Graig Presti is founder and CEO of the agency, LocalSearchForDentists.com. This is Graig and I’s third interview and this time we are talking about something that nobody in the marketing world is talking about … leaving a bunch of money on the table.
What is this missing element? How and when to inject use of the telephone into your marketing and sales sequence. We will talk in detail:
When should you call
Who should you call
Why should you call them
What should you say in the first 10 seconds of the call.
We are NOT talking about cold calls.
For higher price point items, there comes a point in life-cycle of a lead when they need to talk to you. When you call your warm leads, there is a very specific way to handle the conversation. If you don’t have a process you will probably have a high failure rate and kill many great leads.
Looking for warm calling tips, including exactly what to say? This is the episode for you.
Listen now and you’ll hear Graig and I talk about:
(01:00) Introduction
(09:00) How does the phone play a role in marketing?
(17:00) How should your structure a call with a prospect you’ve not talked to before?
(21:00) How do you ask “trick questions” that make you look like an expert?
(25:00) Overview of Trent’s first call with a prospect
(32:00) How do you pre-qualify a prospect prior to making a call?
(34:00) How can a survey play a role.?
(42:00) How does silence play a role in closing?
(44:00) How do you recruit salespeople?
Resources Mentioned
GrabTrentsBonus.com
More About This Episode
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Graig Presti, founder and CEO of LocalSearchForDentists.com, is a foremost advertising authority who operates with dental practices all around the planet, assisting them to leverage the internet so they can generate more telephone calls, reach more new patients, and bring in more revenue. His strategies begin to work immediately and continue to work month after month.
Presti specializes in helping dental practices dominate their nearby location by using confirmed regional Internet dental advertising strategies to help them dominate the top rated regional research engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Presti uses easy to understand stories to help his clients comprehend how they can improve their internet presence. He is a repeated featured speaker at dental conferences and other venues.
Presti has mastered the art of bringing a flood of new patients into dental offices, and has undoubtedly established himself as a top specialist in his field. His considerable accomplishments, and his industry contributions, led him to be showcased as a Newsweek Magazine Champion of Health, Wealth and Success.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/graig.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-30 06:00:012020-09-16 04:53:27How to Use the Phone to Dramatically Boost Your Marketing Campaign ROI with Graig Presti
The very first step in your content marketing plan should be to pick your target audience. You’d think this would be common sense; however, skipping this step is actually an extremely common mistake.
The reason it’s such a common mistake is that marketers fear that by really focusing their message on just one audience, they will “lose out” on the hundreds/thousands/millions of other potential customers that aren’t a part of that audience.
The truth is that the benefits of targeting one niche actually outweigh the negatives.
In today’s post, I’m going to walk you through the process that you should follow to select a niche, as well as give you some examples of success.
How Knowing Your Target Audience Affects Content Strategy
Why Should You Pick a Target Market?
The reason that picking a target audience is so important comes down to this: the benefits of doing so far outweigh any downside that you can ever think of.
The Hedgehog Strategy
In the book, Good to Great, by Jim Collins, Jim conducted an extensive study on what makes great companies – as opposed to just good ones – and in the book he talks about something he calls the Hedgehog Strategy.
The point of the strategy is this: you need to find a market that you can totally dominate.
Do you think you could be the #1 marketing agency/consultant/SEO firm for everybody in the entire world? Not likely! There is simply too much competition for you to have any hope of achieving that.
Instead, as Jim points out in his book, great companies are extremely selective about who they are targeting, thereby significantly increasing the odds that they can achieve the #1 position in the mind of their audience.
I agree with Jim Collins and I think that a really killer inbound marketing strategy has to start with picking a very specific audience to create content for. If you have a different opinion, please share it down below in the comments.
Defining your audience is not as hard as you might think. In the next few paragraphs I’m going to walk you through some ideas and strategies that you can use.
First, let’s use Apple as an example, and look at how they are using the Hedgehog strategy.
Do you think that the people who work at Apple are deeply passionate about creating amazing products?
Definitely.
So, with that in mind, do you think it would make sense that a suitable audience for Apple would be a group of people who believe what Apple believes? Again, I think the answer is yes.
For example, I’m a loyal Apple customer. I own an iMac, a Macbook Pro, an Apple TV, an iPhone, and an iPod mini.
Why?
Because I believe that ease of use and a killer design is more important than a bunch of technical details that I don’t care about – and I’m willing to pay more for it.
Alienware Hardware Display Page, Notably Different Than The Clean Apple Look
If you go to Apple’s website, you will see that all their messaging is for people just like me. The technical details are there, but they aren’t front and center like they would be with a company like Alienware.
Unlike Apple, Alienware makes PCs for gamers, and these folks are deeply concerned with technical specs and performance. While I’m sure Alienware’s customers enjoy a pretty looking computer, I’m equally sure that aesthetics have very little to do with their buying decision. Theirs is all about performance.
Do you think Alienware cares one bit about regular PC users that don’t play video games? Nope.
Do you think Apple cares one bit about highly price conscious buyers? Nope.
Both of these companies are successful because they know exactly who their customer is and they direct their entire marketing effort to reaching more of them.
Now that we covered why having your target market clearly defined, let’s talk about how to learn more about them, as well as to establish two way communication.
Researching and Connecting With Your Target Market
When it comes to researching and connecting with your target audience, there are several strategies that I suggest you use. They include:
Talk to them
Conduct research on:
Twitter
Discussion Forums
LinkedIn Groups
Surveys
Magazines
Facebook
For Twitter, forums, and social networks, make sure that when you first start out that you spend the bulk of your time answering questions for other people. When you do this, the other people in the community are going to become interested in who you are, and when they do that, they will naturally think, “Hey, Dave is a cool guy. I wonder what else Dave has done?” Once you have established yourself as a knowledgeable person, the participants in these communities are going to come and check out your site.
So, with that said, lets have a look at some ways to use each resource.
If your organization already has a large customer base and you are looking to gain insights into how to attract more of your best customers, there is a very specific, unscripted process that will work well.
The goal here is to understand their psychographics (why they buy) more than their demographics (who they are).
This is a process that I first learned when I interviewed Adele Revella of Buyer Persona Institute. Adele has been doing this type of work for over 25 years and really knows her stuff.
During our interview, she gave me a high level overview of the process that she uses.
First, the person asking the questions cannot be involved in the company’s normal sales process. If they are, the customers aren’t likely to be as candid as they might otherwise be, and if that is the case, you aren’t going to gain the insights needed.
Step 1: Make a list of the customers & prospects who evaluated your firm, as well as your competition
You will want to interview people that chose your firm, as well as those that didn’t.
Step 2: Have a member of your team reach out to each one of them to have a conversation
The key, says Adele, is to not tell your customers that you are doing market research. Instead, you simply want to talk to them about the story of their decision to buy.
To do this, start off with the following question: Dave, take me back to the day when you first decided to look for a new [type of product] and tell me what happened?
According to Adele, it is absolutely critical that you start the ‘meat’ of the conversation with this question. You aren’t looking for random facts (like can be collected with a survey). Instead, you are looking for the story of their decision to make a purchase.
As you listen to them, you want to get them to expand on the story by asking all sorts of follow on questions.
For example, you might ask:
How did you come up with a list of potential suppliers?
Once you have this list, how did you narrow the list down?
Were there things on their websites that affected your decision?
If so, what types of things?
How else did you research and evaluate each company?
Did other people’s opinions factor in?
Who were these people?
What types of questions did you ask them?
Who else in your own company did you collaborate with?
What kind of input did they have?
Why was it helpful?
As you might guess, there are a LOT of questions that you are going to ask and this is only just a sample. They key is to always focus on the story…as well as asking why they made each mini-decision along the way to the major decision.
If you’d like to dive deeper into how to develop your buyer personas, check out Adele’s blog.
Primary Research: Talk to Your Prospects
If you don’t yet have a large customer base, without a doubt, talking to the people who are in your target market will give you the most insight, when compared to the other strategies below.
In my case, I regularly reach out to people with an invitation to talk to be about being a guest on my podcast. If you don’t have a podcast, tell them you want to talk to them about some research you are doing for an article or ebook that you are writing.
By being a reporter, as opposed to a salesperson, you will find that it is much easier to get your calls and emails returned.
When my prospect accepts my invitation to connect, I start off the conversation by asking them about their business and they results they have achieved. I do this because I am genuinely interested in finding out if they would be a good person to have as a guest on the podcast.
As you might expect, the longer we talk, they more rapport that is built, and when that happens, I can now very easily finished up my pre-interview by asking them some of the following questions:
Who would you really like to hear interviewed? (tells me who their influencers are)
What blog(s) do you regularly read?
Who do you follow on Twitter?
What social networks do you spend time on?
What magazines do you read?
What conferences do you attend?
These are just a few of the questions that I suggest you use. I’m sure you can think of many more.
In addition to these questions, you should also invite your contacts to invest 5 minutes to complete a more detailed survey. The goal of the survey should be to gain additional insights into:
Budget levels and/or spending patterns
Consumption trends
Preferred suppliers
Problems they are looking to solve
Which conferences/blogs/podcasts/magazines they rely on most
To host the survey, I suggest you use Survey Monkey.
The goal of my conversations is to gain an understanding of:
What are the top issues/problems they are looking to solve?
What language do they use to describe these problems?
Who influenced any decisions they made about choosing a solution provider(s)?
What to Do With This Data
Secondary Research
Once you have completed this primary research, I suggest you take some time to visit the websites that were commonly mentioned as being popular with your target market.
When looking at these sites, you are looking for data on:
What are the top posts?
What kinds of language is used?
What kinds of offers are made?
Who is commenting on their content?
Find the Most Popular Posts
To find the top posts, just look for the ones that are shared the most on social media. Posts with a lot of comments are also a strong indication of what is popular.
To help you analyze a site’s posts, I suggest you use Quicksprout’s free tool because it will save you heaps of time.
When you run the report, make sure to click the ‘social media analysis’ tab so you can see which pages were the most popular.
Twitter
When I first learned of Twitter, I thought it was a huge waste of time. Now that I’m starting to figure out how to use it, I have actually become a pretty big fan.
When it comes to finding your target audience, as well as connecting with them, Twitter is pretty amazing.
The Top Twitter Page For PC Gamers
For example, let’s suppose that you wanted to find and connect with hardcore gamers. How could you use Twitter to do that?
Well, you could first begin by looking for “best gaming PC” on Google. When I performed that search, that is how I found out about Alienware.
Next, I pulled up Alienware’s profile on Twitter and noticed that they had 62,672 followers while following only 130 people.
This tells me that Alienware is an influential brand in this space, and, because they don’t follow very many others, I also know that their 62,000 followers are legit. (whenever you see a Twitter profile that has a lot of followers, it can often be the result of their following a lot of others, just to get them to follow back)
The next thing I will want to know about Alienware is how much social authority they have.
Social Authority is ultimately a measure of influential activity. As such, it highlights content that is successful on Twitter. When you find users with high Social Authority, you’re finding great marketing strategies to analyze and mimic. And we think that this will help you be more successful with Twitter. – @peterbray
To discover how much social authority someone has, I’ve been using SEOmoz’s tool, FollowerWonk. This is a powerful tool that makes discovering influential Twitter accounts extremely easy.
As you can see below, Alienware is the most influential Twitter account for the phrase “pc gaming”. When I sorted by the Social Authority column, Alienware’s score of 61 put them on top.
Social Authority, in its simplest definition, is based upon re-tweets. If your tweets get lots of retweets, you have a high social authority. If you want more details on the science behind this, just read the entire post.
Followerwonk for PC gaming tweets
So now that we know Alienware has a high social authority and plenty of followers, the next move is to start connecting with the people that follow Alienware so that you can learn more about them.
To do that, I used FollowerWonk to find people that are interested in Alienware and then I sorted them by social authority. As you can see below, there are two users who actually have more social authority than Alienware. These are definitely people that you want to connect with because they can help you to really understand your audience (by speaking with them), as well as to help you to connect with your audience (by retweeting your tweets).
As you can see below, when I mouse over Anthony Wheeler, his total engagement is 56%. This is a good person to know if you want to learn more about hard core PC gamers, as well as to have the potential to get your content in front of many of them.
Another Example of Followerwonk Capabilities
Even if you don’t have FollowerWonk, Twitter is a total goldmine because it gives you the ability to search the Twitter stream. You can search by topic, by hash tag (#PCGamer) or by user. As soon as you do, you are going to find endless ways to better understand what your target audience is interested in.
Discussion Forums
For virtually every topic you can think of, there is at least one discussion forum. Finding them is easy. Just go to Google and do a search.
Discussion Forums Give You An Idea of Customer Engagement
When you participate in a discussion forum, you are going to see first hand what your target audience is interested in, what keeps them awake at night, and what they believe.
LinkedIn Groups
If your company sells to other businesses, I would strongly encourage that you check out LinkedIn Groups as they are very popular among the B2B crowd.
As you can see below, for the phrase, “marketing automation” there are 209 groups; the first of which is called Marketing Automation Experts. This group has 4,218 members, 142 discussions this month, and is considered to be very active.
Do you think that if you were to join this group that you could learn more about people who are interested in this topic? Do you think you could connect with a few of them? Do you think you could position yourself as an expert (assuming you are) within this community? Do you think that if you did, some of them would want to know more about you?
Surveys
Each time I’ve started a new blog, I’m quick to incorporate surveys into my auto-responder sequence. I do this because I want to quickly find out who is reading my blog and what they are interested in. The more I learn about my audience, the better chance I will have of creating content that they will enthusiastically share with their respective followers.
For example, because I ask every new subscriber to complete a welcome survey, I have know that 15.9% of my audience are marketing agency owners, 41% are small business owners and 34% are solo-preneurs.
Surveys Give You An Analysis of Your Customers, It Might Be Different Than You Imagined
I also know that lead generation is the #1 challenge faced by my audience, hence why I do so many interviews to address that topic.
Once you have access to this type of information about your audience, you are now in a position to either create more content for the audience you have, so you can expand that audience, or, if the majority of your readers aren’t the exact audience you intended to have, you can now publish more content that will be of interest to your intended audience, as well as to share that content on the social networks where your audience hangs out (which we discovered by using Twitter to ask them directly).
If you don’t yet know that much about the demographics of your targeted audience, and you don’t yet have a following, don’t despair. There is another way to very easily get the demographic profile for virtually any marketing that you could possibly be interested in.
There isn’t a magazine around that isn’t staffed by a crack team of researchers, all of whom have invested countless hours in market research. You can bet they know exactly who their customer is and exactly what that customer wants to buy.
They know this because they need this information to pass along to their prospective advertisers.
Don’t have the funds for a research team that big? No problem. Just piggy back on the magazines.
For example, when I googled “Field and Stream Media Kit” I was taken right to this page. Once there, all I did was click on the demographics link to learn more about this audience. With just a few clicks of the mouse, I now know the median age, percentage that are college grads, percentage that are employed, percentage that served in the military, etc…
Even Magazines Have Online Options
Facebook
Let’s suppose that I wanted to know how many people in my local area and into hunting and fishing. How could I find that out? With Facebook, this is actually pretty easy to do. It won’t be 100% perfect, but it will be close enough to help you assess if your size of a certain targeted market is large enough.
To do this, just pretend as though you are going to create a paid ad on Facebook. You don’t have to actually publish the ad, but you do want access to the data that going through the ad creation process will give you.
As you can see below, when I did a search for people that lived in San Diego, aged 37 to 57 (I chose this because of the median age from the Field and Stream media kit), who are interested in hunting and fishing, I see that there are 11,120 people. If that number is too small, or too big, you can easily just make changes to your search criteria, and from those changes, you are likely to make some valuable distinctions.
For example, if I change the gender from men only to men and women, the 11,120 increases to 16,840. So, for this topic, I now know that the ratio of men to women is roughly 3:2. For this particular example, the answer was rather obvious beforehand, but that probably won’t be the case in many other niches you could be looking at.
Facebook Analytics Usually Offers Interests and Engagement With Brands
I’m sure there are more tools than this, and if you have some good ones to suggest, please be sure and share your thoughts down in the comments below.
Common Mistakes
For companies with an established customer base, the most common mistake is assuming that you understand the psychographics of your best customers. Having a very strong understanding of your company and it’s products is by no means a guarantee that you really understand why your best customers bought.
If you are a younger company, by far the most common and most expensive mistake is trying to be everything to everyone. If you are going to get traction with your target market, you need that market, at least initially, to be as focused as possible so that the content you produce is highly relevant.
If you try to be everything to everyone, you will end up being nothing to no one.
Another common mistake is not taking the time to listen to your audience to really find out what they want (not the same as ‘why’ they buy). Surveys are a terrific way to do this, and if you do, be sure to ask questions that are both multiple choice as well as open-ended, because, while harder to analyze in aggregate, it’s those open-ended questions that can provide you with some really valuable insights.
No point in creating content that doesn’t draw your target audience’s attention. –Natalie Sisson
It’s also worth mentioning that one of the goals of your initial marketing campaign to your newly defined audience should be to further test and validate your chosen niche.
Let’s Recap
A marketing plan that doesn’t begin with a thorough understanding of the needs, wants, and desires of a very specifically designed target market isn’t really a marketing plan at all. Instead, it’s more of a hope and a prayer, and when it comes to business, hope is not a strategy.
Getting clear on who your target audience is has never been easier. Start by investing time in one-to-one conversations. After you have done that, use Twitter, discussion forums, LinkedIn Groups, Surveys, Magazine media kits, and Facebook to gain additional insights.
Not making use of these free resources will significantly reduce the effectiveness of anything that you try, and, even worse, could spell the end of your company before you ever have a chance to really get going.
Put the time into identifying your targeted audience and you will have taken a step that so many small business owners don’t put nearly enough focus on, and you will be in far better shape as a result.
Hey, thanks for the info. Now what?
If you need any help with content creation, we have tons of free resources to get you over the hump. Please subscribe to this blog to ensure that you never miss an article.
If you really enjoyed this post, please help us to spread the word by clicking one of the social media sharing buttons.
Thanks so much!
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/targeted-audience.jpg349620Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-25 12:02:542018-08-01 18:42:47How (and why) to Define a Targeted Audience for Your Marketing Campaign
For me, there are a few keys to ensuring that I don’t deviate from my routine.
1. I need to get to bed on time. Now that it’s summer time, this is even harder to do, but every time I go to bed too late, I end up sleeping in later than my plan, and when that happens, I fall behind.
I hate that feeling.
2. I must have a daily activity list prepared and printed out the night before. That way, as soon as I arrive at my desk in the morning, I know exactly what I’m supposed to be working on.
To do that I use a simple Google doc:
3. To make sure that I keep my routine on track, I schedule it in my calendar. If something isn’t scheduled in my calendar, it’s like it doesn’t exist.
4. Put my work out clothes on the floor beside my bed with the podcast I plan to listen to already queued up and ready to go.
Do I ever failed to follow my routine? You bet. I’m human, just like everybody else, and sometimes things just come up and pull me off the routine.
Fortunately, tomorrow will be here soon and I will have another chance to get it right.
What works for you?
I’d love to hear how you keep your routine on track. Are there any tools that you use? If you have thoughts to share, please leave them in the comments below.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Lost-Time.jpg338550Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-25 09:43:342014-06-25 09:45:44The 4 Keys to My Productivity Routine
Since writing a post about how I’m planning to grow my agency, Groove Digital Marketing, into my next 7 figure success story, the feedback I’ve received from readers has been very positive. Thank you to those of you who shared the post, commented on it, or emailed me directly. Your feedback is very encouraging.
In today’s post, as promised, I’m going to give you a look over my shoulder for the past week and share with you what I did, as well as the results we achieved. If you missed last week’s post, you can find it here.
As always, my hope is that my transparency with you can be the fuel you need to achieve similar results in your own business. Sound good? Here we go!
Key Activities in the Week of June 16th, 2014
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
We published 3 blog posts
I met with a new prospect (the new CMO of a very large software company) and gave them a proposal
I finalized the slide deck for this week’s webinar
I added some more content into Groove’s funnel
I developed a mind map for the Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing
Liz, Kiana, and I attended the Eagle Rodeo :)
My friend Drew Sanocki and I decided to launch a marketing agency duel!
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
Using the LinkedIn prospecting strategy that I explained here, I was able to secure a meeting with the CMO of a large UK-based software company that is struggling to get traction in the US.
The meeting was actually in person, because, strangely enough, the CMO lives here in Boise.
When we met, I asked him to explain the marketing issues that were at the top of his list. I then asked him to explain to me the impact these issues were having on his company (this style of questioning is something we are going to cover in detail during this week’s webinar, so make sure you register).
Once I’d confirmed what his pain was, I explained to him a few ways that I thought we could work together to solve the problems. He told me that he really liked the concepts that I’d explained and asked that I sent him a proposal. As my proposal is pretty much a boiler plate, sending it out is pretty easy, so I was happy to do it.
The proposal was sent on the 16th, and on the 20th, I received an email from him that said:
Hi Trent,
The pleasure is on my side. Thanks for the documents and links. Well done. I need to review in detail while I am travelling extensively over the next two weeks. Will likely get back to you after July 4th weekend.
Regards,
After receiving this email, I logged into DocSend (use this link for free access) to see how much of the proposal he’d looked at, and if it was shared with anyone else. As you can see below, he viewed 96% of the proposal and spent 1:07 on the pricing page…which is a good sign.
During our meeting, he told me that he was the sole decision maker, so it’s not a surprise that it’s not been shared with anyone else so far.
At the end of our meeting, he told me that he was most interested in starting on a retainer, so with a little luck, after July 4th, he’ll sign on for a $3,000/mo retainer.
I Finalized the Slide Deck for This Week’s Webinar
I have to say that I’m pretty stoked about this week’s webinar. Over the last year, I have learned a LOT about content marketing and my results continue to improve as a result of what I’ve learned.
In the last two weeks, in particular, I have notice the quality of inbound leads has increased quite a bit. I’m happy to say that we are now starting to generate leads from companies doing $5M+ in sales….which is exactly the type of leads we want.
I attribute this increase in lead quality to how I’m using Oktopost (affiliate link) to promote my content on LinkedIn. Here’s the video that I created last week that shows how I’m using the software. If you haven’t yet grabbed your spot for the webinar, register here before it’s full.
I Added More Content to Groove’s Marketing Funnel
While seemingly an unexciting announcement, I included it in this week’s update because I wanted to make sure you understood something about a marketing funnel.
The goal of the funnel, especially at the top of it, is to build trust, and the way to do that is with content. But you knew that already, right?
Well, here’s a tip for you: the content that you are using doesn’t all have to be yours! In fact, it’s a good idea to also curate some other people’s content in your funnel, especially if it is content that will help you to convey the point(s) you are trying to get across.
In my case, the way to do this was to find some posts on other people’s blogs that would help me to demonstrate the value of inbound marketing to my prospects. To do this, I simply wrote emails that gave brief introductions to the content along with a link.
Here’s an example:
So, the take away for you here is this: you don’t have to be the one to write every post that you use in your funnel. In fact, it’s better if you curate the work of others in addition to your own content.
The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing Mind Map
Over the last few weeks as I’ve been carefully watching the leads we’ve been capturing, I have been thinking hard about ways to attract more of the right kinds of readers.
In order to do that, I have to first decide who I really want reading the Groove blog. At this point in time, my most desired type of reader is the CMO of a $5M+ technology company that isn’t yet getting very good results from their inbound marketing efforts….if they have even started, that is.
Once I know the who, I need to discover what makes these people decide to hire a company like mine. What problems are they having? What language do they use to describe these problems? Where do they look for solutions? Who already has influence over these people now?
This isn’t a step that I put enough effort into when I first launched Groove; mostly because I thought I already knew the answers to these questions.
Well, it turns out that I didn’t.
Oops.
So, with that in mind, I developed the mind map below.
Click to Enlarge
There are a couple of reasons why I think this mind mapping exercise is worthwhile.
First, I’m a visual person, so seeing the problem laid out in front of my eyes helps me to think my way through it.
Second, once I have a visual representation of my plan, I can share it with others and ask for their input (please leave your questions down in the comments).
Third, when I showed this to another agency owner, she said, “Trent, that thing is awesome. You should show it to prospective clients so they really understand what it is that you are going to be doing for them.”
Liz and I Went to the Rodeo
Ok…so this has nothing at all to do with how to build a marketing agency…but we had a blast and I like to share a little bit of our personal lives with you as well, so here’s a pic of my better half :)
Traffic & Leads
Thanks to a webinar we are holding on June 26th, new leads this past week were up quite a bit.
Marketing Agency Duel: The Race to $20,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue
I’ve saved the best for last in this week’s update!
On Friday, I was on the phone with my friend Drew Sanocki, owner of Mineral, a paid search agency, and we were talking about our plans for the future.
Drew and I actually have fairly similar backgrounds. We have both founded multi-million dollar companies and sold them. We both have a new babies, and we are both growing marketing agencies.
Among the many things we discussed was our mutual desire to get to $20,000 a month in retainer income as fast as possible. I told Drew that I’d been writing these blog posts and publishing income reports and I suggested that he become a contributor to Bright Ideas so he could also write a weekly update.
He thought that was a great idea, so look for his first post soon.
Another of the things that we agreed to do was to create a “Marketing Agency Duel” so we would publicly race each other to the goal of $20,000 in monthly retainer income.
If you think this is something that you’d like to see, please be sure and tweet out this post, as well as to leave us a comment with any questions or suggestions you have on how we should run the duel.
Personally, I’m hoping to kick his butt! (and I’m sure he plans to do the same, lol!)
Here’s a podcast episode Drew and I recorded to give you more information on the duel.
If you liked this post and want future updates on our progress with how to start a marketing agency, just click the image below. If you’d like to get even more help and surround yourself with other agency owners, be sure and check out the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite, which is my mastermind group for entrepreneurs running marketing agencies.
Hey, thanks for the info. Now what?
If you need any help with content creation, we have tons of free resources to get you over the hump. Please subscribe to this blog to ensure that you never miss an article.
If you really enjoyed this post, please help us to spread the word by clicking one of the social media sharing buttons.
Thanks so much!
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/groove-weekly-update-post-header.jpg281686Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-24 08:18:252018-08-01 18:42:47Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results Week of June 16th
Rachel Cogar is the CEO of Puma Creative, a 7-figure boutique inbound marketing agency and an evangelist for inbound marketing methodology. In addition to running her business, Rachel juggles Mom duties with three children, including a 6-week-old newborn.
Puma Creative is a 100% virtual agency with a team of 13 people all around the world. They focus on small to mid-size businesses around the world that believe in the power of inbound marketing. Their clients are all on retainers of $4000 – $10,000 per month.
Would you like your business to look like that? When you listen to this episode, you will learn exactly how she did it.
Listen now and you’ll hear Rachel and I talk about:
(04:45) Introduction
(05:30) What types of customers do you most often attract?
(08:30) What size retainer do you charge?
(10:30) What research do you rely on?
(11:40) Which Healthcare sub-niches do are you having success with?
(14:30) How did you get traction in healthcare?
(19:00) How are you using LinkedIn in your marketing sales?
(21:40) Please explain your process to qualify a lead.
(25:00) Do you pass your qualified leads to another application?
(28:00) How do I automate the sales process?
(35:00) Please explain some of your internal procedures & processes.
(48:00) Please tell us about your ROWE(Results Only Work Environment).
(54:00) What advice would you give to people looking to build a virtual team?
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Trent: Hey there, bright idea hunters. Welcome back to Episode #140 of the Bright Ideas Podcast. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, conversions, profits,and ultimately attract more customers of course, well guess what, my friends, you are in the right place. This is exactly what we do on this podcast. The way that we do that is I bring on other entrepreneurs who are walking their talk and getting results and then I get them to share with you and me, exactly what it is they’re doing to achieve all the success that they have, and this episode is exactly that.
In this episode, my guest is a woman by the name of Rachel Cogar. Rachel is the owner of an agency, a seven-figure agency, called Puma Creative. She’s also the mother of three with a brand new newborn just six weeks old at the time of this recording, and she, much like myself, is an absolute evangelist for the inbound marketing methodology. Her agency, by the way, is also 100% virtual. She works out of her house and has a team of 13 people spread all around the world and they are serving clients all around the world, and these clients are paying retainers of anywhere from $4,000 to about $10,000 or $12,000 per month.
Just imagine the lifestyle that she has with a business like that. Would you like to have that kind of life? Would you like your business to look like that? When you listen to this episode, you’re going to hear exactly how she did it.
We’re going to talk about the types of customers that she deals with. We’re going to talk about how she creates content and, most importantly, how she’s using LinkedIn to place that content in front of the exact target customer that she wants to have. Then we’re going to talk about the inbound methodology and how her funnel is built, and how she takes leads from being information qualified through to being marketing qualified, and then ultimately sales qualified. We share some ideas back and forth on how automation plays a role in that, both on the marketing and on the sales side.
If you’re using HubSpot now, but you don’t have a CRM system in place to handle a lead once they become sales qualified, you’re going to get some really valuable, golden nuggets on exactly how to do that.
We talked a lot about how she’s using data to support the claims that she’s making to her prospective clients. We name specifically from HubSpot that she’s using to get that data. Man, oh, man. There is just so much good stuff in this.
Then at the very end we talked about what many people call a results-only work environment. We talk about building a virtual and we talk about how we manage that team and some of the tools that we use. It’s that process that allows her and I to run these businesses where we can literally be anywhere in the world that we want to, so long as we have an internet connection, and it’s just business as usual when we’re doing it.
That’s it. No fluff, no puffery, just real stuff and in this episode you are going to get a ton of it. So in just a moment we’re going to welcome Rachel to the show.
Before we do that, my very quick announcement as always is I get a lot of emails from people saying, “Trent, what are the tools that you use to run your business? How do I create landing pages? What should I use for video hosting? Where should I host my WordPress site? What themes should I use? What should I use for email marketing? What should I use for marketing automation? How should I do content marketing?” and on and on it goes.
I have a list of all of the tools that I use. Some of those links on that list are affiliate links which means that if you click them and you buy the other people’s stuff, they’ll send me a little commission for promoting it.
Now as a thank you to for doing that, if you go to GrabTrentsBonus.com, you will see a list of all the tools and my recommendations for them that I use in my business. If you do choose to use any of those affiliate links to buy lead pages or whatever it is that you want to buy, then you send me your receipt afterwards and I have some free stuff for you, my paid products. I will give you a couple of choices on things that you can get for free and that’s just my way of saying thank you for using my affiliate link.
With that said, please join me in welcoming Rachel to the show. Hey, Rachel. Welcome to the show.
Rachel: Hey, Trent. Thanks for having me today.
Trent: No problem. It’s my pleasure to have you on and come and share with my audience the story of how you have built and are building your agency. I’m really keen to get into all the nitty- gritty of all the things that you’ve done to get the results that you’ve got. But so far I think we need to start off with allowing you to introduce yourself so that the audience knows who they’re listening to. We’ll talk about what some of those results are very early on and then, as I mentioned, we’ll get into the nuts and bolt of how you achieved them.
With that said, please take a moment and introduce yourself. Who are you and what do you do?
Rachel: Well, I am Rachel Cogar. I am the CEO of Puma Creative. We are an inbound marketing consultancy, a boutique agency and we help small- to medium-sized businesses across the globe to get their business and their marketing strategies optimized so that they are following best practice, and really just optimizing the processes of their business in order to grow their business, enlighten their clients, and to continue to expand into their marketplaces.
Trent: So when you say small businesses, can you narrow that down for us a little bit? Is there any particular size or niche or some kind of focus that you’ve chosen to target?
Rachel: That’s an interesting question. We’ve actually tried the informal inbound marketing strategy with various businesses in various industries and verticals and various sizes. What I have found that I enjoy most is we enjoy working with companies that have five or six people that they can dedicate to the marketing effort. We enjoy working with people that understand inbound marketing as a belief system, as a philosophy, as a way of life, I guess, as opposed to that it’s just another arrow in the bag of marketing tricks.
As far as verticals and industries, we’ve worked a lot with healthcare, healthcare consulting, IT technology, and we’ve seen some really great results for those industries. Just recently, I guess a year ago, we brought on our first e-commerce retail client and it’s a completely different ballgame than the business-to-business marketing and the healthcare consulting or technology world. We’re learning those ropes. We’re learning how to apply the principles of inbound marketing to e-commerce and retail and the sales funnel is very different there. As far as the size, we like the small- to mid-sized businesses.
The enterprise is something… We’ve worked with one or two enterprise clients. We’ve found that it’s a lengthier process to go through to capture approvals and to devise a plan and to get it implemented and executed. A lot of times with our small business guys or medium-sized businesses we can devise a plan and start to implement next week and start to see results. If we need to monitor and adjust and change direction, we have the approval to do so and the hands-on experience of the team and the client to jump in and do that with us.
Does that answer your question, Trent?
Trent: It does to a certain degree and as always I’ve got some follow- on questions that I want to ask. Now in the pre-interview you mentioned to me because you’re an inbound agency 100% of your income is retainer income. What’s the average size retainer that you are getting from working with the size of clients that you work with?
Rachel: Our retainers are $4,000 monthly up to $12,000 to $15,000 monthly. Well, I just want to point out that that is really diverse to compare one $10,000 month retainer to another, to compare the two customers. They could look very different.
One could be a small business that doesn’t have a marketing department or doesn’t want to bring one on, so they look to us to be an extension of their team, to be their marketing department. For that sized retainer, they’re getting a copywriter, a graphic designer, a web developer, an inbound marketing strategist, a social media expert. They couldn’t get that for that cost if they went to hire all of those people and those experts into their business.
Then we have another client that might have the same retainer size at $10,000 a month, but they’ve got a couple of marketing people and maybe they’re a larger business as far as their revenue goes, but they’re looking for quicker results.
Our retainer fees are based on frequency. A lot of times we lay out for our clients, when they’re choosing how much money to invest in this, we look at some very key research that shows frequency of blogging and number of cumulative blogs on your website and compare that to lead volume and its impact on lead volume. We look at how many landing pages and there are some magic numbers along the way.
We have some clients that opt for a higher retainer so that they can have more frequency and get there quickly and reach critical mass and reach the momentum with their lead generation. Once they’ve reached that point sometimes they’ll scale back and maintain. Sometimes they bump it up and keep on going because they’re getting some results with that.
Trent: Now you mentioned based upon research and I know in our pre- interview we talked about an MIT report that was done in conjunction with HubSpot. Is that the body of research that you’re most often referring to or are there some other items?
Rachel: There are some others. I really like the MIT study. It’s the ROI of inbound marketing and the ROI of using HubSpot for inbound marketing. But some others that I like are “The State of Inbound Marketing” report and HubSpot has put out a couple of reports also, “7,000 Benchmarks for Businesses Using HubSpot and Inbound Marketing.” We refer to those quite often.
The one specifically I was referring to is there’s a graph in “The State of Inbound Marketing” report that shows that your number of cumulative blogs to the number of your median lead volume coming in. When you reach certain benchmarks in certain numbers your lead volume increases exponentially. We try to hit those magic numbers when we’re blogging and building landing pages, so that we can see the lead volume increase.
Trent: Perfect. Now going back to healthcare, healthcare is a huge niche and there are quite a number of sub-niches within it and I’m not even terribly familiar with it to be honest with you. What areas of healthcare are you working with when you say, “We deal with healthcare”?
Rachel: Healthcare it’s a very interesting subject matter right now just because there’s a lot of change happening. There are a lot of upset in the marketplace and there’s a lot of players. You’ve got your physicians. You’ve got your hospitals, your combo care organizations, your insurers. The clients that we worked with in the healthcare field… I neglected to mention there are also the patients, right? All of us.
The ones that we worked with are the business to business in the healthcare industry. It’s a technology company selling quality software to hospitals to keep up with provider data. Or it’s a healthcare consultant, consulting the hospital CEOs on patient safety and patient satisfaction and quality assurance.
We’ve seen that there’s a lot of movement right now and a lot of uncertainty in the healthcare field. What these hospitals and doctor’s offices are doing is they are having to be very efficient in their spending and in their income and how they generate revenue. That really comes directly back to how they market. Not only their operations and how they run their businesses, but how they market themselves. They have an opportunity here to delight existing patients and to keep their current customers and to grow their business.
There are also a lot of mergers and acquisitions going on in the healthcare space right now. We’re seeing a lot of rebranding and re-juggling of who our experts are and where we have experts and on what topics. So there’s really a lot of movement and the sky’s the limit as to what we can do with healthcare right now.
We’re seeing a lot of interesting moves in healthcare marketing that tend to be a little bit more risky, a little bit more transparent of putting yourself out there, whereas five years ago or 10 years ago, it was a little more conservative marketing. So we’re seeing people take some risks just because of the volatility of the space and do some things differently. “Differentiate or die” is the way we could say this from a marketing perspective in healthcare.
Trent: When it comes to the inbound methodology, of course, you’re creating content and making sure that content gets in front of the right people and that it’s written for the right people. How did you get your traction in the healthcare niche because they don’t strike me as the kind of folks who are reading marketing blogs?
Rachel: It’s interesting that when you devise an inbound marketing, when you decide, “I understand inbound marketing and this is the way we’re going to go with our business.” Inbound marketing is more the belief system. It’s more of a way of doing business. We see inbound marketing as not just marketing. We see inbound as a cultural thing, as inbound operations and on sales, inbound delighting of our clients.
Let me just take a second to explain where I’m coming from with that. This is review of you inbound marketers out there, but we know that the way people buy anything has changed. We know that, Trent, if you’re going to buy a car today or next week and you decide you have $30,000 to spend on a car, you’re not going to drive down to the sales lot. You’re going to go online. You’re going to go online first and you’re going to figure out what you can get in that budget and where in your area that you can find some cars on the lot that you can look at. You’re going to read the customer reviews and you’re going to know everything about that car, pull the Carfax before you go down to the lot and talk to the sales guy.
Because we see that consumers are savvy and they have information at their fingertips, apply that to healthcare. Think about “Oh, I have this rash on my arm and it’s itching.” Before I call my doctor, what am I going to do? I’m going to go online. I’m going to Google it. I’m going to research this myself and come to the table as a more educated contributor to my own health.
When we look at healthcare business to business, it’s the same way. We see these CEOs of multi-facility hospitals going on to LinkedIn, and getting in LinkedIn groups for healthcare executive networking and groups like very highly expert groups, asking questions about software, technologies, processes, mergers, and such.
When it comes to inbound marketing, the idea is to create content the people are already searching for. We know the consumer goes online, consumes information, becomes a more educated buyer or patient or whatever they are. What we want to do is create content that’s going to educate and inform when they go looking for information, so that we position ourselves as the expert.
If we’re targeting a healthcare CEO, a hospital CEO to sell our software, we want to be in the LinkedIn group for our healthcare executives’ network and we want to see what the conversations are.
Then we want to create content that we think answers the questions that those CEOs have or the quality directors, or the director of medical staff services or whoever our personas are. We want to create content based on what they’re asking, their questions are.
We have found that in the business-to-business healthcare marketing, LinkedIn groups are frequented by these top level executives searching out answers for how to maintain and sustain in this constantly shifting space in healthcare right now.
I think the key, at least in our opinion, is to go where your customers are. Sometimes inbound marketing is synonymously misplaced with just blogging or with social media. Really it’s, A, who are your personas, B, what questions do they need answered, C, can we solve their problems, and then, D, getting our content in front of our audience. I don’t think it’s enough to necessarily write a blog and publish it on our website and then wait for the masses to come. I think that’s an immature process.
I think the rest of the process is we go and do our research and development first. We frequent those groups and see what people are asking and what they’re looking for and we figure out how we can solve that. Then we write our content. Then when we go back to promote our content, we go to those groups where we see that the potential prospects are.
We have a client in healthcare consulting and they sell a software for credentialing providers. There’s a group on LinkedIn called Credentialing in Healthcare. It’s a direct fit to who they’re trying reach. That’s a great place to promote their blogs or to promote their landing pages and their whitepapers and things that they’re producing. I think it’s a full strategy in order to get in front of these personas and prospects.
Trent: I agree completely. Brilliant answer. I’m glad that you brought up LinkedIn because it’s a tool that I use as well. I don’t consider myself a super expert on it, but I think I do an okay job. I want to dive a little deeper on LinkedIn for a moment. So let’s say that you’re placing your highly relevant content that is high quality and well-written, we’ll just assume that that’s the case because I know that it is, and you’re getting it in front of the right eyeballs.
Do these folks ever comment on it and then do you reach out and make a connection, and then do you send them an email and say, “Hey, thanks for connecting. Would you like to chat?” Or do they just read it, come to your site, download whatever lead magnet report and go through the funnel or is it some combination of both?
Rachel: That’s a great question and what you’re asking really marries in marketing and sales. A good friend of mine, Dan Tyre at HubSpot, calls this smarketing. It’s sales and marketing in the process. The way that this has been the most successful for some of our clients is that they frequent these groups on LinkedIn.
Let me just back up and start with that going into the LinkedIn groups should be perceived like going to a networking event or a cocktail party. When you go, you don’t want to talk about yourself the whole time. You want to talk to other people, ask them what they do, comment on what they’ve got going on, and build some credibility there and build a relationship.
Our clients will go into the LinkedIn groups and see what people are asking and what people are discussing and they’ll jump in. They’ll give their opinion and answer other people’s questions. When other people see that you’re answering their questions, they’re going to jump in and have a conversation with you when you pose a question.
Generally speaking there are opportunities to reference an article that your CEO has written or reference a blog or reference a whitepaper that may help someone who’s struggling with a certain problem. When you reference that and put that link there, we see that a lot of people will click on that link and go back to the website and read the blog.
As best practice, something we always do, is every time we publish a blog on our website, at the very end of it we put a 600 pixel wide by 200 pixel tall call-to-action that goes onto a landing page for some premium content. We view the blog as the appetizer, the teaser, and they read it and it’s compelling enough to make them want more, so they click on that call to action at the end or within the blog.
They go to the landing page and often download the content. At that point we have a process in place, this bridge between marketing and sales, where we’ve got a lifecycle of the lead. We see that they come in and if they fill out a form on our landing page to get a piece of content, they become a lead. But the lead is really just a holding bucket because we know that just because someone fills out a form doesn’t make them a good lead for our business.
Our next step is to qualify them as a marketing qualified lead, an MQL. We generally have a checklist, and we have a marketing designated person at the client’s office that will see the lead come in. They’ll get the notification that so and so has downloaded this whitepaper and they’ll look that person up on LinkedIn or online and they’ll see, “Is this person in our geographic area that we serve? Are they in the industry of our target audience? Are they our persona? Would this be a good customer for us?”
If the answer is no, because it could be your competitor, it could be somebody in Egypt, it could be somebody doing research for their college graduate research paper, we mark them as a subscriber. We let them consume our content all day long.
If they answer’s yes, that they could potentially be a good client for us, we mark them as a marketing qualified lead which just means that they’re qualified for us to continue marketing to them.
At that point, we have some stuff set up behind the scenes for lead nurturing and with marketing automation where because they’ve downloaded this whitepaper, we think the obvious next step would be to watch this webinar or to read this case study. We try to send them emails and try to guide them down the sales funnel to a phone call, basically, with our client.
If the next stage though, after they’re a marketing qualified lead and we continue marketing, we keep our eye on it. If they come back and download other content, we set up some rules and some alerts and notifications to let us know, “Hey, these guys are more interested.”
We also use lead scoring. The more they do on our site. They come back and they read blogs. They share our blogs. They tweet about us. They post something about us on LinkedIn. They’re increasing their score and the sales team is watching this.
We like to get our sales team involved a little bit earlier than normal in the process. What the sales team does is what’s called an outreach call. They might pick up the phone and call this person at some point of engagement and say, “I saw that you’ve downloaded some of our content regarding patient satisfaction. I’m just calling to see if there’s some particular information that you’re looking for or that we could help you with or I could send you.”
It’s more of an outreach call instead of a sales call, but the goal is to find out three things. Does the company have a budget? Do they have an interest or an initiative for what you’re selling? Number three, is that the decision maker or an influencer that you’re talking to? If the answers yes to those, then we mark them from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead and start the sales process.
That’s the process, I guess, that we put in place. We work with each client individually to define that process, custom it to their business, to their sales team, and the systems that they already have in place. Does that make sense, Trent?
Trent: It makes perfect sense and boy oh boy, audience, I hope you were taking notes because you heard Marketing 101 brilliance just there. That is the exact process that we use in our own agency as well, so well done. Bravo.
Question for you on that. HubSpot is not… You and I are both HubSpot partners so we know the software quite well. It’s not a CRM though and I have a way that I… I’ve made videos and stuff of how I do it, so I won’t dive into that now. I’ll just put a link in the show notes. When someone becomes either marketing or sales qualified, do you pass them from HubSpot to another application of any kind?
Rachel: Generally yes, and it depends on the size of our clients too. Some of them have one or two salespeople and they send their sales team notifications and they manage it in HubSpot with a limited functionality of the CRM. There’s a note field and they keep track of it themselves. Our clients that do want to manage it with a CRM because they’ve got a sales team and a formal process, we generally connect HubSpot to Salesforce or HubSpot to Autotask or something like that. HubSpot has an open API, so as long as the CRM that they’re using also has an open API, we can automate that and push the leads into their system for their sales teams.
Trent: Have you explored did you know that HubSpot gives you 15 free zaps from Zapier?
Rachel: Yes, and we’ve used Zapier for multiple things with HubSpot and having that process seamless really makes a big difference to how well we can execute on the strategy. The other thing HubSpot has is they’ve recently put in integration to Wistia and to GoToWebinar. Now if you’re going to do a webinar for your prospects, you just go into HubSpot. You turn on the GoToWebinar integration, enter your GoToWebinar password, and then when someone registers on your HubSpot form it automatically pushed them to GoToWebinar, which sends them to a unique link for them to join the webinar. There are lots of integrations and Zapier is something we utilize on a regular basis to tie HubSpot to various softwares.
Trent : For me, I use Infusionsoft because it allows me to do all sorts of really cool automation when I pass both my marketing qualified and my sales qualified leads using Zapier over into Infusionsoft. Folks, if you want to see a video on that, at the end of this episode, I’ll give the link to the show notes and there will be a link to that video.
Rachel: That sounds great. Trent, let me ask you a question. When it comes to the process, I feel like we’re talking about a couple of different things here which is great. We’re talking about a marketing process, an inbound marketing process marrying sales and marketing, having this cohesive, seamless process. I can tell from reading your blogs and seeing your videos that you’re really strong in the marketing automation piece of this.
I’m curious to hear maybe what your thoughts are as to how important that marketing automation piece is to the process. You can do the process manually or you can do it in an automated fashion, but how do you foresee the value of that impacting the end result of the email marketing?
Trent: Thank you for the question. If you’ve ever seen the movie Apollo 13 there’s a scene when all hell is breaking loose and Gary Sinise says something to the effect of, “Hey, do we have a process for that?” and that expression permeates my entire organization. We try to never have something that occurs more than once that we don’t have a documented process for. The thing that’s better than a documented process is an automated process.
The reason that I’m such a staunch believer in this is I don’t want things to fall through the cracks. I know that the human memory is prone to failure. Mine sure is. Dealing with turnover and training issues is another area of ROI when you have automation. When you have those systems, the customer experience will be consistent time in and time out, as well as I am very interested in knowing exactly which parts of my marketing and sales are working. That means I need to be collecting data at all times.
Now sometimes I’m able to easily collect data through analytics and clicks and so forth. What happens if there is some type of interaction where the data is not so easy to collect, so I want to also build automation processes? Actually, I recorded a video about this just the other day. I’m actually experimenting with some direct mail as well because I want to get hyper-targeted on some of the people that I’m going after and my content plays a huge role in the direct mail.
I have very carefully selected 100 individuals that I would really love to have as a customer. When they call, as they have been, it very quickly occurred to me I thought, “Man, I’ve got to have a way that when the phone rings and I handle these conversations, I make sure that document what letter was it that caused them to call and what week was it and where did the lead come from?”
With Infusionsoft, and I’m assuming other applications as well, you can build a web forum and I put checkboxes. When someone calls in, of course I’m filling in their name and their email, and putting in the stuff in the right checkboxes. When I click the submit button when I’m done with that inbound call that I’ve received which happened as a result of my marketing, certain things will happen automatically. Certain tags will get applied tasks will automatically be triggered telling me to send a follow-up email.
The goal is if you employ a sales staff, you would ideally like everybody to handle your prospects in exactly the right way so that they go through your process in exactly the right way. I think that the only way to do that is to create a framework of automation. You can customize it of course, on a per person basis. The task says, “Send the templated follow-up email,” but it doesn’t mean that that person can’t go and amend the templated email a little bit and make some personal comments and they should.
What you don’t want to have happen is them forget to send the email, or critical elements of that follow up email don’t get included. Like one of the things that we get on the table right at the get go is how much it costs to work with us. There’s a certain retainer below which we won’t go. We just don’t the customer because the burden of account management is too high relative to the income and it won’t be a profitable customer. I don’t want to find that out at the end. I want them to know right at the very beginning so that we don’t have to waste each other’s time. Does that answer your question?
Rachel: It does and I heard you say so many really cool things that I tried to write down throughout the process, like documented, automated, do we have a process for that, framework. Some of those words I think are key to a successfully implemented inbound marketing strategy. I look at some of the clients that we’ve worked with and a few of our clients maybe worked with another agency or they tried to do it themselves before they came to us and they didn’t have necessarily a process or a framework. I’ve seen people try to do inbound marketing without the framework, without the backbone, without the structure of it.
It seems like when that’s the case these strategies are more, “Let’s write a blog and throw it up on our website and see who comes to visit.” Having that framework not only on the automation, but on the front end of what are we going to write, who are we writing it to, where are we going to place it, how are we going to promote it? I think that framework on the front end is critical, but if you have that framework on the front end, and then you don’t have the automation after the lead is generated, you have a drop off there. You have a big gap in your marketing.
Trent: Huge drop off.
Rachel: Yes. I would say to the listeners today, to our audience, does your inbound marketing strategy have a very secure framework behind it? Just hearing the words that you’re saying, Trent, as you described your automation process, the framework, the process, the documentation, the automation, the structure for turnover, I think that that’s critical.
A lot of marketers, I’m going to say this about myself as well, are right-brained creative people. But putting the structure in place here is a real left-brain task. Making sure that you’re not out there being too creative and forgetting to have your structure in place, I think, is critical to the success of the strategy, to growing your business, to gaining the leads, and closing the leads.
We see people that can generate tons of leads. They can’t close them. We see people that can’t generate the leads, but you put them in front of someone they can close the deal.
I think this is really a marriage of processes and creativity and being on target with knowing who your audience is, knowing what questions they have that need answered, and how you can solve their problems. There are just a lot of pieces to this. I think when the structure is in place, that’s when you set yourself up for success.
Trent: I agree and we’re going to hang on this for a little bit longer. I think you and I can probably compare notes on a few the processes that we’ve developed internally and I suspect that the audience would really love to hear that.
With that said, I know that I do and I’m happy to explain my process, but when it comes to figuring out what content you’re going to create, creating it, making sure that the checklist of items is never missed for every piece of content that is created, optimized, and promoted, we have a system that we use for that. It’s a spreadsheet. It’s got all these columns and then every task is linked to the corresponding page in our wiki and there are training videos for everybody on the team. We’ve really put a lot of effort into having this process. I’m curious how do you do that kind of stuff?
Rachel: Is that an internal process in documentation for your team or do you share that with the client as well?
Trent: It’s internal.
Rachel: Puma Creative was started just about three years ago, and prior to Puma Creative I had the traditional ad agency for six or seven years. With my traditional ad agency we took on any market. We were full service. We took on any marketing project. We were putting billboards in the Panther’s stadium on the Jumbo- Tron. We were designing logos and print collateral and email campaigns. We did it all.
The problem with that, Trent, was that nothing was repeatable. We didn’t have a process because we didn’t repeat the same thing twice. We would sit at the table with our customers and say, “Well, that was nice. We placed that ad in South Park Magazine. Did you get any phone calls this month?” We had no way to measure it, number one, and they would say, “Well, I think we got one phone call from it.” I’d say, “What are we going to do next month?”
We started to see as early as 2008, 2009, and 2010 that this approach just wasn’t working. When I ended up moving on to starting Puma Creative in 2011, the goal was that we were just going to be an inbound marketing consultancy. Only take on inbound marketing clients and stay focused. We’re not going to do traditional outbound marketing unless it’s part of the integrated plan and we’re not going to do project work.
I’m answering your question the long way here, but because we’re three years old as a company we really spent the first two years building our systems and processes and understanding how we do things within our markets and our niches. We spent the first two years figuring it out and then we spent the last year, this past year, really documenting and putting the framework and the process in place. We use Basecamp for our project management and so we’ve set up Basecamp templates.
Trent: We do as well.
Rachel: Do you use that as well?
Trent: We do, yes. For client interaction, work with Basecamp is where it all lives.
Rachel: Yes. We set up these templates for our client. We’ve got a new client coming on May 1st. We’re having our kickoff meeting tomorrow with him. I’ve already set up his Basecamp project, and it has certain sections and certain documents, and it has the processes that we defined for him in place. As far as the blogging and the social media and the content planning and all of that stuff, we’ve got a very distinct process we use for that that’s documented internally and we share that process through our Basecamp project along the topics of our client.
I’ve got this one-sheeter that I’m very happy to share with you. You can put it in the docket it you’d like. It’s an overview of how do a B2B inbound marketing campaign. I think I call it the B2B Inbound Marketing Campaign Asset Sheet. It’s a one-sheeter and it lays out everything you need to implement one campaign. From the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, all the way down to your landing pages, your content, your headlines, your CTAs, your workflows, your emails for your workflows, your blogs, your social media, everything in one.
We use that as a checklist for the client and we show them this is the big picture, where we’re headed, and these are the content assets that we need and the graphical assets that we need to develop in order to execute this campaign. That matches the Basecamp project that we set up. In Basecamp, we’ve got 10 blogs. We’ll list out a category of blogs and we’ll list out 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, all the way through 10 as placeholders to say, “This is the first month of what this is going to look like that we need to create based on best practice of how to implement this.” I’ll send you that document, Trent, if you want to share it with the group.
Trent: Absolutely. I’d be very happy to do that. It’s a shame. I’d love us to be able to be doing visual right now because I’d love nothing more than to do a screen share and have a look at your Basecamp and compare it to my Basecamp and see how we could both learn from each other and improve. Maybe we’ll have to do that offline and I’ll record it and put it in the show notes as well, if you’re up for it.
Rachel: Absolutely. Like I said, our first two years were figuring out our process and our last year has been documenting it. Sounds like you’re a little bit ahead of us on documenting your internal wiki and all of that, which makes me salivate over what you’ve got in place. Putting those operations in place is critical to growing our business. We’ve gotten a lot of referrals from HubSpot, a lot of referrals from our clients. We’ve got leads that come in, people we’d like to work with, but we have to make sure that operationally we’re set up to handle that. Growing our own business is critical as well, and I think having that framework and process in place for us means that we can help more people.
Trent: Absolutely. You might not know and some of the listeners might not know, on my Bright Ideas blog, each week I publish a post about how I’m building Groove and I go into quite a bit of detail of what we did, what we accomplished that week. A lot of these videos and stuff that I’m referring to I do create and share within my weekly update. If you go Groove and you find… In the categories on the side bar there’s a thing called, I think, the Groove Digital Marketing Project or something like that. If you click that you’ll get to see all of the posts and it’s week by week, everything that we’re doing, lots of detail.
Rachel: I love how you’re so transparent. I’ve read a couple of your blogs on what you’re doing to grow your business and I love the transparency there. That’s something that I’ve really been learning this past year is how valuable the transparency is in not only sharing what you do that works, but in being able to get feedback from other people and enhance the strategies. I commend you for your transparency on that. I think it benefits everybody. Thank you for that, Trent.
Trent: No problem. Those are the most fun posts for me to write. I don’t always have some amazing result to share, but I always have, “Here’s something new that we created,” or, “Here’s a process,” or, “Here’s the results of something that I talked about last week.” The feedback that I get on these posts has been absolutely phenomenal.
My wife was telling me at dinner last night, “None of my family has ever commented on any of your blog posts because I don’t think they read them, until you started to do these weekly updates. Now some of my friends actually send me emails. They actually read your stuff.” People are enjoying it and I enjoy doing it so I will keep on doing that for, well, until I get bored of doing it or until people lose interest, one of the two.
Rachel: I think that what you’re giving there is so valuable to not only how to grow an inbound marketing agency, but how to grow your business in general, how to be entrepreneurial, how to communicate. I love that word. It’s the oldest word, but really what we’re doing with inbound marketing is we are being authentic and real and communicating authenticity to our prospects. I think your blogs are so valuable because you’re letting us see the real deal, the real limitations or problems or successes that you’re having, and that would apply to me growing my inbound marketing agency.
It would apply to a healthcare consultant who’s trying to reach a CEO because you’re giving some very practical hands-on strategies. I think in one of yours that I read you talked about having your VA make a list of the top 100. Here’s how you’re approaching them and here’s what you’re going to do next. It’s very tactical as far as takeaway that I think any of our clients would benefit from as well. I think you’re going to continue to see an upward trend of interest in what you’re doing with that.
Trent: There are some pretty unexpected things that come from this. For example, I’ve had one individual, a fellow by the name of Chris O’Byrne, and gosh, Chris, I wish I could remember your URL off the top of my head, but I will put it in the show notes. He said, “Trent, I really want to help you turn one of your books into a Kindle book and I’ll do it for free. You’ve given me so much value I just want to do this for you.” I said, “Really? Okay.”
My Digital Marketing Handbook is in the process of getting turned into a Kindle book and it’s go onto Amazon. For me, that’s a neat experiment. It’s not something I would have devoted any time or energy to because it wasn’t a priority at this point in time. He said, “I’m really digging that.”
Then Patrick from HubSpot who I’m sure you know quite well, their VP of Sales, he caught wind of these weekly updates that I’m doing and has been all over me on Twitter.
Now he and Greg Fong, our sales guy, we have a three-way call coming up today or tomorrow. He says, “I love what you’re doing. I want to see how I can help you more.”
When you really open the kimono like this, people find it, and then they react in pleasant and unexpected ways. I guess that’s my point in all rambling on like this. It’s go ahead and do stuff like this. Even if you can’t exactly figure out what the immediate benefit will be, trust me, people will find you and they will appreciate you and you will experience benefits that you can’t even predict in advance.
Rachel: I agree with you completely. I go back to I’m working on a book right now that’s supposed to be out in August about the inbound marketing world view about inbound marketing as a belief system, and I think you really are a strong example. You just nailed it on providing value. If you’re providing value, through being real and transparent, you’re showing people the way. You are trying it and then showing people the way to grow their business.
That realness, that being real there is going to get you noticed. Like you said, the benefit of that is growing your business. The benefit of that is beyond growing your business.
I spoke at HubSpot last year at Inbound 2013 and my presentation was called “The $120,000 Close Deck” of how to close a $10,000 a month retainer. I had maybe 150 HubSpot partners in the room and every time I go back to Boston or to any HubSpot event now I have people saying, “Your presentation helped me close my first $10,000 retainer. Thank you for that.”
I had a guy two weeks ago, I was in Boston, and he said, “You’re my hero. You really helped our agency jumpstart.” That’s so rewarding and that’s so fulfilling, but in addition to that, I had a guy in Wilmington from another agency who said to me, “You’ve helped me so much. What can I do to help you? Can I share your content? Can I write a blog for you?”
I think that it makes you feel good of course, and it makes you feel good to know you’re on the right track and that people like you, but it also validates what you’re doing from a marketing perspective. It validates the fact that when you’re being real and authentic and helpful, people need that. People will find that and I think if we apply to that our customers and prospects in the same way and in the same manner, be authentic, be real, be helpful, your prospects will find you too.
I think some people are hesitant with inbound marketing because they want to keep their secrets close to their chest. I think we’re beyond that as a society. We’re beyond that when the consumer knows how to get a move on and find the answers they need in 3.2 seconds. We’re beyond holding your wares into your chest. I think that really hits home with what inbound marketing is. The culture of inbound marketing is giving and sharing and exposing and helping other people.
Trent: Do you have a PDF of the slide deck “How to Close a $10,000 Retainer” that we could also put in the show notes?
Rachel: Oh, I sure do. It was recorded by HubSpot and we’ve got a link to it on their website. I’ll send you that link.
Trent: Awesome. That’d be great. Where are we on time? We’re just about done. One of the things that we haven’t talked about, so we’re going to shift gears here, but I know we did talk about in the pre-interview is what you described as a results-only work environment. Your agency is virtual. My agency is virtual. Many people’s businesses are becoming virtual. I think we would be remiss if we didn’t talk a little bit about how the results-only work environment is working for you. Take it away.
Rachel: Through HubSpot I met these two ladies, Jody and Callie, who’ve written books and they do public speaking engagements about what they call Go ROWE. ROWE stands for results-only work environment. I was very curious, especially the first time I heard them speak. They said that somewhere along the way somebody decided that showing up an office from 8 to 5 equals results. In fact, it does not. The new way of doing business, I guess, is based on, “Did you get the job done? Did we get results from the job that you got done?”
When I started Puma Creative three years ago, I’d had a traditional ad agency before and we had a big office. The name on the walls, we had cubicles and butts in seats, and payroll taxes.
When I exited that business, I was really looking for something more. I spent my entire waking hours at that office and it consumed me. I was really looking for work and life balance or integration of the two. I have small children. I didn’t want to work at that office for the rest of my life.
When we started Puma Creative, I have my home office and started to grow the team and they’re all virtual and we don’t count hours. The rule is “get the job done. Get it done on time. Make the client happy.” Other than that, anything really goes.
I know that for myself I can work from Charlotte, North Carolina, or I can work from India, or I can work from China, Thailand, St. Thomas, or wherever that I want to work, so long as I have my laptop and my cell phone.
I think that that’s how I want to work and my team does as well, so we manage our projects in Basecamp. We use Dropbox to share files. We have entire meetings on GChat and we jump on GoToWebinars with our clients who are spread out all over the world. We get these things done. We make our clients happy. We help them grow their businesses. We have a blast doing it.
Now we’ve evolved through the Go ROWE. We ask ourselves three questions as a business. Number one, are we making an impact? Number two, are we having fun? And number three, are we making money? If the answer is yes to those three, we love what we do. We use that to determine if we’re going to take on a client or not. When we’re interviewing a client or they’re interviewing us, we’re looking too to see, “Hey are we going to make an impact with these people? Are we going to have fun with these people? Are we going to make money with these people?” That’s guided our agency over the past three years, the virtual team and the virtual setting.
One other book, the book “Rework” by Jason Fried from 37signals, the Basecamp developer, was the first introduction I had to the virtual team. He’s extremely profitable with a small team that’s spread out all over the world. That’s what we do and you mentioned that your team is virtual as well.
Trent: Yep, indeed they are. We have two people overseas. We’ve got somebody in northern California who’s just joined our team. She’s our director of operations in the making, starting off with our blog editor. My wife, as many of the people following know, is literally… Well, she’s two day past her due date. We haven’t given birth to our daughter yet, but as you might imagine when that happens, which could be at any moment, her ability to fulfill the role that she’s played will be impaired for a couple of months at least or longer. I really don’t know how long.
We needed to find another individual living in a relatively small town here, Boise, Idaho, the pickings aren’t necessarily exactly as fruitful as what we might have needed. We did try to find someone locally first and couldn’t. Actually we did and we had a false start, so then we just decided… There were certain roles I was very okay with outsourcing and then others where I thought I needed to see faces. After my pre-interview with you, Rachel, I went and I spoke to my wife and I said, “If virtual works for Rachel for key roles, virtual can work for us. Let’s make it happen.”
We had our onboarding interview with Rebecca yesterday and it was my first opportunity actually speaking with her, because Liz generally does the hiring, and I was just absolutely floored at the caliber of talent that we were able to attract to our team. Much like probably many professionals out there, she doesn’t want to work 40 hours a week. She has small kids and wants to be very involved in their lives. She says, “I’ve sure got 30 hours that are available and I have a pretty impressive resume,” which she sure did.
I thought, “Oh, man. What a score,” to be able to have someone who has this level of talent and experience to very affordably add her to the team. The other thing is when you give people the opportunity to work remotely on their own schedule, they’re not nearly so demanding in the salary department.
Rachel: It can be a win/win. It’s really a tradeoff because the value to them is there as well. There’s a lot of research on the productivity and the quality of work you get when you can give these flexibilities. I think that some people aren’t motivated by money as much as they’re motivated by the autonomy or by the freedom or flexibility to be part of their kid’s lives. That’s fantastic. It’s a beautiful relationship when you can find that.
Trent: Let’s close off with this final question then. What tips would you give for people who are looking to attract this type of individual to join their team? How do you do it?
Rachel: Well, that’s a million dollar question, Trent. I think that there are some things that you have to keep in mind. You have to make a list. Maybe start by making a list of what you can live with and what doesn’t matter. For me, personally, the things that matter are, “Is the job done on time to the best of our ability? Is the client happy?” If the answers yes, I don’t care if the person works 10 hours a week or 80 hours a week. Go to the dog park, enjoy the sunshine. See you later, as long as the job is done. We don’t even count hours.
As far as finding those people, we use several resources. Of course we use HubSpot to refer us. People who have experience with inbound marketing, Inbound.org has a new hiring portal on their website. We use oDesk and Freelance.
Although I will say that if we use something like oDesk to find team members, what we like to do is assign them a project and then if it goes well we assign them another project, and we have this trial period.
Our goal in using something like oDesk is to find somebody that can be a permanent part of our team through oDesk, not a one-off outsourced person. We have, let’s see, five or six people through oDesk that we’ve been working with for two years or more and they’re loyal and committed to us for the full term. That’s how we like to work.
My advice would be, A, start with making a list. What do you need? Then when you go to find them, utilize HubSpot, utilize Inbound.org, utilize oDesk, Freelance, LinkedIn, etc. Make sure your offer is motivating from what that person needs as well as what you need. When you can find a win/win, it makes life so much more fun. It makes it fun for both people involved.
Trent: Absolutely. Here’s some irony for you. I’m looking at Amazon as we’re talking about this. One of the little book suggestions along the bottom is a book by an internet friend of mine by the name of Chris Ducker. It’s called “Virtual Freedom: How to Work with Virtual Staff to Buy More Time, Become More Productive, and Build Your Dream Business.” You can get that on Amazon for like $9. Props out to you, Chris. I know you probably aren’t going to be listening to this, but if you are, there you go.
Rachel: There you go.
Trent: Well, Rachel, thank you so much for making some time to spend with me here on the show. If people want to get a hold of you, what is the one easiest way to do that?
Rachel: The easiest way to reach me on Twitter @RachelCogar and of course my website is Puma Creative. You can Google me and I’m there. It’s been my pleasure, Trent. Thank you for having me. I’ll send you some documents that we discussed that you can include out to the listeners. If you need me for more conversation or collaboration, please feel free to reach out.
Trent: Oh, I will definitely be doing that. Thank you again so much for making the time today.
Rachel: My pleasure. Have a great week.
Trent: To get to the show notes for this episode go to BrightIdeas.co/140. If you enjoyed this episode, which I sure hope you did because I know I sure did, I’d love it if you help me to spread the word very easily. All you need to do is go to BrightIdeas.co/love where there’s a prepopulated tweet awaiting of your mouse. It couldn’t be easier, could it?
That’s it for this episode. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. I hope to have you back for another one which will be available in just a day or two. That’s it. Take care. We’ll see you again. Bye-bye.
About Rachel Cogar
Rachel Cogar, the Founder and CEO of Puma Creative, a HubSpot Gold Certified International Consultancy, is a progressive-thinking, profit-driven inbound marketer who isn’t afraid to try something new. Always on the cutting edge of innovation and best practice, Rachel is revered as a thought leader AND a doer in the field of business strategy, communications and inbound marketing. Rachel and her team consult and coach clients across the world to perform at optimal levels for lead generation and demand generation marketing. Rachel is the author of The Inbound Marketing Worldview, the up and coming business book that describes the belief system we have about consumerism and how our worldview affects our behavior as marketers.
Rachel’s ambition and her ability to think “bigger” attracts CEOs and marketing teams who can see past tradition and want to be remarkable. Her passion for remarkability is dynamic and infectious, and continues to guide clients and their marketing teams to great success. Rachel believes that *sometimes* the rules truly do not apply – that is, the rules we’ve always known – but have never questioned. Question the rules; question the norm; and always look for ways to be remarkable.
Since writing a post about how I’m planning to grow my agency, Groove Digital Marketing, into my next 7 figure success story, the feedback I’ve received from readers has been very positive. Thank you to those of you who shared the post, commented on it, or emailed me directly. Your feedback is very encouraging.
In today’s post, as promised, I’m going to give you a look over my shoulder for the past week and share with you what I did, as well as the results we achieved. If you missed last week’s post, you can find it here.
As always, my hope is that my transparency with you can be the fuel you need to achieve similar results in your own business. Sound good? Here we go!
Key Activities in the Week of June 9th, 2014
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
We published 2 blog posts (it was supposed to be 3)
We received payment from our big client and started working on their project
We signed another new client to a $3,000 monthly retainer
Another podcast guest is looking to become a client
I started using a new tool to promote content on LinkedIn
I started to plan a joint webinar with a successful author
I sent out 50 emails using my LinkedIn strategy and a new spreadsheet I’ve created
One of our proposals didn’t get accepted (and why)
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
Regular readers will have noticed that we’ve reduced the number of posts that we are publishing each week. The reason for this because, according to data from Hubspot, it’s key to get to 51 posts as fast as possible. Once you do, leads generated actually go up a fair amount. In our case, that is pretty much what happened.
Going forward, our plan is to publish 3 posts per week. The only reason it was just 2 this week was due to a miscommunication on my part.
We Received a Check for $14,000
Remember the big client that I told you we landed a few weeks ago? This week we received payment and started the work.
So why am I bothering to include what appears to be such a trivial fact in my update? In my first company, I was foolish enough to start work and then invoice the client when the work was done. Then, I waited another 30+ days to get paid. From a cash flow perspective, that s-u-c-k-s.
With Groove, we bill our clients in advance. When ask by the new (big) client what are payment terms were, I told them “we bill in advance” and they both started laughing. “Seriously…what are your payment terms?” they asked again.
“We bill in advance.”
They still didn’t believe me. So I repeated it again and they said, “ok.”
My point is this: if you don’t ask, you won’t get.
Getting paid after the work is done is very risky, especially if you have staff or sub-contractors to pay before hand. Most people bill after the work is done because they are too chicken to ask a new client for the money up front.
Just ask. You have nothing to lose and a LOT to gain.
We Signed a $3,000/mo Retainer Client
On Tuesday, we received a $3,000 payment from another new client. This client found our content some time ago and has been steadily consuming it ever since. On May 30th, they completed the web form for our Bottom of Funnel offer (a free consultation to talk about our Inbound Marketing Game Plan). On June 5th, when we talked, they told me that they’d really been enjoying my podcast, and knew that we could help them to solve their challenges.
Given that they already knew so much about us (thanks to our content), the first scoping call was like a conversation with someone I knew well, and a day or two later, their order came in. First phase is to create their Inbound Marketing Game Plan. Once that is done, we are going to set them up on HubSpot (they are also using Infusionsoft, thanks seeing a lot of my content on it), and once that is done, we’ll be helping them to publish and promote their blog posts.
My Podcast Strikes Again!
A few weeks ago I recorded an interview with a CEO who expressed interest in becoming a client. Since then, we’ve exchanged a few emails and I’ve told them how much it costs. He emailed me again to schedule a time for his team and I to talk about it more next week. With a little luck, when I write next week’s update, we’ll have yet another client.
The New Tool I’m Using for Promoting Content to LinkedIn Groups
Last week I started using a new tool called Oktopost to promote my content on LinkedIn. So far, I’ve found the tool to be excellent for a number of reasons:
It has features that no other tool (that I know of) has
I can connect more than one LinkedIn profile
I can pre-schedule my shares
The analytics on which post and which groups are producing traffic is EXCELLENT
In the video below, I give you a very brief overview of the app. If you like what you see, go sign up for a free 30 day trial (affiliate link) and Valerie from Oktopost will reach out to you to give you a one-on-one training session.
I Started to Plan a Webinar with a Past Podcast Guest
One of my past guests is a very smart guy by the name of Ian Altman. Ian is the author of a VERY good book called Same Side Selling that I have found to be among the most helpful books on the topics of sales that I have ever read. I strongly recommend you get it.
Given that Ian is a sales guy and I’m a marketing guy with two decades of sales experience, we get along pretty well. About a week or so ago, I reached out to Ian to ask him if he’d like to do a webinar together as a lead generator. He was immediately on board and our webinar is scheduled for June 26th at 3pm EST. Click here to register.
The reason for a joint webinar is this: two minds are better than one, plus, Ian and I will each benefit from getting exposure to each other’s audience. If you haven’t yet done a joint webinar, or even a solo webinar, what are you waiting for? Just ask someone you respect.
LinkedIn + Pocasting for Lead Generation
In my last few updates, I’ve talked a lot about how I’m using LinkedIn for lead generation. As I have been using the platform, I have been continually tweaking my approach and think I have finally figured out the combination of minimum effort / maximum results.
When I originally started using LinkedIn, I wrote a detailed post about what I was doing here. Since then, the only significant change that I’ve made is that I no longer email the top 4 execs in a company. Now, I just sent a connection request to the CMO. Then, when that request is accepted, I sent them another email (via LinkedIn) to invite them to speak to me about being a guest on my podcast.
Below is a screenshot of the spreadsheet I used to track all my activity. It’s not glorious by any stretch; however, as I explained last week, this isn’t really a scalable activity, so the spreadsheet need not be anything super fancy.
As you can see in the 3rd column (called Person #1), once the person has accepted my LinkedIn connection request, I change the color of the cell with their name in it to green. I then send them a LinkedIn email to invite them onto my podcast.
The subject line of that email is: I’d like to talk to you about being a guest on my podcast.
The body of the email says:
I’m in the process of producing a podcast series to talk with marketing executives about what types of digital marketing strategies are working best for tech companies and would like to talk to you about being a guest on my show.
If you are interested, all we’d need to do is arrange a chat for about 10 minutes to see if you’d be a good fit for the show. Interested?
– Trent Dyrsmid
PS. There is no charge to be a guest. Show info: http://groovedigitalmarketing.com/guest
So far, 21% of the people I invite say yes to a pre-interview.
You will also notice a few columns titled, Touch 1, Touch 2, Touch 3, etc… (there are a total of 6 touches). The reason for this is because I want a visual way of reminding myself when I last contact them and what I said (indicated by color code)
The real goal here is to get on the phone with a CMO with the least amount of effort. The podcast invitation paves the way for that. When they reply and say they’d like to be considered as a guest, I do a 15 minute phone call with them to do the “pre-interview” and during this interview, I’m easily able to qualify them as a good prospect or not.
This is by far the best cold email strategy that I have ever tried. If you don’t yet have a podcast, get one. If you don’t know how to get started, read this post.
Once the interview is recorded, I get it transcribed and attach all that text to the post. When I was doing 3+ interviews a week, this got too expensive, so I stopped getting the transcriptions. However, now that I’m producing fewer episodes, I plan to resume posting the transcription…plus, I’m going to have our content manager chop up the transcription into several blog posts. I may also created some ebooks, and maybe even some paid products with all the content that is produced by these interviews.
Voila…high quality original content at a very low cost.
The Proposal That Didn’t Get Accepted
I first wrote about this opportunity here. Thanks to DocSend, I was able to see that my prospect spent quite a bit of time reading my proposal.
When someone spends a lot of time reading it, that is generally a pretty good sign, so why did I get an email that said:
Trent,
I hope your weekend went well.
Thanks for the proposal, I really appreciate it and the time you spent with Jennifer and I on Friday. We are however, in a holding pattern right now concerning the Hubspot decision. We are still looking at several particulars before we move ahead with that decision. So, for now we will pass on using your services. Once things change I’ll revisit the proposal and let you know if/when we are ready to move forward.
All the best,
When I received this email, I was really shocked. I thought for sure we had the deal.
I wanted to know what happened, so I picked up the phone and called them. Turns out a buyer has emerged for the company, so all spending on new initiatives has been put on hold! Drat.
At least I know what we “would” have got the deal (unless the buyer isn’t being honest with me about the M&A talks…which I don’t think is the case).
If you liked this post and want future updates on our progress with how to start a marketing agency, just click the image below. If you’d like to get even more help and surround yourself with other agency owners, be sure and check out the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite, which is my mastermind group for entrepreneurs running marketing agencies.
Hey, thanks for the info. Now what?
If you need any help with content creation, we have tons of free resources to get you over the hump. Please subscribe to this blog to ensure that you never miss an article.
If you really enjoyed this post, please help us to spread the word by clicking one of the social media sharing buttons.
Thanks so much!
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/groove-weekly-update-post-header.jpg281686Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-17 10:03:532018-08-01 18:42:47Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results Week of June 9th
Inbound vs outbound marketing. Which is a better use of your time?
I had the opportunity recently to interview 2 CEO’s who were both running very successful businesses and taking very different approaches to lead generation.
One CEO focused on inbound marketing, the other on outbound marketing. Which marketing method is a better use of your time if you are just getting started and don’t have the momentum from having an established content marketing strategy in place?
This podcast discusses the pros and cons of each approach as well as a hybrid approach.
(01:38) Introduction
(02:05) Inbound or Outbound?
(03:15) The case for inbound
(05:20) The case for outbound
(09:35) Our hybrid approach
For more episodes from myself and other successful business professionals, subscribe now and don’t miss out on future shows.
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Create-Content-or-Prospect-via-LinkedIn.png469690Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-16 06:00:042020-09-16 04:28:15Create Content or Prospect via LinkedIn: Which is a Better Use of Time?
Are you a new agency owner? Do you have an agency that’s been around a while but isn’t growing?
In today’s episode I interview Drew McLellan. Drew has owned a marketing agency for almost 20 years, and has revenue of over $2.5 million per year. He is also the founder of the Agency Management Institute which advises other small and medium size agencies on how to increase profitability.
Drew has found that many agency owners start out because they are really good at a particular marketing craft. Once they go from being a practitioner to an owner, they find themselves swimming in waters of overwhelm dealing with all the things they don’t know. Listen in for powerful advice on growing a successful agency by focusing on the mechanics of the business.
We finish off the interview talking about how to crowd source books which can be a huge boon to your business.
Listen now and you’ll hear Drew and I talk about:
(03:00) Introduction
(05:00) What type of agencies do you work with?
(07:00) What advice would you give to new agency owners?
(12:00) How should a solo agency owner make the the transition to team building?
(16:00) Should agencies focus more on inbound or outbound?
(27:30) Why is having processes so important for agency owners?
(33:00) How does one crowd source a book?
(39:00) How many authors contributed to each book?
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Drew McLellan has worked in advertising for 25+ years and started his own agency, McLellan Marketing Group in 1995 after a five-year stint at Y&R.
He also owns and runs Agency Management Institute (AMI), which offers agency management training, consulting and facilitates agency owner peer networks for small to mid sized agencies (advertising, digital, marketing, media and PR) so they can increase their AGI by at least 25%, attract better clients and employees and best of all — exceed the agency owner’s life/financial goals.
Drew’s agency was a member of the organization for years before Drew acquired AMI and began to run it full-time.
He launched his agency’s blog in 2006 and it has been on the AdAge Top 150 from the list’s inception. His first book, 99.3 Random Acts of Marketing, was published in 2003 and Drew and Australian marketer Gavin Heaton created the Age of Conversation series of crowdsourced books in 2007. To date, the AOC series has raised over $50,000 for charity. Drew launched the AMR blog in 2012 and hopes it will be a great resource to agency leaders.
Drew’s often interviewed/quoted in Entrepreneur Magazine, New York Times, CNN, BusinessWeek, and many others. The Wall Street Journal calls him “one of 10 bloggers every entrepreneur should read.”
When he’s not hanging out with agency owners/staff, Drew spends time with his family and pondering why the Dodgers can’t seem to get back to the World Series.
Drew has a Master’s Degree from the University of Minnesota but alas, he cannot remember their fight song.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Drew-McLellan.jpg7202200Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-09 06:00:392020-09-18 06:58:31Agency Veteran Drew McLellan on How to Increase Agency Profitability
Since writing a post about how I’m planning to grow my agency, Groove Digital Marketing, into my next 7 figure success story, the feedback I’ve received from readers has been very positive. Thank you to those of you who shared the post, commented on it, or emailed me directly. Your feedback was very encouraging.
In today’s post, as promised, I’m going to give you a look over my shoulder for the past two weeks (I was just too swamped to write last week’s post) and share with you what I did, as well as the results we achieved. If you missed last week’s post, you can find it here.
As always, my hope is that my transparency with you can be the fuel you need to achieve similar results in your own business. Sound good? Here we go!
Key Activities in the Weeks of May 26th and June 2nd, 2014
During the past two weeks, here’s a summary of what happened:
We published 10 blog posts
I began to pro-actively use LinkedIn to prospect for large clients
Met with a new prospect (from LinkedIn)
Sent proposal with DocSend (very cool new tool!)
Target 100 direct mail update
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
In this post, I go into detail on how I’m using LinkedIn to prospect and promote my content in a non-scalable way. Why am I doing something that doesn’t scale? Well, as Paul Graham wrote here, when you are just starting out, you need to focus on activities that allow you to have one-on-one conversations with actual prospective customers.
The reason that this is so important is because you need to get the real-time feedback on what you are saying (your sales message), so that, later on, when you make use of more automated marketing systems, you already know that your message is on point.
Plus, as good as Inbound Marketing is, you can seriously speed up your results with some direct outreach. Most of what I describe in the post is handled by my VA. I simply deal with the replies as they come in.
I’m happy to say that this particular strategy has yielded results pretty quickly. Of the 59 people on my suspect list so far, 25% of them accepted my connection request, and 20% of those people replied to my email. One of them, the CMO of a 50 person company, bought me lunch today – and it looks like they might sign up as a client within a week or so.
My next step is to send the proposal that they’ve asked me for. Normally, I’d do up a proposal in a PDF and send it over and wait. Now, thanks to DocSend, I can get a LOT more insight as to what is happening with my proposal once I send it.
Gains Valuable Insight into Who Read My Proposal Thanks To DocSend
One of the things I hate most about sending a proposal is that I can never get much information on who is looking at it, how often or how long they spend looking at it, and who else they send it to.
With Docsend, you don’t send a PDF attachment. Instead, I sent a DocSend link. DocSend provides analytics, feedback, and control for documents you send. You’ll get to see how much time each person looked at each page and who it was forwarded to. You can also update and restrict access to your documents at any time, even after you’ve sent it.
For a free account, and to skip the beta line, use the referral code ‘groove’ at DocSend.com (it’s free)
Direct Mail Update
My direct mail campaign was a total flop. Aside from the two calls that I got in the first week, I have not received a single response to the campaign. I even did a test run of 20 follow up calls. I never got one live person, left 20 messages, and never heard back.
I’m sure that if I hammered away on the phone and made hundreds of calls, I would have got through…and maybe even landed a client…but I HATE cold calling, so I didn’t do it.
Traffic & Leads
What’s Coming Next Week?
In next week’s update, I plan to:
Share the results of my prospecting and a spreadsheet I’ve built to track and manage my outreach
Share a new tools that I’ve found for helping me get more eyeballs on my content on LinkedIn
If you liked this post and want future updates on our progress with how to start a marketing agency, just click the image below. If you’d like to get even more help and surround yourself with other agency owners, be sure and check out the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite, which is my mastermind group for entrepreneurs running marketing agencies.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/groove-weekly-update-post-header.jpg281686Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-06 14:28:462018-08-01 18:42:48Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results for May 26th to June 6th
Hi Trent, and thank you for accepting my invitation.
How can you help? OMG, do you have a comfortable chair?
It may be best in a phone call. In brief, we are not on the same page (people at my own company) when it comes to social media.
When we push too many emails to the sales force and determine few even open the information, our solution is to send the information next day air because the emails are not being read. My bet is soon they will not open the next day air letters so we will change to carrier pigeons. Um, what about sending more valuable content? Nah, that can’t be it.
Our social media content does not get enough views so now they want to change the time of day to a optimal time. Argh! How about we send valuable content?
Your article was like a breath of fresh air, validation for what I have been saying.
I need to see how I can incorporate you, or your company, into a presentation.
I need to be upfront. At this time, the company is committed to another, outsourced social media company. In my opinion, our efforts have not been very social.
https://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/How-to-Use-LinkedIn-to-Make-Meaningful-Connections-BI.png301682Trent Dyrsmidhttps://brightideas.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Bright-Ideas-logo-1030x255.pngTrent Dyrsmid2014-06-05 06:00:242018-08-01 18:42:48How to Use LinkedIn to Make Meaningful Connections with Qualified Prospects
We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.
Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.
Essential Website Cookies
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.
Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.
We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.
We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.
Other external services
We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.
Google Webfont Settings:
Google Map Settings:
Google reCaptcha Settings:
Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:
Privacy Policy
You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
Graig Presti, founder and CEO of LocalSearchForDentists.com, is a foremost advertising authority who operates with dental practices all around the planet, assisting them to leverage the internet so they can generate more telephone calls, reach more new patients, and bring in more revenue. His strategies begin to work immediately and continue to work month after month.
Drew has found that many agency owners start out because they are really good at a particular marketing craft. Once they go from being a practitioner to an owner, they find themselves swimming in waters of overwhelm dealing with all the things they don’t know. Listen in for powerful advice on growing a successful agency by focusing on the mechanics of the business.
