What Happened When We Started Treating Roger West like a Client
This is the true story…of 7 strangers…picked to live in a house, work together, and have their lives taped…
Oh, sorry. No. That was the “Real World.”
But this is also a true story—a Roger West story—of what happens when a digital marketing agency decides to market itself the same way it markets its clients.
This does not sound like an earth-shattering plan. But here’s the thing that you learn if you work for a marketing agency. Clients come first. Always. Happy clients are everything.
And that’s how it should be. If a few developers have to die along the way from lack of sleep, so be it. (Just kidding, guys!)
The problem is that most marketing agencies don’t take the time to market themselves the way they should. They’ll put in thousands of hours doing world-class, award-winning creative work for a client, but their own marketing gets pushed aside.
About 6 months ago we decided to practice what we preach. We decided that if we were going to recommend that our clients use certain tactics to successfully market themselves, we were going to take our own advice and see what happened.
Over the years, we’ve had success with these different tactics, but this time we wanted to make a concerted effort to strategically apply all that we’ve learned.
The results have been pretty damn awesome. But first, let me walk you through all the things we’ve been doing.
Don’t Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk
One of the first things my wise employer did was hire a Marketing Manager to promote the agency – me. While I occasionally pitch in on some billable work, about 90% of my job is helping to generate interest, leads and love for Roger West.
We started by doing a content audit of our site and building a robust new content strategy. We went from having 3 blog posts in the first 10 months of 2015, to consistently posting one a week, plus case studies, downloadable tools, infographics and more. We even created an animated explainer video about animated explainer videos. We strengthened our social media presence, promoted our new content there, and put together a strategy to build more followers.
We amped up our PR strategy – submitting applications for more awards and submitting press releases. We also worked on partner marketing and guest blogging for increased exposure.
We invested in a marketing automation platform called SharpSpring to help us capture and track leads, score them according to their behavior, and nurture them with drip campaigns, e-courses and more.
The most successful thing we’ve done is built up our email program, delivering 27 different email campaigns to targeted contacts in just the first three months of this year.
Additionally, we began doing comprehensive marketing campaigns, where we built promotional landing pages with forms that entered leads into SharpSpring. We promoted these pages via social media, emails and blog posts, as well as launching pay-per-click (PPC) & remarketing campaigns.
Real World Results
Well, we’re happy to report that this digital marketing stuff really works. (We already knew that, of course.) We are on-track for a record-breaking year so far, and have acquired some awesome new clients--top brands that we’re really excited about.
Some other noteworthy results. In just the past six months:
- Our web traffic has grown by almost 500%.
- We’ve quadrupled our Twitter followers.
- Historically, only about 10% of our sales came from our own marketing efforts. That number is now 41%.
- Our campaign landing pages are all within the top ten most visited pages on our site.
- Our Animated Explainer Video landing page is the second highest ranking page on our site.
- We’ve won 4 awards including Carolina Skiff (Sitefinity’s Website of the Quarter), Lowry Park Zoo (Silver ADDY), AMIkids (Gold ADDY), and Lowry Park Zoo (Sitefinity Website of the Year for Graphic Design).
We’re working on a new website design and brand video, just completed a successful webinar, and are creating a new ebook. There’s much more to come.
Marketing never sleeps, my friends, but we’re happy to say that we believe, when done right, it can make a world of difference to your business.
We’d love to help your company have a record-breaking year too. Ready to get started? Let’s talk.
Diane Callihan
With more than 20 years of experience writing for some of the country’s top brands, Diane helped to shape Roger West’s content strategy, lead generation, and PR efforts as Director of Marketing. She currently serves as President of Callihan Content Creation.