Mike Lieberman, founder and president of Square 2 Marketing shares how he helps business owners create strategic marketing plans and tactics to drive revenue by transitioning from traditional marketing to inbound marketing. This article has been written based on an interview made by Trent Dyrsmid in BrightIdeas. The ideas reflected in this article are those of Mike Lieberman. You can see the full interview here.
About reality marketing
At Square2Marketing, they call the type of marketing they do reality marketing, which consists of:
- All marketing activities should be quantifiable and need to create a return. This helps them understand what works and what does not.
- The marketing has to be prospect-focused. Most of their clients talk mainly about their service. They need to change that focus and make it all about the prospects. To check whether their customers are prospect-focused, they do the red-blue test where they look at a website, sales letters, a piece of direct mail, or a brochure and circle in red when they talk about themselves and in blue when they talk about their customers. To pass the test, circles should be 95% blue and 5% red. Almost 100% of customers fail this test.
Getting website traffic
They help clients create content that is educational and then place this content in those communities where their prospects are spending their time.
These places are:
- LinkedIn groups
- Blogs and industry websites their prospects are reading
- Social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest.
The key to getting a prospect’s attention is to have the right content. For them to understand who they want to do business with, they need creative engaging content which appeals to them. Then they place that content in the right places and as a result, they get more traffic to their website, which turns into more leads and conversions. In order to know what content they need to create, they create editorial calendars.
Developing retainer business for the agency
When they started in 2003, they knew they did not want to work based on projects. This was a challenge because most of their prospects wanted to work this way. They would come and say: “I need a new website, I want a brochure, or, can you do my email campaign for me?”… They were able to talk clients out of that by simply asking why they wanted this new website, what were they really looking for and what’s going on in their business? They also explained that inbound marketing is something that takes time and needs a couple of months before customers can start to see results.
Conclusion:
The tactics that Square2Marketing uses to get leads for their customers are the same that the agency ThinkHandy uses to get their customers. These Inbound Marketing tactics can be summarized by: Create great content for your prospects where you are addressing their issues, place it where they are, attract them to your website, collect their emails, build a relationship through email and other content you offer or sell to them. One key aspect that Mike talks about is the importance of tracking results. If you track results, you can show that what you are doing works. If it works, you justify being their agency for a long, long time.
Comments are closed.