Greg Taylor

Greg Taylor is the Co-Founder of Trinity Web Media and Development. Greg has become well-known in the WordPress community as a speaker and teacher. He has presented at several conferences (including TechPHX, WordCamp LA, WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Orange County and WordCamp Vegas), been featured on industry podcasts (such as EOFire, WP Elevation, BusyMarketer and Excellence Expected), and hosts his own podcast The New Marketing Show.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Greg’s success

Podcasting and problem solving content

Result if you follow the steps in Greg’s session

Greater brand visibility and increased revenue

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Right. So we always start with you know, Stephen Covey says, you know, you begin with the end in mind.

So what we want to do is what’s the goal? What does success look like to the business owner? What does success look like to the stakeholders? Who are either investors or employees? And what is success also look like to their customer base?

So we want to figure out what are the goals and typically, you know, there are only three goals that are achieved when you develop websites or your launch social initiatives.

The three goals are to produce content, for you to become a subject matter expert, or also to gain higher search visibility.

So the more people can find your expertise to create a community around your product service and brand like a lot of nonprofits and fundraising organizations need to do and then three conversion, and conversion is kind of the king of them all.

A lot of business owners will then give them push back and say, generating revenue is my only goal. And we say, you know, with all due respect and politely, generating revenue is not a goal unto itself. Generating revenue is a byproduct of meeting your goals.

So we begin with the goals. From there we want to go in and we develop some personas, some client personas, and who’s driving the business? Who do you want to drive the business? What does your ideal client look like?

And we worked with an audience research company on it, called audience audit here in the States. And what she’s taught us to do is to develop personas that have nothing to do with demographics.

Because demographics are fleeting, if you think about it, you know, you’re only going to be 25 to 29 for a short amount of time, you know, but if you’re, but over a lifetime existence of a being a client, you know, it’s going to be more, potentially can be more than four years.

So what we try to do then is develop personas based on behavior. And when we develop personas based on behavior, we can find out what really drives them, what’s important to them, and what helps them make decisions and go from there.

After that, we match the content tools, and the different platforms to what’s important, where they live and their behaviors.

And during that process, are we identifying, you know, these problems that needs solved? Or are we figuring that out later?

So we’re going to identify. So typically, we identify the problems that need to be solved either when the business is really broken. And a lot of times a business is really broken.

And they come to us as sort of like a hail Mary on their last legs, you have to help us do X, Y, Z. You know, a lot of other times during the persona development, we end up figuring out what problems are inherent to each one of the clients, how do we go ahead and speak to each one of those people.

Typical problems that we get is, I think I have no visibility, nobody knows that my brand exists, you know, or I, you know, in the restaurant bar cafe industry, I would like to have my audience, my customers stay longer for larger tickets, you know, or I need to speak out.

Or a lot of times we work with startups, just trying to build buzz and get the word out. And again, you know, its visibility, how do we position them within a tough marketplace? Or how do we position them within a competitive market?

Okay, interesting. So you’re identifying different aspects here, positioning, that kind of thing. Are there certain questions that you’re asking to uncover these things?

Yeah, my favorite question and a mentor of mine, Francine Hardaway taught me how to ask this, said to any business owner, what keeps you up at night?

When you lay in bed and you know, you’re trying to fall asleep and you lie on your back and looking up at the ceiling fan, what’s on your mind? Is it employee retention? Is it you know, growing a customer base, a customer loyalty? What’s that number one thing?

And that typically when they say whatever that is, whatever they say that is, that’s typically never it, it’s usually something else. Then what we’ll say, and we’ll follow up with the question. Okay, what else is going on?

And typically, when you ask that follow up question, what else is going on? Then you really start to get to the problems that they’re experiencing.