GUEST!! Marketing GIANT – Marcus Sheridan – Secret to INSTANT Customer Growth! | Ep. 414

Jay Schwedelson: We are back for do this, not that podcast. And I gotta guess I've been trying to get on this thing for a long time. 'cause the dude is a legend. He is Marcus Sheridan. I don't even need to tell you who he is because you already know who he is. But for those of you being under a rock, let tell you about him.

Jay Schwedelson: The New York Times calls him a web. Marketing guru. He's got a wild backstory, which he's going to tell us a little bit about. But the thing that I really fell in love with is his, this book, they Ask You Answer became this bestselling book, and it was literally named by Book Authority, one of the five best marketing books of all time.

Jay Schwedelson: Then he had another book called Endless Customer, which became a national bestseller, USA today. The dude speaks everywhere. He's a legend. He's a big deal. So Marcus, welcome to the podcast.

Marcus Sheridan: Man, Jay, that was really nice, bro. Let's do this, man. Let's do this. We're gonna have a good convo today.

Jay Schwedelson: Absolutely. Alright for everybody who doesn't know your your story, which I think is awesome. 'cause everybody's like, maybe they're in a job they don't like or things are falling apart.

Jay Schwedelson: Can I go in another direction? You have a cool backstory. So how did Marcus become Marcus?

Marcus Sheridan: And so this is when I really started to learn about things today that are just normal marketing speak, like in mal marketing, content marketing. And as I was studying that stuff, what I heard in my simple, my mind was, you know, Marcus, if you just obsess over your customer's, questions, worries, issues, concerns, and you're willing to address them online.

Marcus Sheridan: You might save your business. So I said, ding, ding, ding. That's what we're gonna do. We're gonna become the Wikipedia of pools. And we became that. Uh, we became the most traffic swing pool website in the world by obsessively answering every question that you could think of through text, through video about, in this case.

Marcus Sheridan: Ground and fiberglass swimming pools and, uh, the business took off, it saved the company. And I started to write about that and that led to other companies and events saying, Hey, can you teach us how to do that? And so today I teach organizations how to implement this system, which is called Endless Customers.

Marcus Sheridan: That was the third edition of They Ask You Answer. And um, and uh, it's been an extraordinary ride. And I still own the swing pool company in Virginia, which is pretty fun. Still a pool guy at heart.

Jay Schwedelson: I gotta know something. Anybody in your life, in your orbit that has a problem with their pool, are you like the instant phone call? Like, help me

Marcus Sheridan: Well, the problem is, man, I've been out the game so long. Now it's like I don't have, I don't have all that knowledge that I had 15 years ago when I was writing about this every day. But yeah, for the basics, I can help you out.

Jay Schwedelson: wait. Uh, because I live in South Florida and sometimes you be like, I got an alligator in my pool or whatever. Can I call you if that happens? Is

Marcus Sheridan: the, the, the pool world in South Florida is, is, it's so unique. It's one of a kind and not an easy place to have a swimming pool business because the competition is fierce and the prices are low,

Jay Schwedelson: There you go. Horrible combo. Um, that's amazing. Alright, so let's get into it though. You know, everybody out there listening, I don't care if you're a business consumer, nonprofit, whatever you are, everybody struggles with the same thing. How do I get more leads? How do I get more customers? Uh, uh, SEO is changing, uh, ai.

Jay Schwedelson: So I feel like you have the answer. What, what is the secret sauce here? How do you become a brand that people wanna like, interact with?

Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, we talk a lot about this in endless customers. The. We call it the four pillars of a known and trusted brand. And this is a great litmus test because if you follow these four pillars, you're gonna be loved by humans, you're gonna be loved by Google, and you're gonna be loved by ai. That's the big three right now.

Marcus Sheridan: And you know, I, I will say too, that I. Eventually it's gonna be a big two. 'cause it's gonna go back to just to being humans and just being ai because traditional Google search is just not gonna be a part of the game. And who knows? I mean, I don't know exactly when, but I know within a certain amount of years we're just, for the most part, we're not gonna be using the phrase, just Google it.

Marcus Sheridan: By the way, kids don't use that phrase anymore. That's that, that is becoming an antiquated phrase in and of itself. The future is not people clicking on blue links. The future is people getting their answer immediately. That's just what we want. That's, that's what history tells us too. And so what are the four pillars of a known and trusted brand?

Marcus Sheridan: Number one, we have to be willing to say online. What others in our industry aren't willing to say. We gotta be willing to talk about stuff that buyers wanna know, but, but businesses don't wanna talk about, so I'm sure we'll get into that Jay. Number two, you gotta be willing to show with video what others aren't willing to show.

Marcus Sheridan: That's fun. Number three, you gotta be willing to sell in a way others aren't willing to sell. Everybody thinks they got a unique sales process. Generally they do not. And finally, number four, you gotta be more human. Then others are willing to be. All right. So those are the four pillars of a known and trusted brand.

Marcus Sheridan: Say, show, sell, and be more human. If you do that, you will differentiate and you'll disrupt, and you'll become the most known and trusted brand in your market.

Jay Schwedelson: So, okay, now I'm listening to this out there and I'm saying, oh, I'm, I'm in a regulated industry. You know, my boss won't let us go off brand. Uh, and here you are saying, and I agree with this playbook that you have to say what other people. Won't say you have to do what they won't do. So how do those two things come together where your hands are a little bit tied, but if you don't do what you are talking about, there's no way to break through.

Marcus Sheridan: Yeah, that's, that, that's the problem. Right. And look, the number one, uh, email I think I get probably is from marketers saying, I am so frustrated because I see what you see, Marcus, and I know these things would work, but my CEO doesn't allow me to talk about these things, and we're just playing everything safe.

Marcus Sheridan: We're not willing to go, you know, fill outside the circle. Right? It's like, and. What you have to understand today is the rule breakers become the rule makers, and everybody else eventually becomes the rule followers, but you do have to become rooted in, all right, um, am I willing to give the customer what they want?

Marcus Sheridan: Or not, am I truly buyer obsessed or not? Because if you are, you say, alright, I'm gonna put them first. And to put them first, that means you gotta address the things that they want to know. And when we look at that first pillar that say what others aren't willing to say and also show, but. What it comes down to, really, and this has been true now for the better part of 15 years I've been talking about it, is just basically five subjects that move the needle in every single industry.

Marcus Sheridan: Five things that buyers wanna talk about, wanna learn about, wanna research, wanna understand before they reach out to a company. And we call these the big five. All right? And the big five dominate industries in terms of research, they are number one. Cost questions, cost rates, prices, budget, anything to do with money, right?

Marcus Sheridan: Number two, problems slash fears or objections. When somebody is thinking about buying something, Jay, they start thinking, what could go wrong? Right. Number three, comparisons. People love to compare stuff online. Product versus product. Service versus service. Brand versus brand. Method versus method. Go down the list company versus company.

Marcus Sheridan: Number four, reviews. We're obsessed with reviews. The thing about reviews though, is we want the good, the bad, and the ugly. We don't just want the good. And finally, number five is best, best, most top. But think about how many times you've gone on online and searched best such and such, right? It's like hundreds of times.

Marcus Sheridan: So cost problems, comparisons, reviews, best. Those are the big five. Okay. Buyers and consumers are obsessed with them. Businesses don't want to talk about them oftentimes, and that creates a huge level of distrust and distance from the buyer and from, in this case, AI visibility and AI recommendations and Google.

Marcus Sheridan: It just has a terrible effect on your ability to generate leads.

Jay Schwedelson: You know, I, it's really great that you just went through those five 'cause what I was gonna ask you is like, how do you find out what people, you know, what you should be saying that other people aren't. I'm like, do you go on Reddit? But really those five things you just talked about are. Are kind of timeless.

Jay Schwedelson: Like when I'm out there trying to buy something, I do wanna see the price, I wanna see the reviews, and I wanna see how they check off against their competition. I mean, everything you just said applies to business marketers, consumer marketers, nonprofit. It does not matter. And is that a reality? Like it's not like you need to go and find out what is the hot take today In my industry, if you focus on this, that is what's going to attract that trust.

Marcus Sheridan: Oh yeah, there's no question about it. And this works for B2B, B2C service, product, local, national. You know one of the problems, Jay, and I know you've seen this before, but. Oftentimes companies like to think that, that they're different and the rules don't apply to them. And my buyer special and our industry special.

Marcus Sheridan: But when it comes to these five things, I mean, this is every industry we've seen it, we've got the data on this. And um, one of the quickest ways that you could just immediately brainstorm this and just get a world class editorial calendar is I've got a free custom GPT on chat, GBT right now, if anybody goes online, you go to custom GPTs and you do a search, you just search Marcus Sheridan.

Marcus Sheridan: There's a ton of like. I shouldn't say a ton. There's like six or seven GBTs that I've, I've built for folks. One of them is called, uh, endless Content Titles. Uh, and this is great because what it does, it takes the Big Five as I've like, as I've written about, as I've trained folks on, and it does it for your business.

Marcus Sheridan: And all you have to do is say, Hey, this is what I sell. Uh, this is where I'm located, whatever it is, and it will just boom, instantly. Just create like I was next to you. Hey, here's the big five for you, for your product, for your service. It rocks. It's really, really solid.

Jay Schwedelson: So, okay. Along those lines, part of your playbook, it really came out of your pool company playbook, where you became the Wikipedia for kind of the pool world, and I think it's really the right playbook moving forward is that. You kind of, you, you, you know, agenda marketing is what I would call it. You're just constantly putting out value, value, value.

Jay Schwedelson: And then the earth brings back to you opportunity. And in the world that we're moving towards where uh, people aren't, to your point, clicking on these blue links, they're not going off of Chacha bet. Eventually they're not gonna go off of Google. What is the playbook to build? Trust, uh, for your brand understanding that people are not gonna be leaving these platforms, but they're gonna be consuming your information there.

Jay Schwedelson: Like, what should we be thinking about as it relates to what we're putting out there to build that trust?

Marcus Sheridan: Well, it really starts with, all right. I've gotta have a, a baseline framework or system to use. And that's, that's why endless customers works is because a lot of people say, oh, I know I should be doing content, but like, roughly where do I start? So it's like, okay, well you start with the four pillars, say show sell.

Marcus Sheridan: Be more human. And then under each one of those, you've got micro frameworks like the big five, the big five, super obvious. But once you do the big five, you apply that to text and to video, certainly to your YouTube channel, which I would argue by the way, it just as a side note, your YouTube page is quickly becoming more important than your website folks.

Marcus Sheridan: And so if you're not picking up on that, you really should be just based on the megatrend that video is. YouTube is only increasing. With, uh, like YouTube usage is increasing with ai. You've seen a lot of companies, their, their website traffic is going down, their YouTube traffic's not going down because of ai.

Marcus Sheridan: Right. And so YouTube has a big play in the future, and so. Once you have that baseline content foundation, you're putting the content on your website and on YouTube, then you can repurpose it, of course, and put it across all your social platforms, because today, unfortunately, we've gotta be in more places than we were before.

Marcus Sheridan: If we're gonna generate the awareness. 'cause to your point, Jay, you gotta meet people where they are. You can't try to force them in, you know, this, this square peg in the round hole. It's like, if the buyer is on the TikTok, well we need to go to the TikTok. Even if you don't like the TikTok, it doesn't really matter what your opinion is on the platform.

Marcus Sheridan: What matters is where is the buyer? We've gotta meet the buyer where the buyer is. You know, I learned a long time ago that personal opinions can really screw up smart business decisions. And so I don't allow how I feel about platforms to dictate if I. Am making myself aware if I'm leveraging the platform for a particular brand.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm making that a clip and I'm putting that everywhere because it is so true. So often you're in a meeting like. I'll say, you guys should use popups on your website for whatever. And they're be like, I hate popups. They're so annoying. They drive me bananas. I'm like, yeah, but, but they work, you know? Or YouTube, for example.

Jay Schwedelson: Oh, I'm never going on YouTube. If you don't have a YouTube strategy, you forget it. You are in, uh, I, I don't know what your thing, so it's so important for people to hear that your opinion is not the most important thing. It's what your, you know, what your base is really interested in.

Marcus Sheridan: Well, it goes back to that phrase they ask you answer. When I say they ask, it's like, what do they want? It's not just their questions. It's your questions worries. Fear, issues, concerns, and how do they want to behave? How do they want to buy? And, and, and this is the, the big adjustment that so many need to make.

Marcus Sheridan: I don't wanna jump too far ahead, but you know, one of the third pillar there is sell in ways that others won't sell. Let me give you an example of, of

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah.

Marcus Sheridan: There's a stat out by Gartner that says 75% of all buyers would prefer to have a seller free sales experience. What does this mean? Well, it doesn't mean we hate salespeople, it just means we don't wanna talk to salespeople until we're good.

Marcus Sheridan: And ready until we're confident, until we're comfortable, until we feel like we're not gonna make a mistake. Now, how do we take advantage of this trend? Because that's the key. When it comes to trends, you always gotta say, all right, what are we gonna do about it? And in this case, what we know is buyers want control.

Marcus Sheridan: The way to give them control is through self-service tools on your website. Self-service tool is usually some type of interactive tool that as the person does it as let's say, answers the questions or whatever it is, they're able to take an action or get an answer that previously they would've had to have gotten by talking with a human first.

Marcus Sheridan: Okay. So lemme give you an example of, of, of this. Um, one of the types of self-service tools is what we call self-selection tools or recommendation tools essentially. So if you go to the River Pools website, my swimming pool website, um, on the homepage you'll see that there's different interactive tools that you can use.

Marcus Sheridan: One of them. Allows you to figure out what is the best type of in-ground swimming pool for you. Now, we only sell fiberglass pools, but we know fiberglass pools aren't a good fit for everybody. So instead of having a sales conversation about that. You should learn that before you ever talk to a salesperson.

Marcus Sheridan: You would want to know that. We would want you to know that. So we have a tool that you answer a series of questions and at the end it literally recommends to you, Hey, you should get a uh, concrete pool. You should get a fiberglass pool every single day. We recommend to people that they don't buy our product with this tool on our website.

Marcus Sheridan: And why do we do that? Because we wanna be the most known and trusted brand, and we wanna be the most known and trusted by humans. And of course, again, by ai. Another example of this pricing estimators. Every single person, when they have a problem and they know they need to buy something, the first literal question that comes outta their mouth is, Hmm, I wonder what this is gonna cost.

Marcus Sheridan: That's what everybody wants to know. They don't need to know the exact number at the beginning, but they need a sense for it, Jay, because if they can't get a sense for it, they're gonna opt out. So one of the most effective, I would argue it's actually the, it is the most effective self-service tool that anybody can put on their website would be a self pricing tool or a pricing estimator as we like to call it.

Marcus Sheridan: So for example. My swimming pool company, you can build and price your pool on our website now we've got dealers that set the end price. So how can we have a pricing estimator? Well, it's called an estimator for a reason. It's not a quote tool, it's an estimator. But this gives someone an answer to the question of roughly how much is this gonna cost?

Marcus Sheridan: Now they're able to go through this series of questions and they're able to say, I think I want this. I think I want that, just like they would with a salesperson at the end. They get a range, and now. Because they got that range, they're happy. But here's what's wild about that, Jay, is we've seen that companies that have an estimator on their website and it shows clearly on their homepage and they've got a call to action that says, get instant estimate.

Marcus Sheridan: Get instant estimate. Immediately you'll see a three to 500% increase in leads the day you put it up, the day you put it up. And I've got the data on this because I started a company on this. That is an AI software that helps organizations quickly, easily, and cost effectively build pricing estimators.

Marcus Sheridan: It's what it does. It's called price guide.ai. And um, hit what's crazy is this one tool costs somebody to use for the entire year, about $200. All right, and you'll. Pay for it probably within the first 24 to 48 hours of it being on your website. What's wild though, Jay is most people will say, there's no way I could do that.

Marcus Sheridan: There's no way I could put a pricing estimator on my website. It's like I'm telling you, the day is coming when if you don't have some type of pricing estimator tool and you, and you're not willing to talk about price at all, the day's coming when a. Humans will hate you even more than they already do when they can't find it.

Marcus Sheridan: And b, and this is the real kicker, AI's not gonna recommend you because if you look at where AI, AI, SEO is going, or AI optimization or whatever you wanna call it, and you know, I've, I've done a lot of work around this. I've got a, i a software that actually measures this. It's called AI trust signals. And we know all the parameters that dictate, and this is a moving target by the way, but dictate does AI.

Marcus Sheridan: To recommend you. Are you visible to ai? And one of them is pricing transparency. And it's getting to the point where if AI cannot find an estimator on your website, they're not gonna recommend you because they're gonna say, eh, ding. That's a lack of transparency. Just like negative reviews with AI are very high, very highly weighted, much more so than.

Marcus Sheridan: Regular reviews, whereas Google didn't do that. They didn't weight negative reviews, AI does and they do it heavily. So this is a different moving target. But the point is you've gotta create all these powerful trust signals. The way you create these trust signals is by talking about things that others aren't willing to talk about and producing better content more consistently.

Marcus Sheridan: And everything becomes a signal, and all those interactions become a signal. And these tools that we're talking about putting your sight. They become a signal, a trust signal that says you are worthy of doing business with and I can recommend you. And so clearly you wanna lean into self-service as a business.

Jay Schwedelson: And the beautiful part about all of that is that, by the way, operationally, it'll take a load off of your team of being on calls and conversations that are a big fat waste of time.

Marcus Sheridan: It's crazy to me. One thing I didn't realize when I, when I started, uh, price guide was how many, uh, folks would come back to us and say, we actually now use this as a requirement for people to do before they meet with us. Because we don't want there to be shock and all when we're having a conversation.

Marcus Sheridan: It just means the sales conversations are so much better, which is the opposite of the person that's thinking. I don't want them to see anything to do with how much this might cost because I don't wanna scare them away. What scares people away online? Is when you don't address the thing, when you, when you are, when, when you allow them to live in a state of ignorance, people can't stand being ignorant anymore.

Marcus Sheridan: 'cause they know if they just make a few clicks more, they're gonna find that answer they're looking for. So the question becomes, are they gonna learn that answer from you or they gonna learn it from somebody else? Is AI gonna learn the answer from you, or they're gonna learn the answer from somebody else?

Marcus Sheridan: My mindset is always, I want them to learn it from me, Jay, like that's the goal. And hopefully that's the goal for you if you're listening to this right now.

Jay Schwedelson: All right. I love all this. I told you Marcus was going to just share so much good stuff. How does everybody get involved with your world? Where do they find you? Where do they consume your stuff? They wanna be all in a Marcus Sheridan.

Marcus Sheridan: Uh, easiest way to do that is connect with me on LinkedIn. That's where I put my best stuff. Alright. Connect with me out there. You can also message me, uh, marcus@marketsheridan.com. My website is marcus sheridan.com. You can get the book@endlesscustomers.com or just go to Amazon. I think you'll love the book.

Marcus Sheridan: It's, of course, it's available on Audible, but if you're looking for a great speaker, someone to come teach your team or speak at your event, I'd love to have a conversation with you. 'cause that's what I do and I'm pretty dang good at it.

Jay Schwedelson: I, I can attest this, I've seen. Marcus speak. He crushes it. He's got the highest ratings all the time. He's an incredible dude, Marcus, thanks for being here, man.

Marcus Sheridan: Go, bro. My pleasure.