How a Local Marketing Business Achieved a 7-Figure Income in its First Year

Graig Presti runs the agency LocalSearchForDentists.com, which assists dental practices in maximizing the power of the Internet to attract more phone calls, invite more patients, and generate more revenue. They do this through Local Search Engine Optimization and advertising. Their agency has a 40% margin over sales and about 16 employees (some outsourced).

Graig Presti’s sales strategy is market driven.  That is, attract potential customers to their website and then educate them on how the internet can bring them more patients.  Through their sales process, many of the people they are “educating”, become customers.  Through these tactics, they grew from zero to 7-figures in the first year and to 3.5 million dollars in the first 3 years.

This article is based on a great interview from BrightIdeas.co.

Picking a profitable niche. 

Graig chose dentists for the following reasons:

1. Customer transaction size is high. The average patient value is anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000. Dentists only need one new patient to pay for Graig’s services, which is not difficult to achieve. If they reach this objective, it makes sense for the dentist to maintain this service.

2. Dentists have difficulty with technology and marketing, so they need outsourced specialists to do this type of work. Dental practice is usually not a referral-based business, so dentists have to market themselves constantly to get more customers.

In summary, dentists have high transactions to cover the costs and they need help in marketing to maintain their business.

Marketing and Sales Process Automation

This agency has automated the sales and marketing process, which allows them to acquire customers without the need of them being there and at a low cost for personnel. Once the system has been created, the system takes care of the full process.

He does the automation through InfusionSoft, a very advanced email marketing service that allows him to synchronize email marketing, SMS marketing, direct mail, sales funnels and to create the webinars.

He only sells services with recurring revenue, and concentrates on bringing in new leads

All of Graig’s products rely on monthly recurring fees, but he is always looking for growth and for new customers. Graig and his team focus on retention and new sales because those are the key aspects.

He is always looking for new customers and nurturing them, because you never know when a prospect is going to become a customer.  For Graig, it is especially important to always be looking for new leads, especially at the beginning, since you do not know how long it will take you to close a deal or what your success rate will be.

Their marketing/sales process

Their marketing/sales process is as follows:

The process starts by finding dentists interested in improving their online presence. They find these dentists by using:

• Sponsored email
• Direct mail blasts
• Postcards
• Online ads and LinkedIn ads

He attracts these people to the website by giving them a free report in exchange for their name, email, and other information.  Then, a follow up email is sent containing the free report.

He has 2-3 different reports, and the one that works the best is a free Google Review Guide that shows dentists how to get 5-star Google patient reviews.

After getting the free report, leads are offered the chance to buy a $97 product, the Dental Marketing Game Plan, which helps them understand where they are failing and not failing with their marketing efforts.

The free guide needs to be really helpful, and the follow-up emails should also bring great value, to start building trust in the agency.

If a person does not purchase the guide, the agency continues to email the dentists free videos, invitations to webinars, and other kinds of content that continue to build a relationship with the customer.

Many of their materials include videos and webinars and Graig is the person speaking on these videos. This way, prospects can identify him as the authority in marketing their dental practice.

The main sources for visitors

The sponsored e-mail blasts

They find publications, magazines, forums, and blogs that have email lists where dentists hangout. These places have names and email addresses of dentists. They approach the publication/community and ask to participate in a sponsored email program. Some of these publications offer, for example, a sponsored email at $1,000. Then they will send a pre-approved e-mail to their email list, which includes the link to the free report or Google cheat sheet offer at Localsearchfordentists.com.  If they find some good places that do not offer it, then Graig’s team makes them an offer.

Sponsored email is the fastest and best way to build a list and make money, but it saturates very fast. You may get 100 leads in the first email blast, but that number goes down to 10-30 people a couple of months later.

The use of postcards

They also use paper postcards to direct the leads to their landing page or webinar opt-in page.

Graig uses a PURL postcard, or personalized URL postcard (on paper), which is sent to each person.  This postcard is personalized with the name of the person to whom it is addressed, and includes a personalized URL on it. For example, if the prospect’s name is Mary, the postcard will say something like:

“Hey, Mary, look at this cool new way to get 10 to 15 more clients a month without lifting a finger. I made this brand-new website just for you. Check it out at: abc.com/mary.”

The prospect who receives the personalized postcard appreciates the fact that you have made her a personal website and will want to see it. She will be intrigued by what the website looks like.  This personalization increases the response rates, since it will entice her to go online and check out her “own website” which is just a landing page that personally greets the prospect using her name and contains a web form that already has her name on it.

To create these personalized websites, you just need to upload a list of people’s names and the system automatically creates them for you.

You could use PURL postcards with PURL websites or use only PURL websites and send the links by email.  Graig does both. The physical postcard has a unit cost of about $0.65 each, including postage fees. To prepare and send these, with a handwritten message for each individualized postcard, he uses Craigslist.

The objective of the postcard is to intrigue the receiver, so that they want to check out the website online and do whatever they are requested to do.

LinkedIn for marketing

Graig also runs LinkedIn ads.  Graig prefers to use LinkedIn vs. Facebook ads because he can find specific people by their profession—in his case, dentists—with 100% accuracy.

The objective of these ads is to direct people to their landing page.

In the ads, Graig uses images of sexy girls, even some dressed in bikinis.   Graig uses these because over 80% of dentists are males. He also uses this strategy on the PURL postcards. He has tested several images in the ads, and sexy girls seem to do the best and have the highest CTR.

They do monthly webinars

Graig got his first 5 clients pretty fast.  He got 50 dentists who opted in for a live tele-seminar and converted 5 of them into paying customers.

Since then, every month they hold webinars to promote their products.  These webinars can be live or recorded, but most of them are recorded, since these have the advantage that they can be watched anytime. The content of each month’s webinar depends on what his company is promoting at any given time.

The format of his webinars is a video sales letter, which is a PowerPoint presentation on video that contains written words and his voice reading the written words out loud exactly as they are written. This technique makes attendees understand and absorb the information even better. His conversions went up by 20% when he used these video sales letters.

In these webinars, there is always a clear call to action to buy one of their products and an urgency, so that dentists act.  He offers a package with great bonuses to the first 10 people who order.

No need to network

To this day, and after 3 1/2 years in business, Graig has not done any networking at conferences and professional gatherings.  He puts his emphasis on being considered an expert and an authority in his field, helping dentists to get new customers. If you have built a good reputation, people will come to you, instead of the other way around.

The Phone: A very powerful sales tool

Graig is proud to say that they have never cold-called any lead. The sales process starts with online marketing and tries to attract as many customers as possible online through emails and webinars.  For some of those prospects who do not sign up, they follow up by phone with sales representatives.

A sales-driven company employs a sales team that dials and dials and hopes to get lucky and find interested leads they can close afterwards.  A marketing-driven company does not pick up the phone unless the lead clearly expresses an interest in the product. They don’t waste man-hours, money, or energy on contacts that do not want what they are giving away. They are a marketing-driven agency, so they only call people who have expressed an interest in what they have to offer.

The main products that LocalSearchForDentists.com offers its customers:

1. Local SEO – Helps dentists get a good ranking in Google, Yahoo, and Bing in the city or area where they are. It costs $2,500 to setup and $500 per month for the next 12 months.
2. Google AdWords Management – Creates, manages, and monitors dental marketing ads in Google and other ad networks to give dentists more targeted traffic.  This service goes for $699 per month for a 4-month contract. This fee includes the cost of the ads, as well as an administration fee (their cost and profit).
3. The Revenue Protection Program is a reputation management program.  9 out of 10 patients look up a dentist on Google to see what other people say about the dentist. Graig’s service consists of releasing different press releases, videos, and news stories with good press about the dentist, so that these items will take the first positions on Google with the dentist’s name.  If there are any bad reviews, which are highly probable for any dentist, these WILL NOT appear in the first results, since all the good PR will be first at the top.  If there is any bad feedback, it may never be spotted.

This product costs $1,000 to setup and $497 per month afterwards to monitor the reputation and maintain the rankings of the press releases.

They have a special product called Local Search Dental Implant Marketing Program targeted to help dentists market their implant dentistry services. This is a high-priced service that brings in patients who spend $1,000-$1,500. It costs a little over $3,000 to setup and $697 per month.

He usually offers medium to expensive products and never offers cheap, low-end products. The most inexpensive product offered was a press release that costs $200 to setup and $97 for a monthly subscription.

Conclusions:

The most interesting parts of this agency’s strategy are:

1. How they selected a specific target market they wanted to focus on.  They chose dentists because a single customer has a lot of monetary value and they are always on the lookout for new customers.  They are also small companies, so cannot have anyone on their team to manage the marketing and sales operations.
2. The advantages are that this agency is focused on a specific type of customer.  Thanks to this, this agency knows these customers very well, and knows their needs, their psychology, where to find them, what to tell them, how to convince them, and many other matters.
3. Being a specialized agency with dentists automatically positions this agency as experts and this provides them with a credibility that allows them to close more sales.
4. The different ways they find dentists online are by using LinkedIn and by closing partnerships with magazines and other media.
5. They contact these leads with either ads, emails, or personalized postcards sent by regular mail that include a personalized URL.
6. They convince these people by sending them to a landing page, or even a personalized landing page, that offers a free report.  Using these techniques, they get high conversion rates.
7. They use webinars to sell more of their services.

These techniques have helped the agency grow in 3 years to over 3.5 million dollars.

A communication or PR agency could adapt this strategy to sell its services.

In order for a communication agency to use these strategies, they should:

1. Choose a target market and services related to that target market.
2. Find out how to contact these customers: online, by email, by regular mail (if emails were not provided), or advertising.
3. Contact them and send them to a landing page where they can subscribe for a free service.
4. After they sign up, start marketing to them through emails, webinars, and the phone until they finally become customers.

This strategy will bring the following benefits to the agency:

1. It will identify those customers who are more interested in what you have to offer.
2. The agency will give them value, so they will start to build a relationship with them.
3. They will convert some of these prospects into customers.
4. If the agency decides, they could also call those leads that have not gotten the service and try to sell to them on the phone.  In this case, it will not be a cold lead, but a warm lead; that is, someone with whom the agency has built a relationship over the last few months, who is much more likely to pick up the phone first and then obtain the agency’s services.