How to Report on Inbound Marketing Results

Posted by Roman Bodnarchuk on Sep 26, 2016 11:40:16 AM

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The "about" page is typically an afterthought. While designers, copywriters, and CEOs might spend weeks agonizing over what information and pictures are included on your homepage, they rarely consider what elements other than a short description should be included in the "about us" section of the agency's website. They simply pop in some copy and press publish. 

This often leads to confusing, self-indulgent information that tells potential clients very little and can even alienate you from the people you want to hire you. 

I reviewed hundreds of agency websites to see how firms are using this digital real estate to spark the interest of prospects, and I found a few common problems:

  • No target audience in mind: I couldn't tell if I should hire the agency, apply for a job, or call them for a quote for an article. Prospects, job seekers, and journalists have vastly different needs. Define who you are writing for, and consider creating additional pages for the other audiences who visit your site.  
  • Too many irrelevant details: You might be proud of your growing agency, but most people will find it unnecessary to learn about every new office you've had in the past 10 years. Unless the information is relevant to who your agency is now and how it operates, leave the small details to your Wikipedia page. 
  • Confusing copy: Some "about us" pages contained less than three sentences. Others covered every possible detail. One was written in some type of poem-hybrid, while another included a motivational quote from the agency owner. There was no structure, no story, and everything was given equal emphasis. 

As more and more clients turn to managing their own searches for agencies and researching potential partners online, it will become increasingly important that an agency's digital presence reflects who it is, what it does, how it does it, and who it does it for. This informations helps clients get to know your agency during the research phase and connect what you do to solving her brand's needs.  

And the perfect place to start is with your "about us" page. 

14 Ideas for Creating an 'About Us' Page

During this informal research, I found a few key elements that agencies could include on their own sites to increase their credibility and likeability, start a conversation with prospects, and help potential clients self-qualify. If you want to connect with potential clients, consider improving your "about" page with a combination of these impactful elements:

Avoid jargon. 

Writing full of overly embellished phrases, complicated constructions, and marketing buzzwords will only leave a prospect confused and irritated. If you can't communicate clearly the who, what, and how of your company, few prospects will want to hand over their own client messaging. 

Argonaut's "about" page copy is clear and straightforward, while also expressing the type of work it wants to do and the type of clients it wants to work with. 

Magnetic's focus on experiential design could result in copy full of industry-specific terminology, but instead, it details what it does with examples and simple language. It's perfectly approachable. 

Speak directly to potential clients. 

Yes, your "about" page should be about you. But more specifically, it should be about what you can do for your clients. People care about their own problems -- that's why they are hiring an agency. 

Square 2 Marketing's "about" page specifically addresses potential clients, making it clear that it is solely focused on getting measurable results. 

Make it easy to get in touch with the right person. 

Everyone knows that info@ email addresses are where spam goes to die. And picking up the phone? That's a little forward, don't you think? If your "about" page is written for prospects, be sure to include a way to contact the CEO or new business director. 

Envy's "about" page ends with the picture of the agency's executive director and a short form that provides the agency enough information for them to qualify the inquiry, and it gives the prospect an easy and personable way to get in touch.  

10up outlines what it does and how it does it and then specifically tells the prospect what it wants her to do -- hire the firm. The form asks questions on what the timing of the start of the project would be and how the person heard about the firm. 

List the problems you specifically solve. 

"We're an independent, full-service, integrated agency full of innovators who think differently and solve business problems."

This statement sums up what many agencies say on their "about" pages. And it doesn't tell prospects much about whether or not you are the right firm for their specific business. 

Instead, ask questions or specifically outline what types of companies are the right "fit" for a partnership. 

Imagine Business Development does this by describing who it works with (small- and mid-marketing B2B companies), the size of the company ($5-$100 million), the wants of the business (fast growth), and the pain points its clients have faced. 

Reveal what is important to your people. 

What values are important to your firm? What causes or issues bring your staff together? While clients are first and foremost concerned about how well you can solve their problems, they might also find it inspiring to partner with a firm that wants to make an impact beyond a campaign launch. People hire people, and people are drawn together by shared visions and passions. 

Wongdoody highlights its Women in Advertising scholarship, showing its commitment to educating more female creative leaders. 

Include testimonials from clients. 

Potential clients want to know what it will be like to work with. If they can envision themselves in the place of your previous clients, you've just made it one step further in the sales process. By including testimonials from individuals with a similar job title or someone who expresses a common pain point or desire, people will be much more likely to believe you are the right agency for them. 

JUXT's "about" page features a quote from the vice president of marketing at Clear Channel. 

Highlight your focus. 

Clients want industry expertise. It's important that a marketing partner understand a client's business, industry best practices, and important trends. If you have a strong positioning statement and have defined "who" you provide your services for, explicitly state this. Consider also linking to relevant case studies highlighting the success you've have in these industries or for this specific type of brand. 

Weidert Group has a why us? page that details the company's expertise in B2B while also defining the industries that it has experience in. 

Show off your culture. 

Agencies -- with their beer taps, quirky creatives, and passion for all things marketing -- are inspiring and charming to clients, especially those who work in more traditional companies. By highlighting your fun culture, a client can better understand what the experience of working with your firm will be like.  

Red Door Interactive highlights its 100% jerk free staff and showcases pictures of its offices, team events, and silly moments. 

Tell a story. 

Stories help us understand where we've been and where we are going -- the latter which should lead to your agency. By telling a story about why your agency was created, how it has evolved, and how it sees the larger marketing challenges all brands are facing is more memorable and influential than a simple fact sheet. 

Impact Branding & Design highlights how marketing has changed and why its approach is relevant for the way consumers interact with and buy from brands today. 

Include a call-to-action.

How can prospects get to know your agency better? What knowledge and insights can you provide outside of marketing services? 

Consider adding a CTA that lets prospects keep in touch even if they are not ready to begin working with a marketing agency. 

Head includes a sign-up CTA for its newsletter. You could include links to your social media accounts, a CTA to a in-depth ebook, or a fact sheet download. 

Reveal who makes the decisions. 

Prospects are not going to care who your junior designer is. They care about the executive team -- the people who will be pitching them, who they will be discussing terms and plans with, and the ones they are signing the contract with. They want to know who is responsible for the company. 

Olson showcases its core executive team and links to each person's LinkedIn profile so that prospects can research the background of the executives, find out what mutual connections they might have, read endorsements, and find previously published articles. 

Promote your previous clients. 

Publishing your entire list of previous clients is unnecessary. But a selected list of top-tier brands will interest prospects and add to your credibility. 

ODD highlights brands it has worked with, but it goes a step further by linking each of the logos to a quote from an executive at the brand.

Show off your accolades. 

Creative awards -- while some people think they are irrelevant -- help to confirm that your agency places high value on its creative work and its "product" has been peer reviewed and validated. It's just one more symbol of credibility that will increase the initial trust with a prospect. If you don't have awards, then list the effectiveness of your past work or the ROI clients have seen. 

Use your content to increase credibility. 

If you are guest blogging or are proactively pitching media, consider adding a recent news section to your "about" page. Content from your executives will give your agency a voice and a personality, and it will provide the prospect with an idea of your perspective on the industry. Placements in well-respected, industry publications continue to add to your credibility. 

 

 

Updating your team on the latest inbound tools and techniques, Roman's sales training has managed to not only transform iProperty's sales team to be among the best in the world but numerous others in local and international markets from beginners to experts.
 
Click To Watch A 2 Min Sales Video
  

In just a couple of days of this proven, structured, training -  sessions can help any size team meet their sales goals for continued company growth. Backed by knowledge that has helped Roman oversee $5 Billion dollars of real estate sales around the world, imagine how your team would benefit!

Visit N5R.COM for more information.

 

N5R.ai

North America's Leading HubSpot AI Agency

AI Strategy • HubSpot AI • Agent Architecture • AI Transformation
N5R.aiWisdomClone.ai10X AI NewsStrategic AI Coach

Ready to Become AI-First?

N5R.ai is North America's #1 HubSpot AI Agency.

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

Increase Sales – 83% of Sales Depend on the Customer Liking You

Posted by Roman Bodnarchuk on Sep 12, 2016 3:44:01 PM

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 Everyone knows people buy from people they like. Yet, you can’t really like someone you don’t know. You can’t like someone you don’t trust. And that’s exactly why most attempts to sell fail.

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Most entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales professionals push to sell at the first point of connection. A point of connection is the moment a potential buyer engages either with you or your message. Then they’re surprised when the other person is offended.

Remember that junior high dance when you tentatively asked a girl to dance with you. You waited for the slow dance then as soon as you got the girl out on the floor you squeezed her too close and put your hand on her bottom. She went stiff as a board before pulling away and slapping you.

Well, that’s kind of how your potential buyer feels. They gave you an inch and you went for the mile. Because you went too far too fast they turned coat and ran.

Here’s the deal. You don’t have to have a presentation perfected. You don’t need to know the top 100 closing techniques. You do need to understand how to develop relationships.

The key to sales success is your ability to start and develop long-term relationships. Once you accept this fact then you’re better equipped to make relationships. Plus it’s easier to transform those relationships into sales without the other person feeling violated. Sometimes you meet another person and it feels like you’ve known each other your whole life almost instantly.

However, that’s rare. In most cases relationship development is an incremental process. Because it is a process though relationship development is something you can consistently repeat over and over again with each new person from the first point of connection.

Most people are naturally a little guarded with strangers. Ever walked into the local coffee shop in small town America and noticed all eyes went immediately to you? Respect that and allow the other person to discover a reason to want to know you and know more about you.

Of course, most of us are self-centered so we are more interested in someone who has something we want than we are in someone who has something they want to sell us.

Prove they made a good decision when they decided to get to know you by adding value to them and their life. Focus on them, what they want, what they’re interested in, and what they’re looking for. Engage them and allow them to do the talking and the asking.

Relationships are give and take. Far too often sales conversations are nothing but you talking about you and what you have to offer. And that’s exactly why it doesn’t work.

 
Updating your team on the latest inbound tools and techniques, Roman's sales training has managed to not only transform iProperty's sales team to be among the best in the world but numerous others in local and international markets from beginners to experts.
 
Click To Watch A 2 Min Sales Video
  

In just a couple of days of this proven, structured, training -  sessions can help any size team meet their sales goals for continued company growth. Backed by knowledge that has helped Roman oversee $5 Billion dollars of real estate sales around the world, imagine how your team would benefit!

Visit N5R.COM for more information.

 

N5R.ai

North America's Leading HubSpot AI Agency

AI Strategy • HubSpot AI • Agent Architecture • AI Transformation
N5R.aiWisdomClone.ai10X AI NewsStrategic AI Coach

Ready to Become AI-First?

N5R.ai is North America's #1 HubSpot AI Agency.

Book Your Free 15-Min AI Strategy Session

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

N5R BLOG SERIES: How To Improve Your Sales State Of Mind For Results

Posted by Roman Bodnarchuk on Nov 6, 2014 12:00:00 PM

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n5r-logo21-2Introduction: It’s Not Your Market, It’s your Marketing


If you’re not selling enough, you need to look in the mirror and figure out what you are doing wrong. It’s not the market; it’s your marketing. Don’t ever look at economy and think it affects you. Your sales are completely about your state of mind.

Don’t let the media nonsense get to you.

If you think about the media, those papers get thinner and thinner every day. If I was in a declining industry and every week they were laying off people in my organization and paying journalists less and less, I’d be pretty negative too. That’s why the press is negative about the economy. Don’t believe them. There’s more wealth today than at any other time in history. Global stock markets are at all-time highs. Even US Real Estate, which experienced the biggest fall since the Great Depression, is back to more balanced levels. Within a year or two, they’ll be back at all-time highs.

“If you want to improve your sales, the first thing you need to do is take a good look at yourself, your basic techniques and how you relate to people.”

 

 


 

This blog entry launches a short series on the basics of effective sales and marketing strategy. This 5-part series provides guidelines for improving your state of mind for results.

  1. Introduction: It’s Not The Market. It’s Your AI Marketing.

  2. Get rid of negativity

  3. Always do your research

  4. Sell to women first

  5. Book the next meeting before they leave the room

Learn more from my book

The Million Dollar Minute – The Secrets of how we sold 367 Condos in 90 Minutes, and how You can too!

DOWNLOAD THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS FOR FREE

N5R.ai

North America's Leading HubSpot AI Agency

AI Strategy • HubSpot AI • Agent Architecture • AI Transformation
N5R.aiWisdomClone.ai10X AI NewsStrategic AI Coach

Ready to Become AI-First?

N5R.ai is North America's #1 HubSpot AI Agency.

Book Your Free 15-Min AI Strategy Session

Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, Condo Blog, real estate, marketing, marketing agency, 2014

Marketing Start-up Success Story: Backstreet Boys (Clone)

Posted by Roman Bodnarchuk on Nov 3, 2014 2:20:00 PM

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Marketing Start-up Success Story: Backstreet Boys

This success story was initiated by a man named Lou Pearlman.

Starting the Boy Band

When I first met Lou he was a very successful entrepreneur.

He made his money on Goodyear blimps and owned a publicly traded company, but his vision was to start a boy band. I didn’t understand why a person would go from owning a publicly traded company to wanting to start a boy band, but he had his reasons. His cousin was Art Garfunkel from Simon and Garfunkel and he had always been very envious of him. He had more money than his cousin, but Art always had way better parties.

What was the motivation?

It’s an interesting motivation, but sometimes your buyers have unusual motivations too. Sometimes we think they’re concerned about price, or quality, but it’s really about something else. For Lou Pearlman, the motivation was jealousy, and because of it, he created a little band called the Backstreet Boys. He was in Orlando, Florida, which was a great place to start. Disney was there, and along with it lots of kids. Lou had never been in the music industry, but he was a brilliant businessman, and when I walked into his office he had plenty of charts and graphs already set up. He really educated me on how you make money in the music business. He knew that, from a business perspective, in order to become successful, he had to create a band that teenage girls would embrace.

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Courtesy: instagram.com/backstreetboys

Understanding the teenage girl persona

This was back in the early ‘90s when the Internet was just catching wind. There wasn’t any high-speed Internet. It was very basic, almost unrecognizable to what we have today. But there were news groups and chat groups, and Lou knew that these teenage girls would embrace an Internet campaign because they were already using them. Teenage girls figured out news groups and chat groups before anyone else.

Marketing to teenage girls with direct messaging

So we started an online promotion through these groups, just like you would with LinkedIn and Facebook today, and we confirmed what Lou already knew, that people who used news and chat groups were interested in music. From them we were able to create a database of 3.5 million teenage girls around the world. We did this country-by-country with an automated email system.

Capturing detailed data from the registration site

When a teenage girl registered with our site, backstreetboys.com, we were able send them an email that was very relevant to them. For instance, one of the questions we asked during the registration was, “Who is your favourite band member?” If they said AJ, they would only receive emails that would come from AJ. If, for example, we knew that you lived in Berlin, we only messaged you when we knew the band was going to be putting on a concert in Berlin. If we were putting on a show in a Berlin shopping mall, we would email every teenage girl in our database who lived in Berlin, and that email would come from her favourite band member.

Personalized email messages

The email would be short and sweet. It would simply say, “Hey, I’m arriving on American Airlines flight number,” whatever the flight number was, “in Terminal 3. I’d love to see you. Can you meet me?”

On average every girl that we emailed would forward it to 40 other people. We managed to create riots at these airports, even though the Backstreet Boys had never sold an album.

Launch Marketing and creating demand

It was all about launch marketing and creating demand. At the time we had to figure out who all of the media were, who were the local radio stations and who the local TV stations were in each city. Remember what life was like before Google? We actually had to call around in order to find that information.

The media would show up with their cameras. They usually couldn’t tell what was going on, but they could see all these screaming teenage girls. The boys would walk off the plane and it would look like the Beatles had arrived. All of a sudden they were getting front-page cover stories and news segments.

Staying connected with timely personal messaging

The day after such an event another email would automatically be sent to all those girls from AJ, apologising and saying, “Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you. There were so many people. It was crazy. But would you be so kind as to call your favourite radio station and ask them to play our song?” That was how we got a number one song in every market we went into.

Incremental growth of demand and merchandise

Three weeks later, we’d come back and book a small venue and we’d sell that out. Three months after that, we’d come back and sell out a bigger venue. We created a system for sales and were able to do over $1 billion in merchandise sales.

You can do it too!

All of this was about using the latest available technology, creating a database, creating relevant communication and building brands.

Learn more from my book: "Millon Dollar Minute" 

DOWNLOAD THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS FOR FREE

More blogs llike this one: http://www.n5r.com/blog/surprising-insight-of-marketing-campaigns

N5R.ai

North America's Leading HubSpot AI Agency

AI Strategy • HubSpot AI • Agent Architecture • AI Transformation
N5R.aiWisdomClone.ai10X AI NewsStrategic AI Coach

Ready to Become AI-First?

N5R.ai is North America's #1 HubSpot AI Agency.

Book Your Free 15-Min AI Strategy Session

Topics: inbound marketing, campaign, advertising on socialmedia, backstreet boys, 2014

N5R: The Importance of Smart Phone Optimizing Your Website

Posted by Dmytro Matvisyk on Oct 27, 2014 8:18:00 AM

N5R.ai — We Make Companies AI-First and AI-Native  |  Book Your Free AI Agent Audit →

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The Importance of Smart Phone Optimizing Your Website


Many business' tend to forget the importance of smart phone optimization.

Remember, consumers are not using their desktops, or even the relatively new tablet as often as their smart phones. As technology adapts - we see how the tablet is becoming an almost outdated source of reaching the consumer. If your website doesn't look as good - if not better on mobile than it does when someone were to key in your domain into their desktop browser then you can guarantee the loss of a potential lead. 

Read the Full Report Here:

At N5R - we stress the importance of an online sales video optimized for smart phones. This is because as Adobe's latest Bench-mark report revealed video consumption is up 53% on mobile from last year and has overtaken tablet streaming by 13%.

Above: Sales Video created by N5R for Belleville Park: Smart City in Nodia - Delhi, India 


However, remember that on 26.6% of those videos reached 75% completion - which means it is important to get your pitch across quickly and in a manner that keeps the viewer engaged. 5 minutes is usually ideal. 

If your team can create, optimize, and reach your target audience on their smart phones then you are set up for success!   

VISIT N5R.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION

 

N5R.ai

North America's Leading HubSpot AI Agency

AI Strategy • HubSpot AI • Agent Architecture • AI Transformation
N5R.aiWisdomClone.ai10X AI NewsStrategic AI Coach

Ready to Become AI-First?

N5R.ai is North America's #1 HubSpot AI Agency.

Book Your Free 15-Min AI Strategy Session

Topics: website optimization, n5r.com, marketing, smartphone, Content Optimization System, 2014, adobe