My web design and Internet marketing agency has had an amazing 24 months and I would like to share three tools that we have used to rapidly grow our business.
1. Duct Tape Marketing
Duct Tape Marketing is a best-selling book by the undisputed king of small business marketing: John Jantsch. Read this book and it will change the way you look at your customers, and teach you how to build an inbound marketing system that draws in your ideal customers.
Duct Tape Marketing helped me remove my tactical SEO blinders and look at SEO as it really is today: an integral part of a holistic digital marketing strategy. Further, Jantsch places an emphasis on content-driven SEO, which is undoubtedly the present and future of search engine optimization.
Duct Tape Marketing is much more than a book; it’s a complete small business marketing system that can be installed in virtually any business. I installed it in mine and it’s changed my digital agency forever. If you run an Internet marketing agency, and especially if you’re a web designer or SEO professional, you should definitely check it out.
Duct Tape Marketing is also a network of certified marketing professionals that leverages collective purchasing power for access to some of best digital marketing tools and services in the industry. The network also acts as an international brain-trust of leading small business marketing experts. A Duct Tape Marketing Consultant certification will help your agency establish trust in a notoriously sleazy Internet marketing industry that is chock full of cold-calling, email spamming and robo-calling snake oil salesmen.
Duct Tape Marketing, however, isn’t lead generation pixie dust. You need your own talent and ambition to make it work, and especially consistent discipline to practice what Jantsch preaches.
2. UpCity
If you are in SEO and haven’t heard of UpCity yet, you will. This is far and away the best SEO task management and automated SEO reporting system on the planet. I know some agencies that spend a week out of every month generating client reports. UpCity documents your work as you or your staff are doing it, and automatically sends clients detailed monthly (or weekly) reports!
It would be hard to imagine running my business now without UpCity.
This platform has enabled me to systematize my own SEO process into detailed tasks so that I can not only improve communication with our small business clients, but also scale my business through hiring. If you are a true SEO consulting professional, you know that it’s hard to scale SEO services because best-practices SEO is a talent-based profession, not a commodity service. Since UpCity gives you the ability to document your process, its now possible to hire staff to execute your own brand of SEO – and thus really scale out your practice.
The company is led by Dan Olson, a guy that knows SEO and digital marketing. In other words, UpCity was created by SEOs for SEOs. We get great support from their team as well.
What’s even better? Duct Tape Marketing and UpCity go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
3. Hatchbuck
We have been blessed over the years with consistent lead flow and it keeps improving every year. Yet, my agency has been terrible with inbound lead management. Everybody wants more leads, but when you get lots of leads all the time and have no way to process or follow up with them, you end up leaving a lot of money on the table.
We tried many vanilla CRMs. None of them worked.
Then I realized what we really needed was a lead management and marketing / sales automation system. While many folks love this type of system to draw in and nurture cold traffic, in our case, we needed a way just to process our consistent flow of warm and hot leads.
After all, this is what good SEO does for your business – you bypass the long cycle of education and get to people that want your services right now.
Yes it’s a so-called ‘high class problem’, but it’s one on the most significant problems we had with respect to scaling. But if you can’t effectively follow up on quality leads, you lose business. A lot of it. When you start scaling up and taking on more overhead, you can’t cherry pick clients anymore and you need to close every ideal client.
We looked at very closely at several small business solutions in this space and Hatchbuck came up the clear winner because of its affordability. There a many great solutions in this space such as Infusionsoft and Ontraport, as well as comprehensive platforms like Hubspot that offer sales and marketing automation as part of a larger platform offering. Hats off to Hatchbuck CEO and co-founder Don Breckenridge Jr. for creating a great product and providing great on-boarding and ongoing support.
This solution enables us to automatically educate prospects on our Unique Selling Position, pricing and process, so that if and when we meet in person, the client is ready to close on the spot.
Questions or comments? Let me know below. I would love to hear what tools and services fellow SEO pros, web designers and marketers use to grow and scale their agencies.
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