PROVIDING MARKETING SERVICES & TECH (WITHOUT DOING THE WORK YOURSELF)
Why are we jumping to solutions? You might think that since we were discussing Branding, the next logical subject would be prospecting and sales.
However, before you engage with potential clients, you should hone your marketing skills, and more than that, understand the tools in your toolkit, which is also equatible here to solutions you can provide.
As a trusted advisor, your job begins with asking a lot of questions. This is also known as ‘Consultative Selling’. You are basically highlighting problems in the client’s marketing strategy, sometimes even sales strategy, and you, as an expert, lead the client to the right solution.
This can hardly be done without knowing the main tools in the marketing toolbox.
And while you do not need to be an expert, as you will not be providing the services yourself, you’ll need to know what they are, how they work together, and why use one over another.
It might seem daunting, but you’ll see it’s easy to follow.
An agency’s solutions consist of marketing services and software. It’s what you sell, what provides value and solves the challenges your clients are facing.
It’s your factory, and your core, and usually (without this book ;-) it takes years of experience to deliver quality solutions without fulfilling them yourself.
As such, in this chapter we’ll address several key cornerstones in marketing services:
*IMPORTANT NOTE: This book is not Marketing 101. It is important that you educate yourself about marketing fundamentals and study the marketing strategies in the niche you’re targeting. Using this book, you’ll be able to focus solely on being the trusted advisor, which will allow you time for learning.
While there are dozens of different marketing services and hundreds of tech solutions (which together can be referred to as Marketing Solutions), they can be simply distilled into two buckets:
*A very basic example would be Google Ads (Traffic Generators), sending visitors to a Website (Conversion Solution) to be converted to leads or sales.
Solutions from both Traffic & Conversion buckets are utilized as detailed in a MARKETING STRATEGY:
Inside a MARKETING STRATEGY there might be several CAMPAIGNS. A Campaign being a specific marketing tactic (a flower shop might have a yearly marketing strategy that includes ongoing promotions on social networks, sending traffic to its online site, etc.). But it also has a dedicated Marketing Campaign on Valentine’s Day, with a dedicated budget, effort and set of marketing solutions utilized.
In a CAMPAIGN, different Traffic & Conversions solutions are connected together in a FUNNEL, usually using an Automation system.
If you’re getting a brain twister, don’t worry, it’s simpler than you think. Let’s get back to the Flower Shop example. Valentine’s Day is coming, and they decide to do a special promotion – two weeks before they do a PRE-SALE at discount rates – “Avoid the Valentine’s Day Rush, Order Today and have it delivered to your loved one on Valentine’s Day!”
They have a concept for the campaign, and now they need Traffic & Conversion solutions.
They want to go all out, so they are utilizing several Traffic solutions that are hyper local:
As alluded to above, the Conversion solution is their online store.
When you boil it down, it sounds much simpler: The flower store is reaching out to potential clients via mailers, emails and Facebook ads, and sending them to a discounted offer on their online store.
Sometimes, when we use industry jargon like Strategy, Campaign, and Traffic & Conversions, it sounds overwhelming, but when you put in simple English it becomes clear..
The success of the marketing strategy is measured by a tracking & reporting solution, like Google Analytics. We’ll get to measuring later, but in the meantime, let’s focus on the two buckets – Traffic & Conversions.
If this sounds confusing, don’t worry, we’re going to simplify it, make it complex again, and simplify it again, so you’ll understand it well.
This is going to stretch your focus and memory, but I promise I will be bringing it back to a simple structure. The process of starting with an overview, drilling down to details, and going back to sub-overviews is core for rapid learning, so trust the process.
Solutions That Generate Traffic
This section will focus on digital marketing but anecdotally include other forms of media to bridge the mind gap for those of you who are less familiar with digital marketing.
All forms of traffic generators are divided into to two groups:
Push (Display) Marketing - Offers that are displayed to the target audience without that audience requesting to receive the promotion. This includes TV commercials, Radio, Facebook, Display, billboards, etc.
Pull (Search) Marketing - Offers the audience is searching for. In the old days it was the Yellow Pages. If you needed a contractor, you would open the phone book to find one. Today we have online directories like Yelp, Expedia, and of course search engines like Google, where we can search for what we want.
Let’s dive into them:
Push (Display) Marketing
*Features of the below solutions might change depending on when you read this book.
**The word OFFER used below refers to Offers, Promotions, Brands, Content pieces (lead magnets), etc.
Facebook Advertising - allows you to advertise to the Facebook community using many targeting parameters. It has different ad types to facilitate Awareness to an offer, Traffic to an offer and Lead Ads to generate leads for an offer. Excellent ad platform geared toward 25-plus.
Instagram - part of Facebook, presenting ads based on user profile targeting.
Google Ad Network - while Google is essentially a search ad platform, it has a display platform that is used to retarget users who searched for something specific. Case in point, I searched for red boots. Later when I read an article on my favorite blog site, I might see an ad saying “Get red boots now from BootTown”.
YouTube (Google) - Video ads preceding, during, or after the video you’re watching. Because it’s powered by Google, and Google has a profile on you as a search user (things you’ve been looking for) and as a YouTube viewer, it is very good at matching the right ad to the right user, resulting in a high converting display platform.
LinkedIn Ads - LinkedIn has many ad types. Ads to get more followers for your page, Lead Ads to generate leads for your business, Click Ads to send you traffic. Like Facebook it knows its audience very well; their business profile, content they post, content they like, and other behavior variables it can measure. But like Facebook, LinkedIn is PUSH advertising, as the user wasn’t actively searching for a service or a product when displayed with a matching ad.
LinkedIn Organic Reach-outs - There are many tactics for organic reach-out, from crafting content and sharing it, to direct reach-out to potential customers, to reach-outs in Groups (very powerful) and all the way to LinkedIn automation tools. LinkedIn doesn’t approve of automation tools, but they are out there, they are useful, and many companies use them without actually spamming.
TikTok - the same as Facebook. I won’t expand, other than it is geared toward a young crowd, and unlike Facebook it has a paid Influencer ad network, meaning you can pay, using TikTok’s interface, to an influencer to promote your offer.
Programmatic Display Networks (banners) - You see ads on many different sites, such as online newspapers, that could be images or videos. They are served to the site you’re visiting via one of several ad networks. In addition, some larger sites have their own internal banner system.
Mobile Advertising - This refers to ads you’ll see when using apps. After you win a trivia game, you see an ad pop up for another type of game, or sometimes an offer you searched for online (coming usually from ad-networks mentioned above).
Native Ads (Sponsored Content) - Ever notice that on some sites, when you’re done reading an article, there are more “recommended” articles for you? More often than not, these articles are pushed by a sponsor content platform like Taboola or OutBrain.
Influencer Marketing - On TV you can see a show host or even big movie stars “casually” using branded products (e.g., drinking a Coke or driving a Ford). In online marketing, it’s YouTubers, Podcasters, TikTokers and Instagrammers who have an audience in a specific niche (such as Beauty and Style) and are paid to recommend specific products and services. This is very effective.
Social Posting (Related to Influencer Marketing) - You connect with a colleague on LinkedIn or you join a fan page of a company on Facebook. They do a promotional post and you’re getting exposed to it. You didn’t ask for what they posted, ergo, it's under Push Marketing.
*NOTE RE: social/influencer marketing - Though I divided the traffic ecosystem into two buckets, there are of course nuances. Influencer marketing for example is a hybrid model - while the audience is not actively searching for a specific solution, they have opted in, and are very interested to receive information from the influencer. It’s like saying, ‘I’m not interested in specific offers from Disney, but I am interested in getting information from Disney on a regular basis.’ This is why Influencer marketing is super effective.
Cold Mass Emailing - The process of building email lists (we’ll cover that later) and mass emailing them a specific offer. Sometimes referred to as Spam Mailing. This can be done by mass emailing tools that provide dedicated IP like MailJet or MaroPost.
Cold Direct Emailing - Finding a specific, relevant potential client email and reaching out to them. Use tools like LemList.
Cold Social Reach-outs - You direct-message (DM) a potential client on LinkedIn or Facebook to start a sales conversation. There are great tools to automate this process.
Newsletters or Internal Client Emailing - You send a periodic newsletter or a promotional email to your list or client base. This is critical for generating more revenue from your existing leads and clients. Use systems like AWeber, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, etc.
Cashback Promotions - Promote a cash-back offer (e.g.,10% cash back with every purchase) via networks like Figg or Groupon. The offer is pushed via a network of participating sites like banks, airlines, etc. (you may have seen them in your bank account)
More Push Advertising You Probably Know - TV ads, Radio ads, Newspaper/magazine ads, billboards, fliers, mailers, blimp ads (yes, it’s a thing), posters, in-store signs, and more.
Pull (Search) Traffic Generators
Destination Directories - Yelp, HomeAdvisor, ZocDoc, etc. These are usually sites that have a meaningful reputation as the go-to venue when searching for a specific solution, usually very niched (for restaurants, doctors, travel, etc.).
Paid Search - Google, Bing, Amazon - you search for a product or a service and you get an ad for those products or services. There are many different ad types:
Organic Search - when users click on an organic search result. To get ample traffic you need to be on the first page of Google. To get there we sell a service called SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization.
It includes the utilization of many different services:
There are many more micro services that require knowhow and tools to promote a site to the top of a search engine.
Online Reviews - You probably won’t work with a business that has a two-star ranking on Google, or patron a restaurant that has three stars on Yelp. Generating consistent high-ranking reviews requires review generation tools like Broadly, GradeUs, BirdsEye and others.
While Reviews can be Pushed on a user as part of an ad, in essence users SEARCH for reviews when making their buying decisions.
Referral Program - referral programs are about turning your clients into brand ambassadors, enabling them to profit on referring clients your way. These programs can be powered by any affiliate program (e.g., OSI).
Solutions That Generate Conversions
Websites – an online venue for a business to showcase their business, services, products, team, content. It is a digital representation of their business.
Landing Pages – online venues that are focused on a specific message such as promoting a specific product or a specific lead magnet (Download the Top 5 Diets Report, etc.).
Online Stores (eCommerce) – a website that is dedicated to selling products online.
Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn, etc. – Your page on designated social networks is like another website, engaging users and turning them into followers, fans, and eventually leads.
Online listings such as Google My Business, Yelp, other directories – These usually get double the traffic from search engines than the average site, as they come up first on searches and they are an extension of the business’s digital presence. They turn browsers into visitors of your site, or leads.
Chatbots or Live Chat – When you visit an online venue, you might see an option to chat with a live or automated representative. These are the digital equivalent of a sales rep, mainly used for lead generation and providing information to increase engagement.
On Site Popups – These have different names, such as Engagement Widget, Exit Popups, Light Boxes and more. Essentially, they look like popups with a specific message that are set to activate based on visitor action (such as leaving the site or coming back for the third time), time (15 seconds after the visitor lands on the site/page), or visitor info (visitor is coming from a specific state or a specific campaign). More often than not, you see these popups when trying to leave a site, and are alerted by a message to keep you on site or provide your information.
Webinars – An online live event or presentation that users register for. Billed as educational but really a sales tool. Think about any live event/seminar you’ve seen. It’s the same, just online. Instead of a local real estate seminar, it could be a Las Vegas real estate broker doing a nationwide online webinar for real estate investment opportunities in Vegas, or a Facebook marketing software company doing a webinar on “How Small Business Can Crush Facebook with Less Than $500” and so on.
The Conversion component inevitably will provide information for the action a user can take (Buy this, register for that, leave your info, etc.).
Once you niche, your T&C becomes much more specific, and therefore much easier to learn and implement.
You’ll find that a limited number of solutions are usually used in specific niches. As an example, real estate agents are always looking for leads. Mainly seller leads, but also buyer leads. There are several different ways to generate these leads, but overall, your campaign is very focused on becoming very good at providing qualified leads for a good price.
When you work with life-style businesses like restaurants, travel and beauty, marketing tactics will change, and BRANDING will play a bigger role in their marketing.
Okay, now we know there are many marketing solutions we can use. There are actually many more niched solutions (e.g., just for real estate agents) we didn’t include above but they all fit into the T&C funnel.
They are all cogs in a machine we’ll build called a funnel.
In marketing we use the term funnel to describe the prospect’s journey from being aware of the offering to lead or sale, going through several stages.
There are more and less detailed funnel structures, but overall, these are the steps –
*IMPORTANT NOTE: Funnels are tactical plans on how to accomplish specific marketing goals.
Before we can build a funnel, we’ll need to create a strategy, which is coming up.
Dental Implants Practice
Your client is a high-end dental implants practice. They are focusing on people over the age of 60, with a high household income or a net worth of more than $1 million, in their local community (e.g., Dallas, TX). This would be considered a very small target audience.
You might want to invite people who are 60-plus with a high household income to a live event where they can get all the information about dental implants and ask all the questions. This can also be an online event (webinar).
Below you will find three scenarios for the campaign: one for an Appointment campaign, one for a Webinar campaign and one for a Live Event campaign.
However, you’ll notice they all follow the same structure: traffic leading to lead gen, leading to a sales situation (via sales rep or direct online or in event) and follow-up sequence of emails and text messages to support every step of the process.
To make this happen, you’ll need to get the client branding right (people are not going to show up to an event held by a no-name dentist). Then you will need the following:
You can outsource all of the above (I’ll explain how) and still make very high margins, but the actual plan is up to you.
An easy way to build a funnel is to copy what others have done successfully. As the saying goes “Imitate, then innovate.”
Let’s take an HVAC example. You’ll see it’s the same.
HVAC Company Provides AC Repair to Local Homes
If you use Pull marketing (e.g., Google) - you can target everyone that is NOW searching for AC repair. You’ll be competing on very costly search phrases, and with leading HVAC companies that have tons of money to spend.
If you use Push marketing (e.g., Facebook), you’re essentially trying to convince people that they should repair their AC. Not really the right fit.
But you can find ways around it and entice them to get their AC inspected earlier in the year for a discount.
Here’s another example: a new cosmetic eCommerce product geared toward young adults. Since it’s a new brand, they have no brand equity. No one knows them. So, if you advertise, your conversions will be low. You need to get them SOCIAL PROOF first. One good way to get Social Proof and Traffic is with influencers.
Without getting too much into influencer marketing, you have a lot of Micro Influencers (MIs) that would post a nice usage pic, usage video or shout-out to brands they like just for giving them a free sample. They usually have 5K-10K followers. For a bit bigger MI, you’ll pay $500. This would get the right audience + social proof at the same time. Choose the influencer based on their niche (e.g., Cosmetics) and the influence channel based on who they reach. Facebook and Instagram are geared more toward the 25-plus crowd, while TikTok and SnapChat are for the younger audience.
Here's how the funnel would flow:
*TIP: It’s important to note that TRAFFIC can also come from influencers and business partners. For example, a deal with the local HVAC association can get you in front of a lot of HVAC companies.
So, when thinking about helping your clients, don’t rush into solutions and don’t be concerned that you don’t know all marketing solutions. Be logical and ask the right questions (coming up in the next chapter). Always think about:
In the next chapter we’ll learn how to build a strategy without being an experienced marketer. All you have to do is be logical, and attentive to important details which I will lay out for you.
We’ll also take a deep dive into how we build a marketing strategy for our clients, even those from industries we may not know. 99% of good marketers hack other funnels as a beginning for their own creative journey. If I need to promote an HVAC, why not look at ads and funnels that other leading companies are doing? More about that coming up.
You can provide a product, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get websites highly-ranked in search results. (I’ll show you how to provide the best products without doing any fulfillment in the next chapter.)
Or you can go a bit further, become a true marketing advisor and help the business win.
While you can make money with both, the latter is where you’ll eventually provide more value, make more money, and have longer relationships with your clients.
But how do you do that?
You need to train yourself. Read books and watch relevant courses. But more than anything, use simple business logic, asking the right questions, and “hack” strategies successful competitors applied.
Let’s dive into it.
**Don’t forget to niche down. If you do, your journey will be much easier, because you won’t need to reinvent the wheel with every new client.
The process begins with your “Discovery Meeting”.
How do you get the most out of that?
Here are the right questions to ask a potential client:
These key questions will allow you to understand their current cost per lead, cost for connection and cost of client acquisition.
*TIP: Usually, working on just one of these (i.e., leads conversions, connection rate or sales conversions) will increase sales faster.
So, you had a good day. You had a long discovery conversation with your client, asking the right questions, and after thinking about it, and maybe researching online, you’re pretty sure you understand the holes in their marketing. GREAT! That’s a really good first step.
Now you need to do something about it.
That can be creating a plan to fix the holes or, in some cases where the business does not have a marketing history you can review, you’ll need to decide on the right strategy and tactics for them to start.
Coming again to the rescue, the simple Traffic & Conversion scheme can be used.
*NOTE: Some issues that you’ll encounter will be in the business model. A very common one will be a service that is priced too high or too low. Another is a client that wants to sell too many things instead of focusing on their top sellers.
Be on the alert for these potential issues as you do your initial research, asking the client all the questions we mentioned above, and as you run the campaign and see the results.
The best place to start is to review the funnels of successful competitors. Remember, hacking the funnel is finding the ad (traffic), the conversion units (LPs, forms, sites), and the follow-up funnel (what happens after a lead is generated).
Hacking Google Advertising or SEO Funnels
There are several competitive analysis tools you can use. One of the best-known is a tool called SpyFu.com - using this tool you can actually view all your clients’ advertising campaigns: the ads themselves, the copy, what they tried and stopped (i.e., it didn’t work), what they have continuously run and are still running (i.e., it works and you should copy).
You can see:
Once you have a couple that you think are good candidates to copy, you can then click on their ads, and see where you land (Landing Page). You can then copy the landing page as well.
Of course, you can’t copy word per word. Tweak the copy and restructure it a bit.
Remember, you are doing this to provide your client with a marketing plan. You are not going to do the advertising yourself, or even make the final decisions on keywords. This will be the Google Ads marketer you’ll be working with.
Your job is to say to your client – “I think we should do a Google Ads campaign, like your competitor “Mr. Competition,” and here is why,” and then present what you learned from your research.
*You can also search on Google and click on live ads.
I mentioned an incredible tool called SpyFu.com. Mike Roberts is the brain behind it, and he shared how it works when we talked on my podcast.
Mike Roberts:
If you're starting a brand-new campaign, what you can do on SpyFu is figure out who the most effective advertisers are in that niche, and check out their campaign. See which keywords they're buying, and look at their history, every ad they've run, and every split test they ran, and you can effectively determine the winner by looking at which one they kept. Sometimes, for some domains, we'll have 50 tests on a single keyword. So, you can see the results of all that and understand, "Well, what ad copy is going to work?" Ad copy is one of those things that people don't think about a lot because everybody thinks the ad copy they came up with is probably the best ad copy ever written, but in Google Ads, quality score is directly related to what you're going to pay and directly related to the efficiency of your campaign. 90% of quality score is click-through rate. Everything that Google does, everything that Google optimizes for is optimized for effective CPM, which is the amount of money that Google makes per 1,000 impressions. They optimize for that. So, they have this thing that's a quality score, but ultimately the quality score is your click-through rate. It's how much money they're going to make from you. And the only thing that can really impact the click-through rate is the ad copy, so the ad copy is paramount to optimizing your campaign, but also increasing your quality score and driving the efficiency of your campaign.
Hacking Facebook Funnels
Facebook has a section called facebook.com/ads/library where you can search for past and active ads by category, keywords and competitor names.
You can see the ad creative (image, video, etc.), the copy, the links that are included, and even related text from the initial funnel, such as questions the advertiser is asking the users once they reach the landing page.
You can and should click on these links and see what the landing pages look like.
TIP: You can also see when an ad was launched and if it’s still active. If you’re seeing an ad that’s been running for two-plus months, it means it’s working.
Hack the Entire Funnel
Go through the entire funnel yourself; from ad to conversion to booking an appointment, even talking to the sales rep. This will give you so much more information than just doing an online investigation. You will know their sales pitch and pricing, what emails they send after you book a meeting, whether they send text reminders and what kind, whether a person follows up, if there’s a quote form and what’s included, and so on.
And again, enjoy it, you are in a creative process.
Just Google it :-) I know, it’s not really what an expert suggestion should be, but Google is the best way to find small businesses case studies.
I ran this search - “HVAC marketing campaigns case study.” That’s really straightforward, and I got plenty of case studies.
You have a strategy, a plan for the client, and you get them to sign off on it. Now you need to fulfill and deliver campaigns.
What should you do?
Fortunately for you, I’m going to save you a TONNNNNN of time and effort.
You can outsource everything.
Option #1 - You search for vendors online, e.g., “white label Facebook advertising services” and you find several. You’ll need to talk with them, try them out (they may not be very good), and of course negotiate your wholesale prices.
This requires some work, a learning curve, and low margins to begin with, as you don’t have buying power yet (assuming you’re just starting your business).
Option #2 - You plug into Umbrella. Umbrella is my company, so I know all our products and services intimately.
Umbrella provides you one dashboard via which you can resell the leading marketing services and tech you’ll need (all done for you 100%). And because Umbrella buys on behalf of many agencies, it gets amazing rates, so you’ll always make at least 50% profit margins. Sometimes it’s 80-90% profit. Umbrella also provides all the tactical training on how to sell these products with simple videos you can easily follow.
This method has zero searching, sourcing, testing and negotiating, and you can manage all your clients and their products from one dashboard.
Go to www.umbrellaus.com and check it out.
It’s critical to remember:
Outsourcing is not ALL OR NOTHING. If you already have marketing experience, and you want to keep some services in-house (such as website building), then just outsource everything else.
Once you plug into Umbrella’s platform, you can power any and all marketing services.