Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results for Week of April 7th
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:
- Did a conference call with our new client to go over design option for their new site
- Reviewed and finalized the Target 100 list of suspects
- Wrote all the sales letters the Target 100 direct mail campaign
- Created an improve landing page for the Target 100 campaign
- 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:
- There is a big opportunity in manufacturing, or
- 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:
- Magnifying glass
- Pill bottle
- Shredded money
- Trash can
- Dice
- Army men
- Message in a bottle
- Decoder Pen
- 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:
- Provide more value
- 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
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.
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