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!

Key Activities in the Week of June 16th, 2014

During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:

1. We published 3 blog posts
2. I met with a new prospect (the new CMO of a very large software company) and gave them a proposal
3. I finalized the slide deck for this week’s webinar
4. I added some more content into Groove’s funnel
5. I developed a mind map for the Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing
6. Liz, Kiana, and I attended the Eagle Rodeo :)
7. My friend Drew Sanocki and I decided to launch a marketing agency duel!

Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.

3 New Blog Posts

• HubSpot’s Social Inbox: 6 Steps to Get Started Right
• Five Tips to Ensure Your Social Marketing Doesn’t Make You Look Like a Zombie
• How to Get Top-Tier Sites to Link to Your Content

Proposal Sent to a New Large Prospect

Using the LinkedIn prospecting strategy that I explained here, I was able to secure a meeting with the CMO of a large UK-based software company that is struggling to get traction in the US.

The meeting was actually in person, because, strangely enough, the CMO lives here in Boise.

When we met, I asked him to explain the marketing issues that were at the top of his list. I then asked him to explain to me the impact these issues were having on his company (this style of questioning is something we are going to cover in detail during this week’s webinar, so make sure you register).

Once I’d confirmed what his pain was, I explained to him a few ways that I thought we could work together to solve the problems. He told me that he really liked the concepts that I’d explained and asked that I sent him a proposal. As my proposal is pretty much a boiler plate, sending it out is pretty easy, so I was happy to do it.

The proposal was sent on the 16th, and on the 20th, I received an email from him that said:

Hi Trent,

The pleasure is on my side. Thanks for the documents and links. Well done. I need to review in detail while I am travelling extensively over the next two weeks. Will likely get back to you after July 4th weekend.

Regards,

After receiving this email, I logged into DocSend (use this link for free access) to see how much of the proposal he’d looked at, and if it was shared with anyone else. As you can see below, he viewed 96% of the proposal and spent 1:07 on the pricing page…which is a good sign.

During our meeting, he told me that he was the sole decision maker, so it’s not a surprise that it’s not been shared with anyone else so far.

At the end of our meeting, he told me that he was most interested in starting on a retainer, so with a little luck, after July 4th, he’ll sign on for a $3,000/mo retainer.

I Finalized the Slide Deck for This Week’s Webinar

I have to say that I’m pretty stoked about this week’s webinar. Over the last year, I have learned a LOT about content marketing and my results continue to improve as a result of what I’ve learned.

In the last two weeks, in particular, I have notice the quality of inbound leads has increased quite a bit. I’m happy to say that we are now starting to generate leads from companies doing $5M+ in sales….which is exactly the type of leads we want.

I attribute this increase in lead quality to how I’m using Oktopost (affiliate link) to promote my content on LinkedIn. Here’s the video that I created last week that shows how I’m using the software. If you haven’t yet grabbed your spot for the webinar, register here before it’s full.

I Added More Content to Groove’s Marketing Funnel

While seemingly an unexciting announcement, I included it in this week’s update because I wanted to make sure you understood something about a marketing funnel.

The goal of the funnel, especially at the top of it, is to build trust, and the way to do that is with content. But you knew that already, right?

Well, here’s a tip for you: the content that you are using doesn’t all have to be yours! In fact, it’s a good idea to also curate some other people’s content in your funnel, especially if it is content that will help you to convey the point(s) you are trying to get across.

In my case, the way to do this was to find some posts on other people’s blogs that would help me to demonstrate the value of inbound marketing to my prospects. To do this, I simply wrote emails that gave brief introductions to the content along with a link.

Here’s an example:

So, the take away for you here is this: you don’t have to be the one to write every post that you use in your funnel. In fact, it’s better if you curate the work of others in addition to your own content.

The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing Mind Map

Over the last few weeks as I’ve been carefully watching the leads we’ve been capturing, I have been thinking hard about ways to attract more of the right kinds of readers.

In order to do that, I have to first decide who I really want reading the Groove blog. At this point in time, my most desired type of reader is the CMO of a $5M+ technology company that isn’t yet getting very good results from their inbound marketing efforts….if they have even started, that is.

Once I know the who, I need to discover what makes these people decide to hire a company like mine. What problems are they having? What language do they use to describe these problems? Where do they look for solutions? Who already has influence over these people now?

This isn’t a step that I put enough effort into when I first launched Groove; mostly because I thought I already knew the answers to these questions.

Well, it turns out that I didn’t.

Oops.

So, with that in mind, I developed the mind map below.

Click to Enlarge

There are a couple of reasons why I think this mind mapping exercise is worthwhile.

First, I’m a visual person, so seeing the problem laid out in front of my eyes helps me to think my way through it.

Second, once I have a visual representation of my plan, I can share it with others and ask for their input (please leave your questions down in the comments).

Third, when I showed this to another agency owner, she said, “Trent, that thing is awesome. You should show it to prospective clients so they really understand what it is that you are going to be doing for them.”

Liz and I Went to the Rodeo

Ok…so this has nothing at all to do with how to build a marketing agency…but we had a blast and I like to share a little bit of our personal lives with you as well, so here’s a pic of my better half :)

Traffic & Leads

Thanks to a webinar we are holding on June 26th, new leads this past week were up quite a bit.

Marketing Agency Duel: The Race to $20,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue

I’ve saved the best for last in this week’s update!

On Friday, I was on the phone with my friend Drew Sanocki, owner of Mineral, a paid search agency, and we were talking about our plans for the future.

Drew and I actually have fairly similar backgrounds. We have both founded multi-million dollar companies and sold them. We both have a new babies, and we are both growing marketing agencies.

Among the many things we discussed was our mutual desire to get to $20,000 a month in retainer income as fast as possible. I told Drew that I’d been writing these blog posts and publishing income reports and I suggested that he become a contributor to Bright Ideas so he could also write a weekly update.

He thought that was a great idea, so look for his first post soon.

Another of the things that we agreed to do was to create a “Marketing Agency Duel” so we would publicly race each other to the goal of $20,000 in monthly retainer income.

If you think this is something that you’d like to see, please be sure and tweet out this post, as well as to leave us a comment with any questions or suggestions you have on how we should run the duel.

Personally, I’m hoping to kick his butt! (and I’m sure he plans to do the same, lol!)

Here’s a podcast episode Drew and I recorded to give you more information on the duel.

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

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.

[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]

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:

1. We published 10 blog posts
2. I began to pro-actively use LinkedIn to prospect for large clients
3. Met with a new prospect (from LinkedIn)
4. Sent proposal with DocSend (very cool new tool!)
5. 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.

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

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

• See prior posts in this series
• Get my B2B Lead Generation Training Course
• Get a copy of my Digital Marketing Handbook

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.

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 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 Week of May 19th, 2014

During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:

1. Kiana got bigger
2. We published 5 blog posts
3. I gave our site a ‘make over’
4. Created 8 more lead magnets

Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.

Kiana Got Bigger

Kids grow like weeds. Kiana’s body weight has increased by 13% in just two weeks. Wow!

Here’s a few pics of our little darling (yes, I know pics of Kiana has nothing to do with this post…but I just couldn’t help myself!)

At the ripe “old” age of 23 days, Kiana has already been on a number of adventures; a train ride and boating among them. As you can see, she didn’t think too much of boating. Or maybe she just didn’t like the color of the life jacket?

5 New Blog Posts

Here are this week’s posts:

• Top 10 Insights on Effectively Using Content Marketing For Your Business
• Inbound Marketing: The Key to Predictable Lead Generation
• 4 Steps to Using Digital Marketing to Improve Your Marketing Strategy
• How to Use A/B Testing to Double Your Conversion Rate
• 7 Common Blogging Mistakes Made by Financial Services Firms

Website Upgrade

As you may recall, when I fist launched Groove’s site, it looked very similar to a friend of mine’s because he’d sold me a copy of his basic look/feel. Given that the site got zero traffic back then, I wasn’t interested in spending days to design my site and write basic content.

Now that, thanks to our blogging, traffic has taken off, so I knew it was time to give the site the attention that it needed to better convey our message, as well as to look different than Robb’s site.

If you’d like to see the new look, head over and check it out.

New Lead Magnets

The more landing pages you have, the more leads you will capture, and in order to have more landing pages, I needed more eBooks to offer as leads. The following eBooks are now in the works:

1. 10 Useless Things to Cut From Your Marketing
2. Social Prospecting Workbook: How to Use Social Media to Find New Leads
3. 6 Marketing Metrics Your Boss Actually Cares About
4. An Introduction to Closed Loop Marketing
5. 10 Step Website Redesign Checklist
6. Attract Customers with Twitter
7. Unlocking ROI Analytics
8. Inbound Marketing Campaign Toolkit

All of these ebooks will each have a landing page of their own as well as be listed on our Resources page (not yet completed).

Traffic & Leads

Since my decision just over a month ago to begin actively blogging on Groove, the results have come very quickly. Below is a summary of the activity over the last week. As you can see, traffic was up 16% from the previous week and new leads were up 12%. Go team! :)

Additional Resources

• See prior posts in this series
• Get my B2B Lead Generation Training Course
• Get a copy of my Digital Marketing Handbook

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.

[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]

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 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 Week of May 12th, 2014

During the past two weeks, here’s a summary of what happened:

1. We landed a $3.2 billion dollar company as a new client!
2. We published 6 blog posts
3. I created a process to support the cold email lead generation that has been working so well for me
4. Set up lead scoring and social monitoring in HubSpot
5. Created a Wiki for our in-house training material

Now that you’ve seen – at a high level – what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.

We Landed a $3.2B Client

I’m very happy to report that we had a very big win this week. Remember the referral that I wrote about in my last week’s update? On Wednesday, I received an email from them that started with….

Hello Trent, 

I am delighted to report that we are a go! We’d like to begin the project in June and I will be the point person on our side.  I will send the agreement to our legal department for review of terms and barring any modifications needed, will sign and return.

I’ve copied Sue to let her know where we are in the communication and [name withheld] of finance for guidance on invoicing and payment. Wendy, you’ll find the proposal and payment terms for Option One (non-retainer) attached.  

Now that is my kind of email!

The important take away from this is that this referral would have never happened had I not spent the last two years building my personal brand online by publishing post after post, after post. Luck did not play a role.

If you aren’t yet blogging consistently, see what you are missing?

5 New Blog Posts

This week is the first week that we’ve been publishing a post per day on Groove, and as you will see down in the traffic numbers, more blog posts = more traffic. Here are this week’s posts:

• 4 Steps to Ensure Your Website Attracts Your Ideal Customer
• The 3 Best Blogs to Read to Master Content Marketing
• How to Measure the ROI for an Inbound Marketing Campaign Using HubSpot
• 4 Ways to Use Automation to Improve Your Customer Experience
• 3 Ways Content Marketing Can Help a Mortgage Company Attract More Clients

New Automated System to Support Cold Email Lead Generation

In last week’s report, I wrote about a new cold email system that I’ve been getting really incredible results from. There is a little bit of leg work needed (which you should outsource) to get the email addresses, but once you have them, you will be amazed by how well this works.

Unlike the instructions in the free cold email course I linked you to, I put on my “reporter” hat and contact companies to see if they would be interested in sharing their success story on my podcast, or in one of my posts.

Just watch this video to see how it all works.

I Set Up Lead Scoring in HubSpot

During one of this week’s calls with a client, I was asked if HubSpot did lead scoring. As I didn’t know the answer, as soon as the call was done, I looked into it and discovered that the functionality does indeed exist.

In the screenshot below is just a snippet of the scoring criteria that I created.

Once the score of a lead hits certain thresholds, I then created a rule that adds them to one of three lists within HubSpot.

Next, I created a stream that allows me to monitor what each of these people are saying on social media. I check this stream each morning to see if there is any way that I can add value to the conversation. If there isn’t, I don’t do anything.

We Created an Internal Wiki

In my opinion, the only way to scale a service company without killing yourself is to have detailed checklists and processes for everything you do. In the video below, I share with you what our content manager looks like and how it’s tied directly to our wiki, which his housed in a membership site that only our team has access to.

Traffic & Leads

Since my decision just over a month ago to begin actively blogging on Groove, the results have come very quickly. Below is a summary of the activity over the last week. As you can see, traffic was unchanged from the previous week and new leads were up 13%.

Additional Resources

• See prior posts in this series
• Get my B2B Lead Generation Training Course
• Get a copy of my Digital Marketing Handbook

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.

[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]