Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: All right, in this episode, I’m going to walk you through one of the most useful marketing campaigns that you need to oversee as the fractional CMO for businesses. This is one of the few campaigns that you ought to do early on with your clients. They’ll generate a lot of money for them and build a sense of like repeatability system, just like infrastructure in the business  that allows you to be successful with less work long term. Let’s do it.

00:00:29 Casey: Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up and companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer. 

00:00:52 Casey: It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact. This is the Fractional CMO Show and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOx, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.

00:01:26 Casey: All right, so this episode is all about one of my favorite marketing campaigns. And it is a campaign called the Short-Term Nurture Sequence, the STN. And it is an email campaign that is special. And if you’re like, hey, I’m gonna skip this app, Casey, this sounds boring. You’re wrong. This is very useful and you ought to do this for every single one of your clients. 

00:01:48 Casey: So first of all, let’s talk about the problem that we’re solving. The problem that we experience when we step into businesses as the Fractional CMO is,

oftentimes, if there is a marketing team, it’s like a well-meaning marketing team. It’s people who care and who are trying, but they’re oftentimes just doing like the urgent task, an urgent task, an urgent task. And as a result, there’s really no repeatability in what they do. Just as they finish one marathon, they’re off to brace the next one and then the next one. 

00:02:19 Casey: As a result, that marketing technician or the marketing team members, whatever their titles are, they tend to feel a sense of like constant pressure, never being able to kind of relax, release, recharge, right? Take space. So this is one of those campaigns that if you can build out, it can start creating structure inside of the marketing department. Okay. Bigger picture. I think a fun way to look at a marketing department is to split it up.  

00:02:46 Casey: One part of the marketing department’s job is to get leads and the other part of the marketing department’s job is to get those leads to do something later. So here’s a bad analogy, excuse me, but I’d like to kind of think of dating  when I think of what we do in marketing. So if we want to go  and we want to ultimately get married, what’s the fastest way to get married?  What’s the fastest way to get married is just to walk up to a stranger and say, will you marry me? And if they say no, you move on, will you marry me? No.

00:03:21 Casey: Will you marry me? No, you do it enough times. Someone’s going to say yes, right? Someone will be so down on their luck or crazy or whatever, that they’re just going to say yes, sight unseen. Okay. In marketing, we want to ask upfront for a big, the big commitment. Hey, do you want to do this whole thing? Do you want to get married? And if they say no, we say, no problem, no problem. We’ve got a bunch of other stuff that you can do too. I like that approach to marketing, which is like selling the big thing upfront. 

00:03:47 Casey: And if they say no, no problem, no pressure, offer them all the other small stuff. That’s why you hear me inside of this podcast saying to you, hey, do you want to book a call with my team to see if you’re a great fit? We also have a book, you know, I’ve got the Fractional CMO method, which you can go get for $4.99 at cmox.com/book. You can also listen to all the podcast episodes here. We’ve got almost a hundred. You you can go to the cmox.com website and download a bunch of our free resources. There’s so much free stuff that we have.

00:04:15 Casey: But I still ask for the whole commitment upfront because some people are like, yeah, let’s do it. Right. So that’s what we want to do in marketing. I think you want to ask for the big thing upfront, certainly test that  and then catch the person with the free stuff and like slowly build up their lifetime value over time until they’re ready for the big thing too. Okay. So that’s the big idea here that I want you to like lock into and understand it is okay on the front end to ask for the big thing.  

00:04:38 Casey: So when you think of that marketing department and split it up, part of the marketing department’s job is to generate leads and potentially like offer them the big thing.  And then the other part of the marketing department’s job is to take all the people who said no to the big thing  or who just came in for the lead magnet that was a free downloadable or came to the event and signed at the booth or you scan their card at the trade show or the list that you acquired or whatever it is. 

00:05:06 Casey: You have like the other part of the marketing department working on facilitating long-term relationships with those people because they will buy in some. I think of companies that I’ve worked with. They have, when they get a customer, some customers are ready to go right now, but a majority needs some time. And if we only focus on the ones that want business today, like they’re ready to  pull their wallet out of their pocket and give you money today. If we only focus on those people, we lose the long tail. And if you know marketing, you know that the long tail oftentimes is larger in value than the short tail.  

00:05:38 Casey: The short tail is the people that say yes immediately, the long tail are the people that say yes over the next 90 days, 180 days, 750 days, whatever. Right, so producing good valuable content on an ongoing basis tends to be the solution to help the long tail. So short tail, make the offer, capture their information, make the offer. If they say no, then they become long tail and you want to sell them over time by providing value. So how do you provide this value? Well, there’s really two approaches to it.

00:06:12 Casey: Approach number one is just to every week feel the pressure of sending out some marketing communication and try to figure it out. And for some businesses that can work. Oftentimes that relies on a good copywriter, having good copy or good testimonials, or like a executive who likes to write and they share this information. That’s one way that you can do it. Also, if you have like notable things, like for us at CMOx, it’s easy to email people every single week because we release a weekly podcast episode.

00:06:40 Casey: There’s value with that. So we have a couple emails that go around that. We do some live events, yada, yada. You have the option of just kind of always chasing the next thing that you’re going to be doing. And if you want to do that, it’s fine. This is certainly not a negative. You want a marketing calendar for that. People kind of work ahead. And you’re kind of always building new content. Certainly is a way to do things. Then there’s this other way, which is an indoctrination sequence. I don’t know who said that in marketing.

00:07:07 Casey: I’ll give it to Ryan Dice. He probably said it, but maybe as somebody else. But it’s the idea that we want to indoctrinate someone early on in the marketing conversation so they can consume as much content from the brand as possible. This is critical. If you’re going to make a buying decision, you want to consume as much content to make an informed decision as quickly as possible. I don’t know about you, but when I think about buying something that’s over a couple hundred bucks, I’m probably going to do a lot of research.  

00:07:36 Casey: I mean, shoot, I just took receipt today of a new ham radio. Very excited. I’ve done untold hours of research on it. Do know how many hours I’ve spent understanding the difference between a switching amplifier and a linear amplifier and which one’s right for me and should I get one that has Anderson power poles on it or not? It’s a lot of research I’ve done, but I just like front loaded that research so I got the right product. You’ve done that too in your life. Most businesses fail to serve the customers that want to binge content early on.

00:08:08 Casey: So the way that you do that is you create a nurture sequence. And I think of this as a short term nurture sequence, an STN, short-term nurture. And the STN is a series of emails. There’s really four types of emails that you’re gonna be sending out. And if you do it right, you start it for 30 days. It’s a 30 day campaign. Then it grows to a 90 day campaign, and then 180 day campaign, and then a 365 campaign. 

00:08:31 Casey: My first job in marketing, I worked with an information marketing client, a guy who sold info products. Years ago out of Detroit  and  his name was David and  he hooked me up with a copywriter named Craig, Craig copywriter. And Craig showed me that they had a 700-day long nurture sequence. Blew my mind.  They knew that all they had to do was get leads and then just chill out. And those leads would get sold to automatically by the emails that those leads were sent. It was awesome.

00:09:05 Casey: This was like one of my first lessons in marketing. So as I looked at that, I realized that they just had like a sales machine. And all they had to do after they had that 700 day long email sequence was just review every month. What’s our worst performing email? How are gonna increase open rate? I know that’s hard to track now with Apple’s updates, but just stay with me.  How do we increase open rate? How do we increase click through rate? How do we increase purchase rate? So each email had a job.

00:09:34 Casey: And we track that job on a spreadsheet. And we would say, email one, email two, email three. What’s the open rate this week? What’s the click through rate? What’s the purchase rate? What’s the  total amount of cash received from that? That was awesome. That’s what I want you to create. Just consider that for your clients. Now, how do you create it? Well, you create it by using one of  or a collection of four different email types. So the first email type that is critical to put together is an educational email.

00:10:03 Casey: What is the educational content that a prospect needs before they make a buying decision? I’ll tell you a piece of educational content that I got recently, buying this power supply for my radio. It’s that switching power supplies tend to make RF noise, which is  antithetical to what you want, right? You want no RF noise inside of your shack. Okay, weird, right?

00:10:30 Casey: So you wanna move to a linear power supply, but a linear power supply, because of how it uses transformers is incredibly heavy and they tend to be more expensive and really hard to ship. So like that’s education right there. A linear power supply is heavy and expensive. A switching power supply is lightweight, less expensive, but produces RF noise. Very interesting. Then I read some stuff that said, oh, if you add ferrite beads to it, it can reduce the RF noise. Oh, this one, this great company, Elecraft says, doesn’t have any RF noise and they actually stand behind it. 

00:11:04 Casey: So the problem that I had,  what power supply do I choose was solved because of education. I figured out what I needed and then I figured out the problems with those things and I figured out a solution that made sense to me. So I moved forward with a certain power supply from a company called PowerWorks and it’s the right one for me for what I want. That’s education. No amount of pressure could have gotten me to buy the Powerworks product. I had to be educated first before I bought it. 

00:11:35 Casey: Where have you had to have been educated first? You know,  I have no  need right now to have a second car in our family. We’re like a one car family, but at some point I’m to get one. And you better believe I’m going to get a Porsche, right? I just think that they’re fun. I’m not a car guy. I just like the look of them. I don’t even know if I’m saying it right. Porsche, Porsche, whatever. But I’ll tell you right now, if like I was going to go buy a car today. I wouldn’t know which one to get. Do you get the 911? Do you get some other number? The Taycan? Taycan? I don’t know. I am uneducated. 

00:12:12 Casey: And I say that this is at the fault of the brand for not educating me. I went to their dealership to inquire and say, hey, in the next year or two, I’m thinking about getting this car. They’re like, great. You know, what model do you want? What price do you want to pay? What functions and features do you want? I was like, I don’t know, man. And they’re like, okay, well, when you figured out, us know. Kind of frustrating, right? If they had some kind of series to educate me on what I wanted and walk me through stuff, that would be helpful. Instead, I just look at stuff on YouTube and kind of self-educate.  

00:12:39 Casey: So they took the education  out  and honestly, my decision-making has slowed down dramatically. I don’t need the car. I’m not gonna buy it anytime soon. I don’t have any reason to get it. But if I had all the education and then they started emailing me stock notices of the car that I think that I ultimately want,

right, like that would get me to move a lot faster. So they took the education, they said, you’re on your own for it. Tough, right? It’s kind of frustrating. I don’t know if you’ve been watching like the watch market, I always find just what high end brands do to be fascinating. Rolex just came out with a new watch.  

00:13:18 Casey: They also came out with a new band, they released their  this like next year’s models. I don’t know if they’re calling them 2025 models or 2026. But they’ve got the land dweller. It’s a brand new watch. They’ve got the sky dweller, the sea dweller. Now they have the land dweller  and they’ve done a really good job of educating people on it. Yeah, just like  read all of the stuff about it. Go to the Rolex site. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go check it out. Go see how they talk about things. They educate in a way that makes it like, oh, I want the Rolex. Like you want it because it’s the brand and you kind of grew up thinking it was cool.  

00:13:52 Casey: But then you see like the components and this like special alloy of metals, precious metals that they’re using and why that matters and how a fluted bezel is made out of precious metals and  you can’t get a fluted bezel bezel made out of stainless steel. Right? Like they kind of educate you to that. And it’s very interesting. They do a good job at that. How can your client educate prospects? What would they educate them on? I mean, they would educate them. They have a problem, there is a solution, they offer the best solution.

00:14:23 Casey: Like that’s kind of the main education points. But there’s nuance to the education. So what is the education your client ought to have in emails? So once someone opts in for whatever they’re opting in for, they opt in for a report or sign up for a webinar or a newsletter, God forbid, or some other thing, you’re then going to give them  more stuff. You’re gonna send them more emails, right? They’re on the newsletter. What are you gonna send them? 

00:14:49 Casey: Well, first, I think you should start sending them educational emails. Stuff that makes them smarter. And the email shouldn’t be, you know, long winded. They should be reasonably short, clear, direct, punchy, educational emails. Did you know that linear power supplies tend to be heavier than switching power supplies?  And the reason people have loved them for the last hundred years is because linear power supplies produce less to  zero RF noise. 

00:15:12 Casey: Well, did you know that there’s a switching power supply that offers no RF noise, and it is trusted by these top brands, and it’s the lowest cost option as well.

Educational, right? Super helpful. Like I want that now. Alright, that’s education. Next thing you got to do in your emails is you have to  overcome objections.  So what are objections people have? If you don’t know the answer of what objections your client faces when customers attempt to buy, or consider buying, you got to go figure it out. There’s the traditional way of doing this,  which is to like look at Amazon reviews and see what people are saying. 

00:15:49 Casey: There’s even tools that will scan Amazon reviews and say, you know, you go to a book that’s all about power supplies, and you see what people say on the reviews, oh, this is so helpful. I ultimately bought this one because of these things. And you start pulling out the objections that they had. It’s too noisy. It’s too expensive. I don’t know what to buy. I don’t know if it’ll work for my rig. I don’t know if I have the right grounding in my house. don’t write like I don’t know if it’ll handle all the power I need. I don’t know if I need all that power. You want to overcome objections. 

00:16:18 Casey: And sometimes these things are educational based. Like you have to educate someone to overcome the objection. Sometimes you just have to call out the objection and then have to see what’s right.  You can also ask the sales team like, Hey sales team, what’s up? What objections do you guys get? Give me your top 25. Let me review your top sales calls. You choose the ones from the last week that you want me to review. I want to go transcribe them in Otter. I’m going to pull out  the objections people had and how you disarm them. Like those can then be emails. Pretty,  pretty cool. 

00:16:46 Casey: So overcome objections. That’s your second type of emails. Your third is social proof. What is social proof? It’s just proof that things worked. So you have a testimonial. Meet Casey from, you know, lonely loser to a ripped lumberjack. Here’s how he did it. He took my, you know, mushroom supplement and did this workout with a kettlebell and boom, here’s the result. Want to see if it works for you? Purchase it, 30 day money back guarantee. Like that kind of email is social proof. Those are really useful. 

00:17:17 Casey: When we think of social, when you think of social proof, I want you to think of this. People shop around social proof to find someone who is like they are now, but got the outcome that they wanted. So they started where I’m at today, and they are now where I wanna be. That’s what you want your social proof to be. So saying like, this client worked with this company, this client did this with this person, this client made this transformation with this person’s life. It’s helpful. Here’s a little hack at CMOx.  We get testimonials.

00:17:48 Casey: One of the people on my team have a bogey every single quarter to generate a certain number of testimonials so that we’re always amassing proof. Right? Because we are doing really good work of helping our CMOs build confidence and  sell fractional CMO services and charge great rates and have a really great lifestyle. And we’re able to do that, capture the testimonial and then use that as social proof. So consider that.  How are you getting social proof?

00:18:17 Casey: DJI, the drone manufacturing company you might know, they’ve got the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 Creator Combo. It’s a mouthful, but it’s a little camera that’s  handheld, it does 4K, has  remote audio that you can clip on your shirt or whatever. Some people will do it on their hat. And you can have really great quality video.

00:18:44 Casey: And you can get your client to buy that and you can give that to someone who’s going to the conference or the event or whatever. And they’re just going to rip a bunch of video and then you get that over to a videographer or video editor who like makes it look pretty. And then you can use that in your marketing social proof. Hey, we were just at this event. Look at this behind the scenes of how we got ready and all the people we talked to. Boom, boom, boom. Social proof. 

00:19:05 Casey: It builds up the value of the brand. It makes you look bigger, right? Maybe as big as you are or maybe bigger. So social proof incredibly useful. And then what’s the fourth type of email? Hard pushes. Hard pushes are so useful. Here’s a hard push. Hey, we just had a big client reschedule their service next week for a couple weeks out. They had a family emergency. We’ve got some extra capacity next week. Can I get my team to come out to your business and do XYZ for you then? Hey,  I just got  open slot on Thursday. Do you want to book a time on with me? Reply back to this email. Let me know when that works for you.

00:19:45 Casey: We can bake those hard pushes into our nurture sequence. So every single person gets them on the 13th day of them being in the email sequence. So they come in, they opt in, they do the whatever. 13 days later, they get this kind of manual email that’s sent from somebody that’s like, hey, it’s Casey. I had this appointment canceled  for Monday. Do you want to book a call with me? Reply back to this email. Tell me time that works. I’ll send you a calendar invite.

00:20:12 Casey: You automate that every single lead starts receiving that. Think about the impact that you’re making on the business. So those are the four email types, education email, overcome objection,  social proof, and then hard push. Those four, and you just kind of mix them up. You mix them up. I want the education early on. I don’t want to push people hard early on, because I’m going to ask for the big thing. I’m going say, do you want to marry me upfront? They say no. I say, cool. Let me just educate you for a while. 

00:20:39 Casey: Let me just give you a bunch of value. You give them some free stuff. All the things that you have them opt in for, you just kind of slot that in on your nurture sequence, because you don’t need them to opt in again. So they’re just going to grab this PDF or this video or watch this thing on YouTube or listen to this podcast of the CEO or check out this article that was, you know, from a press release of yours that you’ve got on your website, whatever it is, you’re like getting them to read content, and they’re getting smarter. They’re having their objections overcome.  And they’re  seeing the social proof so they know that you can help them.

00:21:10 Casey: And then naturally, you’re asking them to take action. Hey, let’s have a call. Let’s  Watch this webinar, book a call with me afterwards. Hey, I just recorded this thing. Watch it. Reply after you’ve done watching it and let me know, you know, when you want to chat next week. That stuff is super, super valuable. And if you build that, you have a repeatable system inside of your client’s business that you can help them drive consistent outcomes with. And then you give that outcome like this, this whole nurture sequence is then owned by an individual in the marketing department. 

00:21:43 Casey: And they just work on extending it and improving it. And that’s it. So getting it live for 30 days, like a 30 day long one, important. And like, how often should you be emailing? It’s your call. I’m fine being aggressive. Two emails a day, whatever. People can unsubscribe if they don’t want it. Maybe it’s five emails a week. Maybe it’s two emails a week. Maybe it’s one email a week, but it’s certainly not one a month. Compress the time that people have to spend to binge your content. 

00:22:11 Casey: We want them to become heavy consumers of your free stuff so that they really want your paid stuff.  It’s a great recipe. And it’s like also proof that you can help them. It goes back to Frank Kern’s thing. What’s the best way to show people that you can help them? It’s that you actually help them  and in showing them and then they believe you and then they wanna work with you, right?  So short-term nurture sequence, it is a absolute hack. It is so valuable. Real quick about these emails, simple, plain text, if you want to put a logo top center, go ahead, but everything else should be plain text.  

00:22:42 Casey: Send me the email as if you were sending the email to your best friend asking them out for lunch. You’re not going to go to the designer and get some fancy email built. I’m talking about getting the email out.  Not the perfect most beautiful image. No plain text email. Like if I’m going to write this myself, and I’m going to send it, which I advise you not to do is the fractional email. But let’s just say you will. You’re going to do this for the first one. You go into the email software you hit, you know, create email that says choose a template you say blank, and you just write it out there. And that’s it. Like it’s that simple. 

00:23:14 Casey: So nothing fancy about this. It’s just like raw information. So it’s education, overcome objections, social proof and hard pushes. You do that for your clients, you’re to build a consistent process for them to generate more and more value from your work. And it’s really easy for you to manage that soon that can blossom into a from a 30 day to a 90 to a 180 to a 365 and beyond.

00:23:35 Casey: And then things are just gravy. Then you can broadcast over top special events, podcast episodes, you know, whatever. But shouldn’t you take if you have if your client has a podcast, shouldn’t the first couple emails that they receive be like, hey, here are the top three podcasts that people love, make sure you consume these, you know, before moving further, like just force feed people the content that they’re looking for. So they don’t have to find it or stumble upon it themselves. Right?

00:24:00 Casey: If you want to be a fractional CMO, if you want to be in demand, if you want to win clients,  I’d love to help you with it. I’ve got a great team. We’re helping a bunch of awesome CMOs right now. I just had a great call today,  helping some CMOs build some authority and like how they’re presenting themselves. A ton of fun. If you want my help, go to cmox.com/call and just book a call with my team. We’ll see if you got what it takes to be the next in demand for actual CMO. All right. I hope you’re well. Thank you for being here. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

00:24:29 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners. But you’ve got to take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at fractionalcmoshow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so I know that this content is helpful to you. All right. Go get’em!