Thanks to our consistent blogging and optimized calls to action, we get a LOT of leads from our blog. Sadly, not all of them are a good fit for our services, so ensuring that we focus our attention on the right leads is absolutely critical to our success.
When it comes to your website, do you ever wonder, What’s working? What content is most effective? Are we getting an ROI on our marketing dollars?
If you’re doing a great job with your content, it will be effective and engaging, and you’ll be generating not only brand awareness and traffic, but measurable ROI in the form of leads and sales.
(These are all areas we cover in detail in the process we go through with our Groove Digital clients.)
So how do you know your content is effective, and is actually leading to increased sales? How do you actually evaluate the ROI of content marketing?
To answer this question, we supplement the excellent data provided by Hubspot (which really helps us look at the leads and sales end) with data from Google Analytics (GA), which gives us an overall picture of our traffic and its effectiveness. The nitty gritty details of the GA analysis is exactly what I’m going to reveal in my monthly traffic report for August. (To see July’s report, click here.)
In the past, I’ve found GA to be overly complicated and hard to use. I always knew there was gold in the data, but GA’s poor design makes it difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on. Each month it took time and effort to dig around for the statistics we wanted to view, and each month we knew there were more that we could be looking at. This month, we began using our latest GA dashboards, and I couldn’t be happier.
The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer the questions of What’s working and what’s not? What’s most effective? and What is the ROI of our content marketing – how many leads is it getting us?
Here’s what we found for August:
Our high-level traffic and conversion data is available on our Business dashboard. Here we find out:
Traffic & Referral SourcesOur traffic has risen more or less steadily since we started blogging regularly on Bright Ideas. Here’s a look at the month to month increase:
For the month of August, we continued our focus on Groove Digital Marketing agency activities. Even with the majority of our posts published on Groove, Bright Ideas received a lot of traffic, as would be expected from a mature site where we’ve been blogging for almost two years.
This month, our increase is due largely to increased referral traffic – we had a couple of posts go viral on StumbleUpon again (more on this in the Popular Content section below).
To get truly useful data from GA, you want to know not just what traffic you have, but how many conversions you’re getting. In other words, how many of those visitors are you converting to subscribers? Or, if you have online product sales, to customers? In our case, we measure conversions in terms of subscribers.
In order to do this you need to set up what GA calls conversion “goals”, so that this data will be available. This was something that until recently, we didn’t have working (it’s trickier than it should be!). We finally hired someone to help with this.
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business (includes goals setup).
We had significantly increased conversions in August. Most of the increase was from email; the numbers in the other areas remained similar to July’s conversions.
Significant Conclusions:
Our Content Analysis dashboard helps us answer questions such as:
By far our most popular pages are lumped together under ‘Other’. This is actually a really good thing as it indicates we have a lot of different content that appeals to our visitors.
After ‘Other’, the most popular content were the posts that went viral on StumbleUpon (Lessons Learned from 50 Marketing Agency CEOs and How to Start a Business with No Money). These were actually both great posts (the former is a summary of the best of the best I’ve learned from other agency owners, the latter a podcast interview where I was the interviewee and my friend Wes and I talk about what it takes to make it in business), but as we’ll see below, most of the StumbleUpon traffic was not high quality and didn’t convert well.
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
Again, our StumbleUpon posts showed up as popular entrance pages, as people went directly from StumbleUpon to those pages.
Similar to last month, traffic direct to our homepage increased as well. This month it was up almost 10%.
We also sent traffic to some of our new posts last month (including Tony Wright’s interview and our July income report).
The remaining popular pages are older posts that seem to be receiving significant organic traffic: my analysis of Infusionsoft vs Ontraport and Infusionsoft vs Mailchimp. With these posts, we used focused keywords and smart SEO tactics when we first published them, and our domain authority with respect to all things Infusionsoft is strong.
If we look at the pages that received a lot of StumbleUpon traffic (Lessons Learned from 50 Marketing Agency CEOs and the How to Start a Business with No Money Interview), we see that most of the people who visited those pages also left our site without exploring any further. Compare our top couple entrance pages with our top exit pages:
These are the pages that were most likely to convert a visitor to a subscriber (we also have PPC goals set). Our increase in conversions from July to August was mostly due to these PPC goals.
Significant conclusions:
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
In addition to the Business and Content Analysis Dashboards, we have Site Performance and Realtime Traffic dashboards.
Our site performance dashboard answers the following:
These page load times reveal longer loads than we’d like. Luckily the averages are a bit misleading, as there are spikes in page load times a couple of days a month. Still, we’d like to have pages that consistently load quickly. We have actually switched our site around on the back end a number of times to try to reduce our page loads. This report would indicate that we still have more room to improve.
Our Realtime Traffic dashboard answers the following:
When we look at how our site is performing month-over-month, we like to see averages and trends. However, if you want a snapshot of what’s going on on your site right now, the real time traffic dashboard is where you’ll find it.
If you’d like to purchase these dashboards for your own business, you’re in luck! We have a dashboard package available that includes:
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
If you thought this post was helpful, please be sure and share it!
Our dashboards quickly revealed that:
Best of all, it didn’t take a lot of time to figure this all out.. have I mentioned how much I’m digging those new GA dashboards?
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
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Last November I had the honor of being interviewed by Wes Schaeffer, President and CEO of The Sales Whisperer, on the Sales Whisperer Podcast.
If you are looking to start a new business, or accelerate the growth of your current business, you will want to tune in!
Listen now and hear us discuss:
Mark Lerner is the Director of Marketing for Oktopost, a social media marketing and content distribution platform for B2B companies. Mark is a jack-of-all-trades and his roles include social media marketing, content marketing and distribution, business development, and growth hacking.
Groove Digital Marketing has recently started using Oktopost in our own business and we really enjoy it. (Hint: try it out, they offer a free trial.)
If you are not familiar with re-purposing content, this interview will show you how to save a ton of time and produce a high volume of content with less effort than you think. Of course, you will also learn how to use Oktopost for social media content management and promotion.
Listen now and you’ll hear Mark and I talk about:
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
If you would like a transcript of the show please visit the original interview published at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com/12
Mark Lerner is a marketing guru with years of experience in the world of startups and social media. He’s the Director of Online Marketing at Oktopost – the B2B Social Media Marketing Platform – Tel Aviv, Israel.
Mark has a BA in Psychology from Boston University and an MBA from Florida Atlantic University. He joined the Oktopost team in late 2013 and has helped take their marketing activities to a new level.
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 the last post, you can find it combined with the July income report 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? Let’s get into it.
During the past two weeks, here’s a summary of what happened:
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
Ever since getting back from Boston, I have been uber-focused on creating a better prospecting system for our Target100 accounts. The goal of the new system was to create a consistent 7 step process that was specific to what we are selling and who we are targeting. If you’d like to learn how to create a system like this, just purchase my Best Buyer Formula…because that is the exact process that I’m following.
Here’s an overview of what the process looks like for each target account.
Step 1: We use HubSpot’s Signals Insight to easily get their email address.
Step 2: I send them a LinkedIn connection request so that I can invite them to participate in the LinkedIn group that I created.
Now that we have their contact information and have made a connection request, we send an email.
Touch 1: The first email we send asks them a question that has nothing to do with our trying to sell them anything. In our case, we are asking them about something called an MDF program. MDF stands for Marketing Development Funds, and as each of these company is a Value Added Reseller for a large technology company, they all know what MDF is. When they reply, thanks to their email signature, in most cases, I now have their direct line.
Touch 2: When they reply, and many do, we either invite them to do a pre-interview for my podcast (if their site rocks), or, if their site/blog sucks, we offer one tip to improve conversions and ask them if they might be interested in hearing more ideas. If they say yes, I call them immediately. (HubSpot’s signals app alerts me via my phone to when they are reading my email.)
Touch 3: If they haven’t yet responded to my contact attempts, I send them another email with links to two blog posts on how to blog properly. I then follow up this email with a call and will leave voicemail if they don’t answer.
Touch 4 & 5: If they still haven’t responded, I will call twice more, but will not leave a message. I will also send an email at this point that either shares some more content, has a link to our new eBook landing page, or I will follow the advice in this post.
Touch 6: For this touch, I send them a link to a website diagnostics report that will score their site from a marketing perspective. I will also call to follow up this email and I will leave voicemail if they don’t answer.
Touch 7: This is my final attempt to get in touch with them. In this last email, I ask for their permission to close their file. I will also call them one last time.
Subject: Permission to close your file
Hi Name,
I’m writing to follow up on my voicemail. Typcially, when I haven’t heard back from a prospecct after a 6 or 7 attempts, it means they are really busy or aren’t interested. If you aren’t interested, do I have permission to close your file?
If you are still interested, what do you recommend as a next step?
Thanks for your help.
Why 7 Calls?
The reason I make this number of contact attempts is because a study by Leads 360 told me to. As you can see, 6 or 7 attempts is what is needed.
About a week ago, I interviewed Josh Turner from LinkedSelling and during the interview (not yet published), he shared with me a case study for one of his clients. When I looked at the LinkedIn group that he created for them, it was quite active.
An active group is very beneficial for the group owner because with an active group, you have an engaged audience. Over the next few months, I’ll be curating content and stimulating discussion in my new group, as well as inviting every single one of my target account prospects to join it. The fact that I have a group just gives me another reason to email them that is not selling related.
So far, all the lead magnets (eBooks that we offer for download) that we use at Groove were originally written by HubSpot and then rebranded with our branding. HubSpot allows partners to do this, so it’s a huge time saver.
Now that we are targeting the VARs of this large technology company with our outreach program, I realized that we needed a new eBook (lead magnet) that was written specifically for them.
Rather than write it from scratch, all I did was find past blog posts that would resonate with them and then use the content (with some tweaking) from these blog posts to produce the eBook. Total time invested to create it was only a few hours.
In the past, I was against having my blog on HubSpot’s COS platform. The thinking was that I wanted to “own” the platform that all of my content resides on (WordPress).
After seeing data that told me that page load speeds on HubSpot’s COS were 2x as fast as WordPress, I started to reconsider my position. I then learned that by using the COS, I will gain access to additional features (smart content) and better reporting. I also learned that, should I ever want to, I can easily export all my content back to WordPress with a mouse click or two.
As of this writing, we are only a few days away from having the transition completed. I would have moved the entire site, but, that was going to be too costly, and, at least for my pages, I REALLY like the Enfold theme that I’m using. The advanced content layout editor is just KILLER.
We’ve started to look at our traffic in much more detail in our monthly traffic reports. Our new dashboards are pretty impressive!
You can find all the details in our detailed July traffic report.
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!
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”]
When it comes to your website, do you ever wonder, What’s working? What content is most effective? Are we getting an ROI on our marketing dollars?
If you’re doing a great job with your content, it will be effective and engaging, and you’ll be generating not only brand awareness and traffic, but measurable ROI in the form of leads and sales.
(These are all areas we cover in detail in the process we go through with our Groove Digital clients.)
So how do you know your content is effective, and is actually leading to increased sales? How do you actually evaluate the ROI of content marketing?
To answer this question, we supplement the excellent data provided by Hubspot (which really helps us look at the leads and sales end) with data from Google Analytics (GA), which gives us an overall picture of our traffic and its effectiveness. The nitty gritty details of the GA analysis is exactly what I’m going to reveal in my monthly traffic report for July. (To see June’s report, click here.)
In the past, I’ve found GA to be overly complicated and hard to use. I always knew there was gold in the data, but GA’s poor design makes it difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on. Each month it took time and effort to dig around for the statistics we wanted to view, and each month we knew there were more that we could be looking at. This month, we began using our latest GA dashboards, and I couldn’t be happier.
The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer the questions of What’s working and what’s not? What’s most effective? and What is the ROI of our content marketing – how many leads is it getting us?
Here’s what we found for July:
Our high-level traffic and conversion data is available on our Business dashboard. Here we find out:
For the month of July, we continued our focus on Groove Digital Marketing agency activities. Even with the majority of our posts published on Groove, Bright Ideas received a lot of traffic.
Continuing the trend from last month, our traffic from organic search is waay up again! Most of the increased month-over-month traffic came from organic search, which increased by over 70% from June (in May we had just over 600 organic visitors; before that we were averaging around 400!):
Again, as in June, it appears that most of the increase in organic traffic reflects the long-term effects of posts with targeted SEO that were published in February and March (more on this in the Page Performance section, below). This data, as well as a once-again lower Alexa rank this month, indicates that – as expected over time – our domain authority continues to increase.
Essentially, we’ve hit some sort of critical mass. Strike another win for content marketing!
To get truly useful data from GA, you want to know not just what traffic you have, but how many conversions you’re getting. In other words, how many of those visitors are you converting to subscribers? Or, if you have online product sales, to customers? In our case, we measure conversions in terms of subscribers.
In order to do this you need to set up what GA calls conversion “goals”, so that this data will be available. This was something that until recently, we didn’t have working (it’s trickier than it should be!). We finally hired someone to help with this.
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business (includes goals setup).
We had significantly increased subscribers in July. Most of the increase was from organic traffic, which converted at 3.5% vs 2.1% in June.
Significant Conclusions:
Our Content Analysis dashboard helps us answer questions such as:
By far our most popular pages are lumped together under ‘Other’. This is actually a really good thing as it indicates we have a lot of different content that appeals to our visitors.
Besides our homepage and our main blog page, the most popular pages were two posts that went viral on StumbleUpon (How to Attract Retainer Clients on LinkedIn, and The Dumbest LinkedIn Mistake I See Over and Over Again).
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
Again, our StumbleUpon posts showed up as popular entrance pages, as people went directly from StumbleUpon to those pages. In addition, we sent email traffic to our Groove Digital Marketing Agency Update page, and our June 2014 income report.
The remaining popular pages are older posts that seem to be receiving significant organic traffic: my interview with Sam Ovens, and my analysis of Infusionsoft vs Ontraport and Infusionsoft vs Mailchimp. With the Infusionsoft posts in particular, we used focused keywords and smart SEO tactics when we first published them, and our domain authority with respect to all things Infusionsoft is strong.
Here’s more details on how the entrance pages compare between June and July:
Now here’s where it gets interesting.. here are the pages that were most likely to convert a visitor to a subscriber. Our increase in conversions from June (145 conversions) to July (347 conversions) was 202. A whopping 154 of those – over 75% – were from our Infusionsoft resource page.
Not surprisingly, this same page also had the highest number of conversion “assists” – that is, people converted to subscribers at some point after viewing these “assisting” pages.
(Other Infusionsoft-related pages that rated for conversion assists were our Infusionsoft vs Mailchimp page, and a tutorial on How to Segment Your List Using Infusionsoft.)
Significant conclusions:
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
In addition to the Business and Content Analysis Dashboards, we have Site Performance and Realtime Traffic dashboards.
Our site performance dashboard answers the following:
Our Realtime Traffic dashboard answers the following:
If you’d like to purchase these dashboards for your own business, you’re in luck! We have a dashboard package available that includes:
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
If you thought this post was helpful, please be sure and share it!
Our dashboards quickly revealed that:
Best of all, it didn’t take a lot of time to figure this all out.. have I mentioned how much I’m digging those new GA dashboards?
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGrove”]
Brian Clark is the Founder and CEO of CopyBlogger Media, publisher of CopyBlogger.com, one of the most successful marketing blogs on the internet. On top of their huge audience they have built a very successful business by bringing to market products that their audience wants.
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.
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
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.
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.
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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
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!
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”]
Nathan Yerian is a co-founder of Adhere Creative, a marketing agency started at a kitchen table by Nathan and 2 other founders. Adhere Creative is now a 7 figure a year and agency with a nice roster of clients that pay monthly retainers.
If you want to learn how to build an agency like Nathan’s, this podcast is for you. In particular, we talk in detail about three of Nathan’s strategy for attracting leads.
One strategy is content marketing and we discuss specific questions as to how Nathan makes certain he gets the right content promoted in the right way so the right people read it.
We also talk about how Adhere syndicates their content and the types of conversation they have when a lead becomes sales qualified. They get them on retainer from Day One!
Listen now and you’ll hear Nathan and I talk about:
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Director of Strategy at inbound marketing agency, Adhere Creative, Nathan is responsible for the strategic direction of client campaigns. Nathan challenges his team and his clients to step far outside of traditional practices to breathe a creative life into a brand. The best clients for Nathan and Adhere Creative are those who are most willing to listen. While away from the office, Nathan enjoys traveling like a Roman, experiencing unique foods, craft beers and an engaging conversation with a stranger, soon turned friend.
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 is 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!
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
Yet another podcast guest has expressed interest in working with Groove to help them with their inbound marketing. This company is a very successful agency; however, content marketing has thus far not played a huge role in their success.
They’d like to change that, and so we booked a call to talk about options.
It’s too early to tell the outcome just yet; however, I’m fairly sure they are going to retain us for some kind of ongoing help with their content marketing. With that said, having had two other agencies get excited about content marketing, and then not follow through, I’m really not sure how this one will turn out.
At the end of our meeting, they told me that budget was not the issue and they were very likely to proceed in some capacity. Look for an update next week.
Since creating my Target100 list, I have been very hands on with the prospecting and have invested quite a number of hours into sending LinkedIn requests, one-off emails, and tweets.
Now that I have tested a number of strategies and found that podcast invitations seem to work the best to get conversations started, I have handed the ask off to my VA.
What a time saver!
Now, all I have to do is reply to the people who accept my invitation for a pre-interview.
Like I have said before, if you’ve not yet started a podcast, there is no better prospecting tool on the planet.
Once per month I hold an online meeting for the Bright Ideas Elite Mastermind and last week I held our most recent meeting. Our special guest was Rachel Cogar and she spent 80 minutes answering questions from myself and the other members of the group.
Rachel has built a very successful 7 figure agency that allows here to earn a very nice six figure income; all while working from home and raising her kids. Impressive!
If you’d like to apply to join our mastermind, you can do that here. It costs $179/month.
After reading a post on Michael Hyatt’s blog about creating a daily routine, I decided that my routine needed a tune up. Since Kiana was born, I’d been sleeping in more than usual (due to a lack of sleep!) and now that she’s sleeping most of the night, I felt it was time for me to resume waking up at 5:30am.
If you’d like to see my current routine, check it out here. Over the years, many people have written to me to ask how I get so much done, and I will tell you that this routine, combined with the help of my team, is how I do it.
On June 26th, Ian and I hosted our webinar and out of 230 registrants, 90 people showed up. If you haven’t hosted a webinar before, you might be surprised to see that the “show rate” was just 39%. This is actually slightly higher than normal, as far as webinars go.
There are a number of reasons why so few show up. Some people only register so they can get access to the replay, some people’s schedules & moods change, and some people like to register for just about every webinar they are ever invited to, even though they know they probably won’t attend.
Content-wise, I thought the webinar was excellent and quite a number of people emailed afterwards to say as much. However, I think one of the mistakes that I made was to host it in the afternoon. Being as I’m such an early riser, my energy is usually much lower in the afternoon than it is in the morning.
One of the unexpected benefits of the webinar was this email:
Trent,
I was able to attend a conference call last week hosted by you and Ian Altman (Discover How to Make Clients Chase You).
As you know, a banker’s services are highly commoditized. It seems that everyone has the same thing, and says the same thing. Distinction is a challenge. Regulations play a part in this, and they also limit communication avenues, and make selecting clients tricky.
Economic reports are starting to reflect what I have seen firsthand this year. I entered the year with a full pipeline comprised of walk-in clients and prospects. However, the flow quickly tapered by the end of the first quarter, and is dry now.
Now I’m in the position of being on the “hunt” for new clients to refill the pipeline, keep a steady flow, and grow my book. As I am not simply tending to walk-ins, I want to be effective by being selective. I have been spending time every day trying to get better at reaching those prospects that I believe I can best serve.
Your call was very helpful, so I have been looking for more information from you – hence my prying around on your profile. I have shared with others in my company the things I have learned from you, including the article you posted on LinkedIn, How (and why) to Define a Targeted Audience for your Marketing Campaign. Some have asked if the webinar I attended was recorded and if others could view it, so far I’ve not seen that it is available.
If you are looking for corporate clients like the bank I work for, Columbia Bank, I would be happy to do my best to make introductions.
As you might guess, I wrote back and told him that I’d love any introductions that he’d care to make. Below is the reply that I got a few minutes ago:
I am working on the bank side of things now to try to coordinate an introduction for you. Respecting your time, and the time of our folks, I want to get you to the best person possible. It may take a few days to nail this part down.
You didn’t miss anything, CB does not have a blog, at least one that I’m aware of. We do have a Twitter account, but I ‘m not sure how effectively it is being used. We actually have people assigned to “social media,” but I really believe we are missing the boat still. These are the folks I would like you to meet.
I’ll be in touch again soon.
Thanks!
The lesson here is this: the production and distribution of genuinely helpful content rarely goes un-rewarded, so get on it and start producing helpful content today!
Here in Idaho, we are surround by beautiful country and to celebrate our first anniversary, Liz and I booked a cabin up at a place called Redfish Lake. We first discovered Redfish back on our honeymoon, so it was pretty cool to go back a year later.
To say that Redfish is a beautiful place is an understatement!
Thanks to a webinar we held on June 26th, new leads this past week were up quite a bit. For the month of June overall, the increase has been huge. Look for a full report in the June traffic report.
Just in case you missed it last week, 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)
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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!
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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