Susan Finn 0:01
Hi there welcome to rise above noise. Each week, I have the honor of shining a spotlight on someone in the rise above noise community who's making a real difference and helping others with their own business growth. If we haven't met yet, let me introduce myself. I am Susan Finn, I am a digital marketing strategist, with rise above noise where for the past for over 15 years, I've been working with transformation creators, that would be energy healers, lightworkers, coaches, creatives teachers, and guiding them with a personal roadmap in their digital marketing journey. So together, we create your own system, one that feels like joy, and it feels like ease so that you show up in a way that feels generous, and in service, so that you're more likely to show up with consistency. So the people who are already looking for you can find you, your business is going to grow with flow and ease. You see I real, I really feel that when you do marketing, you reach people. So I'm really excited for you to listen to today's guest, Ed McDonogh. He's with eceee marketing systems. And he wants you to know that storytelling is the most powerful tool in your marketing inbox. Today, he's going to show us how we can combine storytelling with a time honored formula to create these evergreen case studies that engage and attract your audience. And you're going to get to see how they help you generate new leads. And of course, close more deals, get more clients. So I want you to make sure check in in the show notes. Ed is offering us all access to his case study guide, and a template so that we can get started on this right away. So let's get to it. My favorite day of the week is Thursday Telenet. I love Thursday, so much not only because I get to, because it's kind of like my last day of the week on Fridays, I have two awesome calls that I take first thing in the mornings. And then it's kind of free to do my deep work. My planning work is on Friday. So Thursdays are great for that. But Thursdays are also great because I get to spend time with somebody. So in tune with, I think the rise above noise philosophies of helping people get the word out there about the change they make about the work they do about the products they sell that make people's lives easier, better. And so I'm super excited to to introduce you all to Ed McDonough today if you haven't already met him. But first I'm going to kind of set this up a little bit. Because what we're going to be talking to ties so well into the rise above noise five pillars that I wanted to show you where it all fit, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.
Unknown Speaker 3:27
I'm going to go back one. What happens when we do this? There we go.
Susan Finn 3:32
So okay, we've talked about this, it's going to go through this slide. I didn't mean to show you but here it is digital marketing, right. It's like all the things, its website search optimization, online listings, all the things email marketing, webinars, courses, it's just so much and we know we all know that you can't do all of it well. And what I've tried to what I do is I take a lot of the confusion, away from all of the things and basically with the people that I work with the transformations that I work with, what we're doing is digging into what your core values are, who your ideal clients are, who you're going to make a change for. So that when you're out there doing all the things, you're speaking directly to people who align and are searching for you already. So there's five pillars. In the rise above noise system I just mentioned, you need to know what your core values are, what your mission statement is, what your boundaries are, what your non negotiables are and who exactly you're speaking to. You want to be able to create content. And the reason you're creating content is so that people can and whether that's writing or webinars or its video, whatever it is, what you're doing is you're shining a spotlight on what did it have What's the problem you solve? And how do people feel after it. And this way, when people are consuming your content, they understand whether or not you're the person to solve the problem for them, right? You're not selling anything, you're just informing people. Here's what I do. Here's the type of people I work with, here's what we've solved, here's how they feel afterwards. And so to that, you have to have this third part of the rise above noise system, you have to have proof of concept. That is, you have to have testimonials, you have to have stories, case studies, because people will see themselves in the stories you share a lot of the work that I do with my clients is helping them to preserve what I say, is really our only true currency, which is our time and energy. And so by helping them to organize and strategize and schedule, the work that they're doing that to show up, that's going to protect their time and their energy. And, of course, we want to keep in touch. And that's another thing with email marketing, a lot of people are really great at making phone calls and going out and having other ways maybe sending cards. I, for reasons I've talked about before I love digital marketing, it gives me an email marketing, because it gives me time to really reflect on what it is I'm going to share and to speak directly to people who have asked to be on my list. All of these things I know I'm talking fast, you guys, I want to get right to it. So all of these are so that we all can show up and be of service. So in this today, it is going to talk about storytelling. And that really touches upon three of the areas of the rise above noise process, he's going to be talking about how to grab those stories, how to put those stories out there as compelling content. And of course, Ed does email marketing as well. And so I probably should have made that number five, one kind of big too, right? So it's proof of concept we're talking about today, compelling content, and keeping in touch.
Unknown Speaker 7:13
Sound good add?
Ed McDonough 7:15
Sounds awesome.
Susan Finn 7:16
Sounds awesome. I do too. Well, yeah, we speak the same language. I want to introduce everyone out here to formal introduction, right. So
let me introduce you to my friend, Ed McDonogh of E c e marketing services, bring this over here so I can look over here. Here's his official bio. Egg McDonogh is an amazing best selling author. Oh, and an Amazon Best Selling Author, and amazing. And the founder and CEO CMO of EC e marketing services located in Walpole, Massachusetts. Ed's specializes in closed loop marketing business systems, he'll tell us a little bit about that. And it delivered that delivers a measurable return on investment. He currently helps professional service providers, consultants and marketing teams to plan, implement, and enhance enhance practical marketing strategies, which save time, save money, right? And increase engagement and bring in more sales. How good does that sound? Edwin i i asked him what his superpower is. And Ed told me that his superpower is marketing business systems that acquire new clients. So tell me about that. And I think you have other superpowers too. But we'll talk about that one today.
Ed McDonough 8:48
Well, thanks. Thank you for that great introduction, Susan. I really appreciate it. I love love being here. And I always love hanging out with you. So um, so really, you know, my, my kind of pillow level, the thing that most people don't know about me superpower really is I'm a trained copywriter. and my specialty is direct response copywriting or you could call it sales copy. So what I love to do for for clients is have them be able to put out content that engages somebody to read it, and then gets them to take the next step, whatever that next step is, schedule a meeting, pick up the phone and you know, make a call, whatever. But there's always some kind of call to action at the end. And we'll we'll talk a little bit of that more in my formal presentation. But that's really what I love to do is I love to be able to get people results right from the get go, you know, there's no waiting months for it. It's, we're gonna we're gonna put together a system that's going to get you clients right out of the box. So
Susan Finn 9:53
awesome. Okay, so let's get into it. So tell me how we're going to do that.
Ed McDonough 9:56
Okay, so let me jump over and share my screen. because today we're going to talk about the power of storytelling. Let me make this fullscreen here. There we go. And in really, it's how to use your success stories and turn them into case studies. And so one of the things that, you know, people have heard case studies before, and there's many different forms out there. But what I'm going to share with you today is a process that's going to actually let you use a case study as a pre sales tool, to engage people and get them to want to talk and do business with you. And so that's, that's really powerful. So um, so let me just start at the beginning and talk about why case studies work so well. And again, we're talking about the case studies, that that I'm going to show you how to create today not not the kind that you may have seen out there, because because some of them also look like white papers, where they're all about the company. This is all about exactly what Susan was talking about the proof of concept, right. So that's what we're talking about here today. So number one, case studies tell a story. Everybody loves a good story, right? But these case studies shape the reader's perception of your business by showing them how you've solved a problem that they have with another client. That's really the bottom line. Number two is because they're a story, they create a visual picture, and they are actually get the reader to see themselves getting the same results. That's pretty powerful. Right? We, you know, when when you watch a good movie on TV, the reason why you're so enthralled with it is because you see yourself as that main character, right. And so that's what we're doing with this with the case study here is we're in, we're invoking that kind of imagination, so they can picture themselves seeing this getting the same results, they also build a know like and relate to factor. Now everybody knows that everybody's heard the term know, like and trust, but in my opinion, long before someone can trust you, they have to relate to you. And so that's one of the things that case study does is it gets them to start to relate to you, it gets the person to start to think, hey, you know, Susan really knows what she's talking about. And I should have a conversation with her. So that's what that's what we're talking about here. And number three, number four is they act as another type of social proof. Testimonials are awesome, they're phenomenal. But case studies actually amp that up, because they tell the story behind the testimonial. And that's why they're a little bit more powerful than testimonials. And quite frankly, we use testimonials in the case study. And we'll talk about that. And then the fifth thing is, and this is the beauty of it is do evergreen. So the case study you write today, you'll be able to use it two years from now, three years from now, five years from now, as long as you're going after the same target audience, your case study is valid, it doesn't matter how old it is. So these are really five powerful reasons why they work so well.
So let's talk about the format that our case studies are in. And again, I want to stress the fact that that you're telling a story to your target audience, right. So if you have different verticals, or different target audiences, you should have different case studies for each one of those target audiences. So to begin with, each one of our case studies needs a compelling benefit driven headline that has client results in it. And this is a lot of people make a mistake here. And they talk about the headline is about what they do not about the benefits people get. And I know Susan talks about this all the time, because I hang out with her a lot. And I see her every week. And we're always talking about, you have to tell people in your marketing message, why they should do business with you. And so that's what the headline does here. The second section of the case study is the problem or the goal the client wants to solve or achieve. The third part is the exact solution you provided to help them achieve or that goal or solve that problem. The third section is the specific results they received by working with you. And then an optional part is if you have a testimonial for them, you want to put that testimonial right in the case study. And if it's a really long one, you just want to put the most benefit driven section of ad in. And I'll show you an example of this in a few minutes. And then the fourth part is the call to action. And you know, I've been in business for over 13 years. And the number one thing I see entrepreneurs do is they slack off when it comes to the call to action. You always want to be telling the people in your marketing, what they need to do next, you know, what do they need to do you want them to call you you want them to schedule an appointment, you want them to send you an email, whatever that is, you want to be talking about that and you want to make sure that you have a strong call to action in your case study. Again, I'll show you an example of that. So these case studies are one typed page. They're one eight and a half by 11 type page. They're in a story format. They don't have anything really about your company in it. This is not a, this is not a slip sheet for your company, it's not a promo. This is about telling a story about how you solve the problem for somebody just like just like the person who's reading it, right? So, so there's no graphics, there's no logo, there's just the case study itself, the headline, the problem, the solution, the results, got a testimonial in there, and then some kind of call to action at the bottom. And by the way, at the end of this, I'll give you access to a free guide that you can go and download, which also has a template that you can use to create your own case studies. So what do we do with the case studies? Well, one of the things you can do with them is use email marketing. That's what Susan was talking about. So what we do is we create a multi part sequence, all about the same case study, we send that email out, we that email gets people to read your case study, and then the call to action from the case study is to either call or schedule an appointment with you. Now I like to use it, and I do this with all my clients, we always have them scheduling an appointment in advance. And here's why. Here's the kind of secret sauce to the case study, emailing marketing process, once somebody schedules an appointment with you about a day or two before you send them another case study, so that by the time you get them on the phone, they've read one or two case studies, and they've seen two examples of how you've helped somebody just like them solve the same problem they have. And that's what makes these so powerful. And by the way, you can, you can, you know, if you have five case studies, you can send them a couple of them before that before the call. So, again, they're evergreen, they're powerful. And they're telling the story about how you've helped somebody just like them saw the same problem that they have. So let's talk about what goes in those emails.
So the goal of the email is, is one thing and one thing only, it's to get the person to read the case study. This isn't, this isn't like your newsletter, this isn't a bunch of information. And there's a case study thrown in there. This is emails that are specifically about getting the person to read your case study. So we use a five part email sequence, each email message builds on the previous one. And what I mean by that is your email message might go something like this. Hey, Susan, I just completed a case study that shows how I'll help the client help someone just like you saw the same problem you have, click here to go read it. The next message may be Hey, Susan, a couple days ago, I sent you an email about a case study that I wrote, that shows how I helped the client who has a problem, just like you have solved it, click here to go read it. And so that's where they build on each other. Right? Again, in the email, there's no graphics, there's no header, your logo isn't in there. It's just it's just about getting them to go read the case study, right. And of course, the call to action in the email already talked about that, you know, to read the case study, click here. The other thing you want to do is you do not want to attach the PDF to the email, this is a question I get asked a lot is, can I just you know, send an email with a PDF attached? The answer is no. And the reason why is, is because it's going to reduce your delivery rate by 20 to 30%. If you have an attachment, it your delivery rate drops right off. So you want to be able to take your PDF and put it somewhere where somebody can click on that link in your email and go and go and open it. And then the the five part email sequence is delivered over a 16 day period. The reason why I use five emails sent over 60 days is because through millions and millions, literally a test, we found that this sequence over this time frame will get you the most engagement and by what I mean by engagement is people open the email, they read it, they click on the link, they read the case study and they book an appointment with you or call or take whatever call to action you have in there. So that's why this sequence works those so good in you know, in this case study marketing system that we're talking about here. So let's talk about the delivery sequence. So this can be done through any any of you know, email client that you have Constant Contact, MailChimp, whatever you're using. And the way you want to set it up is that message one goes out day one, whatever you choose to do on that so they can message one could go out on a Sunday. And then message two goes out three days later, after message one message three, four days later after message to message for four days later, after message three and message five, four days later after message four and that covers the 16 day period. So that's it. It's it's pretty simple to do.
Now an option to do that. An option in doing this is to actually create an unpaid published web page on your website. And this is actually how I do it for my clients. The reason why is because when when you do email campaigns, a lot of people are getting that email on their phone. And if, if you're sending them to a PDF, many times that PDF has to be downloaded. So there's like an extra step there. So they have to read the email, they click on the link, it goes to the PDF, they have to download it to their phone, and then they have to read it. So what we do is we don't we skip that PDF completely, and we just send them to a web page that looks like a document. And, and that has the, you know, the same text that's in the case study that would be in your PDF. And here's an example of it. This is this is an exact example that I use, actually, for my business. And as you can see, it's just looks like a white piece of paper on a gray background. It's the case study, and then down the bottom, that blue box down the bottom, you probably can't read it, but it says tap here to schedule. Now, that's a live link that goes to my calendar that allows people to schedule. So if you know this is an option, this can be done. You can do this on WordPress, you can get a third party vendor like lead pages or something like that. And Susan may even have some better ones, where where you can just create that page. It's not it's not open to the public, it's just used for email campaign. And again, we get we get on doing it this way, we get about a 30% higher engagement rate than if we send some people body to read a PDF. So that's why I recommend doing this. So let's talk about some other ways to use case studies. If you don't have a good email list, or you don't want to use email, here's some other ways to do it. One of them is a networking event follow up. So what I like to do is when I'm going to a networking event, and this could be in person or live, I will say to the person if I think they're somebody that's in my target market, I'll say to them, Hey, look, Susan, I just put together a case study that shows how I solved the same problem you and I were just talking about? Would it be okay? If I send that to you, I always like to ask permission, I don't just I don't just get their business card and send them the case study. I always like to ask their permission. And here's why. Because if you ask for permission, it opens the doors for two things, number one for you to send it, but number two for you to follow up on it, which is even more important. So you send you email in a case study. And then a couple of days later, you can either call them or email them back and say, Hey, I was just following up on the case study. Did you have any questions about it? Right? So it's a great little leading tool when you're doing networking. Another one is social media, you know, works exactly the same way. I'll connect with somebody that's in my target audience on LinkedIn, we'll have a conversation I'm not I'm not just going to jam this down their throat, right? We're going to have a little conversation, we're going to talk about what they do and in things like that. And then somewhere in the conversation, I'm going to say the same thing to them only it's I'm writing to them in a in a personal message or a private message, I'll say, hey, look, I just put together a case study that shows how you know, I saw the same problem that you're having and how I helped the client do it. Would you like me to send it to you? And guess what they always say? Yes, I send it to them. And then again, it opens that door for the follow up. Now, the third way I want to share with you is totally old school, but it works extremely well. And it's called Snail mail. Right? So here's what you do. You take a case study, you print it out, and you send it in the mail to the decision maker of the company. This works really good if if you're cold prospecting people. But there's a secret to doing it. And this is like a million dollar secret. So I'm going to share with you today, what you want to do is you want to put it in a hand addressed envelope. So the envelope, the their name, street, city, and state are all written in hand. And that return address is not your company name, not even your name. It's just your street address, city, state and zip code. And if you put it in a ivory or off white or cream colored envelope, what's going to happen is, even if the gatekeeper gets us in their hands, it looks so personal, that they're not going to open it and they're going to deliver it right to the decision maker. Right. And so I have my clients doing this and they're close and literally deals that are worth 10s of 1000s hundreds of 1000s of dollars with clients because they wrote a case study, put it in a letter like this and sent it to a client. So pretty, pretty powerful stuff here. If you want to follow up for this is you can go over to case study marketing guy.com You can download my guide. It's a quick read. It's only seven pages long, but it also has a template that you can use to follow up and start writing your case studies as well. So go get the guide there's a link right in the chat. Upload on page three, you can download. It's a Word doc, and you can start writing your case studies. And that's it. I'm Susan, happy to answer any questions.
Unknown Speaker 25:11
Yeah, it was
Susan Finn 25:12
amazing. I can't wait to be able to share theirs wider than our group, I'm happy that our group gets to hear it first and to and to learn about it. So, so brilliant. And what I like about it is the simplicity of it.
Unknown Speaker 25:25
Right, we're all we're all trying to
Ed McDonough 25:29
want to stop sharing. Yep, sure. Yeah, that way, we can see both of us nice. So one of the things is that I love strategy. And I love doing the deep work to create something that then you can use in many different ways. And so you showed us a bunch of different ways to use this one great piece of product when you use a professional copywriter, such as Ed is he has gone to so many I know he just got even a new certification. Like he, that's his thing. That's how we met, he was helping bnm catering with some of their, their YouTube call to action videos. And it makes a difference. It makes it different. Like Donald Miller says, right? A gorilla and eight man needs to know what to do a five year old Nick needs to know what to do. And here, you just do that deep work. And then you reuse it. And you can reuse it. Not only with the direct messaging, too, but now you've got these little nuggets that you can pull out and reuse in different ways. Make video it. So I had a question for you, though. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 26:39
So you were talking
Susan Finn 26:40
about which is brilliant. So you're talking about do not attach the PDF? No, or even direct to a PDF, but to bring it to a web page, which I think is brilliant. I'm also thinking then, because that's how I think that you have now in doing it that way, you can set up different ways of measuring your success. Yes, because you send out that email, where do you have just that one call to action? Go read it? Or is it also the call to action is go read it and also schedule a call?
Ed McDonough 27:16
No, just go the email pointing to the PDF. Yeah, the PDF has the schedule call,
Susan Finn 27:22
right? So you measure, right? So you measure did they go to the page. And then of course, on your page, you can measure how many people successfully got there. And then from there, you can measure how many people got to your scheduling link through their call to action, right.
Ed McDonough 27:39
And so that's actually what we talked about in my bio. That's the closed loop system access loop, because you can measure it from start to finish.
Susan Finn 27:47
And I think that's the thing. I was again on a call this week, and somebody said, Oh, no, they only use the out they only use Outlook. And for me, it's like, how do you measure things? Like that's my thing I need to know, how are we measuring? How are we knowing that? What No, how do we know that what we're doing is working? That's awesome. We're so it seems so clear and so easy. Where do people have resistance in doing this? What in what? What kind of people would be like this distance? I can't even imagine there's anybody that it doesn't work for?
Ed McDonough 28:18
I've never had anybody, you know, say that or it doesn't work for them. Because it's a tool in your if you will pre social pre sales toolbox. Right? And so, you know, another way to use it is, you know, you're you're having a conversation with somebody, and and you think they're a good prospect, you just ask them, Hey, listen, can I send you the case study? You know, it's so it's such a powerful tool. And anytime you book an appointment, the day before that appointment, you send somebody a case study for them to read. It's just powerful, because now there's all this, this backing is all these other third party saying that you're the right person for them to work with. And it's just so powerful. So, you know, it works, it works for everybody. There's, I can't think of one industry that it doesn't work in. Because everybody needs some form of validation. It's one of your steps, right? You know, everybody needs to see that, that the person that I'm talking to that I'm thinking about spending money with is valid, they have a system or process or something that's going to help me achieve my goal or solve my problem.
Susan Finn 29:30
So my mind as you know, is going a million different places where it went just now as we need to schedule a workshop for the rise above noise community. Yeah, that's something you do you help him to like guide through. Wouldn't that be awesome? All right, we're gonna that's our next conversation at McDonogh. You said that you have some questions that people usually ask
Ed McDonough 29:51
us. Yeah, um, so somebody asked us this was a great question from another webinar. When do you get the most response from the email message? And so there's two parts of that. So number one is, if you're b2b, if you're if your business to business, you definitely want to send the first message out on a Sunday night. Because most business owners are checking, not me. But most business owners are checking their email on Sunday night, getting ready for Monday. So that's a good little tip. But what I will tell you is that you'll probably find that most of the engagement comes from messages four and five. And people think, you know, people think that, Oh, I've sent one message, why do I need to send more? Well, you know, sales, sales is a process, and you have to have multiple touches. But here's what I'll tell you, in my experience is that what happens is, somebody opens email one, and they go, Oh, this is really great. But I just, I can't do anything with it right now. And they, and they close it, and it's in their inbox, and they forget about it, and then 1200 other messages come in, and now it's a 1201, in their milk, you know, 12 101, and then in their inbox, and they've totally forgotten about you and your message and your case, study and everything. So if you never send a message number two, and message number three, you're not going to be reminded that that's something they need to pay attention to. The other thing that I've seen quite often is that they won't even open messages, one, two, and three, the first message that they open is message four, and message five. So if you never sent it, they would never open. Right. So that's why that sequence is so important to, you know, to follow up to us. Because the more times you touch somebody, the more times more likely they're willing to pay attention to you, and take the call to action that you want.
Susan Finn 31:43
So brilliant. Now you use I know that you use an email marketing platform that is yours. Yes. And so that when you send these out, they don't look like the ones we get from MailChimp and Constant Contact, they look just like somebody sent it through their outlook. Correct. But you're still able to measure?
Ed McDonough 32:02
Yes, absolutely. Well, that that's why I built my own platform, so that we can measure it really to the nth degree. And that's how, you know, earlier, when I said, through millions and millions of email tests, we know that that five sequence over 16 days works the best, because we've tested everything, I mean, I can't tell you the number of iterations we've tried. And we just find that, you know, for something like this, that sequence over that period of time, gets the highest level of engagement, but I will tell you, I just had, I just had two different clients, one did one did it through MailChimp, and had great success. And you know, I work with them, help them set it up. And then another client uses Salesforce, and he did it through Salesforce, and you know, had had Scott on it's got great success, did one email campaign sending case studies out and generated $60,000 in business in one in a 16? day period?
Susan Finn 32:55
Wow. So that is two ends of the spectrum. I would have to say MailChimp to Salesforce.
Ed McDonough 33:00
Yeah, yeah. So So you know, you can you can do it on your own. I mean, there's no reason why you couldn't use Constant Contact or something else to you know, it's, it's just about getting those messages to go out. As I explained in that sequence, you know, over that 60 day period.
Susan Finn 33:15
Yeah. And measuring your results and saying, Thank you so much I held I kept to a couple minutes over. But this was just so juicy and full of such great information. I appreciate it, and sharing it with our community.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this week's rise above noise spotlight as much as I did. Rise Above noise community is revolutionizing how service professionals transformation creators show up in their marketing so that we can make a real difference in the world. I know that marketing is what helps your business grow. All of us every day are out there searching for stories that show us how to solve our problems. live better, feel better, make more money, have better relationships, we're scanning, and we're scanning and we're scrolling and scrolling. And what I love about today's presentation is that Ed offered us all a way to stop the scroll and offer people exactly what they're looking for. They're looking for a clear story of how someone just like me, just like you had a problem. And then had it solved. Right. So what was there? What was the story ending? How How was their life better after their problem was solved? More than that? I think he's shown us a way to protect our own time and energy by creating content that can be used in a variety of super effective ways. You guys now now More than ever our world needs our transformation creators. We need you to be successful in your ventures. We need you to show up in service and make that real difference in our world. Thank you for joining us today and I do look forward to seeing you in our rise above noise community. And also I look forward to sharing my next rise above noise
Transcribed by https://otter.ai