Non-podcast blog posts.
Hello BrightIdeas.co readers!
My name is Drew, and I am Trent’s competition in the “Race for $20K” agency challenge. I thought I’d focus this week’s update — my first — on who I am and what I am trying to do. That way you all will know who the guy is who is kicking Trent’s ass all over western Idaho after beating him over the head with a sack of potatoes.
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!
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
Yet another podcast guest has expressed interest in working with Groove to help them with their inbound marketing. This company is a very successful agency; however, content marketing has thus far not played a huge role in their success.
They’d like to change that, and so we booked a call to talk about options.
It’s too early to tell the outcome just yet; however, I’m fairly sure they are going to retain us for some kind of ongoing help with their content marketing. With that said, having had two other agencies get excited about content marketing, and then not follow through, I’m really not sure how this one will turn out.
At the end of our meeting, they told me that budget was not the issue and they were very likely to proceed in some capacity. Look for an update next week.
Since creating my Target100 list, I have been very hands on with the prospecting and have invested quite a number of hours into sending LinkedIn requests, one-off emails, and tweets.
Now that I have tested a number of strategies and found that podcast invitations seem to work the best to get conversations started, I have handed the ask off to my VA.
What a time saver!
Now, all I have to do is reply to the people who accept my invitation for a pre-interview.
Like I have said before, if you’ve not yet started a podcast, there is no better prospecting tool on the planet.
Once per month I hold an online meeting for the Bright Ideas Elite Mastermind and last week I held our most recent meeting. Our special guest was Rachel Cogar and she spent 80 minutes answering questions from myself and the other members of the group.
Rachel has built a very successful 7 figure agency that allows here to earn a very nice six figure income; all while working from home and raising her kids. Impressive!
If you’d like to apply to join our mastermind, you can do that here. It costs $179/month.
After reading a post on Michael Hyatt’s blog about creating a daily routine, I decided that my routine needed a tune up. Since Kiana was born, I’d been sleeping in more than usual (due to a lack of sleep!) and now that she’s sleeping most of the night, I felt it was time for me to resume waking up at 5:30am.
If you’d like to see my current routine, check it out here. Over the years, many people have written to me to ask how I get so much done, and I will tell you that this routine, combined with the help of my team, is how I do it.
On June 26th, Ian and I hosted our webinar and out of 230 registrants, 90 people showed up. If you haven’t hosted a webinar before, you might be surprised to see that the “show rate” was just 39%. This is actually slightly higher than normal, as far as webinars go.
There are a number of reasons why so few show up. Some people only register so they can get access to the replay, some people’s schedules & moods change, and some people like to register for just about every webinar they are ever invited to, even though they know they probably won’t attend.
Content-wise, I thought the webinar was excellent and quite a number of people emailed afterwards to say as much. However, I think one of the mistakes that I made was to host it in the afternoon. Being as I’m such an early riser, my energy is usually much lower in the afternoon than it is in the morning.
One of the unexpected benefits of the webinar was this email:
Trent,
I was able to attend a conference call last week hosted by you and Ian Altman (Discover How to Make Clients Chase You).
As you know, a banker’s services are highly commoditized. It seems that everyone has the same thing, and says the same thing. Distinction is a challenge. Regulations play a part in this, and they also limit communication avenues, and make selecting clients tricky.
Economic reports are starting to reflect what I have seen firsthand this year. I entered the year with a full pipeline comprised of walk-in clients and prospects. However, the flow quickly tapered by the end of the first quarter, and is dry now.
Now I’m in the position of being on the “hunt” for new clients to refill the pipeline, keep a steady flow, and grow my book. As I am not simply tending to walk-ins, I want to be effective by being selective. I have been spending time every day trying to get better at reaching those prospects that I believe I can best serve.
Your call was very helpful, so I have been looking for more information from you – hence my prying around on your profile. I have shared with others in my company the things I have learned from you, including the article you posted on LinkedIn, How (and why) to Define a Targeted Audience for your Marketing Campaign. Some have asked if the webinar I attended was recorded and if others could view it, so far I’ve not seen that it is available.
If you are looking for corporate clients like the bank I work for, Columbia Bank, I would be happy to do my best to make introductions.
As you might guess, I wrote back and told him that I’d love any introductions that he’d care to make. Below is the reply that I got a few minutes ago:
I am working on the bank side of things now to try to coordinate an introduction for you. Respecting your time, and the time of our folks, I want to get you to the best person possible. It may take a few days to nail this part down.
You didn’t miss anything, CB does not have a blog, at least one that I’m aware of. We do have a Twitter account, but I ‘m not sure how effectively it is being used. We actually have people assigned to “social media,” but I really believe we are missing the boat still. These are the folks I would like you to meet.
I’ll be in touch again soon.
Thanks!
The lesson here is this: the production and distribution of genuinely helpful content rarely goes un-rewarded, so get on it and start producing helpful content today!
Here in Idaho, we are surround by beautiful country and to celebrate our first anniversary, Liz and I booked a cabin up at a place called Redfish Lake. We first discovered Redfish back on our honeymoon, so it was pretty cool to go back a year later.
To say that Redfish is a beautiful place is an understatement!
Thanks to a webinar we held on June 26th, new leads this past week were up quite a bit. For the month of June overall, the increase has been huge. Look for a full report in the June traffic report.
Just in case you missed it last week, I have challenged my friend Drew Sanocki to a marketing agency duel where we are literally going to race each other to $20,000 a month in retainer income. You can get all the details in last week’s update here.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:58 — 20.8MB)
Subscribe: RSS
If you have questions about this post, or anything to do with marketing, please leave them in the comments down below. That way, I can look at the most commonly asked questions and write detailed blog posts on these topics in the future. If you don’t ask questions, it’s much harder for me to come up with ideas to write about, so please don’t be shy!
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.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
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.
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.
When it comes to researching and connecting with your target audience, there are several strategies that I suggest you use. They include:
Conduct research on:
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:
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.
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:
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:
To host the survey, I suggest you use Survey Monkey.
The goal of my conversations is to gain an understanding of:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
Side Note: Check out this post on How To Know What To Write About.
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
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.
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.
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.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
How often do you get to the end of a day and think, “where did all the time go?”
For me, it used to happen all too frequently, and each time it happened, it left me with an unproductive feeling that I didn’t enjoy.
Sound familiar?
I am a creature of habit.
If I don’t have a routine for something, it most likely won’t get done.
Here’s how I organize my day:
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.
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”]
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!
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
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 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.
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.
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.”
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 :)
Thanks to a webinar we are holding on June 26th, new leads this past week were up quite a bit.
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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:58 — 20.8MB)
Subscribe: RSS
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.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
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!
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
Rather than list out all the posts, just head over to Groove’s blog to have a look.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
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!
During the past two weeks, here’s a summary of what happened:
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
Rather than list out all 10 posts, just head over to Groove’s blog to have a look.
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.
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.
Thanks to DocSend, that problem is over!
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)
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.
In next week’s update, I plan to:
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.
Are you looking for a systematic way for your sales team to generate qualified leads using social media? If so, you are not alone.
Earlier today, I had the pleasure of receiving an email from a guy named Doug, who’d read one of the most popular articles I’ve ever written.
Here’s what Doug wrote to me:
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.
Call me when it works for you Trent.
Welcome to my May Traffic Report. To see April’s report, click here.
Traffic generation is a challenge faced by every entrepreneur. At Bright Ideas we’ve made a habit of publishing our traffic reports as a means of giving insight into how we are doing, what is working, and what isn’t. Additionally, writing the report forces me to look at what’s going on! If you think this is helpful, please be sure and share this post.
The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer what we want to know most each month.
When you are doing your own analysis, be sure you start with your own top questions. Ours include:
Here’s what I found for May…
For the month of May, we continues our focus on Groove Digital Marketing agency activities, and the result was traffic numbers very similar to the previous month.
Conclusion #1: Overall traffic numbers were very similar in April and May.
We had slightly lower subscriber numbers for May. Given that we had roughly the same amount of traffic both months, this might not make sense at first glance. However, a closer analysis shows that much of our social traffic in May came from StumbleUpon, much more so than in April, and therefore a higher portion of traffic overall. As I mentioned in last month’s report, this traffic was due to a very popular post (The Dumbest LinkedIn Mistake I See Over and Over Again) going viral on StumbleUpon; however, much of the traffic that came from it was fairly low-quality and didn’t spend much time on the site.
Conclusion #2: Overall subscribers were down slightly from April.
Here’s where Google Analytics showed my traffic coming from:
Google Analytics reports the largest portion of our traffic coming from social; in fact more than twice the number that typed in the URL directly or accessed our site due to emails we sent to our subscribers. We did receive over 600 visits due to organic search, which is almost 50% greater than average (which is closer to 400).
Google has made it more difficult to see where this traffic is coming from (thanks to “keyword not provided”), but from what data we can see it’s possible that some specifically targeted posts we created in February and March may be providing the traffic.
Some of the social traffic that was reported was due to a post going viral on StumbleUpon, which began to happen in March and bled over into April and May (we reported this in more detail in our March Traffic report).
Conclusion #3: In May we received a significant amount of traffic from social media.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
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 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!
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
Kids grow like weeds. Kiana’s body weight has increased by 13% in just two weeks. Wow!
Here’s a few pics of our little darling (yes, I know pics of Kiana has nothing to do with this post…but I just couldn’t help myself!)
At the ripe “old” age of 23 days, Kiana has already been on a number of adventures; a train ride and boating among them. As you can see, she didn’t think too much of boating. Or maybe she just didn’t like the color of the life jacket?
Here are this week’s posts:
As you may recall, when I fist launched Groove’s site, it looked very similar to a friend of mine’s because he’d sold me a copy of his basic look/feel. Given that the site got zero traffic back then, I wasn’t interested in spending days to design my site and write basic content.
Now that, thanks to our blogging, traffic has taken off, so I knew it was time to give the site the attention that it needed to better convey our message, as well as to look different than Robb’s site.
If you’d like to see the new look, head over and check it out.
The more landing pages you have, the more leads you will capture, and in order to have more landing pages, I needed more eBooks to offer as leads. The following eBooks are now in the works:
All of these ebooks will each have a landing page of their own as well as be listed on our Resources page (not yet completed).
Since my decision just over a month ago to begin actively blogging on Groove, the results have come very quickly. Below is a summary of the activity over the last week. As you can see, traffic was up 16% from the previous week and new leads were up 12%. Go team! :)
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.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]