Finding and Converting Leads with Good Content with Anna Tutckaia

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Joe Casabona: Grow your audience, get leads, sell your thing, make money. This seems to be the formula for creators. But these are just nebulous ideas. How do we actually implement them? That’s what today’s guest, Anna Tutckaia is here to talk about.

She’s the head of marketing at ManyChat, and she’ll tell us all about how we can find leads by learning about our audience, how their virtual event garnered thousands of potential customers and helpful tools for personalization.

In Build Something More we answer the question, “Should you really move from Facebook to Circle?” This is a really fantastic conversation with a lot of really good takeaways and I think things that are more than just platitudes. Grow your audience. But how? Anna tells us. Use automation tools to connect. But how? Anna tells us. So look for those top takeaways.

You can find everything that we talked about in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/278. And I want to thank our sponsors for this episode. They are MOFT, LearnDash, and Nexcess. You’ll hear about them later on in the show. But for now, let’s get to the intro and then the interview.

[00:02:31] <music>

Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

[00:02:56] <music>

Joe Casabona: All right, I am here with Anna Tutckaia. She is the head of marketing at ManyChat. And I am really excited to talk to her today. First of all, we had a great pre-show that I didn’t record, but I feel like would have been really fun to share if she was okay with it, that is.

But I’m really excited because we’re going to talk about a couple of things that I and my coaching clients struggle with, which is finding leads automatically. And then if there’s time, we’ll talk about how to not sound like a robot when you are doing automation. So let’s bring Anna in. Anna, how are you today?

Anna Tutckaia: Hi, Joe. I am good. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Joe Casabona: My pleasure. Thanks for coming on the show. I hope I said your name properly. I always practice and then-

Anna Tutckaia: All good.

Joe Casabona: …when we’re on stage, I stumble a little bit. So I hope that was good.

Anna Tutckaia: That was really good.

Joe Casabona: Thank you. Thank you very much. I used to teach in the classroom and I always wanted to make sure that I said everybody’s name correctly, because I would always mess it up, obviously, when we’re in the same room. But on a podcast I think that’s really important… Longtime listeners will know. I say this all the time. But I think it’s really important because if people are listening and they hear your name, that’s how they’ll think your name is pronounced.

I met somebody who I heard on a podcast and the host said their name wrong, and so then I mispronounced their name. And they corrected me and I was like, “Mm.” This is why I need to make sure I say the name as well as I can with my New York American accent.”

Anna Tutckaia: My name is not an easy one to say but you did it perfectly.

Joe Casabona: Well. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I did have help because it’s not spelled like it sounds. I guess it kind of is spelled like it sounds but I definitely would have swung and missed the first time around.

So you are the head of marketing at ManyChat. And one of the topics that we were talking about in the preshow was how to find leads automatically. I think this is a really important topic because it can be hard.

You know, I used to think that if I just tweet something I’ll get sales from like tweeting that link, or if I just tell people to like join my mailing list, right, that’ll work. But finding leads is almost the hardest part of running a digital business.

And I’d always say, you know, if I can get in a room with somebody and talk to them, I could sell them a five or $10,000 website, but I have a much harder time selling, say, a $50 a year membership because I can’t do those face to face meetings.

Anna Tutckaia: Right.

Joe Casabona: I guess let’s start here. How do we go about finding leads in general? I’m kind of almost struggling to be like, where do we even start to find leads?

Anna Tutckaia: I really like that you’re asking the question, where should we start? Because that’s important. And my answer here is, always start with the basics. First of all, I want to make sure that like all of your audience, you know, that are listening to this podcast they understand, you know, the product that they are trying to sell, together with the audience they’re trying to sell it to.

And knowing your audience is crucial. That’s where you need to start. You need to figure out: Who are they? Where do they hang out online? What are the pain points and how your product help to address those pain points?

And once you answer those basic questions, you want to make sure you understand also, what is the interest to your audience outside of your product. So you don’t start with selling your product right out of the gate.

It’s like with dating. Like you don’t come up with a person and say, like, “Hey, Joe, please marry me.” You’d probably very surprised at this point. You need to go through the cycle. And in order to do that right, you need to know that person.

So same here. Know your person, know your product, and try to figure out what are their interests and then try to think what can you offer to them that will excite them, you know, that they want to get it. And then you won’t have any problems with generating the leads.

Joe Casabona: That’s a great point. Because I think, you know, something that creators especially discusses, or any online business, maybe is you want to get your audience to know, like, and trust you, right? They need to know, like, and trust you to buy from you.

But it sounds like a two-way street. You want to get to know, and at least like your audience because you want to be able to speak their language, and really, like you said, kind of understand who they are, where they hang out, and what problems they’re having. Because then you can effectively se… then you’re not really selling them, right? You’re saying like, “Hey, I understand you. And here’s the thing that can help you.”

Anna Tutckaia: Exactly. So first of all, I understand you, I can help you, here is content that I can provide you on the regular basis. So let’s say if we’re talking about content creators, they would already know what content to offer.

And then when time comes and you need to generate the leads, you need to get their contact information so you can keep nurturing and eventually selling to them, you would know what content do they want to get from you so they can do the exchange and provide you with their contact information without a doubt.

Joe Casabona: I think that’s really important. I think something that I did recently that worked really well was I started a new newsletter about podcast tips for people who want to grow and monetize their podcast. So I made it really clear that you already have a podcast and you’re struggling to get more downloads, you’re struggling to make money, right?

I mean, to kind of contradict what I said earlier, that tweet ended up getting me like 30, 30, or 36 downloads or signups in a day, right, which is more than I’ve ever seen on my newsletter. Which is usually just like, “I’ll send you stuff on Mondays.” But this was like very targeted and I understand that audience. I’ve had extremely low unsubscribes from that because I know what they want and they know what to expect from my list.

Anna Tutckaia: Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. And to give more examples is, for instance, last year at ManyChat we were launching a new product. We were launching Instagram Automation. And I had a goal, you know, for the whole marketing team to acquire new users. So we had to figure out how to do that.

And the first thing that came to mind is, let’s launch ads. Because it used to be a really straightforward and I think short-term successful tool where you add your dollars in and you get conversions out, right? But I think that the whole picture and the whole approach changed a lot, because the market is saturated right now. Like the ads are so competitive, and it’s getting more and more expensive to get those conversions.

So we started thinking, as a team, what are the other ways we can do that? And we started thinking about the audience. Like we are launching the new product, they have no idea what automation is. It sounds very fancy, right? Instagram Automation. “But why on earth do you mean? What do I need to automate? Like I create content, I get my followers. That’s pretty much all I need.”

So we figured we need to educate them. And we decided to do a summit with content creators, with educators where we would talk about Instagram in general, how to grow your Instagram, how to build engagement, and how to do automation. So instead of running direct response ads where we would, again, hit the audience with, you know, go get in, buy the product, we started putting together a very insightful, amazing, interesting event.

We started running ads to generate registrations for that event. And the cost per acquiring the registrant was so low because people were genuinely excited, you know, about the conference. They were ready to provide their contact information on the exchange of getting the free ticket.

And then we got to 8,000 registrants. And at the end of the day, those folks, first of all, they watched the content that we provided, they build the trust with the brand, they build the trust with ManyChat, they learned why they needed automation, they learned how to do automation on top of other topics that we provided completely outside of automation, just to give that value.

And then a lot of them converted into our new users. So it was so successful that this year, again, instead of like in Q1, instead of running direct response ads, we’re like, “Okay, let’s do that again. Let’s go even further. And we did a conference with 25,000 people. Again, a lot of them eventually converted into free and paid users because they loved the content we provided, they loved all the workshops and they saw the value.

Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s absolutely incredible. I really like what you said. You still decided to run ads, but the value proposition was different, right? It was, “Hey, here’s a free thing that will benefit you.” And then that event kind of helped you educate your user on things that they were interested in, as well as things that you’re doing to help them.

And I think that maybe that was the thing that brought them in, right? Because if you just said like, “Here’s a summit on automation with Instagram,” maybe that wouldn’t have performed as well because there’s still that knowledge gap.

Anna Tutckaia: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: But your event filled the knowledge gap and also answered questions they already had.

Anna Tutckaia: Absolutely. You’re 100% correct. It’s like you need to figure out what they are interested outside of your product and how can you then connect it with your product, so it makes sense from the business perspective as well.

In our case, we had a lot of topics around how to grow your Instagram. You can’t use ManyChat for that. But everyone who is on Instagram, that’s the number one topic they’re interested about.

And then the second one is how to increase engagement. Like you can use ManyChat, like 50% of the time, to increase engagement. But again, another 50% of the time, you can use other tools, you can use other tactics. And we were talking about those as well. And then only, I would say, 30% of the summit, we’re talking about automation. Maybe even less honestly.

Joe Casabona: That’s great. Again, like you said, it goes back to knowing your audience. I think that a common mistake that I have certainly made and I know that… You know, I come from the WordPress space originally, and something that every WordPress plugin for a long time would do is write on their landing page, tell you like the programming languages that they used in the plugin. And I’m like, “This is not useful to anybody, except for other developers who probably aren’t buying your plugin, because they think that they can write their own.”

So the features are not the things that are… or the things that you’re most interested are probably not the things that your audience is most interested in. And I made that same mistake recently because I help podcasters of any size make money. And for a long time, I was saying, “I’m not gonna teach you how to get sponsors. You can do it without sponsors.”

And then after talking to people in my audience, they’re like, “But I really want to know how to get sponsors.” And I’m like, “All right, well, it’s dumb of me to ignore this because this is the main question that they have.”

Anna Tutckaia: Absolutely. It’s actually interesting. I have a similar situation and mistake. Like two, three companies ago, I was running marketing at the company that was called Lumo Bodytech. And we did devices: one was for posture and another one was for running.

Joe Casabona: Oh, yes. Okay.

Anna Tutckaia: And for the posture device—I am straightened enough while I’m talking by the way—you would put it on your shoulder and then you slouch, it vibrates. And the thing is the audience that we were targeting was, you know, I think on their like 50s, or 60s, sometimes 70s, those who were concerned with their health and wellness, and they wanted to have a health healthy back. A lot of them had back pain. Anyway.

So all of the content was around that. Like how to improve your posture, how to improve your back health, how to do this exercise or that exercise. But when we did our survey, and we actually asked, like, “What content do you want us to provide you?” there were so many topics outside of health. They were real people, and they were like, “Oh, dating for people who are over 40 years old.”

Joe Casabona: Oh, wow.

Anna Tutckaia: I don’t remember what else but I was so shocked about that. And we started then connecting like how posture improves the way you look, how it helps, you know, to find your partner. So very exciting topics. The engagement rate on our newsletters became so much higher just by doing the survey and asking those questions.

Joe Casabona: Wow. That’s wild, right? Because I mean, you wouldn’t have thought of that. I certainly wouldn’t have thought of that. I don’t want to make assumptions about age but you look a lot younger than me. I think your kids are older than my kids, so maybe not. But I’m not in my 40s is what I’m saying. And so that would have never, never occurred to me as content to make.

Anna Tutckaia: Exactly, yeah. I had no idea at that time.

Joe Casabona: That brings me to kind of the next topic I want to talk about here, which is how do you get to know your audience?

Especially if you have a smaller audience, it could feel like a one-way street. This is especially true of podcasting. Engagement rates for podcasting are pretty low. People just listen to the episode and then probably move on. So what do you do to get to know your audience? You mentioned surveys. Are there other methods for that sort of thing?

Anna Tutckaia: Yeah. I would say surveys is the first one. The second one is… Let me start thinking. The second really powerful is if you already have your customer list, you can do the audience lookup on Facebook. I know that they’re limiting it like with every year. But it used to be extremely, extremely beneficial when you would upload your customer list on Facebook, and then it would give you some data on what is the audience, what Facebook pages do they follow. Honestly, don’t catch me on this. I’m not sure if it’s still the case because honestly they change it like every month without the data-

Joe Casabona: Yeah, a disclaimer, right?

Anna Tutckaia: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: All of these things are constantly in flux.

[00:20:19] <music>

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[00:21:25] <music>

Joe Casabona: The more general point here is there are tools that can help you get to know your audience. I know, again, as we record this, I use Chartable and it gives me some basic demographics on my listener’s household income. My podcast audience is 6% more female than the average podcast in my category or whatever. So stuff like that can be really helpful-

Anna Tutckaia: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: …if you find the right tools.

Anna Tutckaia: For sure. Another really good one is Facebook groups. So if you know what your space is, I would recommend becoming a member of a lot of different Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups where you can (a) have discussions with your potential audience, or you can use search bars, where you can find out what people are asking there.

For example, if you are, you know, targeting digital marketers and you want to think, “Okay, what content do I want to create for them?” go and become a member of different Facebook groups for digital marketers, and use search bar with keywords like “how to” or different others, and you’ll see what people want to learn more about. That’s a very powerful tool you can use.

And then in general, try to talk to your customers or potential customers as much as possible. So create a habit where, I don’t know, every week you’re talking to at least one or two folks that could potentially purchase your product or who already purchased your product.

You can be surprised people are actually excited, you know, to provide feedback, because they want to be heard, they want to provide value. And there is nothing like that that can show you your audience, like what they care about, what they like about your product, what they’re excited about your product, and what content do they want to hear from you.

Joe Casabona: That’s so great. That last point in particular about making a habit to talk to your customers or potential customers has been mentioned on the show before. And honestly, it could be easy as, you know, like you said, emailing your current list and sending out a scheduling link to be like, “Hey, can I grab 15 minutes of your time. I want to talk to you about what you liked about my offering, what you don’t like about it.”

I know that I took a page out of my friend Jennifer Bourn’s book. She’s been on the show before. I’ll link that and everything that we’re talking about in the show notes over and streamlined.fm/278. But, you know, I joined the membership of my target audience basically and I got in there, I started asking questions, I started answering a lot of questions and then I decided I was going to offer kind of like this limited free coaching to x amount of people who wanted it. A few people took me up on it and so far about 30% of them have signed up for my coaching plan.

Anna Tutckaia: Wow.

Joe Casabona: That’s a case where I joined a group, I provided a lot of value, and then the membership fee that I paid to be part of that membership is almost completely paid back through these coaching calls or planning calls.

Anna Tutckaia: Yeah, that’s a really great idea to go about it. Another cool thing you can do is, again, for existing customers, you can create something like customer advisory board where you can, you know, create a space for those folks to get together with you on a regular basis, let’s say one once a month, where you can share more information about your products or services, maybe provide something, you know, special, of value. And then have a very candid discussion where, from them, you would get all the feedback, you can ask questions, they can help you with deciding on what other products can you build for your new customers. That was very successful for products I either consulted with or worked with in the past as well.

Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. Because people kind of… they love the behind-the-scenes stuff and they love to be in the know. So that’s a big benefit there. You also mentioned maybe offering some sort of incentive.

Anna Tutckaia: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: That’s another thing I want to ask you about. Because in the past, I’ve just kind of tried…You know, I have a mailing list of a little over 1,000 people, let’s say, and I email a quick like two-minute or five-minute Google Form that’s a survey. And I’ve traditionally gotten pretty low response rates on that.

Do I need to offer like a $10 Starbucks card? What incentives… or maybe what is the framing for getting a higher engagement rate on surveys like that?

Anna Tutckaia: That’s a really good question. So it, again, depends on your audience in terms of what they value. So for example, for VIP customer advisory board, the bigger incentive could be creating a space for people to be heard, to be special, and providing all the newest and latest information for them. And that could be enough, right? And creating that space for them to connect with each other. So that’s one thing.

Another thing is monetary. So you mentioned Facebook card. That’s another big one, right? If you find the value the survey, and you think that you can provide something extra outside of your services, then go ahead and provide either like a Starbucks card, Amazon card, like whatever is aligned with your audience.

The other one is content, some piece of content that at some point of time could… like you were selling for certain amount of money, and you can provide that. And you can say, “Okay, normally the price is, I don’t know, $100 or $1,000. If you go through the survey, you can get this content for free.”

So for example, like the conference, right? If you had a conference, or you had a class that you charge your customers money for, now you can provide it in exchange of the survey results. Be creative.

Joe Casabona: That’s great. I was going to ask you specifically about: is like a content upgrade or something like that a good enough incentive? I guess theoretically if you have the right customer alignment, and if we go back to the basics that we talked about earlier about understanding your customers, then yeah, you should be able to offer them something that maybe you generally charge for free as a good incentive.

Anna Tutckaia: Absolutely. I mean, it took you whatever it took you, you know, certain amount of time to put it together, to do a research. All of that is very valuable. Meaning that you save time for your customers like doing that. Like your content is the key. That’s a monetary value. So go ahead and use it.

Joe Casabona: That’s fantastic. I love that. It’s giving me a lot of really good ideas. A few weeks ago—I guess a few weeks ago as we record this, this is like several months ago as this episode comes out—I interviewed Louis Nicholls from SparkLoop, and he kind of helped me get my referral rewards aligned for the referral program for my newsletter.

And it sounds like, you know, one of the things I’m giving away for say 10 referrals might also be a good incentive for a survey, especially if I frame it as, “Look, this either costs 100 bucks or you need to refer whatever, 10 or 15 people to my newsletter. But if you just take this two minute survey, I’ll give it to you for free.” What’s the least amount of work there?

Anna Tutckaia: Yeah, that’s a great idea right there.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. So let me ask you now… Let’s turn towards… I mean, you work for ManyChat. I’m familiar with several chatbots. And then there’s stuff like Right Message. Let me know if I’m mischaracterizing your product by the way. I’m pretty sure I’m not. I suddenly got nervous. These kinds of like inline chat modules on a website, right? That’s one of ManyChat’s offerings. Is that accurate?

Anna Tutckaia: Yeah. I would say that’s only a small portion of ManyChat does. Basically, ManyChat is a chat platform that allows you to build automation on platforms like Messenger, SMS, and Instagram. So imagine-

Joe Casabona: True to the name, I guess, right? There are many ways to chat with ManyChat.

Anna Tutckaia: Absolutely. And I would say many ways to chat, not necessarily with ManyChat, but there are many ways to chat with your customers. And then there are many ways for your customers to connect with you as a business. And as a business, I think it’s extremely crucial for you to provide this options for your customers.

And then be there for them, you know, answering their questions, and also, from the business perspective, trying to figure out how these conversations can lead to more sales.

Joe Casabona: I think this is a really good thing to talk about, too, because I think there’s a common misconception, like the one I just demonstrated. Which is like, a chatbot is like one of those annoying things that pop up while you’re trying to browse the website that’s like, “Can I help you?” But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that, right?

Anna Tutckaia: It’s not. Yeah. It’s so many cases and implementations. In fact, by the way, even on the website, if done correctly, there are a lot of people who don’t get the product and service once they get on the landing page.

I am sure you experience that as well. When you land on the page, you go through the value prop and you’re like, “What on earth do they offer? I have no idea.” Or you have any questions, like you get there and you’re like, “Oh, but how do I…? And what are the options there? Do I need to email and then wait for how long? Or do I need to call the business?” Like, “Thank you, but no, thank you. And then there could be this chat where you can ask your question and get pretty much instant information that you need.

The interesting fact is, I know that a lot of people are worried about how would their clients think about the Chatbot being there and answering all those questions. But there were a lot of interest in surveys that showed that people don’t always like talking to people. We get anxious.

Like think about your last Uber drive, where you didn’t want to engage in this conversation, right? So when talking to a bot, people feel more relaxed and they can ask questions. And they actually prefer that instead of talking to human.

Joe Casabona: That’s a really good point. Because usually it’s just about surfacing information that is already out there. I think that more people are inclined to open up an email form or open up a chat window than to go to the FAQs page and try to figure out, “Hey, what is the thing I’m looking for maybe?”

Anna Tutckaia: Yeah, because you need to go through more steps, right?

Joe Casabona: Right. Right.

Anna Tutckaia: Like you need to go and find and then search. Like who has the time?

Joe Casabona: You’re talking specifically about bots here. I used to have a chat thing on my sales page that would say send a message to my Slack. And I just distinctly remember feeling the pressure of a pre-sales message that I didn’t… Because I was using the free version. I didn’t pay for it, I was using something cheap.

And I was sitting in traffic on my way to a baseball game and I just felt like so much pressure to get this conversation answered. And if I was using a chatbot, like a robot that I probably smartly programmed to look for keywords maybe, I wouldn’t have felt that pressure. I would have been able to be present in the car (a), (b) with my family around me, right, instead of like being like frustrated about the traffic and about trying to talk to this pre-sales person to try to sell like a $99 product.

Anna Tutckaia: Oh my God, that’s actually the biggest, I would say, scenario and value prop, and the biggest, you know, response that I hear from our customers is like, is that how much time chatbots save them and automation saves them to spend on things they actually enjoy doing, like running their business. Like it could be creating content, it could be driving sanely to your baseball game, or other things. And yeah, you can set up all of that.

So to give you an idea, let’s say with Instagram, let’s say all of your community is on Instagram and have a lot of followers there. I’m sure you’re getting a lot of DMs on how to do this, how to purchase this, or where can I get this information. And all of that you can automate. You can automate your DMs based on keywords so that you can (a) provide the answer right away, so your customers don’t wait for the response.

Instagram would be very happy that there is this instant conversation that is happening. So the engagement rate will be higher, and then the content that you provide will be seen on the better rate.

And then lastly, you can also create it that way that if there is further discussion that is needed based on the conversation the bot had with the customer, you can always get notification and jump in right there and close the discussion with a personal note or be there as a real person with your customers. But then all of that FAQs, like things that could be answered without you, they’re already answered.

[00:37:37] <music>

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[00:38:35] <music>

Joe Casabona: To bring this back to the thing that we’re talking about, well, for most of the show as we come up on the end here is, I guess, do we already need to know our customer or can tools like this help us get to know our customer even more?

Anna Tutckaia: That’s a really good question. Because personalization through automation and through chatbots is a huge, huge part of it. to give you an idea on a very simple scenario, let’s say you’re ecommerce brands and you sell dresses, you sell shirts, you sell jeans, and you have a customer who reaches out on DMs and ask you, “Do you have this latest model of the jeans?”

And then through automation, you can ask them, “What types of jeans do you have?” “You know this, this, and that?” “What size do you have?” This, this, and that.” Like they would answer. “What color do you prefer?” And so you take all of those answers, and then you already know your customers. So you can provide very targeted, you know, either a product or content to that person.

So, to give you another example, if let’s say you’re a content creator and you create content for people who are trying to lose their weight, for example, and your programs are different for different ages, your programs are different for different genders or types of diet preferences, like keto, vegetarian, and so on and so forth. You can do that same thing.

You can create a questionnaire, like very automated questionnaire where you can ask, like, “What is your goal? What type of diet do you prefer?” So on and so forth. And then based on the answers, you can offer a very personalized product that would address all the needs of the customers.

And then you would have the least of the folks that follow you and you would know what they need and what they would potentially be interested in the product just through automation. Like I can’t imagine other ways, let’s say on Instagram, to do it without it.

Joe Casabona: I mean, the other way is almost manual. Again, me just sending out a tweet that’s like, “What content do you want me to make?” that doesn’t get a lot of engagement, because now I’m asking you to do my job for me.

But if I’m asking these targeted questions, like, “Have you struggled with losing weight? Or what diets have you tried? Which one worked? Why did you fall off of the last one?” now, I can make content that’s like, how to do keto in a way that sticks or whatever. And now you’re creating good content, you have an audience that you know and understands it, and you’re building – what’s the term? Almost like a flywheel, where you get to know your audience, you create content, you get to know them better, you offer them a better product, etc.

Anna Tutckaia: Exactly. And also to connect it to the conversation that we had at the very beginning in terms of generating leads, you can also, let’s say generate leads after you have this conversation and after you ask those questions.

So to give you an example, you’re running the stories, let’s say on Instagram, and you say like, “Hey, DM me the word ‘diet’ and I will send you your personalized diet plan.” As easy as that. Just one story. And then your followers go to your direct messages, they send you the word “diet.”

And then there is this personalized questionnaire that is automated, where you ask your followers like, “Okay, let’s get to know you better so I can build a personalized plan for you. What’s your gender? What’s your food preferences? What are your goals? What have you already tried?” so you can learn a little bit about your competitors as well.

So you get all those questions answered. And then based on those questions, you can say, “Okay, now it will take me, let’s say, I don’t know, a day.” Or if you have already pre-made time to send you all this information, please provide your first name, last name, and email, and I will send it to you.

And then they pre-submit all this information. And then you basically have followers, not just followers with their avatars, but you have all the information about them. And you can communicate with them on other platforms that you own, like on email, on SMS, if you were to ask that. So there is a double benefit right there.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And that’s so important. Well, it feels like forever ago now that Facebook was down for about six hours. So anybody who relied on Facebook couldn’t communicate with their audience if they only relied on Facebook for that amount of time. But if you get people to a platform that you own, your email or text, now you’re not out of luck if a platform suddenly disappears or is down for some amount of time.

Anna Tutckaia: Absolutely. Algorithm change and now your content for some reason is not being showed, even to the followers that you have.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I mean, that happens on Facebook all the time. Well, it feels like it happen all the time. But just recently on Instagram that happened where Instagram was like, “Hey, do you only want to see the people that you follow? Now you can go to the following list.”

And I’m like, “I follow these people so that I see that. It’s so weird that you created a feature based on the main function of what Instagram used to be. So I was like, “Maybe we’ve lost… we took our eye off the ball or whatever.” We lost the puck I think is what I was trying to say there.

Sorry. To bring it back to… I went off on a tangent there. I really like the idea of DMs. I tested this recently with TweetHunter and Twitter, where I basically had a tweet and I said, “Reply with ‘yes’ and I will send you my sponsor outreach email templates.” That worked super well, except my problem is that I didn’t really do anything with it. They automatically got a DM with a Google Drive folder.

The next time I do it, though, I probably would take your approach where I’m like, “Hey, there’s a lot of ways to make money podcasting. DM me, and I’ll ask you a few questions to give you a personalized recommendation for the best way you can generate revenue with your podcast.” And then, like I said, I take those people and now I have a warm, at least a lukewarm list for like a cohort-based course I’m launching on that exact topic.

Anna Tutckaia: Yeah, you can surely do that. And another cool thing that you can do is you also have the list of people that engaged with your automation. So you can follow up then with them within like 24 hours, and ask like, “Hey, did you have a chance to download my, I don’t know, eBook that I send you over email? Or do you have a chance to go ahead and check out my course?

And in this way, you basically save yourself a lot of money with retargeting ads that you would have run otherwise. Because it takes a person a lot of, you know, touch points with the brand or with content creator to eventually convert. And you want to make sure that you’re not dropping the ball just with one question just with one offer. But you basically take that potential customer and push them through the funnel until that person eventually converts. And you can use automation for that as well.

Joe Casabona: I love that. This has been such a fantastic conversation. I think if you have time, in Build Something More, I’d love to talk to you about maybe how you put the summit together. Because that’s another thing I’m super curious about. I know my members are curious about that as well. Does that sound good to you?

Anna Tutckaia: I’d be happy to chat about it.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Well, if you are listening, and you’re not a member, you can become a member for 50 bucks a year. That’s less than five bucks a month, which is less than the last iced coffee I bought. So you can do that over at the show notes page, which is streamlined.fm/278. Become a member of the Creator Crew for just 50 bucks a year.

But Anna, this has been such a fantastic conversation. If people want to learn… Well, first, let me ask this. If people want to learn more and get started with kind of getting to know their customers and finding leads, what’s the first thing you recommend doing? Like what’s the number one step they should take?

Anna Tutckaia: First of all, start with what you already have. As I already mentioned, start with your own audience. Start with your own customers and think how can you connect with them so you can get to know them better? That’s the first thing.

The second thing is, think of the products and services that you do, and go ahead and check out your data. Like check out what were the most popular, you know, within your audience, what brought the highest engagement, what brought the highest sales. And try to figure out what was the reason for that, and how can you replicate that moving forward when you’re building new products. So that’s, I would say, number one.

Once you do that, try to think, based on the existing audience that you have, where you can find audience similar to that? Because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Figure out where your existing audience hang out and go there and hang out have with them. Be a part of their groups, read their conversations, read their questions.

As I already mentioned, in the groups, like what they ask, what they want to be answered. And think how you can answer it either using content like creation or through the products or services you provide to them. So I think I would pause at the moment. Do you have any ideas, Joe?

Joe Casabona: I think that’s great. That makes perfect sense. Especially, this is a job I try to beat pretty often, which is like go to where your audience is. Again, I come from the programming space and people are like, “I hate Facebook, I’m not going to be on Facebook.” But if your audience is on Facebook, that’s kind of where you gotta be.

I love Yankee Stadium, but if I’m trying to get people to go to an off-Broadway play, I’m probably not going to tell them all to come to Yankee Stadium. I’m gonna go to Broadway and be like, “Hey, do you like this? Maybe see it for cheaper.” Because I know those people like the theater or whatever. Maybe I like both. So I’m an anomaly. But the point is, be where your audience is and provide value for them there.

Anna Tutckaia: Absolutely. And connect with them there. Be there for your audience. Talk to them, ask questions. Or even further, once you have that audience, think of the way to create a community place for them so they can hang out at the space that you control.

That’s another huge learning that we had at ManyChat, where we learned that we have so many customers right now. We created Facebook group for those customers to be at, so they can (a) connect with the brand, but they can also connect with each other. And what eventually happened is there was a platform where we connected with our audience to figure out, okay, what are the next features do we want to build? And we wouldn’t do that without asking that audience.

And then the second thing is when our users had very specific questions on how to use the platform, let’s say, in a certain geography or in a certain space that we as a team did not have answers to because we were not experts in that specific geography, there were others within this group that helped them to answer that question.

So creating a community for your users would also help you a lot with getting to know them better and also solving a lot of other headaches that you will eventually have.

Joe Casabona: I love that. I think we’ll maybe touch on that in Build Something More as well because I have a specific question about that for you. But for now, we are coming up on time. Anna, this has been such a great conversation. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?

Anna Tutckaia: They can find me on LinkedIn, as LinkedIn, and just Google my first and last name, Anna Tutckaia. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, thoughts. I’m happy to have a chat with you and help in any ways I can. So please reach out.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. And I will link that in the show notes as well. Anna Tutckaia, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Anna Tutckaia: Thanks so much, Joe. Really enjoyed our conversation. Thanks a lot for inviting me to your show.

Joe Casabona: My pleasure. Thanks so much to everybody listening. If you want to learn more about Anna, if you want to get links for anything we talked about, or join the Creator Crew, you can do that all in one place. And that is over at streamlined.fm/278. That’s the show notes. Thanks to our sponsors for today’s episode. And until next time, get out there and build something.