In this presentation Joshua Nelson walks digital‑marketing agency owners through a step‑by‑step client‑acquisition system. He begins by stressing the need for a clear business model and niche before any marketing work. He then outlines the main acquisition channels – inbound content marketing, paid/marketed lead generation, association and speaking engagements, joint‑venture partnerships, and cold outreach – and explains why cold outreach, association speaking, and inbound marketing are the fastest‑to‑revenue tactics. The core of the system is a two‑step funnel: a low‑commitment lead‑magnet (typically a one‑page cheat‑sheet) that captures an email, followed by an appointment funnel (Calendly, AppointmentCore, etc.) that moves the prospect onto a sales call. Nelson details how to populate the top of the funnel by acquiring lists through buying, scraping, borrowing, or building, recommending buying and scraping for rapid start‑up. He wraps up with a call‑to‑action to visit 7figureagency.com/video for a free video series that expands on these strategies.
Chapters
So now that we've built the model, and the reason I started with model is because if you're not clear on what you're going to sell and what you're going to charge and kind of what your business model is going to look like, there's no sense figuring out how you're going to market or how you're going to position yourself. Because you'd just be filling yourself up with dead-end stuff. Now we can talk about how to fill the funnel. Really, when it comes to landing clients and getting clients on a consistent basis, there's a lot of different avenues and a lot of different things you can do. There's inbound marketing. I'm a big fan of inbound marketing. You might have noticed, but like publishing content, conducting interviews, putting information out on blogs, Putting out information into the world that your prospects would find and think, "Man, that's good. That person must know what they're talking about," and magnetically attracting people, that's one of my main plays and that's like one of my favorite strategies for landing clients. Then there's marketed lead generation. That's like running pay-per-click ads, Facebook ads, doing direct mail, doing things to go out and, and really market to your database or market to your, to your sphere, to your niche, and get clients. There's association and speaking involvement. That's like joining the association with your— within your niche, um, being at their events, finding opportunities to speak at their events. You know, that's extremely powerful. Like, there are guys that that's their number one breadwinner, and it works extremely well. There's joint ventures. I just put it as JV, but that's Finding the gurus in your space. So as an example, Jimmy Nicholas, who some of you guys know, has built a great 7-figure business, like $3 million per year, focuses on orthodontics. And, and one of his main strategies was he aligned with the number one guru or trainer in the orthodontic space, got his trust, got him to see what he was capable of, you know, proved himself. And then that, that guru started introducing Jimmy to their client base. And, and through that strategic alliance, that joint venture, he's— his business has, has blossomed. And then there's, there's cold outreach, right? There's just doing cold calls, sending cold emails, doing brute force to kind of shake the bushes and get clients to come in. And I, I believe there's a place for all of these, right? We get business actually, believe it or not, through pretty much all of these avenues, but certain of them work better than others. Certain of them are quicker than others. So what I wanna wanna focus on is cold outreach, because for a lot of you, this is something you can control. It's something you can roll out today, start being aggressive with, and generate leads and opportunity. Associations and speaking, because that's probably our number one client acquisition play. Being in the associations, being active, being known, extremely powerful, and inbound marketing, like putting out good content and then getting customers to come to you pre-positioned to buy. So I'm going to drill down on those three. Um, you know, marketed— there's a great play for marketed lead, there's a great play for JVs, but there's a little bit longer gestation period. And, and the, the challenge with, with marketed leads is you have to have some pretty significant money to put into it, knowing that you're not going to get an immediate return on investment. So landing clients, right, really you need a couple things. You need a clear target. We talked about that, having one specific niche. You need a lead magnet, right, something that, that you can offer to them that they're like, wow, that's, that's good, right, and raise their hand and get them to opt in to your world. I really believe every agency needs an appointment funnel where once somebody gets access to your stuff, they can get themselves added to your schedule, and a really nice tight sales process where you can confidently get somebody on the phone, help them understand where there's problems with what they're doing today that's preventing them to get to where they really want, and then show them your solution. Look, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this. Have a great follow-up package that can go out after the sales. And I know that when you do that on a consistent basis, you can start to close deals on a pretty consistent basis. So when it comes to the opt-in funnel, you know, There's lots of different opt-ins you can have. What I found is that the cheat sheet works best. Having a very simple, the ultimate plumbing and HVAC online marketing cheat sheet, or the ultimate dental marketing cheat sheet, right? You just list out the main things they need to know. The reason it works well is because it's high desire and it's low commitment. You can get a cheat sheet without having to invest a ton of time. Having a simple one-page cheat sheet, offering that to the people within your niche, having that on your website as the main low barrier to entry option is a great play. So I put up two examples for you. This is also in your guide, so you can go back to this after the fact, but you wanna have at least one opt-in cheat sheet or opt-in funnel where people can opt in and get your stuff. This is Dean from Buzz Big, Bug Biz. He focuses on the pest control niche. And he was nice enough to share his checklist that he developed following our model. The next is to make sure you have an appointment funnel. So for anything you promote on like your basic cheat sheet or your guide or your keyword list, lots of cool things you can offer to your industry that would be really interesting, is that once they opt in, get them straight to the appointment funnel where they can be exposed to you, say, "Hey look, what you just requested is gonna be great. I sent it to you via email." The next step is let's schedule a time, right? Because you didn't just download the cheat sheet 'cause you want the information, you want the result. So the result is best if you have somebody that can implement it for you. And so what I wanna do is offer you the opportunity to sit down one-on-one, we talk about your business and how we can execute this for you. So you can have lots of different funnels, but I want you to have one opt-in funnel and one appointment funnel. They opt in and they get the opportunity to sit down with you one-on-one. And of course the ability to choose a time on your schedule, whether that's Calendly or Appointment Core. Lots of different ways to set it up, but that's what you need to have in place. And that's really where you can start to have a base funnel to build on. But what often happens is when, um, when I deal with digital marketing agencies, they're like, yep, I've got my, I got my funnel, I got my cheat sheet, maybe even I published my book, but there's nobody requesting it, there's nobody getting it. I don't have I don't have a list. So how do you get a list? How do you get the names and contact details for the people within your niche so that you can invite them to your stuff, so that you can give them your, your guide, so that you could potentially get them on your calendar? Well, one option is to buy or scrape. So buy a list means you just go out, you search list of dentists in South Florida, and you buy that list. Scrape is you run a tool like Lead Kahuna, which I'm a big fan of, and it goes out and it scrapes the names, phone numbers, email addresses, and contact details of people. You could borrow a list, and this is a tremendously powerful play. I'm a big advocate for it. That borrow means you find an expert that already has your list or that's already selling to your ideal customer, and you form some type of relationship where they will mail on your behalf. Or they will give you their list because there's something in it for them. Borrowing a list is a great play. Then there's build the list. Your built list is your most powerful list, but it also takes a heck of a long time. We're wanting to get you to 7 figures in 2019, and so what we're going to focus on is buying and scraping because that's something you can start tomorrow to build your list and to build your following. That's what I'm going to suggest. And of course there's a play for each 7-Figure Agency Blueprint, which we, which we offer, um, is something where we go deep into each of these different ways to build your list. But let's focus. Well, I hope you found that, that information useful that you can go back and implement in your digital marketing agency. If you'd like more ideas, strategies, and techniques on really how to effectively grow your digital marketing agency, I'd like to invite you to go to 7figureagency.com/video. That's 7figureagency.com/video. There I outline how we were able to grow our digital marketing agency from zero to seven figures in the first two years, and then to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies the last three years in a row. Lots of ideas that you can implement to really accelerate the growth of your digital marketing agency. I really encourage you, go ahead and head over there, opt in, it's completely free, and take a look at that video series. I'll look forward to talking with you soon.
