Small Business Big World
Content Marketing for Your Small Business
Unlock the secrets to content marketing with insights from our marketing director, Jon Portanova. Discover how adopting the "They Ask, You Answer" philosophy has transformed Paper Trails' approach to addressing customer queries upfront.
We dive deeper into the strategic value of high-quality content creation. We'll guide you through our journey of producing varied content, such as blogs, videos, and webinars, that has set us apart from other competitors. By openly discussing pricing and competitor comparisons, we build trust and credibility. Hear how one well-crafted article led to significant recurring revenue by addressing potential clients' needs and questions upfront, proving the long-term benefits of comprehensive content.
Small Business Big World was recently ranked #48 on FeedSpot's list of the Top 100 Small Business Podcasts!
Unlock the secrets to content marketing with insights from our marketing director, Jon Portanova. Discover how adopting the "They Ask, You Answer" philosophy has transformed Paper Trails' approach to addressing customer queries upfront.
We dive deeper into the strategic value of high-quality content creation. We'll guide you through our journey of producing varied content, such as blogs, videos, and webinars, that has set us apart from other competitors. By openly discussing pricing and competitor comparisons, we build trust and credibility. Hear how one well-crafted article led to significant recurring revenue by addressing potential clients' needs and questions upfront, proving the long-term benefits of comprehensive content.
Small Business Big World was recently ranked #48 on FeedSpot's list of the Top 100 Small Business Podcasts!
This is Small Business Big World, our weekly podcast prepared by the team at Paper Trails. Owning and running a small business is hard. Each week we'll dive into the challenges, headaches, trends, fun and excitement of running a small business. After all, small businesses are the heartbeat of America and our team is here to keep them beating. Welcome to Small Business Big World, our weekly podcast, where we talk about all things small business. Today I have the illustrious John Portnova. John is my marketing director here at Paper Trails, so we do all sorts of fun things together. So today we're going to talk a little bit about content marketing for business, which is something that we do a lot of, so it should be a good topic. We're kind of I wouldn't say we're experts, but we're getting pretty good at it. We're getting better.
Speaker 2:We're kind of I wouldn't say we're experts, but we're getting pretty good at it. We're getting better, we're getting better. It's a long process but we're getting better.
Speaker 1:It's taken a couple years, yep for sure. Well good. So a little housekeeping before we get going Like subscribe, follow, share rate review. Getting pretty good at that too. Please, thank you. We're everywhere you are, so certainly all the podcast platforms. We're there, right, so follow along. If you have any questions about this episode or any episodes, any of our guests, feel free to email us. Podcast at papertrailscom. So all right, john. So content marketing. So we started content marketing two and a half years ago, right, close to three, right. So let's just give us a quick overview about how we started, where we started, where we Sure.
Speaker 2:So this is completely new to both of us. Really, my background is more in the restaurants and then when I left the restaurants, I came to work here at Paper Trails and Chris and I both started this journey in content marketing. And I think it started. You were at a conference and you heard about this book called they Ask you Answer, which is a great content marketing book that I believe you read before I started, and then as soon as I started, he had me read it, and that's kind of the philosophy we've taken. We've read this book, we believe in the content marketing strategy. So that was the beginning of the whole process.
Speaker 1:So I always tell my staff when I read a new book you're in trouble, right?
Speaker 2:You go on vacation, you read three or four books and I get three or four emails saying oh, Amazon will be at your door tomorrow with the book, For sure.
Speaker 1:For sure. So they ask you answer. Uh, you know, tell us a little bit about what that is, what that means.
Speaker 2:So it's a book about. The main philosophy of the book is really about trust. Your customers are out there. They have questions. They're asking you questions on a daily basis. The goal is to answer those questions for them. They ask you answer.
Speaker 1:And really it's to have the answer before they ask it right it is.
Speaker 2:It is Because and I think we'll get into that the book says that we know 80% of the buyer's journey is done before they even call you, before they step in your building, before they submit a form on your website. So the thing is is to build that trust and help them along that buyer's journey, that 80% before they reach out to you.
Speaker 2:And help them along that buyer's journey that 80% before they reach out to you. So how are we doing that? There's multiple ways, like I said. So it's about answering the questions they're asking.
Speaker 1:Sounds like this podcast is one of those things, too, right.
Speaker 2:It is right. So when you're going to buy anything, right, say, a car, a pair of shoes, what do you do? You probably search online, right? What's the best car? How much does this car cost? What are the negatives of this car? So there's so many things that you're doing online. What's the difference between this car and that car Exactly? Right? So that's the point of the ask-you-answer is to list out all of those questions that your customers may be asking and answering them. So whenever anyone shops online or in store, there's kind of five things they really think about. They want to know what the best thing is, they want to know how much that thing costs, they want to know the negatives about that thing, they want to know how that compares to the other thing and they want to know reviews especially. You know reviews both in, probably, products and services industries are huge. So those are, those are the kind of the five main categories that they ask you, as your book talks about, and those are the categories that you build your content around.
Speaker 1:And that helps build, build that trust right Exactly. I mean certainly. You know we see it all day long where we have prospects and even clients searching for you know what's Maine's minimum wage? Right, and when they search for that on Google, we're number one when they come up because we're providing that answer. Right, and when they search for that on Google, we're number one when they come up because we're providing that answer and they're already on our website. They're looking through our other content, they're looking at our services pages, they're looking at our pricing pages, which are also on the website. To build that transparency around that.
Speaker 2:And then, finally, they hit the Contact Us page, and a big philosophy, in the book too, is you want them to be on your website, but you don't want to brag about yourself when you're answering these questions. You know we're not the best payroll provider in the world potentially so we don't say we are. We provide education and training and hope that we build that customer's trust when they're on our website and seeing that this is a really good company and that we want to work with them.
Speaker 1:And then they would, like you said, fill out that contact us the nice thing is, we also use tools where our website's integrated with our CRM, with our marketing tools, so that we can see when someone is on our website, where they've been on our website. So when you see those pop-up that says do you want to accept cookies on our website? Please say yes, so we can do that. Right, we need those. The nice thing is is when you hit that sales form and that comes through, we can see what pages you've been on on the website, and I know Jeff, who's our sales manager, loves to go see that journey, as do I, as do you, and it's great because you can go see, okay, what questions have they been asking, and that gives us a better consultative approach to be able to talk to the client when we do talk to them.
Speaker 2:Right, Because we know what their issues, their concerns or their fears, all those things are.
Speaker 1:It's a little big brother, but it's a great way of serving the clients and building their trust, because clients will tell you a lot, of course, but they're not going to tell you everything and it's upon us, as consultative advisors, to really dig down and get that information. Hold that information out of them right. Yeah, so talk to everyone. Talk about how do we use this in our sales process, how do we use this in our service, mo.
Speaker 2:Sure, so we again going back to the questions that our current clients are asking. Our service team uses those things every day, so a question might be you know, with our software, how do I log in? I forgot my password, what do I do? Those types of things.
Speaker 1:How do I log in? I forgot my password, what do I do? Those types of things. So we have content built around those questions that our service team can use on a daily basis, saying here's an article or a video or whatever it's maintaining and building that trust and better serving our existing clients so that they're able to better serve their customers and get on with their day. We always say payroll is not sexy, and it isn't, of course.
Speaker 2:Right, but every business needs it.
Speaker 1:But every business needs it and it's usually the last thing anybody wants to talk about every day. But the faster we can serve our clients and get them what they need, the more trust we're going to have, and so forth.
Speaker 2:Right, and it's not just even about troubleshooting those types of problems. We might have a client out there saying, hey, what's the best way to write an employee handbook? So we have an article written about that, and our service team will link that article to them and say, hey, check this out Again, just building that education and that trust, saying that this company has great service and they care about their customers. And then, in terms of content that our sales team would use, it might be how much does payroll cost? That's an article, right. Cost is a big thing that nobody wants to talk about, right, but it's one of the number one big five. There's five big things in the. They ask you answer, and cost is number one. No one wants to talk about costs for three reasons, one being I don't want to scare my customer away, right, we might be too expensive.
Speaker 1:But, like you said, 80% of the buying decision is made before they even talk to you, right? So for us, if we're too expensive for your tastes, I'd rather you know that before. I spend hours and hours and hours demoing and talking and consulting and so forth, because I'd rather have qualified buyers call me than folks that are just going to say, oh no, you're too expensive, or you're going to play.
Speaker 2:Hey, well, so-and-so down the street is going to charge me this, right, but you also want to show why you're pricing me a little bit higher than somebody else, but show because you provide that value as well on the back end.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And I mean we tell people all the time we're not the low-cost provider, but John's got pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of content that say this is why we're not the low-cost provider.
Speaker 2:Right, you're going to get those resources, you're going to get.
Speaker 1:I mean, and if you look at the content that we produce, it's in multiple formats, right. It's not just blog articles, it's not just eBooks, it's it's podcasts, videos, webinars. You know, there's so much content that we're putting out. We have other trusted advisors reaching out to us for information on state programs and things like that. I mean we we put a webinar on on the new state retirement program. We've done a couple of them, of course, but we had over 100 people on the webinar. More than half of those were accountants and financial advisors that were learning from us. So not only are we the trusted advisors to our clients, we're the trusted advisors to our partners, because we took a little bit of time and figured this new program out and we're just telling everybody about it and on the back end, that's really good for us because those are our COIs that we want you know to be recommending us to their clients.
Speaker 1:So we've been doing this now for two and a half years. About two and a half years, yep, right, what's that timeline look like in terms of results? How do you feel?
Speaker 2:So it's. This is all part process. It definitely is a longer process. It took us probably at least a full year to see really any leads out of it. Slowly, our traffic to our website increased as we wrote all these articles and all these videos and guides answering all these questions. But it's definitely at least, I would say, a year before you start seeing anything. And then now here in the second year, we've seen a lot more growth. We wrote one article called the Best Payroll Company in Maine and I was looking it up yesterday and that was published in May of 2023. So not even a full year now and I know we can say we've got over $150,000 in reoccurring revenue from that one article in less than a year. So that's One article has brought in $150,000 a year in recurring revenue from that one article in less than a year. So that's.
Speaker 1:That's that really. One article has brought in a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year in recurring revenue, which is that they literally Google what's the best payroll revenue made. And they come to us. Now, of course, our, our competitors are on there, which we're very friendly with, of course, and we say, hey, this is what these guys are really good at, and this is what we're really good at, and this is what we're really good at, and this is why, and this is what they're not so good at and this is what we're not so good at. So it's a totally transparent article, right? Uh, you know, it says we're not the low cost provider, right?
Speaker 2:this person is. We talked about our strengths, we talked about our weaknesses and we talked about our competitor strengths and weaknesses. And that ties back to again to the they ask you answer. One of the other five um core principles is best. So it's like what's the best paper company in Maine? We're welcoming a new member to our family soon, so just the other day I was looking up what's the best stroller for a newborn. You know so every day people are out there searching best awesome Now, is that a dog or a baby stroller? It's a combination. You know the dog in the bottom, the baby up top, and then you know the other dog in the back, probably, and the baby Bjorn. But so, yeah, so it works. And it's again thinking about the questions that your clients, your potential clients even are asking and writing content. Be willing to write about that, be willing to show it, be willing to sell. That way, you got to think differently than what people in your industry are thinking.
Speaker 1:And I personally right, we've, we always had that fear about pricing on the website. I always, I always said huh, it's so hard to price our product, which is a lie. We have a pricing chart, we, we have a matrix. We know how it works. Are there some idiosyncrasies to it? Of course there are. Uh, you know, depending on what we do for you, there definitely are some pluses and minuses, but it's pretty well baked and you know, we've taken the approach of putting on our website. This is where it starts and it can go from there and this is why and how and how much, not necessarily specific. You may not be able to, you know, get your exact number, but you can come up with a pretty close idea based on what services that you're going to use.
Speaker 1:I talked to a prospect the other day. She goes hey, I saw your website. You know it's going to be this much per payroll plus this much per employee and this is what your setup fee and this is what you charge for quarterlies. And I'm like, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I'm like she goes. Could you put a quote together for me? I said, well, you, just, you just did, but uh, you know, and I, she did that 80% of the decision. She made a decision and I did put a quote together which included the specific details and she was a very basic prospect and only needed the very basics that were on the website. Uh and, but you know she knew that right. I mean, yeah, I still had to put the quote together, but it it's not like that was she had already had that buying decision. Right, she pretty much had already made the decision before she called me. She was just gut checking it.
Speaker 2:And I think a lot of people will say well, I can't write about price or cost of my service or product because it does depend, right, but, like you said, you can kind of talk about ranges why it's more expensive. If we do this, why it's less expensive, it doesn't necessarily come to a specific number in the article or on the page you're creating, but just talking about it and being honest about it is being transparent. And, again, transparency is breeding trust.
Speaker 1:And we recorded a video, which there's me sitting on the top of the page, saying this is how we price right Exactly, and certainly we talked about the pros and the cons and the ups and the downs.
Speaker 2:So, again, it took us a year, I think, in this journey to even put it out there, right, and there was probably times along that journey that it was like this isn't going to work, we should stop. But it really is important to kind of just keep going and eventually you'll see the fruits of your labor for sure.
Speaker 1:Right. So how do we come up with ideas for this content? You spend a lot of time writing content, building e-books, getting ready for this podcast, getting ready for our video shoots, getting ready for social. How do we come up with those ideas to?
Speaker 2:plan that. So there's multiple ways. First would be again going back to that. They ask you to answer a book, thinking of those five core principles, cost, best reviews, comparisons and negatives, and just kind of generating ideas around those principles. So how much does this cost? Why does it cost this much? What happens if I do this? That's three ideas right there. The second would be and the big thing, at least for our team, is we use our team to come up with ideas. So anytime they feel the question from a client via email, via phone call, hey, write that down, because we want to write a book. Right, we write an article, a video, whatever.
Speaker 1:They've gotten pretty good at looking on the blog first hey, do we have something already Right? Looking in our content storage, and if not, they email me and say, hey, I need this Right. You know, this customer just asked and we don't have something written about it already. So, hey, great, we wrote it up this time. And guess what? Now we're going to save it for next time, for the next time, and that's our service team, and then our sales team, jeff.
Speaker 2:He does a great job, you know, obviously, on his meetings and then anytime he has a question that we don't have content built around, he'll send that to me as well.
Speaker 1:So it's both sales and service teams that and we use the content in the sales process to really engage the prospect and say, hey, this is the type of stuff we're looking out for, right, we're looking out for this new retirement mandate in the state right, we're looking out for here is how you're going to survive a wage and hour audit from Department of Labor. We've done a whole book on that, started as an ebook, and we actually printed some and we use those in our sales process to be able to go out and say are you following all these rules? Right? There's a ton of stuff that you're going to think about as an employer. Are you doing this Right? And you know, I think that helps build that trust, even with the prospects. And and we build that into you know drip campaigns and and so forth, as the prospects are going through the pipeline and then we take it.
Speaker 1:The next step. Further is when we do sign on a new client. We have an onboarding journey that they go through where they get a lot of the basic information their first six or eight months with us, so we can catch them up on that. We've spent a lot of time educating our clients over the years. Well, now a new client. We need to get them caught up to what we've taught everybody else.
Speaker 2:And this self-education is saving our team time in the back end and having to you know, maybe, jeff going through the process in the sales meeting or our service team training them on a main retirement leave or PFML. That's coming because they have this guide that we put together that they can read themselves. Right, how does video play in? What are we doing with video? Video is huge nowadays, obviously. You know you're seeing, hopefully, a lot of the videos from this podcast, but they ask you answer. Just talk a lot about videos too. You know it's. It's again, a way to build trust. Um, a lot of business owners might be I'm not comfortable in front of the camera. You know I wasn't comfortable in front of the camera my first time either and I'm still getting used to it, of course.
Speaker 1:But but but the first time, the first session of short form videos that we did for social, we were all terrible. We were all very like we're trying to get our stumbling, we're stumbling, we're trying to get our feet. You know, get on our feet. Figure out how to say how's a teleprompter work. You know I'm not Pat Callahan. It took some time to get comfortable. One of those videos a year later it was like one of the video number five we ever posted A year later all of a sudden popped on Instagram. Right, we get 67,000 views. We're up to over 115,000.
Speaker 2:On that one video from a year ago, a horrible video, but well, not horrible production necessarily, but we're uncomfortable, like Chris was saying, but the content in the video is important to people, so that's why it took off, because people are engaging with it and want to listen to what we had to say.
Speaker 1:And the same thing on YouTube. Right, we've had videos that are six, eight months old. We have webinars that we record. We post them on YouTube, we post them somewhere, we post them on YouTube and six or eight months later we have folks from all over the country reaching out to us saying, hey, thanks for your webinar, can you help me with this? Right, I mean, that's a real story. We've had people say gosh, I watched your webinar on YouTube, can you help me with this? And so that's where you're getting. We're getting business from it. Some of it we say no to, right, you're in California, that's not our market. There's a whole host of different reasons we don't want to do business in California, but we can say, okay, I'm so happy, I have a friend in California that you can go talk to For sure, and that's, you know, it's building business for them Right.
Speaker 2:And again it's. You know, like you said, it's a long game. It might be six or eight months later, but it eventually will come back because we've, in the back of those customers' minds, we've built that trust that, hey, these people really know what they're doing. And then with the other quick thing with videos is like, even simply, we're putting them on our landing pages. And, like you talked about that pricing page, you're on there saying, hey, I'm Chris, this is what our pricing entails. But on the landing pages we put them on so people can know what to expect when they fill out a form maybe, or on that page. So it's just. It's just being transparent hey, if you fill out this form, we're not going to spam you. We're going to have our sales guy give you one email and if you're not interested, that's fine. You know, take the fill out the form and take our e-guide and learn. We're here to support all small businesses. But again, it's just that builds a trust. They know all these people are going to spam us. They know what to expect.
Speaker 1:It's a trust thing. So it even reaches so far, as our video guy, graham, great guy, just told us. He flew to California last month to meet with another company just like us, who they found us on social and called him and he got this out of it because of the work that he's done for us. So you get a kickback. I hope so. I hope the bill gets reduced, but, but no, it's. There is a true reach to these things and it doesn't only help us. It helps you know others as well. Like I said, it helps, graham, it helps our partners. How many of our fellow you know payroll companies steal our content, right, and I don't care. We tell them right, this is, this is what we do. You know you can do it too, right, how?
Speaker 2:it's a. We're flattered when they do that. Yeah, what is it? Copy is the best form of flattery, or whatever. The saying is imitations about imitations. That's one of this. Yeah, so, and and if I being honest, I do some of that with some of their stuff too. Yeah, you know, because I know it's a good topic or a good idea or whatever it is. So it's definitely. We don't steal word for word, we just take the ideas and use them, of course, right.
Speaker 1:And we're in different markets as well. We're very friendly in the industry that we're like, oh gosh, we've seen this. How do you do that? What's this? What's the return on it? Right? Who wants to know? I mean, I won't lie, this is expensive. It has taken us several years.
Speaker 1:I have a huge investment in John. We have a huge investment in technology. We have a huge investment in video in our website, in our social, in our CRM. There's lots of money that goes into this, of course, but it's become a real sales channel for us, one. It's also become a huge retention channel for us and it's really become a huge educational channel for our staff. Right, because when we publish content, we make sure the staff knows about it too. They're learning, they're understanding, they know this content's out there for when the client asks. It's because we know business is harder and harder every day. The stuff we deal with changes constantly. There's new things happening all the time and you know it keeps everybody up to date. So you know John's the marketing guy, but it's much more than that, and you know it's really been successful for us.
Speaker 2:So, speaking of things changing, john, how do we keep up with it right? So limits change, rates change, policies change every year's. Make sure we update. The previous article we wrote about it. So a big thing for us would be like the timeframe is, but it's making sure that you are updating those things in a timely manner, because if not, then you have false information out there.
Speaker 2:So and I you know we're not going to get into it too much with the SEO stuff, but there's so much that goes into that making sure that you're staying on top of your SEO. When it comes to changes for, like, minimum wage, you have to make sure your headings and stuff are all yearly and all that. So there's so much I don't want to get into for that, but just just making sure you know you're staying on top of, in our industry, policy changes, rate changes, that kind of thing and and just updating all your content out there. And what I do is I generally have like a, an Excel spreadsheet and know what content I have out there which has things that might update on a yearly basis and then making those changes.
Speaker 1:So a couple of weeks ago we had an issue with our software. Right, we do a lot of work Certainly we're all slaves to the software these days and our software had an outage twice in a week, essentially which not only impacted us, but it also impacted our clients and their employees, and it was a rough couple of mornings, I will not lie Of course on the busiest payroll day of the week, to Wednesday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Wednesday we went down for half the day. Our team was freaking out. You know we were. Everyone was going crazy. But you know, one of the things that we're big on in this whole process is is the transparency, and you know we sent out a lot of emails in a short period of time trying to let everybody know what was going on. And what happened was, john was like the read rates are going down and down and down and down and down for every email you send out because we're trying to let people know. Okay, how do you troubleshoot this? How do your people clock in and clock out? What's going to happen if things don't come back up? Are we going to get people paid all these important things? And so everything came back up. We let everybody go. You know, everyone got back in, payrolls got run, people got clocked and everything was fine. But the next day we got some information from the software company about what happened, why it happened, and I said, john, we got to send out another email.
Speaker 2:I was a little hesitant just because, like you had said, we had sent out four or five the previous day and no one was really opening them towards the end of that fourth or fifth email.
Speaker 1:So, and I said, john, it's about building trust, right, and that comes down to this whole theory as well. And I wrote this email and John usually I'll be honest with you, john's awesome, he fills my voice very well A lot of things learned. They come from me, they probably were written by john, uh, but john has done a really good job. And this one I said no, I'm going to write this one, and it was pretty long email, uh, but essentially it said, hey, this is what happened, this is what we learned, this is what our software company learned and this is how we're going to fix it and how we know our software vendor is going to fix it going forward. And it was Prevent it. How are we going to prevent it? Try to prevent it at least, right, try to prevent it going forward, and why and how and so forth.
Speaker 1:And we sent it out and it got a decent read rate, right. But what we got back was half a dozen emails from clients saying thank you so much, right. Thank clients saying thank you so much, right. Thank you for just following up and letting us know what happened. And we're so grateful that you guys learned from this, because we had some technical snafus of our own and you know people were really grateful for that. So our clients were grateful for that, that we are so open about what's going on, right, and nobody wants to have egg on their face, including me, of course, especially when it's not really even my fault, right. But we serve these clients and building that trust has been paramount and I think they do trust us and we have amazing retention, we have amazing reviews.
Speaker 2:Our net promoter score continues to be high. But I think if we sent out an email kind of throwing the software company under the bus, you would have, kind of, by deflecting that blame, would have lost the trust from our current customers thinking that, oh, you know, they're trying to cover their own butts and not take the blame for this, even though it could be their fault, but it wasn't.
Speaker 1:And we stumbled and we learned some things too. We said we weren't quite prepared for if this happened on the longterm. We were very reliant on our vendor as well.
Speaker 2:So we use this kind of to generate some more content ideas. Right, you know what happens if this app, or what do we do if this happens again. We created some not necessary articles or or videos about it, but we created some templates for our team to use in case this happened again, so they can send us.
Speaker 1:It took us a long time to respond because we were creating content, we were creating emails, we were creating guides, we were you know, we were doing those about work while the sauce was down to try to communicate with clients. Well, now we said, okay, we're going to have a few things in the box ready to go. If, hopefully, you know, god willing this doesn't happen again, but it does, we'll be ready to go Right. But so it's. It's really using everything right, it's it's building the trust and again, we were trying to answer the client's questions before they asked it and we weren't ready for that this time. So it really has been transformational, not only from our marketing but for our business, in terms of how we run.
Speaker 2:And I just saw this I would think it was on Facebook just the other day and I saw a restaurant on Facebook say we're sorry for the bad service we gave, we're sorry for the long wait times. This all took place on St Patrick's Day, which I'm sure was a very busy day for their restaurant, but they were being honest and open and upfront and all the comments on that post from customers were saying hey, we never heard of you, but we're going to come back. Or we're going to come and try you for the first time. Or, as from people saying, we were there, we understand things happen, we're going to come back, but they were being open, transparent and trustworthy and they would gain that customer's trust.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. What other takeaways do we have? What other successes have we had, actually, what troubles have we had? Let's talk about that.
Speaker 2:We've created some content that hasn't really hit home and seen a lot of success. That's kind of probably one trouble we've had trying to figure out what type of content to create. You know, we have those ideas, but some of them don't always hit home, so then going back and tweaking those, that's one trouble. Another one would be time. You know, I try to Focused my time on creating a lot of content but then also pushing it out there to so people can see it, you know. So it's kind of balancing that. That's another trouble.
Speaker 1:So some of the troubles we've I've seen is we're fighting the algorithm right now. You know, the algorithm is, you know, is everybody's enemy. I feel like it's constantly changing. Right? We've seen a dip in some of our traffic and some of our viewership. We're not quite sure why, right. We're not quite sure why, right. The content we're creating is good, we're following all the rules, we're doing all the right things, we're answering the questions, we're using the tools that we have always used to see this drive traffic and all of a sudden, the last three months, we've seen a dip and so we're currently trying to figure that out. You know there are still our leads coming to the website. We're still getting contact, we're still answering questions. It's still positive. But where we were seeing, you know, the hockey stick, you know, go up, we're not seeing that as much anymore. We saw the hockey stick just got a little droopy at the end. So, uh, it just became a bit more, I think.
Speaker 2:And where we're, like you said, we're working to figure that out, and that's a lot of marketing is kind of testing and and doing something for a little bit, and if it doesn't, we tried a different, you know opening hook or a different B-roll in the footage or whatever it is. So just, I think testing is obviously huge when it comes to marketing, but any anything really.
Speaker 1:All right, so we covered a lot. So what? What are the big takeaways that you know, you want people to know?
Speaker 2:So I think the couple of big things here with this you know, content marketing and they ask you answer philosophy is one we talked about is a time, of course you know, make sure you stick with it. It's going to take a year, a year plus, to see significant return. I mean, in that first year you might get a couple of leads, which would be great. So really sticking to it.
Speaker 2:Another thing is having a champion to kind of own the content. Obviously that'd be me in this situation, but having someone on your team, whether it's a marketing person, a small business owner, whoever it is and I mean, I know everyone's busy, but if you can have someone really focus on writing and it might, again, might only be one question a week, one article a week, the more the better, of course, but if you can write at least one really good, helpful article a week, that's huge. So just having someone own it and then having everyone on the team believe in it and our team members, I think, really believe in it. Like we talked about, our service team uses it on a daily basis sending out the content. Our sales team uses it to move that sales process along on a daily basis. So having your team believe in. It is another huge, huge factor. So those are kind of a few takeaways.
Speaker 1:Great, okay, shameless plug time. How do people find us to learn more about this?
Speaker 2:Papertrailscom. They can find us on Instagram, tiktok, youtube, linkedin all those fun things, obviously, this podcast. We appreciate everyone that's listened in, so far, that continues to listen in. You can find us on all your favorite podcast platforms and on social media as well. Small business, big world.
Speaker 1:Jeez, I don't even have to do my closing statement Do it for you.
Speaker 2:I'll be taking over hosting soon.
Speaker 1:Hey, we're filling Good, All right. Well, thank you everybody so much. And don't forget, John didn't say this, but if you have questions about anything today or anytime, feel free to email us. Podcast at papertrailscom. We'll get right back to you. We'll get you in touch with who needs to. Thank you so much. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to this week's episode of A Small Business Big World. This podcast is a production of Paper Trails. We are a payroll and HR company based in Kennebunk, maine, and we serve small and mid-sized businesses across New England and the country. If you found this podcast helpful, don't forget to follow us at at Paper Trails Payroll across all social media platforms and check us out at papertrailscom for more information. As a reminder, the views, opinions and thoughts expressed by the hosts and guests alone. The material presented in this podcast is for general information purposes only and should not be considered legal or financial advice. By inviting this guest to our podcast, paper Girls does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific individual, organization, product or service.