What’s going on YouTube. In this video,
I’m gonna talk about five ways to approach businesses and have them sign
on for monthly retainer digital marketing agreements. So if you’re
starting your agency or wanting to grow your agency, watch this video until the
end and learn how to convince any business to work with you in a digital
marketing capacity. So, the first method I’m going to talk about is the most
simple basic and some would say barbaric method of getting digital marketing
client and this is the simple cold call and what you do for this is you make a
list of relevant potential clients in a given area – I generally like to make
lists by type of business as well so let’s say we’re doing chiropractors in
LA or dentists in Houston, Texas etc… You make that list and then you simply get
them on the phone and ask to speak to the owner and then give them a pitch
about digital marketing. Now, in my experience I have done this to get
website design clients because my agency North Digital started off building
websites and then about a year into its life we transitioned it into offering
digital marketing instead so most of my cold calling well actually all of my
cold calling was done in our website design phase and when I was in that
phase it generally took me about 50 calls to get one person that was
interested and then when I got the interested person there’s about a 25%
chance that that person would actually sign on and become a client so if you do
the math there that’s one out of fifty and then one out of four. So you’re
looking at about 200 phone calls, 200 cold calls before you get a client
through that method and this was how North digital got our first handful of
clients and when I’m working with coaching clients and coaching them on
how to start their agency this is one of the places I suggest starting. Now the
main difference between cold calling and business and selling them a website,
versus cold calling a business selling them a digital marketing plan is
that when you’re talking about websites you’re going to be talking about things
that are wrong with their current website – you know it’s not mobile
device optimized, it loads slowly, it looks like it was designed 40 years ago
etc… when you’re talking about digital marketing, you’re talking about return on
investment you’re talking about how if you spend X dollars in facebook ad and
in Google ad then you’re gonna make Y dollars back in revenue and the math is
gonna make sense that you’re gonna make back significantly more than you spend
so that’s the pitch you want to lead with. So, method number two is cold
approaching businesses in person now similar to cold calling we don’t do this
anymore for North Digital but this is also something I strongly recommend
to my clients starting their agency at the beginning of stages and North
Digital did get some of its first website design clients using this method.
The benefits of cold approaching a business in person is that it shows the
business owner you’re confident, you’re dedicated and it shows them that you
care about the success of your business and their business because most people
don’t have the drive to actually knock on a business’s door and try to pitch
them digital marketing or a website. Now, if you remember my video I made some
time ago about how to sell websites when I talked about cold approaching in
person, I talked about talking about how their prospects website is not mobile
device optimized that was my go-to I would open up my cell phone I would walk
into Simon’s bike shop and I would have his website open on my phone and I would
show the owner that it doesn’t show up properly on the phone. Now, that works if
you’re selling websites, for digital marketing this is what I recommend – if
you’re trying to sell a monthly digital marketing contract to a business what I
would do, let’s say it’s a chiropractor what I would do is stand outside that
chiropractor’s office, I’ll bring out my phone and I would Google chiropractor
near me, now chances are the chiropractor in question
not going to show up because the reality is most businesses are not optimized for
SEO properly and they’re also not running Google ads so I would bring up
the business or sorry, I would put in the phone chiropractor near me then I would
walk into the business, I would talk to the owner and I would say, “Hey I’m a
digital marketing specialist, I help businesses get noticed online and I help
businesses grow online. I noticed that when I googled chiropractor near me,
literally five steps outside your doorway you didn’t even show up and
these five competitors showed up in front of you. This is a problem and I can
fix it for you so that would be my strategy and if you did that plan and it
turns out the chiropractor you’re approaching does show up, I probably would just
move on to the next one because when you’re doing something like a cold
approach whether it’s through phone or whether it’s in person, you’re gonna need
some leverage to work off of and that can be your leverage is you want to find
a business that is not optimized for the front page of Google and is not showing
up anywhere in Google ads. The third method is cold emailing, now I’ve made
in-depth videos on this before, I’m going to link one in the description but
essentially the way cold emails work is you are sending out emails at scale to
businesses in certain industries and then a small percentage of those
businesses will email you back and then you have a dialogue and proceed to sign
them up as a digital marketing client. Now, this was one of the methods I use to
grow North Digital shortly after it made the transition from selling websites to
selling monthly digital marketing plans and what I did is in the Greater
Vancouver area, so North Digital is in Vancouver, Canada – we created a list of
essentially all the real estate agents in the area and there were thousands and
what we would do is every day we would send out approximately 200 emails to
these real estate agents the emails were customized, we pulled the names of the
real estate agents from our Excel list so that when each individual real estate
agent received the email it was addressed to his or her name
and we found that I would say about one in 200 to 1 in 400 real estate agents
would genuinely be interested in working together but you can send out 200 emails
at the click of a button every day and you can actually send out much more of
this depending on the software you use we were just using a gmail add-on so
Gmail at the time was capping it at about 200 emails a day before you got
flagged as spam but what we did is we actually did sign on a monthly retainer
Facebook or yeah monthly retainer real estate agent for Facebook ads with this
method, the way it worked is he got the email he responded to the email I gave
him a call we had a preliminary discussion on the phone we met in person
I got to know him a little bit got to know what he needed, I created a
proposal for him and then we signed on to a monthly agreement, so that is cold
emailing. Now, the fourth method is referrals and partnerships and this is a
massive driver of North Digital’s continued growth over the past two years
so when I say referrals, I talk about current clients referring people in
their network to work with your agency and also people in your network simply
knowing you as a digital marketing expert and referring their friends,
family, colleagues, who might need digital marketing help to work with you and this
has been a massive factor in North Digital’s growth both from current
client referrals and because i’m well known in Vancouver and further than that
through doing things like creating a youtube channel about digital marketing
entrepreneurship, i’m known as being an expert in digital marketing so when
people have a friend or a friend of a friend who is either an owner of a
business or a marketing manager of a business and then the topic of how to
scale comes out or the topic of, “Hey I don’t understand digital marketing, do
you know anyone that could help?” comes up I often get recommended and they
usually send me a simple email introduction to the new business owner
and that we take it from there and this is once you your business has momentum
this is for most agencies the primary driver of growth and the reason why this
works so well is that these prospects are I would say anywhere from five to
ten times more likely to actually close and become a client then people that we
contact through cold outreach methods and the reason for that is there’s so
much more trust when someone is contacting you through a trusted
referral from a friend or colleague of theirs. Now, the second part of this
method is partnerships now when I look at partnerships for North Digital
some of the most valuable partnerships we have are actually with website design
agencies because North Digital no longer are at this time build websites, we only
do SEO and pay-per-click campaigns a website design agency is one is a perfect
partner for us when their clients need monthly digital marketing help they send
them to us and when our clients need an upgrade to their website we send them to
our partners and then we send up percentage of revenue back and forth so
this is a massive win-win and if you’re just starting out, there’s nothing
stopping you from finding other businesses that also serve the same
types of clients you want to serve and approaching them and saying, you know “Hey
if you have someone who could benefit from Facebook Ads I will give you 15% of
the revenue that I make and I can assure you I will do an excellent job of
running Facebook ads for people you refer to me.” Now, if you can win the trust
of this potential partner then they and they start sending a few clients and
then you do a good job for those first few clients, a few key partnerships could
literally give you all the new business that you need for your agency. Now, the
fifth method I want to talk about and for me this is actually the most exciting
and this is a method that has become really really relevant for my agency
North Digital over the past six to twelve months is our own digital
marketing. Now, I know why it’s a bit ironic that a lot of digital marketing
agencies don’t even do their own digital marketing but I want to talk about that
right now. So the way I break down our own digital marketing is into two parts,
the first half is organic and the second half is paid. So as you probably know if
you’re watching this video organic refers to ranking at the top of
various search engines without having to pay for each click and then paid refers
to Google Ads, Facebook ads etc… So I want to jump into my computer here and show
you an example of some of our organic digital marketing. So we’re here on
YouTube and I have searched dental marketing into the YouTube search and
this is in a incognito browser so it’s not logged into my YouTube account and
you can see here that when someone searches dental marketing, my video right
here which is about our dental patient marketing system is the first result and
when this is clicked… when this is clicked, it gives the people
who see this multiple ways to get in touch with me through email through a
U.S. phone number and through a Canadian phone number. So having this organically
rank for a keyword like dental marketing brings us a lot of dentists leads. Now,
this video it has been really successful in ranking and it doesn’t just rank for
dental marketing, it also ranks for several iterations of similar search
terms so dental patient marketing – we’re number one. Dental digital marketing for dentists,
we’re number one. Dental internet marketing, again we’re number one with
the first the this guy above us here is running an ad so we’re the first organic
result. Facebook marketing for dentists we’re number one. Dentist marketing strategies, again we’re number one, so this is an example
of something that worked extremely well for us and generating us dentist leads
and we get calls from dentists all over the US who are searching in YouTube, ways
to promote their practice online and they end up seeing our material now YouTube is just one example of a search engine. There’s Google,
there’s Bing etc… What we have found is that YouTube has been an effective
platform for us to invest in and when I say invest that means spend the time to
create high quality content that people enjoy consuming which in turn promotes
it through YouTube’s algorithm so that more people can see it. So this is the
organic marketing half of our digital marketing. Now I want to show you the
paid ads side of it, so what we mainly use paid ads for at North digital is
retargeting. Now, whenever someone clicks through to our website such as after
seeing one of our YouTube videos we follow them around for the next 90 days
with Facebook and Instagram ads that look something like this. So this is a
picture of myself, it’s a small amount of copy which starts off by saying tired of
gambling with your marketing spend and the call to action will link straight to
our website contact form and then we have here another variation of a
Facebook ad which is based on a similar premise and again links through to our
website. So over the past six months the combination of ranking organically
and YouTube having that generate traffic to our website and then retargeting the
website visitors on Facebook and Instagram has resulted in a system that
consistently generates us a stream of leads in the form of businesses calling
us and wanting to talk about working together. So those are the five methods
that I wanted to talk about for how to get digital marketing clients for your
agency if you’re just starting out I encourage you focus on the cold calls, the cold emails and the cold approaches if you’re in the
intermediate stages and you already have happy paying clients and you want to
scale things up I would encourage you to focus on the referrals and the
partnerships as well as on doing your own digital marketing in the form of
organic rankings and in the form of paid ads, specifically retargeting. I hope this
video has been helpful if you’ve liked it, please give the video a like, please
comment and let me know what you want to see in future videos and if you’re not
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comes out. Until next time, I’ll see you later.