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!

Key Activities in the Week of May 12th, 2014

During the past two weeks, here’s a summary of what happened:

1. We landed a $3.2 billion dollar company as a new client!
2. We published 6 blog posts
3. I created a process to support the cold email lead generation that has been working so well for me
4. Set up lead scoring and social monitoring in HubSpot
5. Created a Wiki for our in-house training material

Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.

We Landed a $3.2B Client

I’m very happy to report that we had a very big win this week. Remember the referral that I wrote about in my last week’s update? On Wednesday, I received an email from them that started with….

Hello Trent, 

I am delighted to report that we are a go! We’d like to begin the project in June and I will be the point person on our side.  I will send the agreement to our legal department for review of terms and barring any modifications needed, will sign and return.

I’ve copied Sue to let her know where we are in the communication and [name withheld] of finance for guidance on invoicing and payment. Wendy, you’ll find the proposal and payment terms for Option One (non-retainer) attached.  

Now that is my kind of email!

The important take away from this is that this referral would have never happened had I not spent the last two years building my personal brand online by publishing post after post, after post. Luck did not play a role.

If you aren’t yet blogging consistently, see what you are missing?

5 New Blog Posts

This week is the first week that we’ve been publishing a post per day on Groove, and as you will see down in the traffic numbers, more blog posts = more traffic. Here are this week’s posts:

• 4 Steps to Ensure Your Website Attracts Your Ideal Customer
• The 3 Best Blogs to Read to Master Content Marketing
• How to Measure the ROI for an Inbound Marketing Campaign Using HubSpot
• 4 Ways to Use Automation to Improve Your Customer Experience
• 3 Ways Content Marketing Can Help a Mortgage Company Attract More Clients

New Automated System to Support Cold Email Lead Generation

In last week’s report, I wrote about a new cold email system that I’ve been getting really incredible results from. There is a little bit of leg work needed (which you should outsource) to get the email addresses, but once you have them, you will be amazed by how well this works.

Unlike the instructions in the free cold email course I linked you to, I put on my “reporter” hat and contact companies to see if they would be interested in sharing their success story on my podcast, or in one of my posts.

Just watch this video to see how it all works.

I Set Up Lead Scoring in HubSpot

During one of this week’s calls with a client, I was asked if HubSpot did lead scoring. As I didn’t know the answer, as soon as the call was done, I looked into it and discovered that the functionality does indeed exist.

In the screenshot below is just a snippet of the scoring criteria that I created.

Once the score of a lead hits certain thresholds, I then created a rule that adds them to one of three lists within HubSpot.

Next, I created a stream that allows me to monitor what each of these people are saying on social media. I check this stream each morning to see if there is any way that I can add value to the conversation. If there isn’t, I don’t do anything.

We Created an Internal Wiki

In my opinion, the only way to scale a service company without killing yourself is to have detailed checklists and processes for everything you do. In the video below, I share with you what our content manager looks like and how it’s tied directly to our wiki, which his housed in a membership site that only our team has access to.

Traffic & Leads

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 unchanged from the previous week and new leads were up 13%.

Additional Resources

• See prior posts in this series
• Get my B2B Lead Generation Training Course
• Get a copy of my Digital Marketing Handbook

Now What?

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 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 Weeks of April 28th and May 5th, 2014

During the past two weeks, here’s a summary of what happened:

1. We had a baby! (hence my missing last week’s update)
2. We published 6 blog posts
3. Talked with a New Prospect (inbound lead)
4. Created a training video for our social media manager
5. We got a referral
6. Discovered a new outbound lead generation strategy
7. Results from direct mail
8. Scoping Call into Video
9. Note templates in Infusionsoft

Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.

We Had a Baby!

Our daughter, Kiana, has finally arrived. She was born on May 3rd at 1pm and has been doing her best to rob Liz and I of sleep ever since!

Meet Kiana!

As you might guess, Liz and I are pretty excited about her arrival and have been having all sorts of fun getting to know our little bundle of joy! Liz’s folks have also come by to spend the week with us, and as you can see below, Grandpa hasn’t been playing with more than just Kiana during his stay!

Grandpa taking Trent’s racing simulator for a spin

6 New Blog Posts

This week is the first week that we’ve been publishing a post per day on Groove, and as you will see down in the traffic numbers, more blog posts = more traffic. Here are this week’s posts:

• 6 Ways LinkedIn Can Help Grow Your Business
• How (And Why) to Define a Targeted Audience for Your Marketing Campaign
• How to Test the Viability of a Niche Without Wasting Valuable Time and Resources
• How to Stop Getting Ignored and Break Through the Clutter in Your Prospect’s Inbox
• Groove April 2014 Traffic Report
• 12 Ways to Get Personal Using Twitter

Talked With a New Prospect

On April 22 a woman named Tina (not her real name) found the Groove blog and downloaded one of our free reports. Capturing a lead in this fashion is something that happens about 5 times a day, and each time I receive the notification email from HubSpot, I take a look at the email address of the new lead to see what I can learn about them.

Most times, the address is from a gmail account, so there isn’t a lot I can glean from it (although using Rapportive definitely helps). However, in this case, the email address was not a gmail address. Instead it was from a health care company.

Bingo.

I quickly typed up a very short personal email asking her if she wanted to arrange a time to talk and she replied with a yes.

When we spoke, it quickly became apparent that they need, and can afford, what we do. She told me that they have a budget of $5,000/mo and that the current supplier had two months left in their contract. She also told me that they weren’t happy with the results.

After the call, I sent her the same email that I’ve shared in previous posts and I will continue to communicate with her over the next two months so as to give us the best chance possible of becoming the replacement for the current supplier. If you want to see how this turned out, just become a subscriber so you don’t miss future posts.

Social Media Manager Training Video

For the last month or so, I have been personally managing our social media accounts using HubSpot. Now that I have figured out exactly how many shares, when, and on what network, etc…I thought it was time to create a training video so that I could hand this task of to a member of our team.

The video below, which lives in our internal Wiki, has also been uploaded to Youtube just so that I could share it with you.

We Got a Referral

One of the long-time readers emailed me last week to say that she had a referral for us. From what I could tell prior to speaking with them, the lead looked well qualified.

A week after the introduction, we had our first conference call and to say they are well qualified is an understatement. Much to my delight, this is a marquee client doing $3.2B in annual revenue.

During the call, we talked extensively about their goals and how inbound marketing could help them to achieve this goals. By then end of a 60 minute call, I’d answered all their questions and told them that our fee would be $5,000/mo. They thought that sounded reasonable and asked me for a statement of work.

I’m never one to get too excited before I get paid, so I won’t do that here. They did indicate, however, that a decision would be made early next week and asked me if I had the capacity available to start work for them right away.

So why am I telling you about this? This is the kind of thing that happens when you create genuinely helpful content, so if you aren’t yet doing that, when are you going to start?

New Outbound Lead Generation Strategy

Another reader (Sebastian) wrote to thank me for writing this series of posts and in that email he also shared with me a cold email strategy that he’s been using with good success. Here’s what he wrote:

I did something VERY similar (to your Target 100 list) this week, but via email. I used the cold emailing template to email a target 100 list I made. I picked a particular segment of the market (they have $, they understand marketing, etc). I scraped emails from 2 specific sites. I’m getting a LOT of responses, and even though not everyone is interested I’m openinig conversations with many important people. 2 calls already scheduled for next week, in both cases i briefly described services AND stated starting prices BEFORE they agreed to talk.

The strategy he’s using is freely available here. For those of you who think that cold email is SPAM, you are wrong. If you follow these guidelines, you can email anyone you like. To get the email addresses, just hire a VA or spend some time Googling around. There are plenty of ways to do it.

Results from Direct Mail Campaign

In previous posts, I have written about how we are using 3 dimensional direct mail to reach out to a list of 100 suspects that fit the criteria of an ideal client. Each person on the list receives one letter per week, and each letter tells them to visit this page.

So far, we have received two phone calls, neither of which have become clients yet. None of the recipients has yet attempted to download the report.

While this might appear to be disappointing, it’s pretty much in line with my expectations. I figured we’d have to mail each person at least 5 times prior to getting any results.

If I had the time to make follow up calls, which I do plan to do, I have no doubt that we could have achieved more by now. My excuse? B-A-B-Y! With that said, the total cost of the entire campaign will be more than covered by just ONE client.

New Systems for Handling Leads and Scoping Calls

With all the content, direct mail, and email outreach that I’m doing, I quickly realized that I needed a consistent way to handle the leads that call me, as well as a way to ensure that the first sales calls (called ‘Scoping Calls’) are all handled in exactly the same way.

System for Leads

All the activity that I’m doing is producing conversations and in the video below, I’m going to show you how I’m using something called a Note Template in Infusionsoft to save me time and ensure that I handle the follow up and other important activities in a consistent fashion – so nothing ever falls through the cracks.

System for Scoping Calls

With more leads coming in the door, I find myself needing to do more scoping calls and as a result, I’ve realized that it was time to build a system for these calls so that they were done in a consistent fashion from prospect to prospect. Check out the video below to see how I’m using Infusionsoft and Slideshare to do this.

Traffic & Leads

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 31% from the previous week and new leads was up 46%. Suffice to say, it was a good week for these two metrics.

Results for week of April 28th

Additional Resources

• See prior posts in this series
• Get the Best Buyer Formula
• Get a copy of my Digital Marketing Handbook

Now What?

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.

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!

Key Activities in the Week of April 14th, 2014

During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:

1. We published 3 blog posts
2. We launched our Target100 direct mail campaign
3. I published another content marketing video
4. I created the plan for our next two TOFU campaigns
5. I started to research the health care niche
6. Added a new member to our team
7. Website traffic and leads climbed steadily

Now that you’ve seen, at a high level, what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.

3 New Blog Posts

Two of the following three posts were written by writers that we’ve hired to join our team. Within our wiki, we’ve created a very comprehensive set of instructions for how we want our posts written. The other post with the infographic didn’t really have much in the way of writing, so I did that one myself.

• WARNING: These 6 Mistakes Will Kill Your Blog
• 3 Reasons Why You Must Have a Mobile Friendly Website
• Winning with Content Marketing: 7 Key Ingredients

Mailed Letter #1 to the Target 100 List

On Friday, our first 100 letters were mailed. In next week’s report, I will share the results of this first mailing.

If you missed last week’s post, you will definitely want to read it so you can see the high level view of the 9 week long campaign.

New Video: Introduction to Inbound Marketing

After seeing a video by Andrew Dymski of Guavabox, I decided to create my own version of an Introduction to Inbound Marketing. This video will be sent to new Groove subscribers and the Target 100 list that download our lead magnet.

TOFU Campaign #2 & #3

Our next two inbound campaigns have already been planned in their entirety. Both lead ebooks are now in production. I’ve also selected all the titles for the blog posts and assigned them to our writing team.

Ideally, we’ll have all our content created at least 45 days prior to it being published. In addition to this pre-planned content, we’ll also be doing selective newsjacking like we did here (check out the volume of social shares we got).

Creating this post took one of our writers less than an hour, so it was time very well spent.

How to Plan Your Blog Posts

One of the things  I think stumps a lot of people is coming up with ideas for what to write about.

Figuring it out it much easier than you might think.

Several months ago, Neil Patel wrote a post that (basically) said the following: study your competitors blogs and re-write (and improve) any posts that got a lot of comments and shares.

For some diehards, this is too simple of an approach. Luckily for me, I’m much more interested in getting results than in being a purist :)

I’m the first to admit virtually everything I’ve ever written about has already been covered 50 times (or more) elsewhere. Despite this, when I publish my own post on a topic I’ve seen elsewhere, I still get plenty of shares on social media – and new leads.

Let me put this another way. Do you really think the there is anything on Copyblogger that you can’t find on Hubspot’s blog? I doubt it. Yet, despite this, both blogs are insanely successful.

If that’s not enough, last week I recorded an interview with an agency owner whose blog, which is just two years old, gets 35,000 visits a month.

When I asked him if he follows Neil’s advice, his answer was, “hell ya.”

So, with that in mind, here’s my dirty little secret on how to quickly & easily plan your blog post titles:

1. Create a spreadsheet to store them
2. Every time you see a post that covers a topic that relates to a lead magnet you have planned, re-write the title and store it in your spreadsheet with a link to the original post
3. Hire a writer to re-write (and look for ways to improve) the post
4. Publish it on your blog and aggressively share on social media

Voila…huge volumes of epic content that is guaranteed to be popular.

NOTE: FOR THIS TO WORK, YOU MUST BE TARGETING THE SAME READER AS THE OTHER BLOG AND YOU MUST NOT COPY THEIR CONTENT WORD FOR WORD. 

Health Care Niche Research

Another agency owner that I interviewed last week told me that he’s been having a lot of success in the health care niche. He told me that he can charge 4x the price for the same amount of work that he’d been doing for other niches.

4x? Really?

The reason for this is simple. The lifetime customer value (LTV) of the customers of his health care clients is extremely high, so his clients can (and expect) to pay a lot to acquire each customer.

At this point, I don’t know squat about the health care niche…and it’s a massive niche. To help me increase my knowledge, I’ve joined a number of LinkedIn groups and have started to extend invitations to CMO’s to be on my podcast.

In my experience, there is no better way to learn about a niche that to talk directly to the people in it.

Want to copy me but don’t have a podcast yet? Start one.

New Team Member

As I’m writing this very post, our newest team member, Juliana, is downstairs consuming our training material. Liz is only days away from giving birth to Kiana, so getting a replacement for Liz has been a huge priority.

Juliana has vast experience in writing and editing already, so I’m keen to see the contribution she makes to our growing team.

Case Study: Groove Digital Marketing Traffic and Conversion Stats

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 our results thus far.

Additional Resources

• See prior posts in this series
• Get the Best Buyer Formula
• Get a copy of my Digital Marketing Handbook

Now What?

If you liked this post and want future updates on our progress with how to launch 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.

Have questions or comments? Please share them with us 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 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 that I 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 April 7th, 2014

During the past week, I worked on the following things:

1. Did a conference call with our new client to go over design option for their new site
2. Reviewed and finalized the Target 100 list of suspects
3. Wrote all the sales letters the Target 100 direct mail campaign
4. Created an improve landing page for the Target 100 campaign
5. Created the Target 100 nurture sequence

Now that you’ve seen, at a high level, what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.

Call with New Client to Go Over Web Design

There isn’t really a whole lot to explain about this one. Myself, our client, and our lead web designer all did an online meeting for about an hour where my designer asked all sorts of questions about the client’s expectations for each type of page we’ll be created for them.

Once we have a mockup, we’ll show it to the client to get feedback. I will likely include a screenshot in a future weekly update as well.

Reviewed and Finalized the Target 100 List

I hadn’t really planned to write about this, however, a reader emailed me the following:

Personally I find that the toughest thing to do is not even the marketing of IT, is the list selection for prospecting.
You could add paragraph or two explaining exactly what’s your thought process and sources when you are building that initial list of prospects in Excel to mail/email stuff to.

My thought process isn’t overly complex for this. I start by creating a list that meets a few basic criteria:

• Industry (I chose Manufacturing and Financial Services)
• Revenue range (I chose $10-25M)

Next, I looked at the website of every company on the list. While painfully boring, it was insightful. For example, as a whole, the companies in Financial Services had substantially newer/better websites that the manufacturing companies.

There are two possible conclusions I could draw from this:

1. There is a big opportunity in manufacturing, or
2. Manufacturers don’t care much about marketing

Either of these conclusions could be true and the only real way to find out is to test them with the direct mail, which is exactly what I plan to do.

Wrote the Sales Letters for the Target 100 Campaign

The company that is handling direct mail for us is 3D Mail Results. And while their website kinda sucks (it’s ugly), they do have the items I need to get my mail sent.

After talking with Tara and Travis, I was told that they needed a copy of all the sales letters that I want them to send out each week. Easy enough to do. I simply created a google doc with all the letters in it.

The sequence of the letters is:

1. Magnifying glass
2. Pill bottle
3. Shredded money
4. Trash can
5. Dice
6. Army men
7. Message in a bottle
8. Decoder Pen
9. Round TUIT

You can find each one of these items on the 3D Mail Results site.

Below is the first letter that will be sent out with the magnifying glass. Below the image, I will explain a bit more about the sales copy.

The headline asks a very basic question that should resonate with someone who would be a fit for working with us. I phrased it as a question to get their internal voice to say “yes” and make them want to keep reading.

Up at the top (in red) the print is so small so that they will use the magnifying glass to read it. Just trying to have some fun here.

In the first paragraph (green), my goal is to get them interested in reading the next paragraph. When they are reading these questions, I’m hoping that their internal voice is saying, “no,” which would compel them to keep reading.

In the second paragraph (blue), I’m letting them know that I know something about them and I’m making my offer.

In the third paragraph (purple), I’m giving them some industry data to back up my implied claim that old-school marketing won’t give the ROI that online marketing will.

In the final (black) section, I’m making my offer once again in huge bold letters so they don’t miss it.

The thing to remember about this campaign is that each person is going to get one letter a week for nine weeks. Each letter will be tweaked only slightly so that it matches the 3D item that I’m including with it. The goal is to let the repetition of the letters, combined with the “fun” of the 3D item to eventually get them to call me.

With that said, out of 100 suspects, and 9 letters each, if I can land just one client, my ROI will be through the roof.

Created an Improved Landing Page

Back in last week’s report, I shared a screenshot of the landing page that I created. The more I looked at it, the more flaws that I saw and so I decided to re-create the new one below.

When a visitor completes this form, they will be redirected to a download page that includes a middle of funnel (MOFU) offer that is there to:

1. Provide more value
2. Separate the more qualified prospects from the less motivated

I don’t have that page done yet, so look for it in next week’s update.

Created the Target 100 Nurture Sequence

At this point, the nurture sequence consists of the following three emails. Each email links back to post on Groove’s site that will have another call-to-action offering the same (or another) MOFU offer.

Remember, the goal of nurturing a new lead is to get them to move further through your marketing funnel, and the best way to do that is to continue to educate them.

Email #1

Email #2

Email #3

Update: Our New Client On-Boarding Process in Basecamp

With Liz soon going on maternity leave, the importance of making sure we have documented processes for all of our client interactions has never been higher. To facilitate this process, I decided to give Basecamp a close look, and I have to admit that I’m super impressed so far! Learning how to use their app took me about 20 minutes. It’s dead simple. As soon as I understood how to use it, I set out to create a project template that we’ll use for every new client. In taking this approach, we have a few goals:

• Ensure that the on-boarding process is consistent, regardless of which person on our team executes it
• Create a way to track all client communications in one place so we can avoid hunting through inboxes for messages
• Create an easy way to link to our internal Wiki (where we keep all of our internal training material) from any part of the on-boarding process that requires specific instructions to be followed

I had previously promised to share some details on this, and, as many of your asked, here you go!

Additional Resources

• See prior posts in this series
• Get the Best Buyer Formula
• Get a copy of my Digital Marketing Handbook

Now What?

If you liked this post, and want future updates on our progress with how to launch 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.

Have questions or comments? Please share them with us in the comments below.

[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]