Randomly selected client quote
John, it's absolutely brilliant. THANK YOU SO SO MUCH.
Heather Young, Floral Cakes, 12 Jun 2008
A new customer who finds you through a search engine like Google comes to you for free. That's very different from traditional marketing where you pay for an advertisement or inclusion in a directory such as Yellow Pages.
So what if all your sales could come to you through the search engines?
Forget technology, the Internet isn't about that. It's about the momentary one-to-one human connection between you and your potential customer, right exactly when they are looking for what you provide. Did they find you? Do they believe you? Do they trust you? Are they really going to get out their credit card or pick up the phone right now?
You can cut the cost of advertising and marketing and yes, ditch the directories, if you know how to get a great position in the search engines.
I will act as your virtual marketing director. I'll take on your enquiry, lead, and/or sales generation marketing processes, including your website, advertising and promotion, and I'll move you from being dependent on old media, to being bowled over by new media. I'll manage the process of building your online sales while moving you safely away from old media (as far as you want to go).
Here's how it works:
As your virtual marketing director my first task is to try to build your business so it's running at full capacity (you may prefer 80% or so and we'll agree a level). I will promote you online in order to achieve that goal.
Let's imagine your company is running at 50% capacity, turning over £100,000 and you're spending 10% of turnover on marketing (that's just an example, the figure can vary from nothing to 75% or so depending on the industry). After two months I've managed to get your business to 75% of capacity, so it's now turning over £150,000 a year or £12,500 a month. I raise an invoice for 10% of the new turnover: £1,250 and you claim back any of those old marketing expenses we agreed, so that effectively you pay me the difference .. £416.67, on average, for my efforts.
Just to be clear your marketing spend per sale is the same as it always was, but you have more sales. Your profit will be higher, because you're doing more business from the same fixed cost base (buildings, electricity, car, etc.)
Having proved that you can sell online, I will calculate which marketing methods are costing the most and replace them with more of what's costing the least. I've probably used Pay Per Click advertising in stage 1 in order to prove the concept and work out which search phrases are profitable for you. Here's where I move to search engine optimisation work along with social, web 2.0 promotional methods such as Facebook, YouTube, and blogging if appropriate.
The more costly old-media habits will be the first to go. I make more profit from my work with you if I can move you to where you want to be too: selling for free online. So assuming you're safely making money from online sales and working to capacity, I will cancel ads and old media promotions starting with the worst performers, and fill their space with more Internet marketing.
The more I can cut your marketing costs and get you business free from the Internet, the more of your marketing budget I get to keep. There's a lot for me to do, but the goal is to get to the point, if it's possible, where you are working at full capacity (turning over £200,000 in this case) and spending the same 10% on marketing that you always did, but I get to keep more of it which I divert into the necessary work required to beat the competition in the search engines.
When it becomes clear the situation is stable and you need less of my time, I will lower the marketing budget gradually to a much lower level that will sustain the situation in the long term.
You are now working at full capacity, but with a much lower marketing cost. We made the transition from costly old media to Internet marketing nirvana. In other words, you now have a very successful and profitable business.
We can establish a rate of pay based on the number of visitors to your website. And if you haven't got a website, we can base our figure on what your competition are willing to pay per click in the Google Adwords Pay Per Click system.
Clearly I would come to you to discuss any major changes I propose to make and I may well need to discuss overall strategies, implementation details or stories or news with you regularly. Whether you still spend lots of time doing marketing work or drop it and spend your time elsewhere is up to you.
Every client and market and situation is different but I may start with Pay Per Click ads to discover key phrases that convert efficiently into sales for you. I'll then work on optimising that conversion, mostly by improving your website. Then I'll work on moving from Pay Per Click to natural search so that you get free traffic in the long term from search engines. I'll also work on other free methods such as what's often referred to as Web 2.0. That includes social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and other sharing sites like YouTube, blogging and podcasting, forums and so on.
I take an engineer's approach. There's a lot of Internet marketing information out there. A lot is downright out of date: Google changes its search ranking algorithm about 400 times a year .. more than once a day, so it's no use following a plan from a year ago.
There are lots of Internet marketing systems you can buy, too, and I buy some of them. But you have to ask yourself .. why aren't those people using their systems to make their money? Why bother selling it to us? Usually, it's because it did work, but now it doesn't. Even .. it did work, but now everyone's using it Google will spot the pattern and move against it.
So I test everything and implement what I see working and what makes sense. The engineers' approach is to use what's 'scientifically' provable and repeatable. You wouldn't want to employ an architect who got their techniques from a $97 ebook. Architects use real, proven, scientific knowledge to build something that won't fall down. That's what I do in Internet marketing.
Assuming I accept your project, yes, absolutely. It'll be 'driven' by your customers, though. It'll be about what sells, so that it sells.
I used to run a payment by results PR company, so I've always liked to be rewarded for what I achieve.
To be successful in Internet marketing you need to know a lot about a lot (700 hours of training and counting for me, just in Internet marketing), and many of the things I do take a lot of justifying to people who either know nothing about Internet marketing, or (if I'm honest), think they know something about it. Internet marketing moves fast, and there's a lot of out of date information online. And many Internet marketing activities take just a few minutes .. less time to do than to explain. So it's more efficient for you to buy me as a black box, a function .. just add some John Allsopp and your sales go up.
It's inspired by the idea that money enables enemies to trade (I'm not saying we are enemies, of course). In trade, all we need to know is what's being bought and sold and at what price. That's very efficient. I don't have to justify my time or what I'm doing minute by minute, I'll be judged and rewarded by my results. When I'm done, you'll have a transformed company.
No! 100% definitely absolutely not. Everything I do is white hat. That means, no spamming, nothing dodgy, nothing harmful to your reputation. Actually, reputation matters more and more as more people get used to leaving comments online and supporting you or not on social networking sites. I'll be building your reputation because that helps us both.
Incidentally, I love marketing because I think it's a great force for good. Helping an old lady across the street is marketing. Efficiently getting what people need to them and being rewarded, that's marketing, and it's good for society.
The 'sale' can be replaced in all the above by the enquiry, the donation, the signup. Whatever you want people to do on your website, we can work it out accordingly.
No, you can keep whatever you like so long as you like it enough to keep paying for it.
You can just keep on growing and I'll keep building income streams for you.
You just let me know in writing, and the next invoice I raise will be the last. Once you've settled everything outstanding, I'll send you a list of the logins or accounts I've created.
I'm busy enough. If I turned this up I'd be swamped. I actually can only accept a steady stream of new clients. I'm building my capacity, but in a controlled way. So for those who didn't read this far .. that's fine. And, I tend to explain myself in writing anyway so if you've survived this page, we'll get along just fine.
I'm looking for an initial 10 clients to road-test this new service and because I want to find the holes, I'm happy to take on (almost) anyone. I've a sneaky suspicion this might work better for me if I only target medium sized companies, but I like small companies and for now, it's available on a first come, first served basis.
This system is now sold out. On the scheme are a couple of insurance companies, a GPS tracker manufacturer, a computer components company, a financial training e-book publisher, a craft jeweller, an airport taxi company, an organic B&B, a management training company and a ceramic artist.
So for now it's hourly rate only, get in touch in the usual manner.