Copywriter Club Podcast - Episode 242 With Jared McDonald

Simon De Brito is our guest on the 318th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Simon is a Marketing Automation Specialist who creates inbound marketing strategies in order to turn prospects into customers. Not only does this episode give you the inside scoop on inbound marketing but just how different buyers are in different parts of the world. Tune into the episode to find out: What is inbound marketing and what does a Marketing Automation Specialist even do? How the different stages of awareness helps create conversion-worthy content. What’s the difference between B2B and B2C buyers? Why you can’t just throw content out for the sake of content. Scoring systems – what are they and what does it do for business? What mistakes are marketers making in their inbound marketing efforts? Which free tools translate for smaller businesses? SEO – does YOUR business need it? Why you need to STOP solving everyone’s problems. How to save time, stretch your content, and drive more eyes on your content. The future of inbound marketing. Marketing differences between Europe and the U.S. How understanding cultural differences will give you an edge in your marketing efforts. Check out the episode below. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: The Copywriter Think Tank Kira’s website Rob’s website Simon's LinkedIn  The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM Episode 183 Episode 242 Episode 256 Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  Let's talk a little bit about marketing automation. So as copywriters, we have the opportunity to work with a lot of different tools. Often we simply take care of the copy and then we hand over a copy document and let the client worry about getting into the right tools, whether that's their email service provider or an automated social media content posting tool, or maybe even something more robust like Marketo or HubSpot. But other copywriters are taking the time to learn the ins and outs of these kinds of tools in order to bring greater expertise and strategic thinking to the table for their clients. They're solving even bigger problems, which can be a pretty compelling competitive advantage. Our guest for today's episode of the Copywriter Club podcast is marketing automation specialist Simon De Brito, and he shared a bit about how mastering these tools can make you a better marketer, whether you do it for your clients or for your own business. But before we get to the interview with Simon, let me first introduce my guest host for the day. He's been on the podcast as an interview guest himself several different times. He's been a guest host once before, and he's the person who introduced me to Goo Goo Clusters and started my summer downfall with sugar. It's Justin Blackman. Hey, Justin. Justin Blackman:  I will happily take the blame for the Goo Goo Clusters. They are amazing. That was my favorite part of the Nashville event. Literally, that was the first thing I thought of when you guys said that you were going there. Rob Marsh:  Yeah, Goo Goo Clusters, I ate three bags of them. I'm glad they don't sell them here. At least you have to really go looking for them. And yeah, it knocked me off of my no-sugar bandwagon, which I'm back on. No Goo Goo Clusters on the desk today. But yeah, they're either the very most delicious thing in the world or the most evil thing in the world, or maybe both. Justin Blackman:  I'm sure that there's a marketing lesson in there about scarcity and urgency of, "Oh, I'm going down the airplane. I need to get one more bag because I'm not going to be able to get it anywhere else." Yeah, it's amazing. Every now and again, I'm here in Georgia. Every now and again, I'll stumble on a gas station near the border by Tennessee that will have it in Georgia and it'll feel like contraband. It's like I can't tell anyone about it and I'm just going to buy them all and hoard it and get really fat and love it. Rob Marsh:  Yeah, that's my problem. That's what I did and they're delicious. But enough about Goo Goo Clusters. Before we jump into our interview, Simon, we do need to remind everybody, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Accelerator. That's the program that will help you lay the foundation for a successful business. Whether you've been doing this copywriting thing for a while, maybe you're rethinking your brand or changing your niche, or even if you're just starting out, it's a bit like earning a copywriting business degree. It covers everything that you need to know from figuring out your X factor to creating packages that your clients want to purchase, as well as things like pricing and nicheing and finding and managing clients and so much more. We're opening the doors for new members very soon. So to make sure that you are on the notification list, go to thecopywriteraccelerator.com and just drop in your email there, and we will let you know. Justin, you were in, I think, the very first accelerator we ever ran. Justin Blackman:  I was, yeah. I was in the beta round, and that's when Kira held the gun to my head and made me write 10,000 headlines. Rob Marsh:  So lots of good things can come from the accelerator. I mean, I didn't intend to talk about this, but in some ways, it launched your business and you into the copywriting world. Justin Blackman:  Not in some ways, in every way. Highly recommend it; big fan of that one. I actually still use some of the templates from there. Rob Marsh:  So lots of really cool stuff there. We'll be telling you more about it, but make sure you hear about it by going to thecopywriteraccelerator.com and get on the waitlist. Okay, so let's get to our interview with Simon. Kira Hug:  How did you end up as a marketing automation specialist? Simon De Brito:  Yeah, so I started working in the US close to 10 years ago in a small startup company with around 20 people. And my goal there was to just recreate the whole marketing department. What I found most effective way was to create an inbound strategy. And inbound strategies, what you do is you create a lot of content so people can find you and then you can convert them with this content and then start nurturing them. So I start sending them more content to qualify them and send them to your sales team. So really using content as a key of the lead generation process. And so I started driving to really going into automation nurturing programs, which led me to my second job in a bigger company, but just really on the digital marketing side. Again, implementing an automation process and inbound process, creating all the workflows, the nurturing, really basing everything on content, content that brings value to the prospects. And now to my third company. We have a marketing department, we have a digital department, and in this department, I just focus on automating nurturing programs and helping generate leads and making sure they go to the right person and receive the right content. Rob Marsh:  So Simon, I'm curious, a lot of our listeners are copywriters, but some of them may be thinking, "Oh, maybe the copywriting thing or the content thing isn't quite right." I'd actually like to get on the marketing side. What advice could you give somebody who wants a career path like the one that you just outlined, what kinds of things could they be doing in order to connect with marketers and really figure that kind of a career path out? Simon De Brito:  Thinking about me, my main idea was, on the marketing side, thinking about conversion and thinking about how do I bring value to the person I'm trying to sell to? I'm not here to just spam people to just send just a lot of emails or things like that. So, it's really thinking about, how do I bring value to the people? The value came with great content that's really aligned to the persona that I'm going to talk to. And then from there, it's just really pulling the thread on this and just keep creating more and more content and realizing how I've created one great piece of content, what's the next big piece of content that can be very useful for my audience? Then what's the third one? And then you just start creating a workflow of a suite of emails or a path that people can go down to and really better understand your product, your solution, and how you can fix their problem. So yeah, it's really natural in a sense. Rob Marsh:  Yeah, it feels like it flowed for you. In addition to content writing though, are there other skills that they should be thinking about adding? Do they need to know a certain set of tools or do they need to dive more into strategy? Or is it just to get better at content, get better at solving the problems and it all serendipitously comes together? Simon De Brito:  There are a lot of tools that will help you create your workflows, for example. So a workflow is when someone enters through one door and what type of content you send after and send after, because you don't want to be... So for example, if we're talking about tools, but imagine for an emailing program, you have to set up your email program every week or every two weeks or every month. That can become very time-consuming. What you want is something automated. So you set it one time, you set your five emails automated, and once a person enters through one content, they receive the next five pieces of content. So you can learn about automation tools. Mailchimp has one, HubSpot has one. I'm a big fan of HubSpot because you can really track conversions, KPIs and create very good sequences of emails. Kira Hug:  Yeah. And I definitely want to talk about the tools that you use, but first can you just talk a little bit more about what you do today in your current role, just to give us a better idea of what that looks like?