The full title of this book by Marcus Sheridan is They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer. That’s quite the mouthful, but it’s also accurate. This book covers a lot, but it all boils down to one thing: what does your customer want? What questions are they asking related to your industry, and how can you position yourself as a trusted resource?
Sheridan makes an excellent point about how the internet has changed the way people buy. It’s no longer about going to our local provider or asking our friends and family for our recommendations, although those things do still happen. I still get a fair amount of my business from referrals, and I hear plenty of other professionals saying it works the same way for them.
But more often than not, our first stop is Google. When we want to know something, all we have to do is type it into a search bar, or ask Siri or Alexa, and the answer appears before us. That means if you don’t have a website that answers people’s questions, you’re not going to show up when they’re looking for you. Your competitor who has been busy answering their questions on their website will show up instead. That will give them the ability to educate people while gaining they’re trust. When the customer is ready to buy, they’re going to go with your competitor rather than you simply because your competitor took the time to answer their questions.
Although I already knew this going in (I’m constantly telling my clients and prospects the same thing), I still learned a lot from this book. At the very least it made me think about the concept of what my clients want in a different way.
Table of Contents
- To Price or Not to Price
- Talk Up the Competition
- Show Me the Data!
- What About SEO?
- In-House vs Outsourcing
To Price or Not to Price
For example, my business coach told me last year to take all my prices off my website because once you name a price, it becomes all about the price, rather than the results. I did as she said because I normally do what my coach tells me to do, but I have since had this debate with other people who have been told the opposite: that they should list their prices on their website.
I always felt conflicted about this because if I’m researching a product or service I at least want to know if I have a chance of being able to afford it before I get on a sales call with someone. If it’s way out of my price range, then the sales conversation will just be a waste of time for both of us.
Sheridan simplifies this dilemma by helping his reader put themselves in the position of the buyer: what does your buyer want to see when they come to your website? More often than not, they want to get at least an idea of your prices before they take the next step towards buying from you, so why wouldn’t you put your prices on your website?
Sheridan gave the example of a blog post he wrote for the website of his swimming pool company answering the question of how much a swimming pool costs. The answer varies depending on what you want, but by writing about a big question that a lot of people were asking (and making it the title of that particular blog post), Sheridan was able to provide value to his audience and get them to his website when they were at a middle-to-late stage of the buyer journey.
That said, one thing I did wish Sheridan had included in this book was the idea of the buyer journey and creating content for different stages of the buyer journey.
Talk Up the Competition
Another thing that took me by surprise was Sheridan promoting the idea of creating a “best of” list for your website that doesn’t include your own company. I’ve always shied away from mentioning other content marketers on my website or social media, but Sheridan makes a good point when he says that people are already asking the question. If you don’t answer it, someone else will and then your prospects will end up on that website instead of your own.
Plus it’s a great opportunity for backlinks. When your competitors see you’re promoting them on your site, they’ll link back to it on their own site because it makes them look good. Google sees all those high-quality backlinks and it improves your ability to rank for relevant searches because it positions you as an authority in your industry.
Sheridan’s reasoning for not putting his own company on his “best of” list is simple: doing so would mean losing credibility in the eyes of his prospects, and he’s right. He’s also right that, when they’re reading his blog post about the best pool companies, they’re already on his website, and by writing about the best pool companies, he’s positioning himself as an authority in the industry.
Show Me the Data!
My absolute favorite part of this book was Sheridan’s ability to back up his position with data. Because he tracks the traffic on his website and where leads are coming from, he’s able to say how much money he generated from his “best of” blog post because he tracks it.
Sheridan’s favorite tool for doing so is Hubspot, but you can get most, if not all, the same information from Google Analytics, which is free.
What About SEO?
Although Sheridan talks about getting certain blog posts to rank on the first page of Google and how much traffic and dollars each blog post generated for his company, I wish he had talked about search engine optimization (SEO) as a strategy rather than something that just happens. He seems to generate most, if not all, of his blog post ideas from questions prospects ask him in person, but what about the questions they’re asking online before they ever reach out to him? How does he know whether a topic is worth covering if he doesn’t do his research first?
Granted, as I said, Sheridan started blogging in 2009, when all you had to do was create content on a regular basis to get Google’s attention. I have a similar success story with my first client, whom I started working with in 2012. All I had to do was write a blog post a week and they were able to see a significant return on the investment of hiring me, but these days it’s much more competitive.
With more and more companies seeing the value in content marketing and investing in it, it’s no longer enough to just create good content. You need a strategy to guide the kinds of content you make, the topics you cover, when you publish, map out your buyer journey, etc.
In-House vs Outsourcing
This leads to the one point where I have to disagree with Sheridan. He insists it’s better for companies to do their own content marketing because no one knows they’re industry like they do. Yet I have seen so many business owners completely miss the mark when they try to do their own blogging. They cover topics no one cares about, and in some instances, topics that don’t have anything to do with their industry. Most of them don’t bother to put any call to action at the end of their blog post to capture those juicy leads, or when they do, the call to action is just “call us” even if that doesn’t make sense for where the reader is in the buyer journey.
Learning a topic or industry is not that hard. Sheridan himself points out that there’s not a lot of original content out there. The point is not to cover an original topic, but to do so in an original way. Your professional content marketer can do some research to learn about a topic and/or interview you to get all the information she needs to create authoritative content. Then she can create content that aligns with your overall business strategy so it’s more effective than anything you would have written yourself.
Speaking of which, if you’re looking for a professional to handle your content marketing needs, look no further.
If you found this content useful and would like to have more like it sent straight to your inbox, you can sign up for our newsletter in the space below to make sure you never miss an update. You can also see what we’re up to by following us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
