Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results For Week of May 12

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.

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10 New Blog Posts

Rather than list out all 10 posts, just head over to Groove’s blog to have a look.

LinkedIn for Lead Generation

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.

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)

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

Additional Resources

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.