Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results for Week of March 17th
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.
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 March 17, 2014
During the week of March 17th, I worked on the following things:
- Created a Content Marketing Blueprint to be used as our 90 day content marketing game plan
- Had my designer rebrand our new Top of Funnel (TOFU) lead magnet. This is a report called “25 Website ‘Must Haves’ for Driving Traffic, Leads, and Sales”
- Had my designer create a call to action for the bottom of each blog post that is a part of the first inbound campaign
- Created the back end automation in Hubspot (emails and the blog posts they link to) so that when a new lead downloads this report, they receive a series of 3 emails to help them move towards the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
- Published 3 blog posts that these 3 emails will link to
- Did 4 discovery calls with prospective clients
- Signed one new client
Now that you’ve seen, at a high level, what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
Content Marketing Blueprint
If you are going to succeed with content marketing, you’d better have a pretty solid game plan. Just banging out blog posts without a strategy in mind isn’t going to get you the results you’re after. Trust me on this one.
The goal of the blueprint is to force you to really think about who your ideal buyer persona is, what their problems are, and how your solutions can help them to solve their problems.
Once you have gone through this process, the next step is to come up with 3 campaigns that can be executed over 90 days. Each campaign covers one topic, has 8 blogs posts, and is published over 30 days.
All 8 blog posts have a call to action that sends visitors to a landing page where the campaigns lead magnet (ebook) can be downloaded.
When the download happens, a lead is captured and then the automated follow up emails start to go out. The goal is to have your new lead move down through your funnel and transition from being an ‘information qualified lead’ to a ‘marketing qualified lead’, and then, ultimately to a ‘sales qualified lead’.
The Lead Magnet for Inbound Campaign #1
The first lead magnet is a free report will serve our first inbound marketing campaign, which will consists of 8 blog posts published at a rate of two per week over a 30 day period.
I will not be writing these posts. Instead, I have created a detailed set of instructions and will be outsourcing this task to contract writers.
Why use contract writers? Simple. As the CEO, my job is to work ‘on’ the business, not ‘in’ it. If I’m to build a company that can one day be sold for over $1,000,000 (like my last one), I cannot be the one to handle ANY of the day to day operations.
The Call to Action for Lead Magnet #1
Within Hubspot, there is something called a Call-To-Action.
Essentially, it’s a way to create a button that will be clicked to take someone to a webpage where a lead can be captured.
Rather than use just a button at the bottom of the post, I’m going to be using Hubspot’s Call-to-Action feature so that I can get analytics on how many times the button is shown and how many times its clicked. As you might guess, I want detailed analytics on what is (and isn’t) working so that I can continually improve conversion rates.
To ensure that the Call-to-Action stands out, I had my designer create a professional looking image for me that I just uploaded into the Hubspot software.
Create The Back End Automation in Hubspot
On of the things I really like about Hubspot is their Inbound Campaign planning tool.
By using this tool, it’s pretty hard to forget anything. Plus, as my campaign is running, I can collect all sorts of data on how my content and offers are converting. Plus, at the end of the campaign, I will be able to see how my campaign did against the goals I set for it, as well as if the campaign achieved a positive ROI or not.
Below is a screenshot of our first campaign. The campaign is not yet live, but notice how detailed this screen is. It’s literally a checklist for everything you need to do to run a successful campaign.
In future posts, I will be sharing the results of this campaign, so be sure and become a subscriber if you want updates sent to you.
Published 3 Blog Posts to Nurture My Leads
The goal of capturing a lead is to convert them to a customer. To help my leads to move along through my funnel, I need to answer questions and concerns long before a sales conversation every takes place.
When we did our blueprint and defined our persona, we also determined what some of these concerns might be. In our case, they were:
- How do I know that content marketing will work?
- How do I get started?
- What results can I expect?
The three follow up emails that a new lead receives address these issues and then point readers to the appropriate ‘middle of funnel’ blog post.
The posts we published to address these concerns are:
- Is Content Marketing Worth the Investment?
- How to Get Started With Content Marketing
- What results can I expect from content marketing?
Discovery Calls With Prospective Clients
At the end of the day, everything that I’m doing from a marketing perspective has a single goal: give me the opportunity to do discovery calls with qualified leads.
When you end up talking to someone who already knows they need what you do, and they have already been exposed to your (high quality) content, the chances of your converting these prospects into clients is actually quite high – assuming they can afford what you do, and have the authority to say yes.
My Results for the Week
Of the 4 discovery calls that I did last week, thus far, one has become a client and gone ahead and purchased a Content Marketing Blueprint for $2,000. The remaining 3 have the payment link in their inbox and I am waiting for them to proceed.
Two of these calls were done on Friday, so it’s quite possible that payments will be received at some point today or tomorrow (if they do, I will update this post).
The Content Marketing Blueprint is the first step of a new client engagement. Once this step has been done, my client has a solid game plan for their first 90 days of content marketing.
If we both liked working together on the Blueprint, the next step is for my team to set up their Hubspot account (we call this ‘building the engine’) so that all the inbound campaign items I showed you in the screenshot above (except the blog posts) is done. If they want us to, we will also create the three premium reports for them for an additional charge.
At the conclusion of step two, the next (final) step is for my clients to put Groove on retainer to create the blog posts for them. We’ll also advise them on how to promote their content on their social media accounts.
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.
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