Interview: Ken Robbins on Why Search Marketing is important for marketing a business online and increasing sales

Owen: Hi. Welcome to www.HireYourVirtualAssistant.com. My name is Owen McGab Enaohwo, and what we do here in our company is that we provide you small business owners with exceptional virtual assistants. And on our blog we have a show where I bring on guests from various fields various expertise to come on the show to share with you their insights so that you can learn something and you can apply to your business. It’s my way of saying thank you for coming on my blog.

So today I have Ken Robbins from Response Mine Interactive, and what he has come on my show to talk about Search Marketing and why it’s still relevant and why it is a very important means to market your business on the internet and drive clients to your website and hopefully be able to sell your services and your product. So he’s going be talking to you about search marketing. I look forward talking to you at the end of the interview.

Owen: So hi everyone, today on the show I have Ken Robbins. Ken is from Response Mine Media; Ken go ahead introduce yourself to my audience and tell them what you do in your company.

Ken: Well I’m Ken Robbins. I’m the president and CEO and founder of Response Mine Interactive. And we are an Ad agency, a marketing services firm that helps companies use the internet, lots of search marketing, to sell more products and services.

Owen: Okay. Yeah. So you use the internet basically to… your clients basically come to you guys so that you can show them how to use the internet for selling their products, right?

Ken: Absolutely. Yes.

Owen: How exactly did you get started in this business? I want to get some more background information on how you got started.

Ken: Well, you know, it’s kind of … there’s no logic or rhyme or reason to the story, Owen. I was actually a real estate broker for 11 years.

Owen: Wow!

Ken: And I got a little bored of selling real estate, I get a lot of a business buying and selling, going door to door… you know just handing out my card door to door in neighborhoods and built up a great business and kinda got bored with it. And one of the fellows to whom I had sold a house actually owns an ad agency.

Owen: Okay.

Ken: And this ad agency, the owner Brent is a friend of mine. When I told him I was leaving real estate because I was just tired of it, he recruited me to come into the advertising business. And I learned that about TV advertising, infomercial advertising and that sort of thing for about 4 years with him, and the internet started to come to life. And that we parted up and started with an internet company in 2001.

Owen: Wow! So that was how you get started. And then with the internet, when the clients come to you directly or a referral to you, just walk me through the process like how do you get them from being a client that’s interested in getting your service to letting them know what kind of solutions you can provide to them, all the way to the execution?

Ken: Yeah well, ah, that’s an interesting question. I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that before. Its, you know, we have to do a lot of personal selling and networking to get prospective candidates to come into us. It’s a professional services business, just like being an attorney or real estate agent or a consultant or anything. So the client has to have a lot of confidence Owen, that you’re an expert in what you are doing, and that you’re knowledgeable, and that you’re, you understand their business problem.

So we go through a pitch process where we learn what their issues are, what they’re trying to accomplish, and almost always, they are just trying to sell more stuff. Sell more products, more furniture, more services, more something. They want to sell more. And, we don’t do brand advertising for example. And, you know with images, in colors, with positioning, you it’s all about selling stuffs over the internet or getting customers into their call centers over the internet. So they come to us, and we make a pitch.

And we’ll have ah, pardon me, maybe an hour or two hour meeting with them and we explain to them everything about we do, and we explain to them what we think about their business. We’ll look at their website, we ask a lot of questions, we’ll do some analysis, and we’ll tell them what our strategy would be to help them. And if you like it or we don’t. You know probably these days, we have about a 40% sign up rate. You know, when they’re coming to us they are often thinking about spending a lot of money on a client like us or an agency or a company like us, maybe tens and thousands of dollars, so they usually talk to two or three and if they like us they hire us.

Owen: Okay. So when it comes to make use of the internet for the clients, are these clients coming to you with no prior experience on how to use the internet for their business? Or are they coming to you with actually having something already set up, and you guys, I mean…

Ken: Yeah, that, well most of our clients who comes to us has an experience on the internet. They already have a website, they are already doing marketing at some form. And maybe they had a plateau, or maybe they’ve run into trouble, or maybe they’ve started to miss goals. Most of our clients, even though we’re a small company, I only have forty employees. We’re, most of our clients are national. We have clients like Terminix Pest Control, Brinks Homes Security, and very large clients like these that have either a call center or they are selling million of dollars of products online. So they’re experienced, but they are looking for, you know, they’re looking to take their business to the next level.

Owen: So now, when they come to you guys now, basically what is effective marketing on the internet to you guys? I mean, what, is it social media? Is it SEO? I’m just trying to get an idea what that small business owner that comes to you for instance, needs to wrap his mind around as to what other different sections of the internet marketing that they would have to get involved into.

Ken: Sure. What I find is that it really doesn’t matter the size if the business, the options and the process is really the same. Whether it is small company or it is a very large national company,   that wants what we offer. And really, what we find is that there’s about a dozen different things any company can do on the internet to get more business and generate sales. They can do social media, they can do organic search optimization where they get there business in a website range really high on a free section.

They can do paid search, a lot of people do paid in a search marketing because it is so easy to get into it with Google Ad Words. They can buy banner ads, so if you add all this up they can place classified ads on a Craigslist, go to EBay and sell their products you know through auction marketing. What all these adds up into a dozen things, and what we find is that most people find fantastic success in search marketing, and then if they’re business to business, we find that they find a also add in lot of success in social media, because in social media there’s a lot of networking in it in Tweeter, and in Facebook and these kinds of things. But really it’s all about search marketing. We find maybe about 60% of our clients are gonna go through search marketing in one form or another.

Owen: Okay. So, I mean, is there a difference between the way a business client that, or consumers or compared to a business client between like business to business. What is the difference between their accounts that an internet marketing that both types of companies would do, in your opinion?

Ken: Well, I think in a world of consumers if they are selling to consumers, right? They are going to be, they may have a transaction, a shopping cart on their side, and they’re speaking directly to the consumer and making an offer to them, maybe a discount, or two-for-one, or whatever the value proposition is, free shipping over night if they’re selling a product. If it’s a service to the consumer, they’re also making offers. So for example for a home security company, Brinks Home Security is one of our clients, a national prominent firm. They may make an offer like a free second keypad, security keypad, or a one month’s service free, or something like this, and you bring that call in or that click into the website of the internet marketing, search engine ads or what have you, and you get them to try to convert to sign up then. So in doing consumer face to face marketing, it’s about the transaction very often, or getting leads to convert.

When you’re doing business to business, it’s much more about lead generation and it’s a process. You just want to get an interested party. You can’t usually do the transaction online, and you can’t sell them with just one phone call. You need to get the lead in and get a face to face with them and build a relationship. Because businesses when they’re buying a service, lets say it’s a charge services or a payroll services, it’s a long term commitment. But you know that businesses are just trying to get leverage and just trying to get something solved and they just need a lot more understanding. So marketing on the internet for business to business is about early top of the line lead generation. And then you may contact to start build a relationship. Does that make sense?

Owen: Oh yes. So it is a process of education or kind of marketing when you’re dealing with the business?

Ken: Definitely. Definitely. It’s very true, yes. And that’s what things, let’s say Tweeter, are great for because you can use social media. If you’re business to business service provider you can use something like Tweeter to begin to express that expertise. For us, for example, we have three Tweeter accounts.

My staff, a lot of them have Tweeter accounts. I am @kenrobbins, and mine is business and personal and management expertise really. We also have acquirecustomer, @acquirecustomer and that is our expertise channel where we do nothing but suggestions just on how to generate customers. So you can, you can make these sorts of channels and you build up a following that wants to know more, so yes it is very much about education.

Owen: So when your clients now incorporate all the things you advice, and if there are people who come to them, what’s the next step? Because I know there is a series of things that you would advice them to do in order to turn that onslaught of leads into actual clients. I’m sure there’s a middle part of it, you know. What do they do in that middle?

Ken: Well, you know it is the typical funnel, the sales funnel does apply. You want to generate traffic; you want to develop interest in your product or your services. And then you begin to identify what the customer needs, what their pain is. So for example, a lot of customers they are business to consumer so they use the website, and we use our websites on their behalf, to educate the consumer on why, I’ll go back to the Brink’s example again, why you need the security system, what the benefits are, what type of monitoring, so its really you know, features and benefits and solutions to solve the clients pain.

In a business to business environment, in a business to business sale, you are trying to either save the client a lot of money, for example one of our clients is into IP phones you know office phones systems, you know that office phones with virtual PBX or voice over IP, well that’s really cost savings. And so a lot of website marketing materials and even the phone reps are telling them how you can save so much money by going with a virtual PBX, that client is Vocalocity. And so, you know in a business to business sale it’s always about either saving money or getting a whole bunch of our customers. Whereas in consumers, it’s you know whatever the value proposition is, security or great furniture or lifestyle what have you. So you have to use the website or you use your call center to close the deal and sign the customer up with this value proposition and with this sales messaging, you know.

Owen: Yeah. And you also said something in your email of how you had to change around some of the things you were doing, I think I was just trying to get into your sense on how when you had a drastic change that happens in your business, how you went around when you lose your client, I think, how you went to the process of actually walking around and finding a new solution on how you get your own new clients. I think that’s something that my audience would find interesting on how to adapt to changes on their business.

Ken: Yes, well, you know, as you can see, I don’t have a full head of hair here. But I could tell you, in the last two years I’ve lost a lot of it. I don’t know whether it’s the recession and maybe or if it’s just the maturing of internet marketing. But when we started out nine almost ten years ago, with a lot of search engine marketing, we were very unique. I mean there were lots of search engine marketing around the country, but there wasn’t a big search engine marketing company, so big companies would hire us. And they considered us to have very surgical expertise.

Well, over the last seven or eight years a lot of large world renowned agencies like J.Walter Thompson, Omnicom, and big companies have acquired search engine marketing services, and so what happens is one of our clients for example was Staples, (yeah) and then with another one is Home Depot, two giant retailers, number one office products company in the world and number one home improvement retailer in the world, were our clients, a small ad agency down in Atlanta. Well over time, as their regular agencies that do all their TV etc., began to add in search marketing, they look at us and they say well you’re just a small company, we’re gonna give it because we’re saving money, we are gonna give it to our regular agency.

That really happened to us in the last two years.  Last year, we lost both of these two clients which were our largest clients. Now we had about 18 clients, but these two clients alone made up about 45% of all of our revenues. And it was it was really very tough. Saw it coming for about six months and we tried to keep the business but it wasn’t, wasn’t retainable. We just couldn’t, you know, the clients wanted something rather than us and even though we had great success and good relationships. Business is business.

You part companies as friends, you don’t, you don’t get bitter about it, and you figure out how you provide value on a market place. So one of the things that we did was, we really started to grow a division of our business where instead of acting like a normal ad agency, where the client pays us a retainer, or they pay us hourly, we changed our model a little bit into “just pay us if we make a sale for you.”. So for example, many of our relationships now, and more than half of our revenues, are- they just pay us if we generate a lead that converts to a sale.

Owen: Okay.

Ken: It’s fantastic. We build our own website…

Owen: Was it kind of like on a commission, you get the results and I pay you kind of thing?

Ken: Yes, absolutely. We do it in our own websites. So, we have one of our clients is Sure Green Kind Lawn, if you are familiar with them, they are a big lawn care site where they put a fertilizer, with weed control, and lots of things down and over the course of year they cut some of the trunk bark and fertilize your lawn and take care of it. And they really make your lawns green, they’re a national company.

So they came to us and instead of hiring us like an ad agency we went out and we developed a website called lawncare.net. And you type in lawn care on Google, we’re in the number one position, and we help them generate leads. We have lots of content on the site, we do all of our own marketing on our own dime, and then we put these leads in their call center, and then they only pay us if it’s a really good lead and it turns into a customer and we make a commission. So we had to changed our model and truly loves it, and we love it because we’re able to really apply a lot of our skills to just marketing and handling a lot of process instead of worrying about RFP’s or retainers and that kind of stuff. If we don’t do a good job, we don’t get paid. If we do a good job we get paid a LOT, and we get paid a lot.

Owen: Yeah and that’s good too because now the clients can see that you being basically invested in their success because if they handed you the money, okay whatever results you get, you get. But in this case now, I only get paid when I delivered the results that you’re asking for. And in regards that you coming into that process actually, you know, changing your business around to come across and use that strategy, tell me the transition, how did you get into that point? Cause I’m sure that it’s not just something that you decided to do, you have to go through a series of maybe brainstorming and ideas on what next to do now there has been a change in your business, how did you get into that point or decision on how to do this?

Ken: We had, that’s a good question. We had experimented with it in the past, and we had a relationship like this in the past and we never really developed it into a service offering of any scale. So basically we had one or two clients over the years that would work on this basis where we own the website and we would generate leads and give them quality leads into their call centers.

But really what we decided is, if the world is moving to a situation and all these large clients and our model is sort of set up to service a large client, if the large clients are moving to a world that they don’t wanna deal with the niche boutique aged agency, you know, it isn’t a national scope or international scope, then we have to find another way to service them, and still deal with a large client. And what we find is that, even if they have an ad agency, they are still willing to do a deal with us.

So the whole market is ours, and we’re not competing, you know, we kinda changed the way we are competing so that we are not competing with big agencies we can’t win against who come in with, you know, lots of resources and they send to a pitch maybe 20 or 30 people, when I only have forty people in the company I cant send them all to a pitch. So if I can’t compete that, I had to change the game a little bit. And put more skin in the game, and clients really like that. So we experimented with it, to answer your question, decided to develop that side of the business started really big. And now it’s about 60% of our revenues. And it’s great.

Owen: Yeah and that’s the good thing about this physically adapting in making changes. And to all those small business out there that might be listening to this interview and having to make changes, what exactly would you tell them in regards in making those changes that are needed for their business in regards to adopting?

Ken: Yeah, well, the first thing that I went is I would say is; be willing to change everything. The thing that matters is identifying what, all of them have lots of customers one form or another, no two customers are alike, and what you find is whether you’re a sandwich shop or whether you’re a jet engine manufacturer or whether you sell cars, you find that you have, your customers are either really good or they’re average or they’re poor. So what I like people to do and what we do, the process we get through is, we look at who are the best customers for us. Who pays us the most money…?

Owen: Okay.

Ken: Who pays us on time, and who stays with us. So I think the first thing in order to identify or save the company or that they’re at, is to identify who the best customers are.

Owen: Yeah.

Ken: Then the second process you go through is, and we went through is, we tried to look Owen at where do customers come from. Do they come from speaking engagements? Do they come from us doing advertising? Do they come from us networking with friends? And we went through it, we looked at where all our best customers come from. So if we want to do this pay per performance model, where we are only paid on commission, where do those types of customers come from? And we find that, you know, these types of customers come from networking a lot. Not so much from advertising. We placed a lot of ads, we gone on street show booths…

Owen: Yeah and so we’re back. We got disconnected for a minute. And you were talking about how you started to make use of networking because your whole business model had to change, you have to adapt, and do things differently. So you said you doing a lot of networking, advertisement, advertising for your clients weren’t working. So go back into it.

Ken: Okay. So what I was saying was that, you know you have to build your business. And the way, what we identified was we look at all the sources of customers, and we found that PR, networking, even social media, are really good places. But this networking is the biggest thing, because we’re obviously selling business to business, we’re selling our services to other businesses, not really to consumers.

And then we do consumer marketing for that customer of ours. So in selling business to business, people want to know that we’re expert and that they can trust us, and that we can help them solve their problem, either saving cost or gain more business for themselves. And we found that networking is really good, you know, you asked about do we use educating the clients, definitely. But that networking, finding people who know people who need what we do, guess that’s what one introduction so that we can have a casual conversation about “Hey what’s your problem?” And it works great. PR also works well, I mean you know, we came across you, a good contact, as result of our public relations expert, Megan Webb.

Owen: Yeah.

Ken: And public relations, this is where social media is really exploding because any business can be on par with the giant corporation, through Tweeter, Facebook, Linkedin, these things. You connect with small communities. And you share your expertise on what you do and what you know.

Owen: Yeah.

Ken: Like a big cocktail party.

Owen: Yeah and before I let you go, I want you to just go into some of the details of, you’ve been in the business for quite some time now, what do you say where the mistakes you’ve made and how, if you had the chance would you have done things differently? I guess my audience would learn something from that.

Ken: Wow! I get about 25 years of sales and marketing experience and you know we had a successful company in spite of the difficulties and challenges we faced, you know, the staff really has risen to the occasion, and I don’t think we had enough time to go through all the mistakes, but a..

Owen: The ones that come to mind.

Ken: Yeah, you know, I had two distinct careers. The first one was this 10-12 years where I was a real estate broker and I can tell you for sure in that business I spent a lot of time focusing on a  geographic area and knocking on doors and getting to know people.

Owen: Yeah.

Ken: And I got a really dizzy. And one big mistake that I made there was, the area where I worked had a very low turn over rate. Average price would maybe a hundred thousand dollars and maybe 5-6% turn over annually. If I had identified that early on and I had worked on an area lets say maybe had a 150 or 200 thousand dollar homes, and a 10% turn over rate, I could have made a lot more money. So I think using data, the times I had failed, the biggest was when I failed to just listen to the data, listen to the people around me.

Even in our own business, we knew that in generating leads for big companies that is the most profit for us and is the most value for the customer. When I work with a small company and I’m not doing search marketing, I’m doing something unusual like just maybe building a small website for them, it doesn’t produce a lot of profit for us, it’s never a long time relationship, so one of the big mistake that I made over the last 10 years in the ad agency I’m running this [   ]. It’s very similar, it’s not identifying the best customer and in just calling after those and serving those. Now we do that and we’re having a great run at it. So I think, two things that I would say that I would encourage anybody to do, look at where your best customer is, because anytime that I haven’t done that and I just hadn’t driven to serve, go and get more of those and serve those. That’s always been to my detriment, and I think I see that even amongst my friends in business and clients. So…

Owen: So basically, what you’re saying is that the two key points in what you said is pay attention to the data, know your data as much as possible as the business has the data around it. And also pay attention to who your client really is, spend the time to know who your client is, right?

Ken: Yes. Absolutely Yes.

Owen: Well thank you very much Ken for the interview. I’m sure some of my audience will want to get in contact with you so just tell them on how they can get in contact with you.

Ken: Thank you. Well, you can follow me on Tweeter. And I’m very active with you know, a 140 or 150 tweets a week. At @kenrobbins, K-E-N R-O-B-B-I-N-S. And all the rest of my contact information is there. My company and my website are, let’s see, Response Mine Interactive.

Owen: I see it, yeah!

Ken: So Response Mine Interactive, like Response and then Mine, M-I-N-E, Interactive. So you can visit me us responsemine.com and check out what we do there. I really appreciate this. Thank you, Owen.

Owen: Thank you very much Ken for the interview. And I hope my audience will enjoy like I enjoyed interviewing you. Thank you.

Ken: Thank you.

Owen: So I hope you enjoyed the interview with Ken Robbins. And I wanna know what you’re thinking, if you think that search marketing is something you can use for your business, you think that it’s something that is cost effective for you at your stage in your business. Well, just go ahead and leave your comments right there down below on my website and in the comment page. And one thing that  I want you to do is please do me a favor, and actually go on my website click on the picture on the E-book, and when you click on the picture of the E-book it’s gonna open up a new page where you can enter in your name and your email down below. And essentially you will get new updates for blog post, any interviews with experts that I have and also my news letter. So thank you very much. I appreciate you being on my blog. Thanks.

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