The term ‘secret sauce’ was originally coined by Jack in the Box in the early 1980s as a way to distinguish their flappy fast food burgers from their competition.
While their mix of mayonnaise, mustard, and chili sauce (oops, we may have just given it away!) may have increased sales, fast forward 30 years, and the term “secret sauce” is more often used to describe what makes a company unique. It’s a company’s competitive advantage.
For Chick-fil-A, it’s their customer service. For Apple it’s their seamless integrations across devices. Costco’s secret sauce is its ability to provide quality food at a price that attracts cost-conscious shoppers.
When you’re looking for a marketing partner, it’s important to understand what their secret sauce is so you know what you’re getting out of the experience.
So, what’s our differentiator? Keep reading to find out.
What’s Nettra Media’s Marketing Secret Sauce?
Our secret sauce is pretty simple: as a marketing agency, we don’t rely on paid advertising to create explosive growth for our clients.
This is a big statement for us since we’re the most established Google Partner & Facebook Partner in Central California.
But more importantly, this is a huge paradigm shift since 98% of all marketing agencies scale in two ways: paid ads and billable design hours.
The issue with the typical marketing agency approach is twofold:
- Advertising rarely accounts for more than 30% of a business’s new customers.
- The majority of a company’s new customers come from referrals, business development strategies, and other non-advertising sources.
The current advertising agency (or marketing agency) business model can really help businesses that already have a marketing strategy in place since they’re asking the agency to carry out specific client acquisition tactics like SEO (search engine optimization), Google Ads, Facebook Ads, social media posting, or web design.
Yet many companies spending thousands of dollars on Google Ads have not spent a dime on creating a dynamic referral process. This blows our minds since this kind of referral system can easily outproduce the best marketing campaign on Google!
Every business knows it’s usually 20% of their customers that comprise 80% of their business, and yet they have very few business development strategies aimed at creating more relationships like these.
To create scalable growth, we started developing non-advertising-related strategies that not only worked but outproduced a typical advertising campaign by up to 3X.
We’ve created millions of dollars of new business for our clients, above and beyond the performance of any advertising campaign.
You can read more about our strategies in action for the Law Offices of Nuttall Coleman & Drandell here.
This realization led us to develop one of the most growth-centered approaches of any marketing agency in our area.
We’re a Marketing Agency & an Outsourced CMO
As an established Google & Facebook Partner, creating new customers with digital media comes pretty easy to us. Some companies that already have marketing and client acquisition strategies in place hire us as a traditional marketing agency to fulfill specific tactics like SEO, Google & Facebook Ads, and email marketing, to name a few. We love these relationships and are experts at scaling companies through these tactics.
For other companies that are primed for strategies to facilitate big growth, we act as an outsourced CMO (chief marketing officer) rather than a marketing agency.
The CMO approach allows us to focus more on a company’s customer acquisition channels, business development outreach, and similar strategies. In this type of partnership, our goal is to develop and refine new methods of outreach by focusing on implementation, execution, and optimization.
In other words, as an outsourced CMO, we become our clients’ growth partner, focused on increasing the lifetime value of their customers and also decreasing the cost of acquiring customers.
The Nettra Marketing Summit
The success of our outsourced CMO service is reliant upon gathering as much relevant data as possible and understanding the client’s organization, services, goals, and competition.
To that end, we developed what we call our Marketing Summit. This is the process we use to outline all of the potential customer acquisition channels with our CMO service clients.
In our Marketing Summit, we come up with a viable idea for 20 different client acquisition channels, then we rate each idea based on its impact, our confidence of its success, and the ease of implementation. The top scoring ideas then become the foundation of a phased marketing plan.
Here’s an outline of our typical Marketing Summit:
Marketing Summit Week 1: Getting To Know You
This first week, we focus on getting to know you and your competition. We will:
- Perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis
- We assess your digital presence before this first meeting and we’ll review the findings together
- We perform a competitor analysis before this first meeting and we’ll review the findings together
Marketing Summit Week 2: Acquisition Channels
In week two, our efforts are focused on acquisition channels. We will:
- Cover 10 to 15 of our top customer acquisition channels and create an idea for each
Marketing Summit Week 3: Finish Acquisition Channels
In week three, we finish our brainstorm for acquisition channels, then we rate the ideas. We will:
- Complete the remaining acquisition channels
- Rate each idea (from 1-10) based on impact, our confidence in its success, and the ease of implementation
- Sort the top ideas into Phases 1 & 2 of the marketing strategy
Marketing Summit Week 4: Phase 1 Marketing Strategy
In the final week, we present our findings and outline the steps for Phase 1 of our marketing strategy. We will:
- Take the findings from Week 3 and conduct research to determine what roles Nettra and client will play
- Determine the costs associated for each client acquisition channel we’ll target in this phase
- For each channel, we’ll determine performance goals to gauge our success
Our clients love the Marketing Summit because it helps them strategically allocate their marketing budget instead of copying the marketing of their competitors or hopping on the newest trends.
In our experience, simply spending a lot of money on digital media will never produce substantial growth.
The key in successfully scaling a business is uncovering the levers of growth that are often hidden within the product or service itself, then optimizing the product offering so your customers can’t wait to buy it.
By gathering a breadth of data over a series of meetings, coming up with customer acquisition ideas and rating each idea with the clients in the room, we create a concrete foundation to scale future growth.
Top 20 Client Acquisition Channels
There are many ways to create clients, but the 20 most impactful channels according to our experience are:
- Business development
- Referral programs
- Public relations
- Unconventional public relations
- Content marketing: social media ads, display, & video ads
- Search engine marketing ads (Google, Bing, Yahoo)
- Offline/traditional advertising (TV, radio, billboards, newspaper, direct mail, etc.)
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Email marketing/marketing automation
- Viral marketing
- Engineering as marketing (creating lead capturing platforms)
- Hiring a sales force
- Blog targeting
- Trade shows
- Offline events (like organizing a meetup)
- Swag products (branded promotional material)
- Webinars
- Influencer marketing (hiring a brand spokesperson)
- Networking
- Guerilla tactics
Reach Your Potential
Your future customers are out there!
Companies that take the time to develop, implement, and optimize their marketing strategy are the ones that keep winning new customers.
If you’re ready to create an in-depth, focused marketing strategy to grow your business, get in touch with our team today. We’d love to have you join us on a Nettra Marketing Summit.
