Key Insights from the Traffic & Conversion Summit for Digital Marketing Agencies

Awesome. Well, thank you guys for joining me on today's session. I'm super excited to unpack some of our key insights from the Traffic and Conversion Summit. Most of you guys know it's one of the largest digital marketing events of the year. People come from all over the country, including internationally, to hear from some of the best experts, speakers, trainers. And so I was there. I had a chance to speak on Wednesday, and I took copious notes. I don't know if you'll be able to see this, but I literally took 103 pages of handwritten notes from the Traffic Conversion Summit. And most of what I did was agency-centric. It was like, on the agency track, how do we run our agencies better? How do we serve our clients better? How do we, how do we get our clients better results? How do we land clients? And so what I wanted to do was just kind of compile the key insights from that and do this live session and kind of share with you what I took away. Again, I've been attending this event for about 6 years. I've learned a tremendous amount from it, and so I feel like the best way for me to learn is to share what's working for me, or how I'm going to implement it in the real world. Let me share my desktop and we'll get started. Could someone post in comments, you should be seeing my, my screen now, so we know for sure. So here's some of the, some of the key highlights and some of the key information. Well, first of all, it's a massive event. There was about 100 sessions, over 6,000 people in attendance, some of the brightest and best from all across the, the world really. Billionaire Sir Richard Branson was there in the evening of the first day, just kind of sharing some really cool stuff on how he built his billion-dollar Virgin enterprise. So I say that, you know, in that it's an amazing event. There was a lot of information covered. Don't consider this to be the end-all. Okay, I got everything I needed from the Traffic Conversion Summit. This was the sessions that I sat in, the things that I thought were most useful. You know, this is just a fraction sliver of of what's covered at the Traffic and Conversion Summit. So with that said, the first session was by none other than Ryan Deiss, the founder and CEO of Traffic and Con— of DigitalMarketer, the guy that actually launched with his partners the Traffic Conversion Summit. And his first session was really about the end of marketing as we know it, and the fact that technology basically goes through 5 key stages: discovery, standardization, proliferation, and then consolidation. And marketing is technology. And there was a time at the early phase of discovery where it was relatively easy, right? You could run pay-per-click ads, you could do things with SEO to get your websites ranked, and it was relatively simple. Then came standardization and proliferation. Standardization meaning, you know, the, the, the, the powers that be got clear on how to control things, how to tighten things up. And then proliferation came, where like lots of new things came out— Facebook, pay-per-click advertising, retargeting, all kinds of cool ideas. And then comes consolidation. And right now we're in a phase of consolidation where almost all of the traffic is going to like 3 main websites. Almost all of the traffic is going to Google, Amazon, and and Facebook, right? We all, we all know this. And so when there's standardization and consolidation, it gets harder to monetize. It gets harder to profit from these types of things. And really, as he explained it, this, this full cycle in, in standardization and consolidation, if you're not innovating, then you're going to die. You're basically going to go out of business. So we have to innovate or die. If we're not changing the way we look at things, if we're not, rolling out services that are a little bit different for our clients than we did 6, 9, 12 months ago, then we're just thinking, okay, what got us here is gonna get us there, and life is gonna be grand. Unfortunately, that's not life in the real world. That's not the way things are gonna work. So we have to really start to think opposite. And again, I'm just taking the cliff notes of what Ryan shared. And we have to think opposite. Instead of being fast, we have to slow things down, right? Instead of just expecting people to click on an ad and then enter their information and give us money, we have to know that, you know, there's going to be more personal conversation that has to take place. And this was a big theme of the event, you know, a move towards personal communication and conversations and away from automation. Instead of trying to think of everything on big grand scales, we need to be looking at the micro. And we have to transition from just thinking about things in a funnel format, like a funnel, you know, start here, go here, finish there, and really think of it more as the journey. And of course, Digital Marketer calls it the customer lifecycle and figuring out the best way to really optimize that journey, that relationship, from initial communication to them doing business with you, to to them spending more money with you over time, all the way through to them advocating for you and becoming a great client. And we should be automating, but we should be automating to conversation, right? To a real person on a Messenger bot, or a real person on the phone, or a real person face-to-face, because that's how commerce is done, and it's going to continue to be that way going forward. And really, he made a point that he feels like you have to make the, the scalable, unscalable. Like, don't stress so much about is this going to scale, can I do this one thing and have it work 1,000 times, and really get more down to the fundamentals of salesmanship, of business development. And so really, our approach has to be more personal in our conversation, in our marketing. So we have to automate bots, but we can use those bots like ManyChat and other chatbots that are becoming really, really popular and were like the whole talk of the last Traffic Conversion Summit. We have to leverage that stuff to create real conversations. We should be sending emails that invite replies to real conversations. It wasn't that long ago I was looking at my email campaigns and how we used to email broadcast. Everything was a long text, you know, long text. And a click here to do a next step. And over the last year or so, we started doing what we call SPEARS, simple, specific, and expecting a response type messages, which are subject line, you know, Tom, are you looking for some help with your website, question mark. Just as simple as that on a broad, on a mass scale, getting lots of responses, of course, knowing they can't just self-serve at that point once they respond, You have to have yourself or someone on the other side to continue the conversation. And they really feel like the shift is moving towards that, where people wanna have real conversations, but we can use the bots to do that. And, you know, the future belongs to those that are willing to invest in conversation, whether that's a chat message, again, a live call, or a face-to-face business conversation. So we have to be innovating. You know, we have to be sending out emails without links, SPEARS, We have to be putting our clients into Facebook groups where we can develop community and relationship. We have to post unrelated content. It's not always linear, you know, internet marketing, internet marketing, internet marketing, bye. You can post things that would be useful to your prospective client base and pull them into a conversation with you. One of the key things he said that I thought was really useful and beneficial was We've got to get back to answering the stupid questions, the basic questions, the simple things that our clients ask or that they want answers to that we think that's like just basic, basic, right? We got to answer those questions. When we answer specific questions in a very direct way, we can build a lot of value and develop great relationship. So I mean, lots of cool insights from his initial talk. Talked about, you know, doing one-on-one onboarding, writing a book, publishing a podcast, putting out great content. But I think the key, the key thought was, you know, we've transitioned into this, this, um, this area where we have to innovate and we have to be thinking differently about how we market ourselves, how we market our clients, uh, to get them results. The, the next session I sat in that I thought was really interesting was, uh, was a session by Eric Huberman He runs Hawk Media. Believe it or not, this is a $75 million a year agency. And, and this guy Eric is less than 30 years old. I think he's like 27. I don't know the exact age. And he got up on the digital agency track and shared some really interesting insights. For me, the key things that stood out— again, he grew to $75 million in less than 5 years. That means a lot of us are thinking much smaller than the potential is, right? I talk about building a 7-figure digital marketing agency. People are like, wow, that's, you know, that's a big number. Here's a guy doing $75 million in just under 5 years. Did have a background in commerce and fashion, sold that business, started this agency. And you know, what he really led with was if you're gonna run a digital marketing agency, you actually have to be a good marketer. You know, so many people think they can just jump into running a digital marketing agency They've never sold anything. They've never sold anything online. They just think, "Okay, whatever. I'm just going to sell some people and snow them into hiring me." Well, with competition the way that it is, with reputation, online marketing reviews being the way that they are, you better be good at digital marketing if you're going to play this game. You got to be a student of the game. You got to be at these types of events. You got to be learning and you have to be selling something. You can't just step in and get people to pay you to sell. Their services if you've never sold anything yourself. He made a point that I kind of believe, you know, to be true in our agency, was that it's really hard to control culture with a distributed team. So, you know, he's got, I think it's something like 400 to 500 employees in his agency, and they all work at a physical office scattered throughout the country. And we're the same. So our offices in Florida, in Miami, and we've got a team of 30 full-time employees. And there's just something powerful about having real people working in a real office, putting their heads together. You can develop culture, you can set standards, and really build sustainable results for your clients, which is really what it's all about, is getting our clients results, making our clients successful. I thought that was interesting, something he spoke about there. And then, you know, you have to educate your clients and be transparent. Really, it's a collaborative relationship. What I often see and what he was kind of mentioning in his session was people, agency owners, want to kind of pretend like there's some magic secret sauce going behind the scenes. And like, oh, don't worry about that. Just give us the money and we'll figure it out. And that's kind of a recipe for failure. Like the client needs to know what you're up to. They need to understand the strategy and it should be a collaborative collaborative experience. And that's the way it runs in our agency. Like our clients on the front end, we educate them, we show them, look, here's what we're going to do. These are the exact strategies we're going to implement. And on a monthly basis, we're kind of showing them, this is what we're up to. This is what we've accomplished. This is what the report is telling us. And our best clients are the ones that want to have, you know, they want to be involved in that process. They want to question everything we do, but they also want to understand the strategy and be involved in kind of what we're doing and what we're up to. So I thought those were some really cool, cool insights. And then he shared really $75 million business model. Anybody runs a $75 million agency, I'm going to listen to what it is that they have to say. And he was saying, look, just keep the business model and the financials as simple as possible. And so he kind of shared the formula he uses, which is 18% overhead. So that's your office, that's your phones, that's the tools that you might use. It's like your overhead. 30% to cost of goods fulfilled. So whether that's cost of goods sold or however you have it in your financial reporting system, 30%, that's if you're outsourcing, if you're paying contractors, if you're investing in per-client services that go into your monthly retainer fee, max of 30% should go to the actual fulfillment of the service. 27% reinvested in sales and marketing. And this is a big one, this is the one most of you don't even have on your P&L at all, you're not paying attention to it, it's like, "Oh, whatever, you know, sales just come in." If you set aside money, 27% of your revenue, and reinvest it into marketing and sales, that's how you can generate a lot of leads, you can have money to invest in all of the different marketing mechanisms like attending trade shows, sponsoring events, you know, publishing books, doing direct mail. You'll have a chunk of money to invest. And so many of us digital marketing agency owners, we just think, oh, you know, we don't need a marketing budget. And that's, that's crazy. So that's the marketing side. The other side, which I thought was really interesting though, is the sales side, right? There is a cost of generating sales in like in landing new agency clients. And as the agency owner, most of us are good at sales. Like we're good at talking to the clients and closing the deals. Well, eventually, if you truly want to scale and not have to do it all yourself, you have to pay a salesperson. Usually they need a salary and some type of commission on the— at least the first month or the monthly recurring. Um, and you need to have thought that into your pricing model on the front end. You need to have figured out, okay, I'm going to put 27% of my income from the business back into sales and marketing. And then he keeps 25% for expansion and profit. So, you know, for him, $75 million, he's not as focused on profit. He's more focused on expansion. He's buying buildings and he's doing all kinds of innovative things. Um, but he makes sure he's carved out at least 25% for profit and expansion. So I thought this was interesting. $75 million financial model for a digital marketing agency, uh, was cool. Would love to hear from you guys in the comments on this one. I really enjoyed his session. I thought he had a lot of great salient points. And, um, I thought looking at this, um, this financial model could really simplify things and give you a, a chassis, right, to, to scale from. I'm going to pause real quick. I don't want to just rapid-fire through all this stuff. We'd love to hear thoughts, comments, feedback. Um, you know, what can you, what can you do with what we've talked about so far? So Stephen's asking— what's up, man? Glad to have you on this. Are the salaries included in overhead? I believe so. I believe that's it. That's a— that's an overhead cost. All costs, even our salaries. So I think your salaries, that would be your— yeah, as the owner of the business, that should cover your salary. It looks like 52% of gross profit to reinvest. Yeah, if you take the sales and marketing and the profit to reinvest, yeah, it looks like it adds up to about that. Um, Dennis, it's simple financials, great to know. Yeah, no doubt. I thought, I thought it was some, some interesting stuff, um, and, and cool, cool insights. So Jimmy's asking, did he have a niche business model? I don't believe so. Um, he didn't really talk too much about how his business model was structured outside of that, but but I got the impression they're full service and they're like, they're really targeting the massive corporations that have big budgets, the Fortune 500s. But I can't say for sure. Howard's saying 25% profit's not that much, though 25% on $75 million is not bad. 25% is actually pretty good profit for most businesses. If you're in a one-man operation type of situation, you know, you're probably looking at like 60, 70%. As you grow, as you scale, your profit margin typically, you know, reduces. I'd like to see it at like 30%, but you know, this is a high-growth business. He's focused on growth, he's focused on expansion, but he's still maintaining a healthy 25% in profit and expansion. So the next session was by, was by Dominic Cummins, and it was the Rapid Agency Growth Plan. He shared some cool things. One of the things he shared that is very congruent with StoryBrand, if you've read this book recently, very good book, I recommend you all read it, was that you're the guide, not the star, right? So in your business relationships with your clients, in the marketing that you do in order to land clients, you gotta make sure you're not trying to position yourself as the hero, in the relation to, "Oh, I'm amazing, I can get these great results," but you're really more the guide, right? You're the Yoda to their Luke Skywalker, right? Your function is to help get them to where they wanna go. And this was actually touched on a lot of the sessions, but that's where he started. He gave an interesting stat, and this was researched pretty in-depth. 11% is the average close rate for digital marketing services. So, you look at the companies like ReachLocal, Yodle, Scorpion, any larger digital marketing agencies that are submitting their data, on average 11% of meetings convert to a sale. So that means for every 10 prospects, they're lucky to walk away with 1. I'd be curious what you guys are averaging in your close rates. I know we're somewhere in the 30-40% range. "Which is great, and I think it really has a lot to do with how the customer arrives at your door, right? Did you cold call them? Did you cold email them? Or did they sit on a webinar, be exposed to your expertise, see a couple case studies, and raise their hand? Obviously if they raise their hand, your close rate's gonna be quite a bit higher." And he said really, the reason the sales processes fail, the reason he feels that it's at this 11% range, is that they're more focused on extracting value. So like, okay, ask a couple questions and then ask for the business and answer questions and get the deal, as opposed to adding value and helping to identify what their goals are and really how you can, how you can help. 80% of the people see no value in sales. And so this kind of brings us full circle back to Ryan Dice's session, which was in the first day. Which is the customer value journey. And so I'll see if I can, oops, if I can post this link in chat. But this really outlines this customer value journey, how to map it out and have a great business conversation with your prospects. So it's like build awareness, get them to engage in some way, post a comment, then get them to subscribe for your cheat sheet, your guide, whatever it is, get them to convert by either paying— like they want to try and sell you to pay for an evaluation or an audit. I like to move them straight to a monthly recurring fee. Get them excited, get them enrolled in the whole process, get them to then become an advocate and really promote for you. And so his whole thing was how do you How do you engineer this process so that your sales process is less like a hard sell and more like a value-added conversation? And then Dev Basu did a session on the Google Ads amplification metrics, which I thought was, I thought was interesting. He talked a lot, a lot of technical stuff, so it's hard for me to really recap, but Couple things, ads are getting less clicks, right? That's because there's so much competition. You're just getting less clicks. The best of the best are focusing on intent and not just relevance. So if we look at Google AdWords and the way your campaigns are being managed, the way they're being structured, if you're following the advice of a lot of the books that are out there right now, it's match the keyword and the text ad really close, and like really focus on keyword match so that you have high relevancy, right? And what he's finding, at least in his research, and he runs lots of major Google AdWords campaigns, is that you're better served to focus on the intent and the emotional connection to that intent. And so the example he gave, you know, if you run a search right now for divorce attorney in Seattle, Most of the text ads are divorce attorney Seattle, right? It's very quick. Oh, perfect match. That's what I typed and that's what I got. And so if you're focusing on the intent, like you think about where they're at emotionally, and you write an ad like, is he with her now? That has a completely different connotation. There's no connection between the search term and the actual words in the text ad, but this had a much higher click-through rate and a much higher conversion rate. If you can strategically think about the emotional intent of the searcher and infuse that into your text ads and your landing pages, you can look completely different than all of the results on the page and get significantly greater results. I thought that was a pretty cool insight. On to one of my favorite sessions of the entire event was by Marcus Murphy. and he unpacked what the top 1% of agencies are doing. Marcus Murphy runs, I guess he's called the Director of Monetization for Digital Marketer, but, um, you know, he runs the Digital Marketer Certified Program, which is amazing. We're members of that. Um, it's, it's worth looking at if you're, if you're not. Um, and so he spends a lot of time with agencies. He runs the Agency Success Podcast. Um, he's got lots of multi, multi-million dollar agencies that he's interviewed, spent time with. And so this session was really unpacking what this top 1% is doing. And I was really glad to see it's very congruent with what we, what we believe and what we've found to be true in our digital marketing agency as well. Number one, the number one thing was focusing on one niche, right? Rather than trying to be a generalist that serves any type of business that raises their hand, getting into one specific niche, like positioning yourself as the expert and, um, you know, going out and getting those clients is, is what these top agencies are doing. Um, and it's really the— it's the best way to go. I keep saying it, you know, don't try and serve everybody, be the world-class expert in one particular type of business. But he did say though, again, not, not being service niched, but being business type niche. So not being the Facebook ad guy, but being the cross-channel marketing expert for plumbing or for roofing or for, you know, eye doctors, right? That's what these guys are doing. They're choosing a niche, positioning themselves as the expert, and then going broad, right? What is the right suite of services from SEO and pay-per-click, social media, email marketing, and everything else on that customer value journey that's going to get them the best result, right? So one niche, cross-channel marketing, Creating a great onboarding experience, you know, really thinking about once we get this client, what's the next step? What's the process going to look like? How do we gather the details from them? How do we create this great onboard where they feel excited about what's going on? And through email, through direct mail, through video, through live one-on-one onboarding, um, you know, world-class agencies are really focused on that experience out of the gates, uh, training their clients and their teams. So making sure that their clients understand, here's what's going on, here's what we're doing next, here's how you can help in this process to get the best results. And then of course training the team to make sure they're, they're world-class. And of course, one of my favorite quotes on this piece came from Richard Branson, and it was part of this session, and that's, you know, we always ask, you know, how well can we train the team? Because if we train them, they're probably going to leave. And a couple things. First of all, if you don't train them, do you really want them? Like, are they even going to be any good at what they do? And the second is you should train your team so well that they can go anywhere, but treat them so well that they want to stay. Right? That's directly from Richard Branson, and an extremely powerful quote. So don't sleep on continually training your team, improving their skills, upgrading them. And making them world-class. Leveraging conversation marketing. These top 1% of agencies are, they're doing the SPEARS, right? They're sending the simple one-word message to their prospects. You know, would you like some help with? It's as simple as that. Would you like some help with your website? Would you like some help with your, you know, Google AdWords? Would you like some help with bringing in new patients? Whatever it is, very simple emails that expect a response and engineering that into your communication with your prospects. And then developing community. These, these top 1% of agencies are developing community in that they're not just getting a client and serving them, they're getting a client and putting them into Facebook groups so that they get to know each other, so that they get to exchange best practices with each other, bringing them into live events and mastermind sessions where You know, there, there's more than just a, I pay you a fee, you do my internet marketing. There's a, I pay you a fee, you do my internet marketing, you plug me into other people like me that are experiencing similar challenges, that are facing similar struggles, that make me get even better results, make me know, like, and trust you even more. Massively powerful way to improve retention and to, you know, really get our arms around our client base. So I'm gonna pause there. I know I've kind of, I'm kind of rapid firing here, like my keynotes from the Traffic Conversion Summit. If you have thoughts, questions, insights, I wanna hear from you in the comments. I don't want this to be a long thing where I'm just talking and talking and there's no interaction. So Shane says the book is Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller, yes. Very good book, um, must read for all of us. Um, Will Hank says saw— he saw Marcus at the DAX. Gaurav's asking, what is a SPEAR? So a SPEAR is, is simple, personal, and expecting a response. The S is supposed to be small, so it should be SPEARS, but that's what it is. So you're sending simple emails that feel like you sent them one-to-one but they could be going out to thousands of people at a time. We send a lot of spears through our Infusionsoft, you know, to our prospects. You know, they get invites to webinars, they get reminders that webinars happened, they get, you know, case studies, they listen to, you know, podcast interviews, and then occasionally they'll get an email from me or from Christian, our Director of Business Development, and it's just their first name, and it's something very congruent to what I've been talking about that month. You know, as an example, literally, first name, Tom, first name, and then the email. Tom, would you like to work with us to help generate more, better results with your website? Question mark, right? Not a marketing thing, not like click here to go opt in, not go click here to schedule. Literally just respond back, yeah, I'm interested, right? And when we do that, we get lots of responses that create conversation. So hopefully that answers that question. Awesome, good stuff. Jimmy says, "I think that the onboard experience and good results are key to growth." Yeah, man, no doubt, no doubt. If you don't have a great onboard experience, and obviously you don't get your clients results, they're not gonna stay. And you're gonna be on a treadmill. You'll land a client and then lose a client, and then land a client and then lose a client. You'll literally take one or, If you're lucky, 2 steps forward and 1 step back, 2 steps forward and 1 step back, as opposed to, you know, you create a great experience, they're excited, they get great results, they stay with you long-term, they become an advocate for you, like in that they'll get a testimonial video, they'll be on an interview for the podcast, they'll speak to their friends. You know, one of the key things they talked about at Traffic Conversion Summit is happy clients will write good things Successful clients will refer. So clients that actually get a tangible, measurable return— like, let's say they go from $1 million to $2 million, and it's like, wow, these guys literally made me more money, they made me more successful— that type of customer can't help but refer and plug you into other people because you've made them successful. And so what we need to be focused on as agencies more than anything else is how do we make our clients successful? How do we really make sure that what we're doing is not just good, but it generates a result and it really moves the needle for the clients that we serve? So good, good questions, good feedback. I'm going to look on the Facebook group here real quick and see if anybody's asking questions over in, in Facebook land that I need to pay attention to, and then we'll keep pressing forward. Awesome. So I sat in a session, um, with Mike King, and it was about attracting more high-ticket clients. Mike is an awesome guy. He worked at Anthony Robbins for a couple of years, but now he runs an agency laser-focused on LASIK. So, you know, literally working with high-end laser eye correction centers across the United States, has built a really successful agency, again, he led with this whole concept that the client's the hero and you're Yoda. Back to the StoryBrand. I'm, you know, just coincidentally, a lot of these sessions infused this whole thing that the client is the focal point, not you. And the number one thing that your client wants is a predictable way to get clients and convert them into sales, right? They want to be able to go from, I'm not sure how I'm generating leads and growing, to I have a consistent model that I get new patients on a consistent basis and my practice grows. And so you want to make sure that you, that you connect the dots. Spencer's asking what's the name of his, uh, of his brand. Um, I think it's LASIK Dental, uh, LASIK, LASIK Marketing or something like that. But I know that's the space you're in. Don't feel like, hey, there's already somebody in there. Listen, there's plenty of room for all of us. I think if you search Michael King, you'll definitely you'll definitely be able to find him. And then his key thing that was really different and unique was that, you know, really he feels like you don't have to do it all. You should build a world-class sphere of providers. So Michael really positions himself more as the consultant that can come into a LASIK practice and pull together all of the strategies, set up the campaigns, but not do the work. And not even like show as if he does the work. Like literally he's, he hires a pay-per-click company, not as his company, but the client pays that person directly, right? And they use WebSavvy, which is Mike Rhodes' company. Um, when they need funnel, there's a company that they pay for, for funnels. And so, you know, really just being the thought leader at these clients and going and say, look, here's what we need to do. Here's the pieces. I'm going to put the tracking in place. "I'm going to make sure we get the world best team in order to facilitate all of these different pieces," and not doing it all himself. He found in researching his LASIK clients and figuring out which pages had the most bang for the buck, which search terms really converted to sales, he found the pricing page was like one of the number one things that drove conversion. A lot of the searches that were accessible were LASIK pricing, price for LASIK exam, you know, that type of stuff. And so knowing that, he was able to really laser focus on those key terms and then take them to a funnel page that wasn't just the price, but it was a really compelling opt-in funnel that, you know, was like the LASIK pricing kit, you know, options guide, a lot of different things and that's where a lot of the leads that he generates for his clients come from, is from the pricing section. He really emphasized you have to focus on the sales for your clients, not just the leads. This is one of those things we're talking about, the industry is evolving and it was a long time where we could just say, "Oh, we're just going to get you ranked." right? And then I was like, "Oh, we can't just get you ranked. We actually got to get the phone to ring because that's what you need. You need leads, right?" And I was like, "Okay, we're just going to get the leads. We can't control it much after that." And what a lot of these guys are doing is starting to think about, "Okay, how do we take it one more step, right? How do we take it from now we've generated the lead, but we've also nurtured the leads so that they actually come in for the consult? How do we nurture the people that come in for a consult so that they actually book the surgery, right? And so you have to be thinking as you run your agency outside of just generating the lead, but really generating the result that they want, which is more revenue, right? And when you can get to that level, you're being disruptive, right? And you can really have a massive impact and create more successful clients. Um, so one of the things he did on this front was he set up, um, OptiCall, which is just a call follow-up service. So as they're getting leads that don't convert into an appointment, as opposed to letting them sit stale, he's trying to make sure those leads get followed up within 15 minutes. And so he found a service that will follow up on leads. Hey, you submitted a request. We wanted to make sure we get you scheduled right away. Do you have any questions? Right? I don't know exactly what the script is, but it's the thought process, right? It's like, okay, there's a little gap right here in this lead generation to sale process. How can I help close the gap? Because our clients aren't as good at following through on leads and converting sales and maximizing the ticket as we think, right? And so if we can find a gap and then, you know, plug it with a good solution, we're doing better, we're adding better impact for what we do. And so that's one of the things he did was he set up this opti-call, which was literally following up on the leads on behalf of his clients to make sure they book as many as possible. Oops. So I mean, I thought there were a lot of golden nuggets in his session, really just around the thinking to really grow a successful digital marketing agency. So Jimmy says, so Mike makes his income from consulting and connecting clients to his service providers, must get commission from the clients that he refers. I don't know the details on that front. I believe it's It's more like the client knows that he's an expert, has a proven model, they pay him his fee, and then he plugs in the providers. And I think he charges a healthy fee for what he brings to the table. Uh, whether there's some kind of a commission to the providers he plugs in, I really do not know. So it's— I thought it was fun because a lot— you notice a lot of these sessions are on different topics, right? They're topics about you know, just general marketing strategy. There's topics on serving clients with AdWords. There's topics on Facebook advertising, right? Um, and, and the, you know, this one with Mike Arsh, I don't know if that's the right way to pronounce his name, is, is about retention and really how do we retain our clients once we have them at the highest level. And Mike runs a GSD. Um, it's actually an agency that serves, um, gyms and fitness centers, CrossFit centers, gyms, things like that. Has scaled over $600,000 per month, which is, which is phenomenal. Um, and his session was on how he improved retention from his client base from 42% to 92%. That's just drastic, right? Jimmy, we were talking a second ago about taking one step forward, one step back. With 42%, you know, you sell a lot, you lose a lot. You know, you sell a lot, you lose a lot. You burn your reputation pretty quick. Um, so he was laser focused on how do we tighten that up and really improve the retention rate. And so he said the first step was to get clear on the different types of businesses he served, right? And in fitness, and you gotta look at this from the lens of your type of client, there's really 3 different types. There's the fit guy, which is the gym guy that decided he was gonna start, he was gonna start a business doing that. Then there's the business guy that really understands business, understands sales marketing, and decided he liked the gym business and started a gym. And then there's the transition guy, the guy that is fit, trying to run a business, but is a student of the game. He's like, okay, how do I generate leads? How do I grow this thing? How do I make sure my members stay long-term? And he found that he needed to cater what he did a little bit different depending upon these guys. And for us, we've got the one-man show, like the technician, right? We've got the biz guy, which really runs the sale. Successful agency, a successful plumbing company with team underneath him. And then again, we've got kind of a transition guy also that started as the tech guy but has decided, okay, now I don't want to just be behind the truck, I want to start to hire some people beneath me. And he said something that I thought was pretty interesting, and which was he had to make a choice. Does he just say, okay, I The fit guy doesn't get it and isn't gonna get a great result, so I'm just gonna blow him off, right, and say I only deal with biz guys, you know, the guys that get it, that get great results, that know how to monetize the leads we generate. Or do we figure out how to train up the fit guy, give him the tools that he needs to become a better entrepreneur and to be more successful? And the way he phrased it was his mission as a company is to help these gyms become more successful. And so that doesn't exclude the fit guy that's decided that he wants to figure things out. And so he decided he wanted to make sure he built a training mechanism to help all of the different types of clients, those 3 main types, plug the gaps in their mental strategy to really succeed and to be successful. And so this was his mechanism. Developed great relationships with his top clients. I'm a big believer in this as well. The 80/20 principle really applies. There's 20% of your clients that generate 80% of the results, that are happiest with what you do, that, you know, really knock it out of the park. And so it is incumbent upon you to get to know those clients on a more personal level, like really, you know, spend extra time with them, interview them for podcasts, Go out to their office and do a video day with them, which is what we do. Like, really get to know what makes them tick and what makes them successful so that you can create training that isn't just from your context, it's from the context of the most successful clients, the most successful members. And then you can share that across the board to the people that are struggling, to the people that are trying to figure things out. And move them up and make them more successful. And he made a great analogy I just thought was cool, which was the fit guy, and you know, in my analogy, the one-man truck operator is a lot like a teenager, right? They just don't quite get it, right? And so what does a teenager really care about more than anything else? They care about being cool. They care about hanging out with the with the cool kids. And so by taking your top clients, which in this case are your, your cool kids, and interviewing them and making them the hero and letting them help influence the teenagers that are just trying to figure things out, you can help kind of get these guys invested in training and invested in how to hire better, how to serve better, how to sell better. Um, and so I just thought that was a cool analogy and a cool way of thinking about things. And then, and then his third key strategy is to develop community, right? So don't just serve your client in a vacuum. Take those clients, put them into a Facebook group, put them into a training portal. I believe he does quarterly live gatherings with his client base, and they come together, and the top, top clients share, hey, here's what we're doing, here's what's working for us. And in doing so, he creates a community well beyond just being a digital marketing agency, but being a digital marketing agency that cares, that is giving them a peer group that really makes them better, right? It makes them more successful, makes them happier in life. So I— this is the first time I had ever seen Mike. I was really impressed. I thought he had some great insights and a lot of things, you know, that we do, that we believe in, and it's just cool to see how congruent all of that is. So I'd love to hear from you guys, you know, just want to hear from your comments on, on this particular topic of landing clients, developing community, training up your, your B and C clients to be B and A clients so that they can get better results, that you can retain them longer. I would love to hear from you here in comments. And then I've got like 2 or 3 more sessions that I'll highlight with the cool insights that I learned. How are we measuring retention? So for us, retention is— there's a formula for it in your sales retention tracking sheet, which you have in the members area. Basically, you plug in how many clients you sold, how many clients you lost, and there's a formula, you know, how many clients you had at the start, how many sold, how many you lost, divided by how many you had at the start, or something like that, gives you your monthly client retention rate. And so if you look in the sales retention tracking sheet, you can find it there. I really believe what gets measured gets done, right? And there was a long time we didn't measure retention at all, so we had no idea. We're kind of woefully unaware, and ignorance is bliss, but we were losing clients, right? And then as we became aware of that and started tracking it, then we could start to say, okay, how do we improve this? What things can we put in place. You know, things like the onboard kit, things like the, the monthly review process, things like the, you know, client engagement portal really, really have an impact. Uh, she says, you talked about building a Facebook group for potential clients to join, but building one for clients is interesting. Yeah, I think you have two groups really in your agency. You have two groups. You have a, um, a prospect group, and then you have a client group. So your prospect group is everybody that opts in for your stuff, maybe everybody in the list, and you, you put them in there and you put out good content. So your webinars, your cheat sheets, questions, you can build a whole community of your ideal prospects and nurture them in a Facebook group. And then you wanna have another group, which is a Facebook group for clients. So for us, we actually have a group called Plumbing and HVAC Engage, and that's where our clients sit. And so they get to know each other, they get to bounce ideas off each other. Uh, we do live webinars in there just for our client base and things like that. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's a good insight. It's a good point. You want a client group and a, um, and a prospect group. The client group kind of has more wheels as you have more clients. So if you've got 2 or 3 clients, it might be a little weird, kind of like crickets in there. But if you've got 25, 30, 100+ clients, it can become a pretty active community. So Will's asking, how active is our, is our Engage group? It's pretty active. You know, we post in there a couple times a week. Obviously, as we do trainings and webinars, we post in there. There's questions, there's answers. You know, as you start to develop heroes, like your, your best clients that are getting the best results, that are the most vocal, um, you know, it starts to kind of propel itself at some level. Great, great question. So how many of you are fans of the famous Frank Kern? Post in the comments if you're a Frank Kern fan. I'm a, I'm a Frank Kern fan. Like Frank Kern, lots of energy. He's very entertaining, right? He's like a very entertaining speaker. Um, so a couple insights from his session. He was talking about social media and building your brand through social media. Basically, you know, if you publish stuff that people like and it helps them, they're more likely to hire you. He recommended doing Facebook Live videos. He said they play very well, doing like a 3 to 8 minute video almost on a daily basis, practically just continuously coming on and hitting 3 key topics. Um, their problems, their frustrations, and their fears, right? So you're not necessarily giving how-to, but you're talking about the problems in, in your niche that are relevant to, to them. And as you do that, you know, you're targeting, you're targeting everybody in your niche, let's just say, right? And you start to have a, a wide swath of potential people. Well, video views are very cheap, so you can do a Facebook Live, have it shot, and then you can run an ad to that video. And since it's only 3 to 8 minutes, you can see who resonates with your message, and you create custom audiences based on who's watching, you know, 50 to 70% of your video. If they watched 50% of your video, they're probably pretty interested, probably a decent prospect. For what you have to offer. So you do these broad videos on a very consistent basis, talking about the problems, the fears, and the frustrations. And then you've got a funnel that moves them to, to really schedule a time with you based on the people that are watching 50 to 60% of your views. So you create a custom audience with all of these videos you're creating, and then you move them into a separate custom audience with more of a, hey, if you'd like to schedule a time, to talk about how we can help you generate more leads in your pharmacy, click the button below and let's schedule a time to chat. So it's just a way to really cost-effectively build your audience on Facebook, build your authority, build your recognition within your brand. It says frequency is key. Everyone's heard this stat, you got to touch someone 7 times before they buy. I think that's more like on the sales end. He was thinking it was more like on the— people thought you could just have 7 exposures and they're gonna buy your brand, but really it's more like 100 exposures. They need to see you again and again and again and again and again, and at some point feel like they got some value from you so that they are moving from, you know, stranger to know, like, and trust to jumping on a more in-depth business conversation to being a client. So HistoryKeys were, Provide value, build goodwill so that they kind of like you. Okay, you know, this is somebody I can relate to. And then every piece of content should make an offer. So don't just go out and do videos just for, hey, okay, I'm making videos and making videos. Like, every video should be ending with, hey, if you'd like more ideas on this, go here. Hey, you know, I've got this book on this topic. If you'd like to go, go get it there. Hey, "Hey, I've got this cheat sheet that outlines this in more detail, go here." So you're doing Facebook Live about a problem, and then ending it with, "Hey, if you'd like more information," you're telling them what to do next to bring them to the next phase in your funnel. And his thing was the amount of revenue is in direct proportion to the value you put into the market. So if you're putting a lot of value out, good useful information, you know, you're gonna be rightfully paid more, right? So that was Frank Kerns. Again, I'm a big fan of Frank's. I know he's got a great course on right now that he's selling on how to create your brand with social media and some really interesting stuff. Any questions on that before we press forward? Nick, what's up, man? Nick says he loves Frank, he's got lots of energy. Will is definitely a Frank fan. And Dean McNolan, what's up Dean? Glad to see you. Um, he is a funny guy. He is, he's funny. He's very crass, you know, lots of bad language. This time however, um, not so much, you know, he was very clean and proper, didn't have any slides. He just kind of spoke and wrote on a whiteboard. Um, but, uh, but good stuff. The, the next session was with, with Mike Rhodes, which is in my mind one of the top experts in Google AdWords. Google Ads. I, like, leading up to the event, I spent a day in a mastermind with Mike all around Google AdWords, pay-per-click, maximizing the ROI through paid spend. And so of course I wanted to make sure I was in his session, and he was just talking about what's working now with Google Ads because the ball is constantly moving, things are constantly changing. And really, Google, which is spelled wrong on my slide, I apologize, is all in with artificial intelligence. They, they invested half a billion dollars in an artificial intelligence engine called DeepMind, um, and this DeepMind is, is like the most advanced artificial intelligence engine in the world. Apparently it's already beat the number one player of a game called Go, which apparently is a very complicated game and another game called StarCraft, which is like— there are world experts in these games that spend their whole lives, and they spend hours and hours every day playing these games. And they thought that it would have taken a generation for artificial intelligence to be able to beat players in these types of strategy games. And in the course of, you know, the last couple of years, their AI engine learned how to play the game, learned all of the, the different calculations and algorithms and everything, and is already beating the world's best in this, in this technology. So the point is Google invested in this technology so that ideally they can artificially manage these AdWords campaigns and get better results and get better return on investment for advertisers. And as crazy as that sounds, if the artificial intelligence can beat these guys at these massively complicated games, theoretically, they could learn to beat marketers at managing campaigns and split testing ads and generating the best return on investment possible. So he— I mean, everyone's scared that, you know, artificial intelligence is going to overtake. Obviously, that's not going to happen, but it's more smart people that know how to work with these smart machines and that understand how deep how DeepMind works are gonna be like really the people that lead the future. He says smart bidding is not there yet. If you've already turned on smart bidding, you have to be very careful. You can definitely not set and forget it. You have to make sure that you track. He says in most cases he's finding smart bidding, which is the artificial intelligence, is getting higher click-through rate but actually lower conversions. And it's easier for him to track this kind of thing because he does a lot of ecommerce and things like that. So he's got some really deep data on, you know, being careful with not just turning on smart bidding. And he made a great point on not optimizing for the lowest cost per lead. And this is something I've fallen prey to in the past. It was like, okay, what we want to do is take your budget and generate as many leads as possible at the lowest cost per lead, right? And so we're like on this race for reducing the cost per lead. For us in plumbing and HVAC, We started at like $40 per lead and we brought it down to $35 and we're trying to get into the $20s. $20 per lead for plumbing and HVAC, I feel like we're doing a great job, we're knocking it out of the park. Fact is, if you can, whoever can spend the most to acquire the customer often wins. If you can figure out what your maximum profit is from an AdWords campaign, and then focus on maximum exposure, you can get a lot more volume. So, and we've seen this play out in our agency where we get the cost per lead down to let's say $25 per lead, which is great in certain markets. Um, but in doing so, our uptime in the paid search results drops. So we're getting lower cost per lead, but a lot less leads. Where there might be a happier medium at like, let's say, $35 per lead, where we could be showing up for 90% of the search, we could be generating an affordable cost per lead that can be monetized, that has a great return on investment, but get a lot more volume for our client. So he was just really thinking around not just focusing on the lowest cost per lead, but looking at the true— how to maximize the return on investment via spend. He shared a pretty cool shortcut, which was to find a Google AdWords guy. The best thing to look for if you're looking to hire somebody in Google AdWords is to find someone that plays strategy games, because if somebody played strategy games growing up or they consider themselves an expert in the role-playing RPG type games, they're good at looking at the game board zoomed out, zooming into a very small section, and working that within the game and then zooming out and seeing the big picture again. I've never played role-playing games. I'm probably a very bad Google AdWords person, but that's just a cool insight. If you're looking for someone that you can hire internal or maybe someone you can hire on Upwork, "Hey, have you played strategy games? You're a big fan of strategy games?" He says pretty much anyone he's ever hired that considers themselves a strategy game gamer has turned out to be a great PPC person. So we had Manny, our director of PPC, with us in San Diego. So I looked over and I go, "Do you play strategy?" He's like, "Yeah, yeah, man, I'm a big fan." He might've just been saying that 'cause he knew that that's what I needed to hear at that moment. But, so lots of cool insights there. I'll just kind of high-level touch on my session. You know, I talked about the Ultimate Agency Funnel. A lot of you guys have heard this, so I'm not gonna do the, the whole presentation, but really the gist of it is we wanna get clients coming to us instead of chasing them down. Um, you don't have to have a fancy funnel, you know, with like 19 steps and all kinds of different things. Really, um, you, you just need 3 steps, an opt-in funnel, an appointment funnel, and a hot lead follow-up, and you can build a 7-figure agency from that. Um, the fact is the money that you have in your business is not in your list. It's in your relationship with your list, right? And so you have to have a strategy to connect with the people in your database, and you have to be building your database on a consistent basis. And that's where I found webinars come into play. It's an amazing content lever because you can send emails to invite people to the webinar. You can create the content and show up live like we're doing right now and have people consume that content and get value. And then you can take the recording of it and syndicate it across the web as a video, as a podcast, as a blog post, as social posts, as chopped up videos that all lead people into the top of your funnel. And then one webinar per month can really drive your entire lead generation machine. And even if people don't attend your webinar, which most don't, and your top prospects don't, just by promoting the webinar and getting them to register and offering the shortcut where they can watch an autoplay video, say, "Hey, thanks for registering for the webinar, it's gonna be great, but if you're like most people, you know, you really want someone that can implement this for you, if that's you, let's schedule a time to chat now," right? And giving them the shortcut to schedule an appointment, you can really drive lots of appointments without actually even having to think that they're gonna sit on the webinar. And you can build a 7-figure agency in 1 year by landing 5 clients per month at $1,350 per month. I mean, I, I went for a good 45 minutes, but these are the key highlights from my session at the Traffic and Conversion Summit. Really, how do we build a strategy to get clients coming to us so we don't have to chase them down and deal with the, the high resistance? And so I'm just going to end with why I think it's useful to attend these types of events. You know, I gave you the Cliff Notes. Hopefully if you were there, this kind of triggered, yeah, that's right, that was useful, oh yeah, I'd like to do it. If you missed it, hopefully you got some great ideas, but obviously this doesn't, it doesn't replace attending live events. And for me, the reason you attend is you get great ideas and insights, right? And if you can get just one idea to land another client, to serve a client better, to retain, it pays dividends, right? So you get the greatest ideas, and you have to be on the cutting edge. You're gonna run a digital marketing agency, You need to know what's going on, you need to know what's working, you need to be playing the game, right? And so being at these type of events keeps you sharp. The second thing is the people that you meet. You know, at these events you meet smart people that are thinking, that are playing at a similar game to you, and you can find strategic partners, you can find providers you can outsource to, you can find people that want to plug you into their network, you can find your next JV. You never know who you're going to meet at these type of events. You can make friends, friends, and some of my greatest friends have come from attending these types of events. And then the third really is just the energy. There's something powerful around being around other successful people in a real live environment as opposed to just via web. So, you know, that's my case for being at these types of events. Hopefully you take away some cool insights and ideas that, that you can go back and implement. I'm going to take these slides, I'll save them as a PDF, I'll share them so that you have access to them. If you have any questions, I can hang out for a couple minutes, answer those questions, and we will wrap it up there. So Nicholas, were you a big roleplay guy or a big games? Because you had all the answers, right? I couldn't even think of any examples. Command and Conquer and Emperor. You're right. These are the games. Um, super fun even if you have the time. Will says, can you go on Twitch and watch the top level players and see? Yeah, heck yeah. Ricardo says, great webinar, thanks. Okay, awesome. Thank you guys, I really appreciate the time. Um, if you have questions, let's keep the conversation going in the Facebook group. Post your comments there, post your questions there. I'll be sure to post those— these slides in there. Awesome. I'll look forward to talking with you guys later.