Proven Strategies to Build a $4.3M Agency Funnel

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Our guest today, I'm super excited to introduce. He has been a marketer and an entrepreneur of 2 decades, and he currently manages an ad agency called SM Commerce. He has coaching clients and communities to generate huge results through Facebook ads. His framework, the BPM Method, it's a simple but effective way of advertising that's helped generate over $100 million in global revenue. in e-commerce and digital products. Please help me welcome our Agency Owners Association guest, Dipesh Mandelia. Dipesh, welcome in, man. Thank you.

Looking forward to it.

Awesome. So, um, we've scheduled out about 45 minutes here. Dipesh says he has about— or sorry, an hour and a half. Um, there's about 45 minutes of content. I know that he's going to walk us through, um, some of his methods, and then we'll open it up for about 45 minutes of Q&A. And yeah, with that, Dipesh, I will hand it over to you.

Awesome. Good stuff. So just make sure they can see the screen. So the SMC Agency, $4.3 million client acquisition. Can you see that? Yep.

All good. Cool.

So I'm gonna jump straight in. Over the period of around 2020 to 2023, we generated $4.3 million for the agency. And a lot of that was done by chance. It wasn't done by design, you know, as we start our agency businesses off. I started mine in 2017. Prior to that, I was freelancing and contracting. I kind of didn't really have a roadmap. I didn't really know what to do and how to go about it. And like many people, I started off with LinkedIn. So I was doing kind of LinkedIn organic posts and generating a few leads here and there. But it kind of started to snowball as I understood one of the principles of how we were getting great results for our clients, I had to start applying that for my own agency. You know, the cobbler has the worst shoes and all that kind of stuff. So I think we all get caught up in this thing of, you know, we can get clients great results, but we often forget that we can also get ourselves great results as well. And some of the ways we create our funnels, create our advertising has to be set up for our own businesses as well. So for this particular set of campaigns, We spent $277,000 and generated $4.3 million. Now that's a huge return on investment. But the way I wanna break this down is to explain kind of how we did that as well. The screenshot on the left, by the way, I was just speaking to Austin that I spoke in Thailand at an event in 2018. And in 2018, this is the result we got for one of our clients, which was we spent $260K and generated $4.3 million. And I presented that on stage and it was great and everyone had fun. And then 3 years later, I'd done that for my own business, and it was just the numbers almost matched up. And it was that thing that we were always a small agency but getting huge results for our clients, and we weren't really able to do it for our own business. Because the thing is, when you're running your own business, you don't have the same time and dedication. Sometimes your team don't get their head into the game as well as they do for clients as well. So we struggled for some time until we figured a few things out. And by the way, we only spent $268K on Facebook and made $283 back. So if you look at that as a direct return on ad spend, it's not great, you know, for every dollar we spent, we made $1.1 back. So you'd look at that and say, well, that's not a great return on ad spend. But the way our funnels were set up was that the profit was all made elsewhere. And I'll explain kind of how that looks as well. And what I'll be kind of explaining today and, you know, if you're running Facebook ads, Meta ads, you'll understand this already. It's the secret to consistently profitable ads traffic. That's the core of what I'll be sharing with you today. It's something we've been working with our clients for a long, long time, and it's something that just started to work for our agency as well through this period and generated far better quality leads through the process. So I kind of formulated this over the last few years and called it the Ascension Path Model. Essentially, what we're doing is regardless of the traffic source, we create gateway offers and I'll explain what a gateway offer means for us. We then push that into 2 different areas. Now, the gateway offer idea is we present something, it could be a free thing, it could be a paid thing just to get them into our world and then we push them into ascension. So, you know, you'll think about low ticket offers, lead magnets, self-liquidating offers, all those kind of things, they're all built into this. But the way we produce it, I think is the way we create some amazing results as well. So the gateway offer introduces them to you and your brand. And if they take your, you know, main product, that's great. If they don't, then it goes into list building and list nurturing. So that's the core of the framework that I'll be talking about for the next, you know, 30, 40 minutes. Over the last 20 years, I've been through lots of different guises going all the way back from coding HTML websites back in the late '90s to getting into marketing in 2003. So we're talking about 20 years now. I didn't touch Facebook ads till about 2011, 2012. And that's when I was kind of transitioning away from working a 9 to 5 to trying to find my own way into growing my own, starting my own business and growing my own business. And I failed miserably for the first few years because I misunderstood Facebook. I had already run ads on Google and for me, Google Ads was, there's a keyword, you bid on it, get the lowest cost, highest conversion and life's good. And I came into Facebook Ads thinking about the same kind of methodology, which was let's just go for the lowest price of clicks. Let's go for the highest conversion and things would work and they didn't. A few years later as I cracked it in 2014, helped a client go from $800,000 to about $8 million. in the space of about 6 or 8 months. And that was the first time I realized actually Facebook, this channel could work. And then since then, I started going to kind of freelancing and contracting, working for all these companies. And in 2017, decided to start an agency. Now, when some of us talk about starting an agency, obviously it was just me, like it wasn't really an agency, but I had an idea to start something. I didn't know where to go. So it was kind of just going through LinkedIn, Just posting stuff, trying to talk about my journey and things like that. And the problem with that is it lacks direction. So when you're kind of posting organically, unless you have a brand, unless you have case studies and things like that already presented, it's a bit aimless. I'm not knocking it by any means. It gave me my first probably 5 or 6 clients. But the problem is those first 5 or 6 clients, some of them didn't have money. So I reduced my agency fees as low as I could just to get the client. Some of them were a pain in the backside because they'd overanalyze and just drain so much time. Ultimately, those, you know, first 5 or 10 clients were just complete nightmare. My fault. I can look back and see, you know, clients were great. It was my fault. It's because I didn't bring in the type of clients I wanted to work with. Now bear in mind, I said in 2014, we'd already scaled up a company to $8 million. Following year, I took that to $26 million. So in the space of 18 months, I've done this massive scaling and I've done it for multiple companies throughout. I lack the confidence and conviction to actually pitch myself as an expert. So I was attracting the type of clients that didn't have the money, were super stressed, every dollar mattered. You know, they're monitoring everything we were doing. We had Slack, they're firing questions all day long. So with that, I realized I had to change things up. I had to find a way to attract clients in that we loved working for. And that's a big part of what I'll be sharing throughout this as well. And by the way, I always like to put this slide up whenever I do any kind of talk. Success often looks like a straight arrow just kind of pointing down and going up. Very rarely does it really look like that. So, you know, this is typical probably of 99.99% of businesses. For us, it was the same as well. We went through, especially in the first 6 months in 2017, of hating the business, not paying ourselves, being in debt and just absolutely hating this new business that we created until we figured out a better way of running the business, a better way of getting clients, of getting paid what we should be worth, hiring, getting results, all those kind of things. There's no magic bullet here. I know there's many programs out there that will say, hey, we'll build your agency and we'll help you do it. But it requires you. It required me to actually take a step back and make the right decisions to actually start to grow my agency in the right way as well. So 2020, 2012, this is a screenshot when I was actually first running ads. I think it was 2011, 2012, spent £1,000. So at the time it was about $1,800, didn't make any money, but I learned a lot of things about what didn't work and then kind of taking that forward. I'm not gonna explain this slide. This is something that when I started to work closer with Facebook. So with this kind of scaling that we did, grew it to $26 million back in 2015, I got invited out into Dublin, which is in Ireland, which is headquarters for Facebook in Europe and also to Menlo Park because they wanted to know my secret. Now bear in mind, I'd only been running ads for 2 years and I was still figuring things out, but I got invited out as a big advertiser to help Facebook understand how did we do so well. I didn't really know. I had to kind of play the part, but I learned so much from Facebook. So this kind of complex diagram here was me starting to understand how Facebook actually worked. And I started to go quite deep into the technicalities and all the kind of KPIs and data and things like that. But I realized one of the biggest things about the algorithm, the biggest thing about how Facebook works it can be broken down into, is the advertiser offering the user a good experience and is the user getting what they need from the advertiser? So if you've looked at Facebook ads, you can go quite deep into the algorithm like I did, but they're the only things you need to care about. Are your ads delivering what the user wants and is the user actually getting through your funnel? So whether you're running ads for your clients or for yourself, that's the core part of it. And we can kind of break down all the ways we kind of analyze results and things like that. I'm gonna skip through that slide. And what we end up doing is, and this plays out into kind of how we acquire our own clients as well, is we break down kind of our targeting and our marketing based on where people are in their journey of understanding us. So one of the core models for that is Eugene Schwartz's 5 stages of awareness. And one of the things I realized is that those folk on LinkedIn that we're after, They're at that kind of desperation stage. They want help. They don't have money, etc., etc. But how many prospects out there don't know they need help? They're actually in an okay space, but they could be doing better. And that's where we start to shift our kind of thinking towards finding those kind of people. And then we developed our own ascension path model based on that. So I'm gonna break this diagram down. But essentially, this is what helped to grow our agency. So regardless of the traffic source, we ended up with 5 main gateway offers and I'll explain what that means into the business. So the first one is events. We ran free and paid events. Second one was challenges, which I'll explain. Third one, webinars. Fourth one, books, kind of ebooks and things like that. And then the fifth one is lead magnets. And the idea behind all of these is to find people at the right time for where they are. So if you imagine 2 types of prospects that you're looking at, the first prospect is completely stressed out. They don't have money. They're desperate, all those kind of things. They're more likely to sit through a webinar. They're more likely to commit to a 60-minute webinar because they don't necessarily have money to invest straight away or they don't really wanna book a call, but they're more likely to take up the webinar. For someone who's a busy business owner, They're more likely to go ahead and just book that call if they see the value upfront. So we start to understand that a lot more about our prospects and start to build those gateway offers around where that prospect was and how we can attract them into our products. And then we present them with an offer and then hopefully get them into our P1. So a P1 offer, a product is what you'd call a foot in the door. So it could be an audit. It could be templated things that we could give to the client to then try and offer them up our fully ads managed service or our consulting services or our account builds. So we'd kind of build this as a step-by-step route into coming to our agency. So how does this work in practical terms? What is a gateway offer? I'm gonna show you 2 client examples and then I'll show you how we translated that into our business. So this was an e-commerce client of ours that was doing $100K a year and we helped to scale them to $25 million. And, you know, they've since sold their business. It was a homeware business. They were marketing predominantly in the UK and then they expanded out to the US. On average, their products across the site cost anywhere from probably $10 to $30, $40, $50. And what we realized is if we could get people in at the lowest cost, but then drive up the average order value, a few things were happening there. So we developed the gateway offer around what's cheap and what's a product that we can sell without the customer thinking too much about it. So $10, for example, and then how can we get the average order value up to $30? That's upsells and cross-sells and all kinds of cool funnel stuff. But the cool thing was we were converting the traffic at 6%. So that means when we're running the ads on Facebook, 6% were going ahead and buying. And guess what? That goes back to Facebook and says this advertiser is giving the user exactly what they want because the user is, 6% of your users are actually going to convert, which is very high for an e-commerce store. And Facebook rewarded us with lower CPM. So lower ad costs. So where our competitors were paying $30, $40, $50, to target women 25+ in the UK and US, we were paying $12. So that meant that with our average order of $30, our cost per acquisition was about $15. So we're a 2x just on the front end and we had lots of other things going on as well that helped this company to scale up fast. To give you another example, we had an info product client again in the UK. They helped publishers go live with kind of self-publishing and things like that. $50K would be their ad spend to develop a list for launch building, for launching their products. So we would go out with a target of generating leads for their list for $5 and every quarter they would do a 2-week launch and generate half a million on the back. So they're just 2 ways of how we would bring people into a funnel. This way is a gateway offer product. Which is something that people would need at a very low cost and get them into the funnel and convert. This one for authors, for example, although we wanted to sell a $297 course on the backend, the list building was done on free lead magnets based on here's how to design a cover for your future book, here's how to structure your chapters, here's how to do XYZ. So we're bringing people in with different hooks and then nurturing them into a launch. And that, you know, gave a 10x return on ad spend, which was pretty cool.

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So how do we do that for our own business? So this is kind of how we start to develop those ideas into what we do. So over that period, we spent $278K on ads, mostly on Facebook, some of it on Google. From that, we generated $1.2 million directly. So that meant that you know, from generating those ads into purchases and the lists, we generated $1.2 million back, but we nurtured an additional $3.1 million in the backend. So backend for us is agency services. The frontend is, you know, $7 ebook or a $4 challenge or a $97 training course or things like that. So all those things allowed us to fuel our growth. And part of the biggest thing about this was we didn't realize how effective this front end of the funnel was until about 2 years ago when we started to analyze how did we actually get to growth. Because one of the other challenges when you're growing your business is you don't often get to stop and look at what led you to, you know, the great position you're in right now. So as we're going through this growth stage, you know, I look back and say, well, why could we not have spent a lot more money? It's because we weren't tracking it properly. So it was only after, I think when we came into 2022, we were doing some analysis and saying, right, where do we take the business now? And we looked back and said, we spent nearly $300K and generated $1.2 million on the front end. Why did we not spend more there? Because it was all fragmented. And so the model I shared with you here is it wasn't as it was 3, 4, 5 years ago. We had lots of fragmented pieces which then we stuck it together and looked at and said, hey, We've actually got a process here that works. So first of all, what is a gateway offer? Now, in the world of drugs, there's an idea of a gateway drug. So people that end up, you know, on the streets homeless, but, you know, on these really super hard drugs, they started on something soft. So, you know, thinking about just simple painkillers, they then move up as an example into something stronger, something stronger, and something stronger. That's the idea of a gateway drug. Now, in 2016, I was contracting for a coffee subscription company, and the product director there had kind of brought this up and said, what's our gateway drug for people that subscribe to coffees? And what the analysis he led, and this is kind of where the idea and concept came to me, was he looked at all the different blends of coffee and said, if a customer buys a particular blend, is there a lifetime value that is higher than anything else? And there was. So when he looked at all the different blends, I can't remember the name of the blend, but there's one particular blend of coffee which if that was the first order that the customer had, their lifetime value was off the scale. And it's because it was like the Goldilocks option of coffees. It wasn't too strong, wasn't too mild, wasn't too whatever it was, bitter and all those kinds. It was just kind of in between. And a lot of the people that experienced that coffee were like, this is good. And then they start to expand into different coffees. So now I wanna try the Colombian, now I wanna try the Ethiopian and things like that. But that gateway coffee allowed us to change our marketing. And rather than try and market 10 or 15 different types of coffee blends as the first experience for someone subscribing, we focused heavily on that one blend and said, let's just get everyone into this one blend. We know that the lifetime value is better and we can construct the funnel in a way that we don't want them to end up going from this kind of good experience of the first coffee into something super bitter because they're gonna be like, this isn't great and then they'll cancel after the second order. So we started to piece that all together and that's the concept that we introduced into our gateway offers, which is how do we bring people in in a way that gives them a bite-sized sample of what our agency could do. So on the right-hand side, you know, events, challenges, webinars, books, we've tested them all out and they all work. Like, I'm not gonna tell you like do this one over the other one, but they work in different ways. So for example, a webinar, if you run a 60-minute webinar, do a 20-30 minute pitch at the end of it, then you'll get a certain type of people in who, you know, maybe have $3K to invest in your audit or whatever the lower level of your agency is and then maybe can ascend. People that go through challenges, they have, for example, if we run a 5-day challenge, they've got the time to go and put into that challenge, but they're probably not the type of people that will sink $3K or $5K into the next offer. So for them, for example, we might present a kind of do-it-yourself ads course, and then from there we can ascend them into something else. So all of these funnels work in different ways, and that's something, again, when I talk about fragmentation, we were doing all of these in our team but not kind of tying it all together in one piece. We test one funnel out. Okay, it worked. Let's now test the different funnel out. So it's not like we had all of these running at the same time. If I could have gone back 3, 4, 5 years, we'd have pieced this together and pushed them all in different ways at the same time as well. So that's the concept of the gateway offer, is to find people at the stage where you need them. So for example, let's say for our agency, we found that our niche was e-com businesses that had hit 7 figures but didn't know how to then scale it forward from there. So now all of a sudden we can eliminate anyone that's not made $1 million flat. So it could be in a year, it could be 2, 3 years. If they haven't reached that stage, uh, for us, they didn't have the right product market fit. If they weren't profitable with their ads, gonna have to do a lot of construction work. So we started to also understand what our ideal prospect looks like. Based on this. And if we were attracting people in that didn't meet our ideal prospect kind of makeup, we'd offer them other things. So, you know, I launched a free Facebook group, launched some low-cost trainings, $297, $97, $1,000, things like that. And that was just, let's just make money on the side. But what I also didn't realize is if someone's taken that and they've got results, you're now helping them to reinvest in your company as well. So one of the examples is in 2019, 2019, we started to work a lot with campaign budget optimization. So I think it was 2018 that Facebook launched it. And the idea was rather than managing your Facebook budgets at the ad set level, you could do it at the campaign level. And there was a big fuss that had kicked up because Facebook were going to change the way you run your ads to say that campaign budgets was the only way to run. So in 2018, we started to experiment and we had some massive results with clients. So 2019, I figured What if we launched a training course? Because there's nothing out there on it based on our results, based on our learnings, and we can sell this as a $97 ebook. So bear in mind, the agency was 100% of the revenue at the time, and the ebook idea was let's just make some money on the, on the side. It wasn't even set up as let's generate more clients. It was just let's create a side income. What actually happened was the ebook itself ran at a 2x return on ad spend. So The $97 ebook, the way we'd set up the funnel actually generated about $120-$130 average order value. So we had a few bumps and things like that, which meant our cost per acquisition was around $60. So if you think about, can you spend $60 to acquire one customer that buys this ebook? Even now, I'd say it's still doable. And at that time, you know, ads were a lot cheaper back in 2020 than they are right now. But that's what we're doing. And the cool thing about this that we didn't realize at the time is that it costs us nothing to build a list of active buyers that potentially matched what our agency needed as well. We were also generating calls off the back of it for zero cost. So now all of a sudden we're selling this front-end offer, we're making profit on our ads, we're list building for free, and we're actually generating calls for free as well. So prior to that, I was speaking to an agency that can get calls booked, you know, $500 per call booking. And if you convert it at, I think, whatever it was, 25%, it's $2,000 per client acquired. I can acquire clients for free this way. And that just changed everything for us. It was like, hang on a second, if we do this $97 ebook route, people are paying us money to get the education they need. They're joining our list for free and they're generating us calls for free because once they're on the email list, I think we had a 12-email flow off the back of it and one of them was to book a call. Off the back of this ebook, we generated $1 million in high-ticket sales. So that's to say that whatever we generated on the front end selling the ebook, the agency generated $1 million on the back end from people coming through the ebook, getting results, enjoying what they'd seen. And a percentage of people will turn around and say, this information's cool, we tried to apply it, but it's a bit more complex than we thought. Can your agency just run our ads? And the amazing thing about that is you get a client on the call that isn't going to your prospects and saying, hey, you know, we're going through a pitch process and we'd like to know. They're contacting us and saying, can you run our ads? Now all of a sudden, the ball is in our court. We can price what we want. We can say yes or no. And, you know, if I shift that back to 2017 where You know, our, I think our fees were about, we at the time it was like $2,000 a month to run ads. We were selling client contracts at $500 a month just because we needed clients. Now all of a sudden with this kind of funnel, we could go back and say, right, our minimum fee is $5K plus a percent of, you know, whatever it was, ad spend or revenue. And then we could start edging it up as well because the more calls that came through, the more we could push back on the client and just see what kind of boundaries people would accept. and it actually helped us to get our billings up to $7.5K a month as a minimum because we realized it wasn't that clients wouldn't want to pay $7.5K a month, it's we didn't have the conviction to go back into our market. So bear in mind, our market is ecommerce businesses making at least $1 million or made at least $1 million and they want to invest in growth. Now they're seeing through our $97 ebook, the case studies, examples, our processes, our, you know, the way we run ads and our intelligence, stuff like that. So they're paying for that access. Then they're calling us up and saying, we believe in whatever you've just provided us, we want you to run our ads. So that's the amazing thing about that. And that changed everything for us as well. And by the way, we did a soft launch of this in 2019. It generated $100K in 8 days for us. We'd never done anything like that for our agency before. So that $100K, majority of that being profit, enabled us to reinvest in growth. So at that time, our agency was running quite thin. So I think we were doing maybe $50K a month and our margin was, I don't know, $5K a month profit or whatever it was. Now all of a sudden we've launched this ebook, it's made $100K. I think at the time we spent maybe $30K on ads or whatever it was. We've got money in the bank. We could now invest in results. We could now invest in tools and Growth ideas and things like that. And the amazing thing then is your decision-making changes because right before that, when we've got $5K profit a month, everything feels stressful. Like if I'm gonna go and hire that person, right, that's gonna eat into my profits. When can I see a payback? I need more clients to fill in. It's very difficult to try and manage your growth. Now all of a sudden, we've just ended up with $60K to $70K just sitting there in the bank. And it was just like the stress had reduced. Now we've got different ideas. Let's go and test that thing out. Let's go and run an event and things like that. Second example. So this one we actually ran, I think '21 or '22, was to run a challenge funnel. So as we started to develop these different funnels and start to test, and we got lots of things we tested, I'd probably say about 40-50% of the things we tested didn't work. The ones that did were obviously great, and I'll be sharing the ones that did work with you. Here's another one that did work. So we ran challenge funnels. So if you haven't heard of a challenge funnel, it's where you compress some information in a period of time and try and provide them one piece of result that will then build that trust for them to obviously buy something else from you as well. Can be a free challenge, can be a paid challenge. We tried free and paid. Paid worked best for us. So we charged $4.90 to join the challenge. And then there was a VIP upsell for $49 where for $4.90, you could follow the challenge in a Facebook group. If you upgrade to VIP, you could also join the Zoom call so you can ask questions and, you know, have more direct access. We spent about $2,000 acquiring prospects for this campaign. We made $2,000 back, which is people buying the $4.90 entry ticket plus the $49 upgrade. So The front end broke even. So every dollar we spent, we got a dollar back. On the back end, we made 16x return on ad spend from people buying a $5K product on the back end. So this was targeted at, this was actually freelancers and coaches and consultants as well. So our back end product was a kind of how-to with coaching and we generated $5K off the back of that and we proved to ourselves actually we didn't need just the ebook. Now we've got this challenge funnel that works as well. Here's another example. This is one we actually launched this year, which is called the Ultimate Facebook Ads Launch Formula. So with this idea, what we wanted to do was, could we target people at the earlier part of their journey with Facebook ads on how to launch profitable campaigns in under 5 days without being an expert? And, you know, by this time we've got AI tools and things like that. We also have a new program called Ad Signals, and that's a membership program which we've installed as part of our ascension path model. So right now we have our free community, then we have ad signals, which is $97 a month, then we have our coaching, and then we have our agency and consulting services at the top of there. And we're trying to build this nurture pool. So a lot of people, you know, where this funnel was a lot more direct before, we were getting people in at $97 and we were able to scale them straight into a call into the agency. There are also a lot more people we weren't reaching. So we're going down into a different kind of offer. This is an ebook with a video training. The front end for this where we're running ads is 2x. So for every dollar we're spending, we're making $2 back. This average order value, I think, is about $60 or $70 right now. So there's different upsells and cross-sells, which means we're acquiring customers for $30 to $35 into this ebook example. Again, we're generating our lists for free. We're generating calls off the back of this for free because we no longer run call booking funnels to cold audiences. We do it to warm audiences. Warm audiences are the ones that have bought something from us or have ended up on our list through a free lead magnet, for example. And that means that when we were running ads, I think in 2020 and '21, we did a lot of experimentation running ads to cold audiences, trying to get them into our agency funnel. But the problem there was they didn't know, like, or trust us. And therefore our call advisors had to essentially do the work of selling. So, or of marketing, sorry. So they would have to explain, here's why our agency is good. Here's our case studies, here's our examples and things like that. When we switched to this model, the call advisor, our salespeople would just do selling. It was just like, I want to work with your agency. So the salesperson would say, okay, let me ask you about your business. What's your revenue? Where are you at right now? Why are you a good fit for our agency? Changes the whole conversation because they've already been through the process of consuming our content through free or paid means. They're on our list and by the time they book a call, they've already made the decision, I wanna work with this agency. So when they get through to the sales closer, no longer is the sales closer trying to work hard to get the sale. At times, they're getting the client to convince themselves that they're a good fit for us. So they're opening up all their revenue numbers and saying, yeah, you know, here's what we are at. We think we can. And when they start to do that and you can see their revenue numbers, it becomes easier to pitch $5K, $7K, $10K a month to get the right product into their hands. And that makes the whole process better because we get clients we absolutely enjoy working with. They're paying us enough that we can do all the services that we tell them. So Whether it's running ads, building funnels, doing emails, doing tech integrations, we can we can now afford all of that. If someone's paying me $500 a month, I can't. I'm trying to go into Upwork and just get these kind of small gigs and try and get people to figure out at 10K. I can get the best of the best onto onto the account and get better results for clients. So it becomes a win win win everywhere when the when the quality of that audience is so much better as well.

All right, quick note: This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused. On driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website. also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside.

I want to show you a different funnel here as well. This one in particular uses video funnels. So going back to the idea of a gateway offer, it doesn't always have to be a direct response. So this one is a very simple idea. If you run Facebook ads, you know that you can retarget people that have watched a video. This one, for example, we called it the PTSD Ads Formula. PTSD offended a lot of people and we're working on renaming that. But the idea was pixelless tracking system design. It's just something we came up with without really thinking about it. The idea was at the time when iOS 14 was really kicking off and people were losing tracking and things like that, We were trying to think how could we attract people into our funnels without worrying about the pixel. So the idea was we would run lots of videos top of funnel, remarket to people that watch those videos with a Facebook lead form. So no website involved, no pixel involved, grab them out of Facebook into the lead form and push them through an email funnel. And the cool thing about this, and this is an example of an ad, here's how we've managed to grow past $2 million in monthly client Facebook ad spend for our 7-figure agency. This was targeted at people that had watched a particular video. So with our ad sets, what we're actually able to do is to create videos and then theme them. So for example, we had a theme of agency growth and struggles to grow. We had agency growth, not struggling, but looking for the next level of growth. And we created videos for those different types of audiences. And then deliver the direct response ads to try and bring them in. So this person here, they actually went from that free lead magnet into AdSignals, which is our $97 a month mastermind. And then they booked a call to go and inquire about our agency services. And I could see, for example, looking at their CRM data. So this data is from ActiveCampaign. So whichever CRM you use, you should be able to, from a Facebook form using Zapier, connect up some information from the ad into your CRM. So for example, here it says PTSD interest freelancer struggles that directly matches the name of the ad set we would have set up. So when you use a lead form on Facebook, there is data you can pull into Zapier which you can then push into your CRM or a spreadsheet or anything like that to give you more context. Now, to give you an idea of how we then use this, As this person's booked the call, the person that's taking the call in my team can see exactly who they are and what their journey is. So they came into our mastermind program. We know they're a buyer. They self-identified as a freelancer. They downloaded this lead magnet. So they're interested in our growth flywheel. They've booked a call and they came in through this ad set which says they're a freelancer that's struggling. So now as soon as, you know, 5 minutes before they book the call is when they get on the call, we know so much about them that we already know what type of product and how to nurture that going forward as well. And that's another thing about the gateway offers is the more information you can collect, the more you know about them. So knowing, for example, someone's come through a webinar, what was the title of the webinar? Someone's come through a challenge, what was the title of the challenge? We already know that context so that when they book a call, the agency services, we already know how to serve them. Now, up until this point, I've talked about free, I've talked about paid kind of front-end gateway offers. This is a free lead magnet we actually ran in 2019. So it works for free as much as it does for paid as well. I prefer paid because if you can get them to transact, then the quality of the people in your list is gonna be better. It could be $1, it could be $4, whatever your front-end price is, It's just about getting people to understand that if I give you money, you're gonna give me value. And I discovered this the hard way because we only used to run free lead magnets and the idea was to just get lots of emails into the list. But a lot of those people are tire kickers, they can't afford your services and things like that. So with the paid gateway offers allows you to create that filter. Now, this is an example of a free lead magnet that actually did work for us. 2019, this was the precursor to this product that we actually launched, which is a $97 ebook. We launched this as a free case study. But the way we pitched this was we didn't just say, here's a cool case study, etc. We pitched it to our ideal prospect, which was the 7-figure e-com store owner. So we went out and said, you know, this is how we are scaling up 7-figure e-commerce businesses. Here's some information, get them to a landing page, get them to sign up to the lead magnet. And then every email there was giving them value and showing them how to grow their business, but then dropping a call to action to book a call. Now, this one, for example, cost us £5 to £10 for lead. It cost us about £100 for a call booking and it cost us £1,000 to acquire a customer. At that time, our services were £5,000. So the return on ad spend was pretty good. The problem is you have to front load your spend. So we were spending probably about $5K a month on trying to acquire these leads. We didn't know if it was gonna work or not. So then you have to wait and wait and wait because that $5K is lost now. It's just acquiring emails and then there's a nurture funnel and it takes weeks and weeks for people to come through. At the end of it, you know, 2, 3 months down the line, we realized it is profitable when we're generating those calls, we can convert and we're getting ecommerce clients into the business. But the problem with the free model is you have to front load your spend. And that's when, you know, when we did experiment with this $97 ebook offer, it's a similar concept. So the Ultimate CBO Cookbook and our case study are similar in terms of the content. It's just pitched in a different way. So that's how we've taken results for clients and we've taken our processes and things like that in here. We packaged it up more just to display what we could do. In here, we packaged it up and said, hey, by the way, you can also do it too. In the same way, we brought in the same type of prospects, but this one was profitable from day one and our list building was free and our cost per call was free as well. So that's to give you a contrast on that. How we construct these kind of offers, and I know we're kind of closing up on the time, is we focus on 4 key things: the product, the audience, the offer, and funnel. I call that the Advertising Core 4. And essentially what we wanna do, you know, product, you already got the products. I'm not gonna go deep into that at all. But with the audience, we go through what are their thoughts and feelings, what their needs, wants and desires and what are they in pain or are they in opportunity. So for example, it's the difference between a painkiller and a supplement. If you're in pain, you need immediate response, need immediate relief. If you're trying to get better at something, you need a supplement. It takes a bit longer, but you know the long-term benefits are gonna be better. Thinking about what their identity is, we overlay that on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So your clients will fall somewhere here. So for example, just as you as a business owner have all these kind of concerns and stuff, so does your prospect. So if they're struggling for money, you know, they've got the very basic needs they're worrying about, safety, security, food, water, sleep. If they're profitable and doing really well, now they're thinking about the future. Now they're thinking about impact and things like that. So the way we kind of nurture people in is thinking about where they are and who we want to work with as well. And initially, you know, the agency for us set up here and that's all we had. Then we said, how can we serve other people? How can we serve other people all the way down here? So if you don't have money, we've got free stuff. If you have some money, we've got low ticket stuff. If you've got a bit more money, you've got group coaching and some other things like that. But if you really wanna work with the best of the best of what our agency can offer, then we offer this. And that's essentially, if you turn that triangle sideways, And, and kind of look at how we build our ascension. That's pretty much it. And we're trying to target people where they are and trying to deliver on that as well.

And it—

and the biggest part here is life stage. So your clients will either be, I've got an idea, I'm starting off, or I've started and I've screwed up, or I've started, I'm doing well, or I'm doing really, really well. You have to think about where your pitch is as a client. And we were kind of trying to serve everyone at the same time. That didn't work. But we said, right, who can we actually attract in for the best price and build a funnel around that and then start to position our agency around our ideal prospect, which was, you know, I've got my offer, I've run ads, made some money, and now I wanna scale it to $10 million. That became our niche. Now there's a big barrier to join our agency because if you've not hit $1 million and you're not aspiring to hit $10 million, then you're not our ideal prospect. That's as simple as it is. If you're in any other position, we've got lots of other services and products for you. but our done-for-you agency services are only for this one avatar. So that meant that we could change our front-end offers and our gateway offers around that as well. And essentially the offer is what I call the KLT bridge, know, like, and trust. So if you go back to when we used to run call booking funnels, it was a typical ad, you know, we're a great agency, here's some great results, book a call, or, you know, we're a great agency, see some stuff, it's a VSL, video sales letter, and book a call. Problem was they don't know you, they don't like you, they don't trust you. And then you're up against so many other agencies that are talking the same language. But what Gateway Offer does is to bypass all of that. So they get to know and like you and trust you because they've seen your content, they've seen your results. And now all of a sudden when they book that call, they kind of feel like they know you already as well. And that's where the kind of offers come in to create something that is irresistible to them. Based on who they are and where they are right there as well. The funnel itself, simple 1 or 2-step sales funnels, logical upsells, and then follow-up funnels. That's literally it. So if you look at our $27 ebook right now, it says it's 2 pages, landing page, cart page purchase. There's an order bump for, I think, $29. Then there's an upsell, I think, for $97 and another one for $490 and things like that. But it's all logical. It's very simple. We run ads to our ideal prospect and then follow them up on email. So nothing here is groundbreaking. The key thing is just finding the right gateway offer for your prospect so that you can actually build something like this. And, you know, for us, I think we started off with lead magnets. Like that was the only funnel we had. We had some traffic, lead magnets, offer, and then straight into the agency. We didn't have all these other things broken down and we struggled for some time. You know, fast forward 5, 6 years, this is where we've ended up and we now have a process and a system where we could switch these on and off as needed and push people into our different types of offers as we need it as well. And, you know, just recapping on ads in particular, the key thing to focus on is your funnel conversion rate. The higher you convert, the better the user experience, the better Facebook sees that your funnel is performing. And that's what comes through the offer and that's where the gateway offer sits as well. And that's what enabled us to produce these kind of results and become our prospects' only choice. So that's my, that's my 47 minutes, I think, or maybe just about 45 minutes. Hope that was useful. You know, I've gone through this process since 2017 of trying to understand who our ideal prospect is, trying to build the right funnels. And I think as we were going through it, We were kind of making it up as we went along. It's only when we look back and, you know, we can look back and say, hey, look, here's all the cool things we did. But it was very hard when you're in the moment to actually see some of the good that we're doing. And then you kind of look back and say, hey, we actually have a system and we can actually switch funnels on and off and get those calls booking, calls ringing as and when we need it as well. So thanks for listening in and I'm happy to take any questions.

Thank you.