Mark Colgan’s 3 Genius Marketing Strategies, Ep #76

Mark Colgan is an entrepreneur responsible for increasing revenue across a portfolio of companies. He has 13+ years of experience in B2B sales, marketing, and recruitment. In this episode of The Content Callout, he shares three genius marketing strategies you can use to multiply the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Outline of This Episode

• [2:28] Tip #1: Speak with your customers regularly
• [4:23] Tip #2: Invest in outbound marketing
• [8:38] Leveraging podcasts as a messaging tool
• [13:23] How to attribute sales to a podcast
• [17:23] Tip #3: Leverage job descriptions to provide valuable content
• [21:09] How to reach out to Mark Colgan

Tip #1: Speak with your customers regularly

Speaking with your clients is the best way to inform your future messaging. It’s where your content should come from. It’s easy to send a few emails and book calls with them. You can set up monthly touchpoints to review metrics and priorities.

I recently got off a call with a client who shared their challenges. Knowing their challenges will generate opportunities to provide them with more value. It shows us what common messaging touchpoints should be and helps us make our content more contextualized. You may discover overlapping challenges when you have conversations with multiple customers. What if you connected them to face their challenges together?

Tip #2: Invest in outbound marketing

Mark lives and breathes LinkedIn. He’ll connect with prospects and send messages. But you must avoid spamming people and provide valuable information. He starts by sharing what he has to offer and asks if they’re interested in the content. Once he has their consent, he’ll share his value-add.

Mark will offer useful content based on the conversations he’s had with his customers. He’ll reach out with a short email (or message) stating why he thinks they’d be interested in the content and then ask if he can send it. He never assumes they want it and never sends a link to the content in the first outreach.

The response rate he receives varies across industries. When Mark reaches out to podcast hosts, he gets a 60–70% response rate because it’s a warmer audience. He typically sees 60–70% open rates with a 25–30% reply rate. How? Podcast hosts are more likely to reply to a guest relevant to their audience. I was cold outreach for Mark, solid proof that it works. Mark will share how he can deliver value to your audience.

His sequences are so targeted that I couldn’t help but open the email, read more, and click on the link. Mark books people and books himself on podcasts to leverage podcasts as a messaging tool.

Tip #3: Leverage job descriptions to provide valuable content

Mark believes that you shouldn’t look at keyword analysis tools to strategize your content. He thinks you’ll be coming at it from the wrong angle. Instead, look at your ICP and buyer personas. Mark will go to LinkedIn and look at job descriptions for those personas. Let’s say it’s for an HR director. What are the job descriptions saying that person is responsible for? What skills and aptitudes do they need?

Then he’ll start to pick out the common themes. Maybe they’re responsible for the employee process (attraction, recruitment, onboarding, training, and off-boarding). How does your product help with their responsibilities? Double-down on content that answers that question. Focus on the challenge that you help solve. Focus on the skills they need. An HR director needs to be the domain expert in all things employee-related. So that’s the content Mark would create. The goal is to help HR professionals improve their lives and jobs.

Mark will save that job search in LinkedIn and place a link in a calendar invite that reoccurs every Friday. Every Friday, he’ll look at five new job descriptions to see what’s changing. In HR, it might be employees returning to work in the office. So how do HR professionals handle the return to work process for employees? If you do this every week, you’ll know what their challenges are and be able to provide valuable content every single time—what a brilliant strategy.

Mark also takes a deep dive into leveraging podcasts as a marketing initiative in this episode. Don’t miss his valuable insights!

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Mark Colgan

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