Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results Week of July 7th
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 (there was no post for the week of June 30th because I took most of the week off as part of the July 4th long weekend).
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? Let’s get into it.
Key Activities in the Week of July 7th, 2014
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
- Since my last update, we published 16 blog posts
- We launched the Groove Digital Marketing Podcast
- We submitted a guest post to Social Media Examiner
- We did two more discovery calls
- We submitted one proposal
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
16 New Blog Posts
You can find them all here. 10 of the posts were for podcast episodes as we have now launched the Groove Digital Marketing podcast.
Why another podcast? Simple…two podcasts in iTunes doubles my chances of being found, plus, now that the podcast is such a big part of my prospecting strategy, I felt it was important for it to have the same brand name as the agency to avoid confusion.
Guest Post Submission to Social Media Examiner
SME publishes a new post every day, and virtually every single one of them is contributed by writers like myself.
The goal here is to expose our content to people that don’t yet know we exist, and SME is just one of the blogs that we are going to test to see if we can attract more of the right people. (I’m sure we’ll get traffic…but I don’t yet know if it’s the right traffic.)
After reading GrooveHQ’s post on guest blogging, I felt that this was something that I really needed to stop procrastinating on. The strategy that we are following (in terms of the landing page) is exactly the same as what GrooveHQ did.
To build relationships with higher traffic blogs, I’m extending invitations to them to be a guest on my podcast.
Two More Discovery Calls
In case you aren’t familiar with the term, a discovery call is the very first sales call that I do with a sales qualified lead (SQL).
SQL #1 is a firm that HubSpot referred to us. They are a 25 employee company up in Toronto that makes a technical product that is used by large corporations and the government. HubSpot referred them because they were looking for an agency that could assist them with ongoing content production.
SQL #2 is a 60 person accounting firm from Kansas. They didn’t fill out a form on my site. Instead, they just called me. When they called they told me that they’d been listening to my podcast for quite a while and were convinced that I could help them to increase their lead flow in a specific niche they are targeting.
For both of the calls above, I focused on asking questions to gain an understanding of the issues that they are trying to deal with, the impact that these issues were having, and the importance of those issues relative to all the other things they are working on right now. If you would like to learn more this type of sales process, buy this book by Ian Altman. It’s worth far more than the $9.31 you’ll pay for it.
Once I was satisfied that they had issues I could help them with, I asked them to supply me with:
- A list of their top 3 competitors
- Their current monthly website traffic
- The average lifetime value of a customer
I then scheduled another call with each of them so that I could give them my inbound marketing presentation, which I customize each time to include the data that they supplied to me. (We scheduled the second call while we were still on the phone for the first call.)
New Proposal Submitted
One of the people that has been a guest on my show runs a $3M company and since we recorded the episode, we’ve been talking about helping them with inbound marketing. We’ve submitted a proposal and are now waiting on the decision. If they proceed, the retainer will be at least $3,000/mo.
If all goes as planned, we should have an answer during the week of July 14th.
Traffic & Leads
Here’s a summary of this week over last.
Last week I wrote that we saw impressive gains on all KPIs in June. Here’s the summary. We saw very strong gains across all KPIs. I attribute much of these outsized gains to the webinar that we did on June 28th. I’m hoping to do another before July is over.
Marketing Agency Duel: The Race to $20,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue
Just in case you missed it in prior updates, 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
Additional Resources
- See prior posts in this series
- Get my B2B Lead Generation Training Course
- Get a copy of my Digital Marketing Handbook
What Questions Do You Have?
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!
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.
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