Skip to main content

Why Selplaining is Important for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Are you “selplaining” With Your Customers? If Not, You Are In Jeopardy of Churn and/or Worse, Being Poorly Reviewed!

How many customers have you lost because those customers wouldn’t take some time to understand what you are doing for them?  How many customers switch agencies only to receive the same “poor results”?



What do you mean I am in sales?
If you are a digital marketing agency or you work with any part of the content, SEO or social media team then this article is written with you in mind. Anyone in an Internet advertising firm or agency that directly communicates with a customer, a client or prospect should realize that they are in sales. Even the receptionist has a role in sales. You may not be part of the sales team, but surely you are in sales. For brevities sake from here on in, I will call customers, clients, and prospects by one name which is the real “Employer.”
You see that while a company may pay you to work at their discretion, the real “Employer” are the companies that pay your company. While your boss or team is important, the “Employer” is much more important to the overall agency. Why? Because they pay your company, that takes their money, and divvies it up amongst you and your teammates as remuneration or pay for your services or labor.


Do you directly or indirectly communicate with your company’s clients?
So now you must be wondering what all this has to do with the term selplaining. In fact, you may be wondering what the heck is selplaining anyway? Read on, I will get there, and you will get it.
Selplaining is the art of selling, training, and explaining why certain things that you do on their behalf, are important to the digital marketing results that you are getting for them. Simply put, selplaining is taking every interaction or encounter with your real “Employer”: whether it be via email, phone call, text message or in person and using that time to remind them what they are paying you for and how little steps can gain them new clients or revenue.
Do your reports educate your clients or drive them crazy?  
At our firm, we provide clients weekly reports that are designed to build trust, to convey that we are working for them and that what we are doing for them is working.  We send them an email that takes about 10 seconds or less to digest and comprehend, all while it confirms and validates our value to them.  Image 1A is the actual image a client receives modified with their data.  Notice that we point out something valuable that happened with the data in their account.  
Blog-Image-1.png
Image 1A
It could be as simple as receiving five new backlinks to authoritative domains. It may be that three of their keywords have moved to page 2, after debuting on page 24. Little things that show progress are the key items.
These progress points teach your client about what is important and what drives the overall traffic via the organics. SEO, as you know, is that mystical magic that clients don’t understand.  But, teaching them SEO components gently using this approach is extremely effective.  
Remember you get to pick the progress points. We have used this report at varying times when a client won’t make a change that we know is needed. Sometimes clients won’t pay for backlink building which holds us back from generating enough quality backlinks. We use the Snippet to key in on the loss of backlinks, or keywords going in the wrong direction. This reinforces why these other items are needed.


Do you report regularly to the client?
The weekly “Snippet” has become a powerful tool that helps to keep our clients informed, which helps us retain them keeping our churn rate under 5%.  At the end of the month, we send them a monthly wrap up. It provides all the pretty graphs and charts and other data that they don’t understand or care to understand - but still, we provide it to them.  
The four email Snippets that we send each month provide them with knowledge, while showing them we are on top of their account and are doing our job. It also provides them with a positive feeling about our work. So, it’s a sales tool, right? Sort of, but that wasn’t why we originated it.  
If the Snippet shows data going in the wrong direction, it validates the need for them to change.  It also relieves pressure on you or your firm if there is not a lot of gain within their data.
We don’t use it for our PPC clients often. But, we easily could if we felt it was needed. Since our clients are B2C, they see our results via form submissions and phone calls. Phone calls (which we record and review) are another vital topic that I have covered in 5 steps to Turning Clicks Into Clients®.
Blog-Image-2.png
Image 2A


Ok, the Snippet thing is good, but in every interaction someone should be selling?
YES, YES, YES!  Let’s say that you work in an agency, and it is your job to make sure that reports are emailed. Take a minute to review the monthly report and highlight something positive that is within the report. Write a short sentence or two on the report’s email that could say something like this:  
“Bill – great report attached! You will be happy to see that you gained 3 new backlinks. This is great news as both Google and Bing pay attention to backlinks and attaches high importance to them which affects your domain’s overall score.”
Let’s say you are a technical person that normally doesn’t interact with the real “Employers,” and now you have to be on a conference call with the client. Ask your account management team something that you can highlight or note that is happening within the account. You could say this to the client:  
“Hey, Bill!  Tamaqua tells me that your account is really moving in the right direction. She said you have 3 keywords showing up on page one of the search engines, that’s great!”
That’s it; you have just sent a sales email, client services email and account overview - all in one email. They may not even open the report, but they at least know that someone is watching and that something good happened.


The wrap!
Ok, do you get it? Selplaining is the act of artfully interacting with a client and providing them with news that is usually good, while teaching and/or training them. The act reaffirms that you or your agency are positively working on their behalf, behind the scenes for them and that reassures them they made a good decision to engage you or your firm. It also innocuously provides you with greater value and worth to them.  


About the author
Mike Bannan is a blogger and marketing professional with over 30 years of building client relationships via sales and marketing. Bannan is a co-owner of the Philadelphia digital marketing agency Results Driven Marketing™. Mr. Bannan is RDM’s managing partner and Chief Vision officer. RDM supports him with a strong team of marketers and professionals and technical wizards.


The agency
Founded in 2013, RDM works primarily with clients that are in the B2C category. Lawyers, franchise owners, and small business owners are the main client types. RDM is a full spectrum Digital Marketing Agency which provides content services, blogging, graphics design, video services, web design and development, PPC, SEO, Local SEO, Reputation Management, and Social Media Management.   Furthering the SEO team created the RD-Metric, a tool that finds the best keyword choices. The company overall has 16 employees, and the team holds over 35 active certifications within the digital marketing arena.

To contact Mike Bannan for help for a 45-minute no charge consultation call, 215-600-3540. Emails can be directed to Mike@Digitalrdm.com or check the agency out on the web at www.digitalrdm.com.

Comments

All Time Greats

7 Reasons Every Business Needs to Twitter

This post has been moved to 7 Reasons Every Business Needs to be on Twitter on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: Twitter Dell Zappos customer service influence-the-influencers market intelligence Tony Hsieh b2b Twitter del.icio.us tags: Twitter Dell Zappos customer service influence-the-influencers market intelligence Tony Hsieh b2b Twitter icerocket tags: Twitter Dell Zappos customer service influence-the-influencers market intelligence Tony Hsieh b2b Twitter Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Google AdWords and PPC

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing strategy or social media tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! The Pure Unfettered Power of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and PPC Campaigns Just like optimizing your site to rank for keywords, you can use our online marketing tips to pay to run advertisements on Google so that your business is shown on the first page of search engine results. Ranking this way is instantaneous whereas SEO (Search Engine Optimizati

How to Use SEO: Leverage SEO To Be Found Online and Boost Your Online Marketing

All businesses that want to attract customers online, no matter the business size or age, have few options other than Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO In The Box™ by Results Driven Marketing®, LLC There are roughly 1.8 billion websites online, and basic SEO allows Google to find and index or catalog your webpages.  After that, Google serves you up to searchers in the organic section.  The question remains: where they list your site, on page one or page 22 or further back? SEO controls your positioning. Do you want to be found online or not? If your business is online or you want your product or service to be found online, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must, and knowing how to use SEO to leverage the power of the internet is vital. Arguably, an effective SEO strategy gets you on the organic results section of the search engine results pages (SERP). Organic traffic is highly valuable and requires high-quality SEO. But even businesses that use l

Getting More Out of Each Click with "Post-Click Marketing"

With the economy now officially in a recession (as if we didn't know that), marketers are under increasing pressure to do more with less. On the interactive marketing side, few marketers will get budget increases enabling them to drive more clicks. The challenge, then, is to maximize marketing productivity—to get more leads out of the same number of clicks. This is the first of two posts that will look at how to improve conversion rates to get more value from each click. One answer to this challenge is provided by "post-click marketing," a.k.a. lead automation management vendors. While the specifics of each service vary, all of them essentially: automate the process of extracting visitor IP information from your log files; match the IP address to an organization; filter out ISPs; and map the company name to one or more external databases to provide additional information (company size, industry, key contacts etc.). The better services also use geo-location filte

Top-Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Advertisements That Make Sense

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource ! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper DM advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective Digital Marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top notch-digital marketing tip! Advertisement Congruence If your business is running ads this is one of our most important online marketing tips! Ad congruence is when your ads and landing pages look alike or have the same message. Have you ever clicked on an ad and been taken to a page that looked nothing like the ad? When your ads look like the web pages they lead to, customers will feel like they are in

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Optimize Your Site

Looking for some online marketing tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing and an seo strategy can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! Optimize Your Site to Improve Search Engine Rankings Most small business owners know that their websites need to be optimized in order for search engines, like Google and Bing, to find them and rank them on the search engine results page. If you don’t know, that’s okay. You can learn all about Search Engine Optimization and SEO best practices here to help impr

Best of 2008: Social Media Optimization, Part 2

This content has been moved to Best of 2008: Social Media Marketing on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foertsch Kate Morris TopRank Online Marketing Blog Jessica Cameron-Ruud Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch CircleUp Traffic Travis del.icio.us tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foertsch Kate Morris TopRank Online Marketing Blog Jessica Cameron-Ruud Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch CircleUp Traffic Travis icerocket tags: best free tools for monitoring social buzz social media marketing Six Pixels of Separation Mitch Joel Techrigy SM2 Key Web Data Chris Lang Google social bookmarking HubSpot Catie Foe

Book Review: Website Optimization

This post has been moved to Book Review: Website Optimization – Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: Andrew B. King, Web Site Opimization LLC, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, book review, Wordtracker, SEO insights, social networking, Marketleap.com link popularity tool del.icio.us tags: Andrew B. King, Web Site Opimization LLC, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, book review, Wordtracker, SEO insights, social networking, Marketleap.com link popularity tool icerocket tags: Andrew B. King, Web Site Opimization LLC, Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, book review, Wordtracker, SEO insights, social networking, Marketleap.com link popularity tool Contact Tom Pick: tomATwebmarketcentralDOTcom