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On this Part 2 episode of “Marketing A Marketing Agency”, Dean Denny and Sam Kariuki discuss how to generate leads and create offers for their target audience. They explain how they initially made a mistake by offering a free website to the wrong audience, and how they then created offers such as a free LinkedIn order, Facebook go at it, and a strategy session. After two months of hard work, they launched their ads and generated a hundred and thirty leads.
They also discuss how to build relationships with potential customers and convert them into sales qualified opportunities. They explain the importance of giving value and gain trust before selling.
Timestamps
[00:04:40] Mismatched target audience; wrong market awareness
[00:09:06] Testing mindset yields success.
[00:23:09] Trustworthy relationships yield success.
[00:32:35] Building trust through events.
[00:38:30] Help clients solve challenges
[00:44:34] Marketing success through testing, failure, and data.
[00:50:13] Data-driven decisions for quick wins.
All right, everybody. Welcome to Open Source Growth. I am your host, Dean Denny, founder and director of Owendenny Digital. I can’t even say my business name, but Owens Denny Digital, Australia’s top ranked SaaS marketing agency. Now I’ve got a funny story for the next quarter because it’s just on this.
We actually took this advice and we laid it out and we’re going to talk about how we won an incredible client with this exact advice. So let’s. Guess how many leads we generated for the entire quarter for January to, January through to, uh, the end of March. How many? Just total, just pluck it out of the air.
Uh… Don’t look at the numbers, don’t cheat! More, more than, more than 20. Nah, we had literally only nine leads come through, but at the end, I know it was a failure. It was like a one out of 10 from the marketing team. Oh, thank you, Hannah. Oh, you’re the best. Uh, our beautiful copywriter and my beautiful wife, Hannah has just dropped me off a hot chocolate.
I am a lucky man. Um, now here’s what was interesting though. At the end of March, I was looking at the lead flow and I was feeling, I honestly was feeling a little bit dire about like, shit, this is not good for the agency. If we don’t sort this shit out, we are screwed. So I decided Sam and I, let’s run some Facebook ads.
And we started testing bottom of funnel ads and we started to generate some leads on Facebook again, but guess what? They’re more qualified. They weren’t just people who wanted to have a free hypey training. They wanted to work with the marketing agency and it came back to the whole, what is your lead quality?
And that was the next question that we started getting into because the last quarter of this financial year has 100 percent been good enough to make up for all of our cock ups at Owendenny Digital. 100%. It’s been great, but why has it been great? Because if you look at it so far, it’s looking insane.
And like. The number of leads we have generated for ourselves from the start of April, all the way through to the day we have today, we’ve, we’ve generated about 113 leads for ourselves. Right. And they’ve come from all different directions. So we’ve literally blown it out of the water. Right. So we set ourselves a target.
At the very start of the year to generate how many leads? Let’s have a look
to generate 261 leads at the start of the year. Now we didn’t do that. How much, how many have we generated? Generated 178. Now we didn’t, we, we got, we nearly got there. And I reckon by the end of the week, we’ll probably have close to another 20. So we’ll bet that 200 of the 260. So from a total lead volume thing, we’re going to do okay.
It was an ambitious target to begin with considering where we are, but now how far we’ve come, we’ve hit that point of actualization. We’ve properly profiled the avatar. We’ve developed different offers. We’ve gone through the entire hundred million dollar offer process with Alex Hormozy. We did that in the first quarter of this year.
So that was between January and March. We spent, we’ve got a hundred and something page workbook we created for this. I don’t know when we’ll make it available to the public to show you our process that we went through to get there, but it’s amazing. Then we decided to launch shit. Loads of offers, shit loads.
Yeah. So, Sam, I’m I’m, I don’t wanna do all the talking here ’cause I know you are immensely proud of the work we’ve done over the past two months or so. But let’s start with the worst offer to begin with. So we got, we got a bit busy and we got, we, we did the same cock up as usual. We got desperate. And what did we do?
We came up with an unfreaking believable offer. I’m going to tell you, I’m going to tell you what it is and then you’re going to tell me why it didn’t work. So basically I came up with this great idea. We do web design, we do digital advertising, we do copywriting, we do all sorts of cool, crazy, amazing, freaking growth related shit.
But we just, we, so we decided what’s a way to turn things around. It’s not looking good. It’s April. We need to figure out, what are we doing? So in May, I sat down with Hannah on the 1st of May. It’s like, we have to do some really serious shit. And I was like, we’re going to offer a free website if they sign up for more than six months.
Like a 15, 000 website for a client. And I thought that was unbelievable. I spoke to, I spoke to Kathleen, our web development, um, project manager and office manager. She was the most unbelievable thing ever. Hannah was like, whoa, that’s fricking insane. And then you were like, wow, that’s amazing. But it fell flat on its ass.
Why did it fall flat on its ass, Sam? Yeah. So I think one of the, one of the major thing we did there was not to understand our avatar. We taped out, didn’t we? We didn’t do our process. Yeah, we, we, we are looking for sales marketers and we, we don’t want, uh, startups, but who’s looking for a website? Like who’s looking for a website?
These, the people who are the people we were trying to work with were people who already had the people who the website was not their, their immediate problem. But then we came up with a very brilliant offer, but not for our audience, you know, not for our target audience because we, we, we came up with an offer for a startup for a person who, who doesn’t have a website because having a website.
As an offer that was up for a person who doesn’t have a website at that point, at that point, and even going back to the type of client that we have had previously, most of them had websites already, we could improve on it, we could improve on those websites. They designed the conversion. We can improve on that, but they had that already.
So it wasn’t enough for them. They didn’t need it. They didn’t know why they needed our website for free. They already have it, you know? So I think we, we mismatched, you know, we miss, we misread our avatar because we are offering like most of the clients that we get. We usually end up improving on their website.
So we thought that the website was an issue that they had at the point of coming to us, but that was not the case, you know, you know, it’s, it’s funny. So that was not the case. Yeah. So on this, there are five stages of market awareness and it goes by the acronym called upside. Unaware of a problem, problem aware, solution, solution aware, your solution aware, deal and offer of your solution aware.
Yeah, the funny thing about When people get engaged with a marketing agency, they may come. It’s like, Hey, I need new clients. I want to run Facebook ads. So they, they, they come fairly prescriptively into the funnel, right? They, they come in like, Hey, I want to grow my business. I want someone who can support me with my Facebook ads.
And so you can manage my services and make sure it all works. And I need a guarantee and whatever. Okay, cool. Yeah, great. Rad. We got this all, all for you, man. We got this. What’s interesting though, is we get in there, we start scoping out the project. And then all of a sudden we’re like, hang on. Whoa, wait.
If we’re going to be running Facebook ads at this website, we’re going to have some serious issues getting this right. So what do we end up doing? We’re like, well, in fact, not only do you need to do Facebook ads with us, but we also need to rebuild your website. And the problem is that it’s almost like, Hey, here’s a free website.
They were unaware that they needed it. So that was the problem. That was the wrong. Level of market awareness, and they don’t have the prescriptive understanding of what they need at this point. Number two, here’s what’s interesting for people who get their website built. It’s often a, it’s, it’s an exciting experience to start, but it’s a frustrating experience to finish and people never want to pay for headaches.
If I said to you, Hey, Sam, would you like a free headache with your marketing services? What are you going to say? No way. Exactly. So my point is that we’ve been really quite. Think this through properly, but the biggest sin that we’ve, we committed again was when you get desperate, do not try to broaden your audience.
And that’s what we did. We were like, and we made a really foul assumption as marketers. We, I enacted my, my lizard brain, my, my reptilian brain, and it went bad for me. I believed. That it would be easier to smell, not to smell, to sell a small business owner on a free website plus marketing. But guess what?
It’s so much tougher. It is actually tougher than selling your target market. So if you’ve got an agency or if you’ve got a business or whatever and you’re thinking broaden the audience, make it really cheap, let it go, it’s not better for you. It actually is so much worse because, you know, guys, if you’ve been in business, you know that profits are better than wages, but here’s the thing.
If you reduce your, if you reduce you, if you, you know, if you give people like a 20 percent reduction in overall cost, that’s a much bigger chunk out of your profits. You might be doing things profit free, and that will kill your business because it’s what I had for a business to work is profit. And if you don’t have that, it’s game fricking over.
So we did that in April, we did it badly. And then two weeks into the campaign, we were generating all these leads. None of them were closing. They were all startups. They were all people that just wanted to get kicked off in business. I was doing the whole thing. Oh, well, if you get some results for me and then I can pay for you and then it’s going to be a good thing.
And I was just sort of like, nah, this is wrong. Hannah, my wife sits me down and goes, Dean, you’re a SaaS marketing agency. Focus on SaaS, do it right. What would you do if money wasn’t a problem and things were working out fine for you right here, right now? So I sat down and sat down with it. I was like, I would create.
Marketing qualified lead offers to test for Facebook ads, for LinkedIn ads, for a SaaS user growth guide, and I would develop a couple of sales qualified offers around a free LinkedIn audit, a Facebook audit, a strategy session on a whatever. And that’s how I would, and that’s how I would do it. I would develop the different things that have email sequences and we’d go from there.
So then we spent the next two months in May going hammer and tongs creating all these things a lot of late nights a lot Of eating Domino’s pizza and garlic bread Typing away using chatGPT to help create these lead magnets and offers and all sorts of crazy stuff And guess what happened? We launched the ads and boom like 130 leads like bang done Yep.
Bring it. Exciting things. Start working. Hmm. Yeah, I think, I think, I think getting, uh, getting the right offer, I think one of the learning is have the right offer for your type of audience. Yep. Yep. Understand what that offer is. And by understanding what that offer is, you must understand the issues they are going through, you know, so that that’s what, because also one of the other thing we realized was that the offer we thought would be working really well.
Didn’t really perform, you know, the Facebook ads offer Oh, I know. Didn’t work really well as we thought it would’ve worked, you know? But the other offers that we came up with were working really well, and we were wondering, oh, that, what does this mean about our audience? This means our audience have really learned about this type of platform, and they don’t have much information about this type of platform.
And that’s where they are. They want to go, you know, and even now that way, now you understand, you start now understanding your customer awareness. You know, how aware are your customers? You understand if this Facebook is not working is either, if this offer is not working is either they, they really know about, about how this platform works.
Or they don’t trust it to work for them. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And it’s so funny because like we go through it and we were so wrong, like so many times, and we’ve done the research we’ve been on all the forums, we’ve done everything, but then. You get out there and you run the ads and it can just still slap you in the face and put you back in your place so quickly.
And it’s so funny because like, remember Sam, it’s like, Oh, the Facebook ad thing is going to just absolutely shred it. No Google ads, LinkedIn, SaaS user guide, absolutely crushed it. Then LinkedIn.
Um, no, no. Then we had the Facebook ads and just had to turn it off straight away. Then I thought, okay, people don’t want to do a strategy session. I, we, so we created for our, like our, you know, our introductory discovery call, we’ve called it a T2D3 strategy session. And we go through where they’re at, where they’re in their journey, bloody, bloody, blah.
And we tailor it to the person there then and there in the, in the thing, just to get them on the phone. Right. It’s so funny though. We had, I thought, Oh, well, people don’t want a strategy session. It’s a thinly veiled sales call. That’s what most marketing agency people think when they hear strategy, they’re like, Oh, that sounds like a bullshit call.
No one wants that. We haven’t been able to generate a single Facebook audit or a LinkedIn audit or a Google ads audit, but guess what everyone wants a strategy call. Yeah, they all want the strategy call. Like so we’ve got a, um, we’ve got marketing qualified lead campaigns that are working. We’re nurturing people through that.
Our database is blowing up. We’ve got sales qualified lead offers that are working and are generating appointments. Like we have a funnel. My friends, it’s amazing. We’re so blessed and we’re so lucky ’cause we do this for our customers so well, but now we’ve got it for us, like fricking and one. Yeah. And one of the things that, um, you know, people listening to this, uh, need to understand is that, uh, this marketing, this marketing industry, the more you know, the more you know about it, the more you understand your customer, the more you know, you don’t know.
Oh, you know, you come up with things, you come up with things that you thought the mindset. And this is, I usually repeat this to, to our clients. The mindset you have to have is a testing mindset. You know, if an offer is working today, really well. You can’t just sit on your laurels and think that it’s going to work forever.
You know, at some point it’s going to change. So you must keep on testing, keep on testing. And something that did not work yesterday doesn’t mean that it won’t work tomorrow. You know, it just means you just have to keep testing and keep testing and having that mindset really helps has helped us also even to, to reach where we are at the moment where we are generating sales qualified is out of.
Testing different things and not just saying this did not work. So it can never work is saying this did not work at this point. So if we do something else, we test it out, you know, and see whether it’s still,
it’s something, you know, any who could change, you could, is the way we name the offers, you know, name it in, uh, there’s a lot. Uh, there’s a lot that, uh, goes into naming an offer and it’s very important. And I think even this is a step that we are going, we also taking, you know, in how do we name this offer in a way that communicates value and communicates understanding that we understand the issue that these people are going through, you know, so naming is also something that people need to spend time on and naming an offer and then.
Because you can find that just by changing the name, you’re going to offer the same exact thing, but just by changing the name, people, people respond differently. 100%. And now we’re going to get talking about this because it’s really interesting, like at each stage we’ve had in each different quarter.
Right. Where we’ve had objectively good and bad months from a marketing perspective, we’ve learned different things about our business, but the problems have become more and more developed as the business has grown. Right. So initially the problem was, how do we generate leads? And then you’re like, oh, okay, cool.
We’ve done that. Okay. It didn’t work. Okay. How do we optimize the webinar? Okay. That’s our next thing. Okay. Optimizing a webinar is too difficult. Then the next thing we do is we go, okay, cool. How do we go back to optimizing SEO? And then we do that and it starts to work and then it starts to fail. What do we have to go again?
It’s, it’s just so dynamic. And what’s really interesting now is that we’ve now got a new problem, which is good because every level of growth you go through, you go through new problems. And our newest problem is Sam. It’s not. It’s not how to generate leads. We’ve got that down pat. Thankfully, we’re a marketing agency.
We do lead generation for other people. We’re good at it for other people, but we’re now learning about ourselves because we’re using our own processes on ourselves, which is the ultimate testimony to say that our shit actually works. Woo! Now, but like number two, right? Like this is where it gets exciting.
Is that our next problem we have to conquer. Hang on. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me get back to this in a second. You know how we’ve been talking about like personality and entertainment and experiences and how we have to bring that into the content now? Yeah. So, at the start of the year, I started to Towards the end of last year and the start of this year, I’ve started taking podcasting very seriously.
I’ve been doing the content. I haven’t been promoting the content, but I’ve been doing the content. So I, I told you this and everyone knows about it, but I think not many people may know on the podcast, but you know, I started infusing, I started using ChatGPT to come up with a lot of outlines for podcasts and whatever, and it wasn’t very good.
Then one night I had a big day. I was like, Oh, I can’t be bothered doing crap tonight. Be grumpy, whatever. So my dog Zoe, I’m sitting on the couch with my wife, Hannah. We’re talking and all that, our copywriter as well, FYI. And then my dog Zoe comes with this big sloppy ball and puts it in my groin. And I’m like, Oh, Zoe, I don’t want to play with you.
So it’s like, go away, Zoe. Then she comes back with like a tug of war toy and I’m like, Oh, tug of war toy. And I’m like playing with tug of war. And I’m like, hang on a second. My dog did some AB offer testing on me just then. And then what’s crazy. I’m like, Oh, podcast. My poodle did an AB split test on me. I did the podcast.
I recorded it. SEO optimized it. So people would pick it up. It’s on AB split testing, whatever. You wouldn’t believe it. Everybody. Because of that podcast, I now coach a Forbes lister with their direct response advertising. Now, what does that tell you? We have less than a thousand listens a month, guys. Like we are, we are not a micro podcast.
We are a nano podcast. Like we are little, little podcast and. Whoever listens to this, I hope you get some massive value out of this, but guys, if you are going to do a podcast, do start, make sure you optimize the living shit out of your podcast descriptions, get the timestamps, get everything. So Spotify knows to put you like right near the top when you’re wanting to look into things.
Like I’ve had some podcasts go viral. My podcast on quitting caffeine went well, but again, story, my podcast on AB split testing on my poodle got a client, which is paid for all the time I’ve had to podcast for life story. Stories sell. Marketers are liars, as Seth Godin would say, and it’s all, it’s about lying.
It’s about storytelling. Yeah, yeah. Guys, I think like we get so caught up in the direct response advertising game where it’s just like straight down the line sales or straight down the line, all this crap, but guys, just recognize that stories are what’s going to push your needle forward as a direct response advertiser, a brand marketer or whatever this year, because AI is going to create a whole heap of unimaginative, an unimaginative shit for your brand.
And everyone’s going to realize us being generated, people are looking for human stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I think, I think stories, personal stories, experiences, you know, those are the things that are going to, that are going to sell and now a way that the marketer who’s able to fuse your marketing principles, whether it’s a B testing and how Zoe is doing that with you, you know, if you can infuse that Uh, experience with a specific marketing principle and now share it in a way that is exciting and, uh, and something that is relatable.
Yep. Those are the marketers that are going to win, you know? Mm-Hmm. . Those are the marketers that are going to win. And, uh, in this age of everything being o uh, automated AI and things like that, stories. Personal stories, personal experiences. Those are the things that are going to really work, uh, for, for, for businesses, basically businesses has to start coming up with stories about themselves, about, about the people who work there, about their customers.
You know, whether it’s a cleaner in your office, what are the stories that you can come up with about, about your own as a business, probably about your own values as a business and things like that, you know, so it’s, it’s, it’s about, and, and, and it’s coming a time where you, you, as a business, you will need to, to come up with the, uh, stands and values that you stand for, you know, yeah.
Thank you. Because, because the market is going to be fragmented to very micro, micro, uh, audiences, you know, and markets. So it’s very important that you understand those people, understand them, understand what moves them, you know, and now give content at that level. Give content at that level. Once they trust you, once they, you, they build that, uh, relationship with you, then they’re willing to spend money with you because people understand, you know, people understand that we are not angels.
People are not angels. People have challenges and things like that. All they want to do is, do we have a vibe? Are we clicking? You know? Mm-Hmm. you as my service provider and me as the business. Are we clicking? If we click. I’m able to spend money with you, you know, because I know we are having, we are not, it’s not about Uh, an issue where I’m going to follow up on you every time.
You know, you are understanding my business. I’m understanding you even in terms of payment and things like that, we can work together in the journey of success because that’s also something that people are looking for, people are looking for longterm, uh, if, if it’s a marketing agency, a marketing agency that we can work with longterm and, and most marketing agencies go for short, short term projects.
And then they leave that client, you know, if you leave that client, where do they go? You know, how do they market? Probably even offering a training for the in house team, you know, for the in house team as part of the thing that you’re doing could work, you know? So all those, it’s, it’s about you as an agency, as a business, looking at the success of your client, how best can I help them succeed?
How best can I help them save money, you know, and being genuine about it because Google is now our friend. So people are Googling everything. YouTube is there with a lot of content. So there’s, there’s information overload. Absolutely. If you go to a client and you can be able to lay down that information and how to execute each specific step and, and you remove that.
burden of understanding what all this information is saying. Those are the people that people are going to trust. These are the people that people are going to engage and they will be willing to pay. You know, they will be willing to pay and it won’t be like you’re selling. It will be to be conversation.
You want this and this is how to get there. And because at some point you will understand people are not scared of spending huge sums of money. They’re just scared of spending huge sums of money with no results. You know, people are scared of not getting the results. and they have, they have a right to be skeptical about agencies.
They have a right to be skeptical about people who are providing services online because they have been scammed before. They have hired people who, and they have those stories, you know, so it’s about, it’s about agencies, it’s about businesses. creating, creating their own value, creating their own persona that is trust, uh, worthy of trust, you know, trustworthy and, and, and, and something that people can relate to.
And people are understanding that I’m not coming to do miracles. I’m coming here to work. You know, we are going to work together and we are going to achieve these results. If we follow this process. You know, and and and also being able to interact with them in a way that is trustworthy and they can share information because something else that as an agency you struggle with is having a client who’s not giving you all the information.
Oh, if I had a penny for every time I heard that. Oof, oof, oof, oof, yeah, yeah, yeah. If they’re not giving you all the information, so you are working with the wrong information, not full disclosure. So. You’re not fully grasping the, the enormous task that you, you, you actually have to do, you know, and, and, and as an agency, we know that information, getting all the data information, you know, if we, if we give you 50 leads, it’s about you going through those leads, understanding who they are, whether they are qualified or not qualified, because that information is going to help us, Uh, change tact, you know, be flexible in our strategy, change time, change offer and do something that is working, you know?
So all those small, um, moving parts that, that as an agency, you have to incorporate in, in, in your execution of your own strategy and the client. It’s, it’s, it’s key to your success. Now, here’s the last thing, and I know you’ve been wanting to talk about this today because I know it’s your new favorite thing.
You know, that’s what I’m about to say. So before, before we went down the, that great rabbit hole, we were talking about, okay, we’ve got new problems now. We’ve got so many leads to talk or call, where can we find the time of the day to do this? How do we sift through all the junk leads? How do we sift through all the good ones?
How do we properly nurture the right ones? And at scale, how do we take people from marketing qualified lead through to sales qualified opportunity, right? And that’s really crucial. And I just did a podcast, which would been released. A couple of days before this one goes live, and it was on the topic that email nurturing sequences are no longer enough when it comes to taking someone from a marketing qualified lead through to a sales qualified lead or a sales qualified opportunity and.
This is where, you know, with this problem, with the business growing and there’s greater leads coming into the company. And we’re all really excited about how all these amazing things are. And it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s overwhelming and just so beautiful. We’re going to have our biggest year, like our team’s getting bigger and it’s getting badder and stronger.
It’s like, we’re really turning into the Mike Tyson of helping SaaS companies grow, you know? And, um, but here’s the thing guys, like. We don’t need a huge lead volume to be successful because we are a boutique agency, but what we do need is a means of taking all our hard work and capitalizing on it. Now, if you’re generating a heap of marketing qualified leads and you’re nurturing them and they’re not nurtured enough.
There’s something missing in your sales process and Sam, what do you think you want to talk about today? It starts with a, and, and, and ends in vent. Why are we going to be doing now? Tell everybody, why are we going to be doing live events? Every fortnight or even every week depends on how good these go for us.
Again, guys, this is all speculative. We haven’t put anything in concrete yet for next year. So why are we focusing on live events coming into the new financial year? So this is, uh, this is an important, um, an important aspect and it’s about touch points. It’s about customer touch points. You know, in, uh, you know, people think that, uh, marketing has changed really has changed in, uh, enormously and things like that.
But I think it goes back. It’s just the basics. It’s the way we deliver changes. We are offering, we are offering things online. Digital is changing things, AI is changing stuff, but the core of business marketing has not changed. You know, the reason why people. Why you need events, why you need to keep, you know, in constant contact with your customers hasn’t changed, you know, the way it’s being done has changed, but the essence of it hasn’t changed.
So the question is, we have gotten these people online. We have 150, 200 people leads. We know that there are people who could be our customers, but this is their first, because if you look at it, we have really great offers that are working that we only need the person to click on our ad once, you know, for them to, to, to become, uh, to become, uh, a lead, you know, so we really targeting the right people, the right people are taking the action, you know, and they are taking it once they see it, They, uh, they, they, they do the necessary, they become a lead, right?
But now that means that the first time they have seen it, that the first time they have engaged with us, you know, so it cannot be that at first, that, that first instance, the next day they are going to convert, give us the 10, 000 that we are looking for. You know, we need time now to build that relationship to a point where they trust us.
The way we’ve been doing it is having an email sequence going out to these people a week, two weeks. We ask for the offer that really is not building the relationship that we need, you know? Mm-Hmm. . Because these people need to see us. These need, these people need to, to know who you are, your personality, because we say that is very key to, to building trust.
People want to know that you are actually not just using automated sequences. Yeah. To reach out because know it now. Yeah. They know it, they know it, especially understanding our, our specific client is that they know these things, you know, they probably have these systems themselves, like, like, we have a SaaS, we have a SaaS client.
Whose main product is email sequencing, you know, , and then we’re using email sequencing to them. They’ll see it and they’ll know, oh, this is exactly what I’m selling, you know? Yep. So they understand. They understand the space that we are in, the tools we are using. They understand because they ares customers.
So the only way they trust you now. Is when they have one on one with you, but now getting them one on one, they know, you know, they know this is a sales call. That’s what they do. That’s also what they do. You know, when they get you on a sales, on a, on a call, they are going to try to sell you, you know, but for us, we have to be very genuine about our processes about the things we do.
And that’s where the event now comes in because you cannot have. These people coming onto a call one on one. Now you can have one to make. One to many talking to them about the problems that they are facing and the solutions that are there in terms of marketing, you know, and getting them onto something like that is, is key and events are the next big thing that you need to do at that point, because they are going.
And this is what is going to happen in an event. They are going to see you. They are going to gauge your personality. They are going to see, you know, because you are talking to them, they can see your face. They can see, uh, the challenges you’re having in explaining what you know, you know, because that’s what they want to get.
When I come to you one on one, what I’m looking at is, do you understand what you’re talking about? You know, , do you understand what you’re talking about? Do you understand the problem I’m facing? You know? Mm-Hmm. . And once I’m able to identify that, then I know, okay, this guy seems to be a good guy, right?
Mm-Hmm. . Yeah. This guy seems to be a good guy. It’s a guy that I can follow up a little bit further, you know? Mm-Hmm, . And now the next, now that event have to be scheduled in a way that helps you. To eventually give you an offer, you know, and, and, and now in the planning, the event that’s where now it’s important, you know, and, uh, what we are saying, uh, is we can have an event where it’s just, uh, us talking the way we are talking right now, you know, it could be just us talking, no seals, no nothing, just giving gems and pointers on how you can grow your own business.
That’s great. That’s one way, you know, but because you want as, as a marketer, you want to move people from one point to the next point, this content, the people who come to these events and you understand them and everything, the next thing will be to, to design the event such that we give all the value that we can give.
We gain all the trust that we can gain. And then we have an opportunity to actually. Sell, you know, we have an opportunity to actually sell and without, without, you know, hastening the process, because I think one of the greatest challenge you are having is trying to make this process really fast. And this process is really, really slow, you know, because people will want to come to you.
They will want to hear you. They will want to, as they trust you, then they will be able to. Come back and, and, and at a certain point later on, you will be able to sell. So for us as a, as marketers is to understand how do we frame our, our event so that we, we narrow that journey. We build trust and people trust us because we’ve given them really great content, really great value.
Yeah. Then tell them infuse our offers such that people are easily. Going to, to, to schedule the calls, you know, schedule the calls, uh, get into the offers that we are offering at the, at that point, you know, it’s about understanding that process and understanding the reason why we are doing the event is purely, purely for building trust with these people.
The reason why a person can schedule a call and not come or show up for that is. They haven’t really trusted, you know, it’s, it’s just, they don’t trust you to give them the solution. Probably the issue is they think it’s a sales call so they don’t show up because they think, you know, It’s it’s 10. It’s 20 minute call.
So they’re just going to give me really quickly They are not going to understand my my problem, you know, so the offer Is it is it me Is it me having 10 minutes to speak about my product, my service, or is it me having 10, 30 minutes with a client for the client to talk about their business with, you know, once they are facing.
All those challenges. Then I can say, you know what? Uh, I think this is, uh, we identify issues with them and that now with those issues, then we can lay down the solutions that can work for them. You know, it’s not about selling. It’s about helping. I think that is a mindset that has to change, you know, Yourself, but go out there to help, help, help.
And if a client, if, if a pro a client’s problem can be resolved by just saying, go try this.
Let them go. Try and let them build a, a, a problem that is, that is bigger. Because I think also some clients have really simple challenges. You know, it’s just a challenge of telling them you can do this and it’ll change, you know, and, and. Framing your call, framing your call to be something that helps them resolve some of the challenges they are facing will really get people to show up on that call, but they will only show up once you build and and the way you do that is through events and online events for now are the most, uh, the easiest to do, but Even as time goes by is actually having people come physically, you know, the way you build that trust, get people to come online, get people to come physically.
And as. As, as you interact with them more times, you’re going to get them to engage, engage with you. Because remember, it also depends with the amount of money you, they have to, they have to pay for the services that you’re offering, you know? Yeah. So if you have 10, 000 per month, You are, you are seeking 10,000 per month.
Then you need to spend time with them. They need to understand you. They need to understand you really well and to trust you really well, that you can provide what you say you could. So it’s about as, as businesses understand that process and understand the amount of trust you need to build for a person to buy.
And, and the amount of trust you need to build is increasing. You know, the value is increasing doing it. There are so many people doing it. So for you to stand out, you have to do more. Mm-Hmm, . Yeah. And on this, on this topic as well, Sam, I think what’s good for everyone that’s listening right now is that with events, you don’t have to have some crazy thing.
An event could be something as simple as an ask me anything session. It could be a hot desk, it could be, um, a live interview on Facebook. It could be even an interview between your team members on Facebook. It could just be Sam and I like we you are listening to today. It could just be this, we could do this live and this is what they could do, but like.
That’s the, the thing. Because, again, people are so used to automation. People are so used to, um, You know, just getting crappy lead magnets flicked at them and all sorts of stuff, you know. Like, um, you know, everybody’s just used to so much like generated crap. They just want real people that can really help them.
And I think, you know, with these live events, which we’ll be doing every week and every fortnight, you know, this is going to be, uh. So we can help more people at scale. Like if you’re listening to yourself to this today, you may be one of the, you know, the 10 or 20 people that listened to this podcast this month, but this could really blow your mind.
There’s a lot of content that we’re covering today. Um, and just remember guys that this should be like. Oh, I want to just say here and really emphasize, cause we’re going to wind this episode up in the next two minutes or so, um, is that everybody, like even the best of us, like, like tip of the spear marketers like us, we can get it wrong.
And does that upset us? No, or maybe for 10 seconds, but when we do get it wrong, we’re upset. And then we’re like, then we get curious. Right. And, you know. It’s interesting. We, we, we we’re happy that we know one way that doesn’t work, . That’s exactly right. It’s the process of elimination. Strike it out work.
So we go on to the next. Exactly. You know, and, and the funny thing is like it, you know what, if you listened to the story, you, if you listened to the, the four months we had, we had a okay, we had a good, we had a good court first quarter, even though I was not really there to be seen in the business in the first quarter of the year, then.
October to December was average. January to March was even worse. And then this May, this April through to June, we have got our shit together and it’s really starting to hum. And if you ripped off, if you ripped off this last quarter, this financial year, you would have given us a marketing score and I don’t blame you.
Of like a two out of 10, but here’s what’s interesting. We don’t need huge volumes of leads a year to be successful. Like 250 high quality leads a year. We’ll, we’ll turn our business into a seven figure business. Like it’s very simply if we’ve got it, right. The second thing is that with our business is that.
You know, I think this is with any business is that you just need one good quarter and you can turn it all around for yourself. It’s very simple, you know, and what there’s been a few massive learnings here, Sam and I, and I think, you know, apart from, you know, don’t cheap out on your process, really go back to first principles, get down to your customer avatar.
Um, you know, get back to your customer avatar, really refine and develop your offer and spend the time doing it, you know, launch different ads, test a whole heap of things, recognize there’s a difference between developing offers for content and there’s offers for sales calls. And then. Once you get bigger, you get better problems.
It’s not just about leads. It’s specific types of leads with specific types of buying intent. And then during that process, how do you ascend people from low intent to interested in you because they’re showing up at a webinar. How you take people from interested in you to jumping on a sales call with you, whether it be through automation or whatever.
And it’s really funny. There’s been some real cool stories we’ve learned this year. And. It all comes back to, sometimes you just got to stay disciplined, stay, stick to the plan, don’t get, don’t get desperate and just do the work you set out to do and you can really succeed. Um. And I think that’s really it for me.
Any final comments from you, Sam?
Uh, yeah, I think, I think you’ve said it, uh, pretty much, uh, everything that needs to be, to be said. But it’s for listeners to understand that marketing, for you to have successful marketing, whether you’re an agency or any other type of business, you must allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to fail.
Understand that marketing is about testing different offers. And the greatest thing about digital marketing is that you can really feel fast because it’s about that. Feel fast, feel quickly, you know, get out of that. Understand things that don’t work because you’re going to have really brilliant ideas that.
That really don’t mean shit.
Those, those ideas that you think are brilliant and everything, but when you lay them out and you take them to the market, the market is going to say, that’s not what we need. And you must be willing and ready to have that emotional. Uh, intelligence and also like, like, don’t be depressed when the market says no to your best offer, you know, just come up with an offer that they actually love, you know, because another thing that People have is that, you know, you came up with an offer, you spend time, everything.
And it’s actually going even to spend your own money to deliver this offer, but the market says no. So it’s, it’s about you separate yourself, separate your emotions from it. If they say no, understand they have said no to the offer, come up with a different offer. And you might find that the simplest offer, the simplest offer could be the one that works.
Something that is easy for you to do. You didn’t like, like you thought that was not valuable to the person at that point. That’s exact thing they need for that simple step. They need to take the next step. So understand always, always think about what’s the next step for my clients. What’s the next step?
And it would be just information, you know, do this. Do that and they will love you for that. They will trust you. They will, they will be coming to you for information and, and the next thing, event, hit record, record everything you’re doing, have it out there. You’re definitely going to start showing people you are.
a human. You can do things. They’re going to trust you, trust your personality, and that will be the thing that will help you win. Differentiate yourself, build your own, or create your own blue ocean. And, uh, and, and at that point you will be in the category of one. I think that’s in the 100 million offer, right?
The category of one. Yeah. Where, where, where you are the only one who’s leading in that category. Yeah, absolutely. I’m, I totally believe you there Sam. That’s exactly what it is. It’s about. Yeah, and I’m, I think, you know, if I was, if I was a, say a B2B business, whether it be an agency or a SaaS products today, listening to this.
I hope this gives you a bit of hope, you know, you can turn it around in a quarter, you can create a category of one, you can grow your, you know, your pipeline through digital advertising, you know, there are several ways of doing this, like, you know, you’ve got your outbound, you’ve got your people telemarketing, you’ve got your people running Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, you name it, it’s all happening, right?
It’s through this rigorous process of transcription by Going through anecdotally, but also through the numbers and the statistics of what worked, what didn’t work and doing it every quarter or even doing a bit of a roundup like today for the year to give you some flavor of where we go. Like we can’t reveal all the things we’re going to be doing.
This year just yet, because I want to make sure that’s another episode in itself of Dean and Sam talk. Oh, and Denny digital’s marketing strategy for the year, because I think once we’ve got a pretty good understanding of what the next 12 months look like, we’re going to go do, we’re going to run this back again.
Do you think that you’ll have a bit of fun doing that? Yeah, definitely. Those are the things we look forward to, you know, cracking, cracking the data. And, and, and actually one of the other thing is, is for people to. Work with the data. Look at the data. What is this saying? Do that, you know, don’t, don’t impose your feelings onto the data.
You know, Yeah. Yeah. Feelings. Don’t pay the rent, let lead you. Yeah. You know, , let, let it lead you. You know, make decision based on the, be data driven and that will help you. Yeah. Make the, the, the changes that you need to do quickly launch what you need to, to launch quickly. Learn very fast. And, uh, those are, those are the things that are going to give you really quick wins.
Yeah. And, um, yeah, I can’t wait for the, for the next year, you know, next year for us to launch all those things that we’re talking about. A hundred percent. And, uh, to get, to see, to see exactly. How, how, how that one works out and sharing, you know, sharing that journey, because I think also that is very sharing that journey with, uh, with our audiences in the podcast and, uh, and, and other platforms, you know, sharing that journey will be, will be, I think the most interesting thing.
I think so. And I think that, you know. I think that there’s real value in sharing this journey and, um, we’re having a whole heap of fun doing it. So look guys, I think that’s probably it. Let’s wrap this up. Thank you again, everybody for listening to open source growth. This is a new format. Um, you know, obviously it’s Sam and I going through what’s working and what’s not working, but I hope you got a whole lot from that.
Um. Get back to your, get back to the basics, customer avatar, do the numbers, do the math. Um, we’re going to do a, I think we should be doing a few of these coming in soon, Sam. So, um, I think, I think, I think what, what, and this is just something that I’m, um, I’m throwing out there, you know? Okay. It’s a listener.
It’s a, it’s a world first listeners. Here we go. Like if you want to have something like this and, uh, let’s, let’s say we want to test out TikTok. You go, you go live on Tik TOK. I go live on Tik TOK and, uh, and, and, and we are now live. Both of us discussing this, we have our meeting on meeting on, on the Google meet, we are live on, uh, on Tik TOK and we share this, you know.
It definitely is going to, to, to establish us in that platform because on TikTok, going live is really, it’s really something that is, uh, peaking, you know, so it’s about understanding a platform and understanding how we can create content in that. from easily, you know, easily. So if you are, if you are lying, both of us on that platform probably would be having like, uh, uh, 200 people watching you and watching me on the same platform, understanding all this content.
Why not? I gotta, I gotta feel like I’ve been blessed with the biggest challenge. Yeah. It’s something, and this is, this is. Yeah, this is the thinking that each business have to have with all these platforms coming up. It’s about how do you use them? How do you infuse them in your daily working of your business?
You know, because having time to do stuff for a specific platform, you know, it’s time consuming and we only have 24 hours and probably eight of those are sleeping time, you know? So, so it’s very important that we Each time, whatever we are doing, hitting record, you know, recording each, everything that we are doing that is recordable, recording that is key, you know, recording that will help us to, will help us to generate the content we need to push us to the next level content that is relatable content that is not scripted content that is on the go.
Content that will help us build the trust that we need. Let’s do it. All right, Sam. I think that’s, that’s it for today. Thanks for your time. Um, it’s been unreal. I appreciate everybody who’s who’ll be listening to this. Who’s listening to this. It’s a, it’s really interesting. Looking forward to feedback.
Yeah, please guys, if you like what you hear today, uh, feel free to subscribe to the podcast. Um, you know, we do do this every week. We try to drop two to three episodes every single week to help fill your ears with all the good shit to help you grow your SaaS, B2B or online brand effectively with digital advertising.
If you need. Anything more from us. If you just want to see whether it help it working with Owendenny, any can help you. All you need to do is jump into the show notes and hit book a 10 minute chat. You’ll speak directly with me, Dean, and we can go through your business, your unique problems and issues that you’re facing with growing your business and see whether or not we can actually help you.
Yes, we do turn people away, but the people that we do welcome and accept. They fricking love the Owen Denny experience guys. It’s been unreal. Thank you so much for tuning in. It’s been a long one today. I hope you got something from it. Stay well, God bless. And I’ll speak to y’all soon. Cheers for now.
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