Your business is unique and there's never a one-size-fits-all approach. Companies that desire aggressive growth often hire us to be their CMO (chief marketing officer). So this video goes much more in-depth about our CMO approach. We cover all 20 potential customer acquisition channels, how we develop ideas for each and rank those ideas, and how we create the initial marketing strategy based on the findings. There's much more heavy-lifting involved in this approach compared to a marketing agency, but there are also much larger potential rewards.
Video Transcription
Dave Martin (00:00):
Sure, we've spent 19 million on the Facebook and Google advertising platforms and have run thousands of successful campaigns utilizing SEO and a ton of other tactics. But what we're often asked is, what is our actual approach to help our clients to be successful? And that's exactly what I'm going to share with you in the next few minutes.
(00:26):
When we meet with the business, it becomes apparent pretty quickly what their needs are. In many cases, a business might already have a marketing strategy in place, and they're looking for somebody, usually an agency, to help them with a Google ad or a Facebook ad campaign or something specific like a SEO campaign or email marketing or something like that. So in those cases, we act as an actual marketing agency to bring about those goals, where we meet with clients, we understand what they're trying to do. We create whatever marketing strategy it is, and we go forward with that specific tactic. On the other hand, the way that we've brought about so much success with many of our clients is a different approach entirely. And this might not be an approach that you're totally familiar with, but by the end of this video, you will be. So the second approach is a CMO or chief marketing officer approach.
(01:31):
And in many ways, companies that want to go down this route with us, they don't really have a strategy in place. They may come to us thinking, "We want a SEO campaign or Google ads." But oftentimes that's because their competition is doing it. Therefore, they think they should do it too, when there's a lot of strategies that they may be totally neglecting. And instead of putting a lot of money and resources into a tactic, they probably should develop a strategy, figure out how to implement it, and then start executing that strategy. And so for many of our other clients, we sit in that role, a CMO or an outsourced CMO advisory group. The secret to every campaign success is that they had both strategy, execution, implementation, and then optimization all rolled into one. Companies that come to us with the strategy in place and the execution actually in place and they're coming to us to be part of that execution plan."Hey, we have SEO covered guys, but we need you to help us with Facebook ads and Google ads, or we need you to help us with email marketing, very specific tactics." Well, if we're hired to do that, and it fits into an overall strategy that could be very, very successful, and we've worked with many companies in that way. That's really more of a traditional marketing agency that is hired to carry out specific tactics and we do that amazing. Doing that, we've spent over $19 million between Google and Facebook, and we continue to kill it with that. But a lot of companies that come to us, they need a little more than that. And usually it starts with, "Hey, we really need help with Google ads and SEO." And when you ask a few more questions, you find out they're asking us for this because their competition's doing it.
(03:26):
So there's really no strategy behind it other than, "Well, we're kind of falling behind, so we want to catch up with them. Can you help us with this?" So in those cases where there is no strategy, we often put on a hat of the CMO or the chief marketing officer, and companies hire us to do that, to develop strategy with them, to sit at the same table with them. To develop all the strategy and then execute that strategy between us and even sometimes their employees to bring about their goals. So whether it's a marketing agency perspective or it's by a chief marketing officer perspective, we wear both hats to bring about our client's goals. So let's talk about our approach as a CMO, a chief marketing officer. Well, what we do, unlike our approach as an agency, is that we look at all of the client acquisition channels available to create clients for you.
(04:23):
There's actually 20 of them. So let's go ahead and put the first 10 on the board right here. So what we do is we'll sit with our clients during a series of meetings to come up with a viable idea for every one of these client acquisition channels. And then each idea is then rated, and then the top ideas become phase one of the marketing strategy. So let's hop into this really quick. Now, don't worry, I'm not going to spend four or five minutes per channel because that's going to make this video three hours long. And I know you're probably now looking at how long this video is, I swear it's not that long. But the point of this is I just want to show you what we do. Business development is important. Most companies, the majority of their clients are really, because of a handful of relationships that have been nurtured along the way.
(05:17):
And so we often find ourselves working with clients to figure out what are similar relationships. But they just start giving you that kind of business and coming up with strategies on how those can start creating more business. And the next one is blog targeting. And of course, finding bloggers that are in your industry that reach your ideal audience that you might be able to write for or they could write about your product. It's a great way to reach a ton of people without paying for advertising in a much more authentic way. Another huge one that we see is public relations. Oftentimes, if you could stage something in your city to show that you care, to show maybe a segment about your product or service, it really makes you stand out above everybody else. Now, another is content marketing and this takes all together, social media marketing, email marketing.
(06:13):
The point is, when people shop for your product or service, most of them don't just click on an ad and they buy, usually they're doing research, probably similar to how you research things. And so the idea is creating a funnel that pushes people into your funnel to educate them about your product and eventually buy. We see a ton of traction by doing that. And the next one is SEM, or another word for that would be search engine marketing or Google ads. Those are very, very effective because those are the text based ads that appear on the top of Google for any specific search. Another is email marketing, and again, we see a ton of traffic with email marketing. And for the cost of it, it could be one of the most effective channels that you do. And the last here on this list is viral marketing.
(07:05):
Now, of course, if you set out to build a campaign to be viral, there's probably a 99% chance that it won't be. And I know that's kind of a pop in the balloon, but that's what we find typically is many campaigns that are built to be viral, don't become viral. But just because of that, it doesn't mean that you can't set it up to be viral. And there's definitely things you can do to get people to want to share it, and that those things typically don't just happen. You really have to be purposeful about how you do that. So it definitely makes a lot of sense to put a lot of thought into viral marketing. That's the first 10. And so the next 10, let's go ahead and put them on the board here. So the first is engineering as marketing. Well, what the heck does that mean?
(07:49):
Well, let's say you are a realtor and you want more leads. You could do a Google ad or things like that, but you're just kind of white noise, everybody else doing Google ads. Engineering as marketing is what you're doing is building something that's designed to create leads for you. So I'm sure if you've been on Facebook or Instagram, you've seen what's my house worth? And you go into it, you put your zip code in there, it asks you a lot of questions until obviously you want your answer of what my house is worth. But you first have to give your email address. Once you do that, your house is worth $800,000. But the point is, whoever built that software gets your email address and that person knows that you're shopping for a house. Well, when you build those things, they're actually not that hard to build as lead aggregators.
(08:38):
And sometimes they're easier to build than others, but it's definitely something that should be considered when doing marketing for you. Now, of course, the next, sales. Some companies are getting by with just one or two sales people. Some companies don't even have sales people, and then other companies have a ton of salespeople and there's always things you could change in those. Sometimes if there's too many salespeople, things can be optimized in that way. Other times there're ways of bypassing traditional sales channels and trying to sell people directly. But it's great to consider that as a viable channel and a viable outreach. Another huge one that we have to talk about is referrals. Most companies spend $1000 on trying to get a new client and spend maybe 10 cents on trying to keep their current clients to buy again from them. This is a huge channel that we often focus on almost all of our CMO level clients on how do we help companies better wrap their arms around their current clients?
(09:45):
Because most people would prefer to do business with people they trust and people they're familiar with versus trying to do business with somebody they don't even know. So you already have your foot in the door with your current clients, and we're usually not surprised to find out that most of our clients don't really have a viable referral strategy in place. That's a big thing that we focus on. Another one I want to throw out there are offline events. Offline events are huge, things like creating community meetups where with whatever product or service you're selling, meeting up with people that are in your industry, because what you do is you often draw people from the community that are your potential clients. And as long as you create an environment where there's hors d'oeuvres and there's a speaker and people feel safe, like they're not going to get sold or marketed to, all you're really doing is building relationships.
(10:43):
And that's usually how the majority of businesses get their clients in the first place is through relationships. That's huge. Another one that we like to look at are swag. Using swag such as promotional products to get more business. I think you've seen this paradigm shift of traditional marketing is so out of style and digital marketing has become all the rage. Well, in some ways, with digital marketing, you can reach people so much better and so much more specifically, but you and 200 of your competitors are doing that. So ultimately what marketing is all about is trying to reach people in new and different ways to display your value. And so with promotional items, if it's the right item, sent in a way that is memorable and very specific to its recipient, they can have amazing results. That's definitely something that we look at with our CMO level clients.
(11:45):
Last is influencer marketing. It is so important with influencer marketing, getting somebody that is known in your industry or in your area to promote your product for you. Sometimes this could be really, really expensive. But if you're in an industry that is really niche, hiring somebody that is very well known may not be as nearly as expensive as in a very well known industry, hiring somebody there. And it can do wonders to your sales numbers by having somebody that's respected promoting your product for you. Some companies actually invest the majority of their marketing budget into influencer marketing, and it totally lifts their boats and lifts their sales to amazing numbers just by doing that. The last thing I want to bring up is guerilla tactics. And this is kind of like a catchall kind of bucket for everything else. I know with NETTRA, we've actually used this.
(12:45):
We had a mailer that went out and it was really a cold mailer, and it had a 35% conversion rate for a cold mailer. Because we took the time to create this video inside it and made it specific to a recipient. So when they opened the box, it said, "Hi, insert name." Let's say, "Hi Doug." And then we mentioned their business as well. And then we went on to say, "Hey, we should grab lunch." And there was a gift card for a restaurant in it. That campaign was the definition of guerilla. It was definitely not digital, and it had an amazing return because nobody else is doing it. So these are the 20 channels that we look at. And so really the difference with our approach is we don't just do this in a vacuum. This usually takes place over about two to three meetings, where we meet with the client in our office, in our conference room, or in theirs to come up with an idea, a viable idea for every one of these channels.
(13:50):
So this is an approach video. So I don't just want to tell you the things that we look at. I have to tell you how we actually take these ideas and put them to use and create amazing results with them. So what we do is we've created a spreadsheet. I'm going to go ahead and throw it up on the screen here so you can see it. You'll notice on the spreadsheet, every client acquisition idea, all 20 of them, is written as well as there's a space for the idea and sometimes there could be multiple ideas for every channel. But then what we do is we're going to rank them based on three factors. The first is the idea's impact. How impactful will it be on a scale of one to 10? The second is our confidence. It could be really impactful, but how confident are we that's actually going to happen on a scale of one to 10?
(14:41):
And then lastly, the ease. On a scale of one to 10, how easy is it? This might be a great idea, but it requires me flying across the United States. In other words, we're going to come up with a score, one to 10, for the idea's impact. Our confidence of its impact. And then lastly, the ease of implementation. And so you're going to see on the spreadsheet that we've scored all these ideas. This is actually a spreadsheet from a previous client, and what we do is we sit with the client to score these. We don't score them ourselves. The client is in the office with us, and we're doing this together as a team. And so then what happens is the top ideas, they get ranked at the top. And that really becomes phase one of the marketing strategy. And so clients love this because they don't feel like, "Ah, I'm working with this agency and I'm doing SEO and I'm doing Google ads, but I don't know. I feel like maybe I should be doing some other things too."
(15:44):
Or maybe a salesperson calls and says, "Oh, you're not doing this. You should be doing this too." When you go through this process and you've considered every client acquisition channel, there is such clarity our clients get. And our clients repeatedly tell us this after this whole process is done, "Man, we've looked at everything and we've always wondered about this, and we've been able to talk about it. And now our whole team is on the same page that these are the four or five things that we're going to focus on." And so in phase one of the strategy, and so that is what the value of our approach as a chief marketing officer or CMO. That's how we're able to get the kinds of results that we get, is that number one, we go through every client acquisition channel with the client. Number two, we rate every idea that they come up with, of course, with the client.
(16:37):
And then number three, we determine, based on that, phase one of the marketing strategy and the client has a complete buy-in, not only to here's what we're going to do, but also here's the metrics that we're going to use to gauge the success of this campaign. How do you gauge the success of a business referral campaign or a business development campaign? It's very in the weeds. That's why we work with our clients hand in hand to determine those metrics of success. That's how we've been so successful in working with clients, both as a CMO when they don't have this kind of strategy in place, but also as an agency when they do have a strategy in place. And they've reached out to us to fulfill specific segments of the strategy. But either way, that's our approach and that's how we've been able to be so successful.
