their offerings. And so the content becomes obsessed with our company, our offerings, what we do, what we're all about, where we're at this week. And my focus is, and it's funny, like large companies try to be corporate, medium companies try to be large.
Small companies desperately want to be medium and the best companies are obsessed with their customers. And it's the same way I look at content, right? Like you have to be obsessed with the customer and you can't look at it being like, well, if we don't mention our company and what we do and we don't tell them how are we going to win customers? You're going to win customers and drive leads because when you put out content that's highly valuable, that actually speaks to them and helps them and educates them and entertains them or whatever it might be, they're going to see you as a trusted
credible expert and those are the people that buy from you not somebody that promotes self promotes all the time. It's the person that's helpful that makes them think about a problem they didn't even know they had. It's an insight that you're like whoa maybe that's why we're struggling with that problem that is a great point or wow that's a great strategy hey Susie let's go try that strategy and now they're sharing your post in their slack channel or in their email or you know they're they're sharing it to a colleague of theirs.
That's the type of content that, so there's like a big philosophical shift is first, right? And it's like, hey, and that's kind of part strategy, but it's part execution too, even when you get down to it, where people naturally want to gravitate towards, I need to promote in my content all the time. Otherwise, how am I going to drive leads? And my thing is like, you don't promote in your content. And that's how you drive leads because you make the content so valuable that they see you as that trusted guide that they want to go to. Beyond that, you just get the content fundamentals. So even if someone's like, hey,
Alex Sheridan (11:21.518)
Cool, got it, I'm gonna make super value added content that speaks to my customers. It educates them, it shares insights, it helps them solve problems, become better at what they do. Even if you get there, you still just got content fundamentals, which people struggle with, which is like, how do I not open this video up to where it's boring as hell? Like, how do I write a LinkedIn text post that actually drives engagement versus does three likes and two of them are people by the company?
So you just got a lot of fundamentals. How do you edit a video in the right way, depending on what the video is and the length and you know, got a lot of kind of like X's and O's types things, even when you get past the philosophical or strategy.
Adam O'Leary (11:59.364)
That's amazing. And what sort of results have you seen your clients get from implementing this?
Alex Sheridan (12:04.162)
mean, the biggest thing that we do for companies is build a forever asset in their business. So, you you take clients that we work with, they're typically working with a marketing agency, right? So they're spending 12 months, 24 months, sometimes even three or four years with an agency. They're not driving leads. They don't have an internal system to be able to do this on their own. They're completely reliant on some third party company. The brand doesn't sound like them at all. They're almost embarrassed by the LinkedIn posts and stuff that goes out. They look at their website, they go, this doesn't match.
who we are and our quality and what, there's nothing unique about this. We sound like everyone else. And so I think that's like the institutional things that we do, like the foundational things as we come in and like help them build an asset in their business, get the brand right, get the strategy right, build the systems, get the team to where they can create high performing content. And then from a results standpoint, I mean, it's generating leads and winning clients. I mean, no question about it. So I mean, we typically, mean, within 90 days, I'd say six months,
at the slowest, they're starting to generate leads and actually win clients from the business. And that's ultimately what we want to see. But we don't promise that 30 days in. We're trying to build something long-term here, but certainly we're looking at, I mean, I had a client, staffing or recruiting client a couple of months ago, we launched our email campaigns and within the first two emails, we won a client because they had this big list of thousands of people that were on there. In their case, it was HR leaders and they just weren't even talking to them. They weren't even talking to them. There was an occasional promotional email that went out.
But we said, no, scrap the promotional stuff. Let's speak to where they're at. Let's meet them where they're at. Let's talk about a pain point they're working through. Let's help them solve it or work through it. And that led to Leeds a new business. so, and whether that's LinkedIn or email or website, it's just, when you make that change, you see the results pretty fast. But again, you're building a forever asset in your business that you now can do this yourself without having to rely on a third party agency. And that's just like, that's just empowering, man.
and you're proud of your content and your brand. And so it's opening up doors that weren't there before. It's really exciting.
Adam O'Leary (14:08.245)
awesome and for somebody who wants to go ahead and start using content and instead of getting just attention be able to convert them into customers where can they go to learn more about you?
Alex Sheridan (14:18.446)
Oh, YouTube channel. I'd probably say for the best long form content would be there. LinkedIn, I'm pretty much daily posting there. I do run a podcast called Founder Talk. We talk about a lot of different things that are founder related, but we do get into some marketing. I've got several episodes on there about marketing. And then sign up for the CMO briefing, which I sent out an email once a week that's like my highest level insights for people that want to produce content that drives results and revenue. And we send that out typically on Wednesdays.
Adam O'Leary (14:47.492)
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, Alex. Really appreciate this. Super cool. Awesome. Well, guys, thank you so much for listening. This was such a great episode. And please, make sure to go check out Alex, because he is amazing what he does. So guys, I will see you all later. Have a good rest of your day. Bye for now.
Alex Sheridan (14:50.476)
Yeah, my pleasure,
