4 Insights of a 3K to a 73K a month Reverse Marketing campaign
(Original article was posted on BD Growth Partners)
Reaching 50K+ a month in business takes a good amount of work.
Even if you have the understanding of your market, you have to implement some key insights.
Here are some key insights from a client campaign that we took from 2K to 73K a month within 5 months.
My client was struggling to get his message to convert online in January of 2016.
He had failed with 7 other marketers (including 2 of the biggest names in the industry).
He was having 15 strategy calls per week with a 3% close rate making $1,000 – $3,000 a month in his business. He only produced $17,000 of revenue in 2015.
He was only working in this business part time because the revenue couldn’t support him.
He was great at delivering his service but he was just struggling to have a system to find the right prospects
He contracted to work with us mid January 2016.
Here’s a picture of his sales growth from $2,000 a month to $73,000 through June using the Reverse Marketingprocess
In the rest of the article, I’m going to walk you through how he made it happen and share some tips to improve your marketing.
Overall strategy:
As much as marketers want to tell you that things will be an overnight fix, many times it takes 60-90 days to see significant results. ESPECIALLY when you are working to improve an offer.
February 2016 – Improve Market Positioning
His marketing went for the shotgun approach of targeting everyone in the industry to positioning himself with the high-end market.
Ads were targeting a large age range and did not have a clear demographic he was chasing.
The problem was, other marketers were chasing a low cost per lead instead of finding the right prospects.
This is the biggest error businesses make.
The client freaked out when I told him his cost per lead may double or triple.
Ultimately the lead cost went up about 2.5 times the original amount. His cost per sale went down 50% as well.
I’ll share with you why in just a second.
March 2016 – Alter the market message to identify ideal prospects
I’ll be honest; we almost got fired this month. The revenue improved to 13K during the money though profit didn’t dramatically improve.
If I wasn’t 100% clear that this was the right direction and if he didn’t know about my background in building actual businesses, it might of turned out differently.
His marketing was targeting the “secrets” crowd, which was giving him a lot of tire kickers and clients who wanted to do nothing and get rich.
Tweet: PRO TIP: Go after the clients in your businesses that are easiest to serve. @bryandrider
PRO TIP: Go after the clients in your businesses that are easiest to serve.
We altered the marketing message to go after higher end and more successful clients.
This increased the lead cost by 2.5X. Definitely a tense moment until the right clients started to buy.
When these clients bought, they were much easier to deliver service to. This in turn made it easier to scale the business.
The business started gaining momentum at the end of March.
April 2016 – Handle things that go wrong, stay true to who you are
April could have been a breakthrough month, though multiple things went wrong.
The client hired a sales consultant that altered the sales process that in hindsight wasn’t a good fit for his personality.
We altered the sales process and pushed leads to get more people on the phone.
The first 40 leads flopped. My client was getting worn-out being on the phone with prospects that were not committed to buying.
It was a strategy built for again selling to weak prospects that would not be good long-term fits.
Luckily, we had event revenue that came in to offset the time wasted here.
Pro tip: Know things will go wrong, track and make adjustments.
In hindsight, it’s easy to say stay true to who you are. Looking back, it wasn’t a bad choice, it just didn’t work out.
It would have been easy to blame and say I told you so. Both parties stayed focused.
The Good news was that his clients were getting fantastic results.
May 2016: Leverage results and know your sales velocity
Going into May, his clients were getting fantastic results.
The problem was, it was taking 30+ days for prospects to buy.
I had multiple conversations that any changes we made take 30+ days to turn into bottom line profits on average.
This is tough mentally for most business owners to deal with. This is why most results don’t happen for 60-90 days despite what people sell on FB.
Our conversions still were not where we wanted them as well.
So we implemented three things that made all the difference:
- Tightened up the initial sales hook. We worked hard to help bond him with his target market and repel tire kickers
- We started featuring results he was getting. Any marketer worth his salt will tell you that getting current clients results is the best marketing. All of the marketing pieces focused on sharing before/after results.
- We got clear on EXACTLY what messages were driving profits. We continued to eliminate marketing that wasn’t driving revenue.
By implementing these 3 changes, we were able to cut the cost of client acquisition by 50%.
All the numbers aligned for a great June where we were ready to push results.
June 2016: Managing Growth and enjoying the business
We could have predicted June was going to be a great month.
We aligned the marketing with his IDEAL client. We stopped using any sales tactics that weren’t in 100% alignment with who the client was.
What else was amazing is the $73,000 of revenue was the same marketing cost as the months before.
It was an extremely profitable month for the business and he made more profit in 1 month than he had the entire 17 months prior.
By September he’ll be breaking 100K a month after he takes some time off in July/August.
He put in a lot of hard work. Now he can enjoy the profits of the company he built.
He’s great at delivering his system (which is the first thing I ask with a new client).
His clients have been thrilled with his results and are starting to refer business to him.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- Not all leads are created the same: You need to find ways to get your ideal prospects on the phone even if it doubles the lead cost. Long term, it will lower your acquisition costs.
- Small changes make large profit differences. There are 3 small changes I made along the way in the campaign that resulted in a 50K+ profit month. Find someone who has the expertise to make those small changes.
- Only work with ideal clients: The wrong clients will suck your time and kill your business. If you want to build a 100K a month business, you need to know how to find the right clients.
If you’re like to know more about our “Reverse Marketing Method” that produced these results, then click on the link to Learn More.
