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Peter Barnes is LearnFast’s Chief Learning Innovator and is responsible for growing the business from both new products and applications, but also a revenue perspective. Peter found that traditional marketing and Adwords were starting to deliver declining return on investment and discovered HubSpot in his search for solutions. After implementing HubSpot, Peter and his HubSpot ninja Julie George increased LearnFast’s monthly website visits by 9X in 18 months and monthly lead generation increased 4X over the same time frame.
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Time Stamped Show Notes
(click the time stamp to jump directly to that point in the episode.)
- [02:03] – Peter gives us some background of how his wife who is a speech pathologist discovered a better way for children to learn and secured the exclusive distribution rights in Australia. His wife needed someone to help run the business and Peter stepped up to the challenge. 10 years later he’s still there.
- [03:04] – One of the pleasures of working in his business aside from the success they’ve had with marketing is the joy of seeing so many kids whose lives have been changed because they have been able to help them learn better.
- [03:24] – Peter explains how children learn differently with his program through the work of neuroscience including areas like attention, memory, how fast your brain things, and how you process language and how technology can be applied to produce amazing results.
- [05:25] – The age of people who can benefit from his technology applies to ages from 3 years old to adults.
- [06:53] – Peter shares how he discovered HubSpot and the Inbound Methodology after years of traditional advertising and Adwords where he was achieving negative return on investment over time. He started to look around and see what was going on in the world of marketing and encountered glimpses of the Inbound Methodology and discovered after using a couple of different platforms to start with he found HubSpot about 3 years ago. HubSpot has delivered all the results Peter was hoping to be able to get out of this journey into Inbound.
- [07:48] – Peter tells us how he did all the work on the Inbound Methodology himself and with another team member (Julie) who is a HubSpot super user. Julie immersed herself in HubSpot training and learning all about it and connected with people at HubSpot. They found the learning resources available and support were wonderful. Peter is a former journalist so just started to write blogs and they now have over 250. Then they realised they needed a Call To Action (CTA) for each blog post so they created information that was additional about each subject that teachers and parents might find useful. That lead them to create landing pages and other content which has evolved to a free resources page on one of their two websites that has about 60-70 different free resources. It generates new names into their database when people exchange their email address for the free resources. It also enables them to have much more educated potential buyers because they’re researching the problem they’ve got before they talk to Peter and his team.
- [10:08] – Peter explains that deciding what to write came out of the problems that their target market were experiencing eg. dyslexia, learning difficulties, attention problems, inability to learn to read easily etc. It evolved beyond that to educational neuroscience subjects like “How We Learn” and then practical articles like “10 ways to help your students where English is a second language”.
- [11:16] – Once all the content was created, Peter decided which CTA’s and landing pages to create by offering content that may be of more value related to each blog post. They NEVER sell in their offers and differentiate between Landing Pages and Sales Pages.
- [13:05] – Peter tells us about his ‘formula’ for creating a blog post – he uses HubSpot’s prompts to ensure his blog posts are complete with links, CTA’s, right size headlines etc. Peter also talks about how his writing style has evolved from journalistic to corporate to informed and entertaining style of content ie. edutainment. Peter studied copywriters such as Ray Edwards and Ben Settle and uses the Hemmingway app to help him make is writing easier and more entertaining to read.
- [16:52] – Samantha asks about Inbound Marketing being a bit of a leap of faith and the time it took for Peter to start to see results. Peter says it took about 6 – 12 months to see the massive results he achieved, but he was buoyed by the fact that they were starting to see new signups in their database, they were getting more enquiries from people who were massively informed about the product so it was a much more advanced conversation and the sales process became quicker. The quality of the leads were much greater.
- [18:25] – Peter’s biggest success with Inbound Marketing has been growing his list of people who are interested in what they do and some of those are having sales conversations much more ready to buy.
- [18:43] – Peter talks about creating The Learning Capacity Podcast on Soundcloud and that it was a positive for branding and credibility, but it doesn’t generate leads or sales.
- [20:33] – Peter shares his biggest mistake when it comes to Inbound Marketing as being not moving as fast as they could have. In the beginning they were trying to be perfect and agonise over words in the posts. You’re better off going out faster with more content even if it’s not English high school teacher perfect. As long as it is content that is interesting for our audience then the more of it the better.
- [22:00] – Peter is excited about developing how LearnFast write so that the content is much more engaging for readers. He would love to have content that people can’t wait to get to every day because it is so interesting.
- [23:54] – The Lightning Round
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- This content is available to The Daily Hub Subscribers. If you’d like to see the answers to the lightening round questions below, subscribe now and you’ll receive access to the full interview and lightening round answers right in your inbox. Questions covered here are:
- What was holding you back from growing your business?
- What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
- Share one of your personal habits that contributes to your success?
- Share a resource or tool that you’re using right now?
- What book would you recommend to Hub Nation and why?
- Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning and your business and success to date are gone and you know no-one. You still have all the experience and knowledge you currently have, your food and shelter are taken care of, but all you have is a laptop and $1,000 dollars. What would you do in the next 7 days?
- This content is available to The Daily Hub Subscribers. If you’d like to see the answers to the lightening round questions below, subscribe now and you’ll receive access to the full interview and lightening round answers right in your inbox. Questions covered here are:
- Note: If you are a subscriber to The Daily Hub and can’t see the answers above you need to login to view the answers.
Parting piece of guidance
- When Peter started the Inbound journey they were looking at attracting customers to sell their products within the region (APAC). What they discovered was that because there are no boarders on the internet, they are attracting customers and others from around the world that are asking LearnFast to distribute their products because they like what they’re doing. When you start Inbound, have your eyes open to other opportunities.
3 Key Points:
- Immerse yourself in the HubSpot training and support to learn all you can
- Start creating content that is of interest to your target market and buyer personas and the CTA’s and landing pages etc will grow from that
- Don’t fuss about with perfection. Create interesting content for your target market and lots of it.
Resources Mentioned:
- Ray Edwards copywriter can be found here
- Ben Settle regarding copywriting can also be found here
- Hemmingway app to help make your writing easier to read can be found here
- The Learning Capacity Podcast can be found here
- For consumers to find out more about LearnFast go to learnfasthome.com.au
- For educators and schools to learn more about LearnFast go to learnfastforschools.com.au
- The HubSpotters – Global (Unofficial) Facebook group can be found here
