In this video Joshua Nelson of Seven Figure Agency recaps Day 1 of the Traffic & Conversion Summit, highlighting the most impactful takeaways for digital‑marketing agencies, especially those serving plumbing and HVAC businesses. He opens by emphasizing the energizing effect of being surrounded by top entrepreneurs. He then outlines several strategic shifts discussed at the summit: (1) the overwhelming dominance of Google and Facebook in paid traffic, which is driving up ad costs and forcing marketers to build stronger brands and relevance beyond paid clicks; (2) the rapid rise of chatbots, AI, and Messenger bots (with ManyChat’s new free training) as the future primary channel for customer interaction, noting a study predicting 85 % of interactions will be bot‑driven by 2020; (3) the concept that “conversation is the new lead,” urging agencies to move from simple opt‑ins to real‑time dialogues via text and messenger. He connects these trends to his agency’s work with plumbing/HVAC clients, arguing that while many customers still prefer phone calls, the shift toward chat is inevitable. He then discusses the importance of community, describing how a Facebook group for agency clients can foster peer interaction, shared learning, and deeper relationships beyond the traditional account‑manager model. Next, Nelson shares his agency’s mission: to help 1,000 plumbing and HVAC companies triple their sales, leveraging his book and case studies. He ties this mission to DigitalMarketer’s broader goal of scaling 10,000 companies. Finally, he reflects on Frank Kern’s message to simplify and focus on recurring revenue, reinforcing his own business model of niche specialization, high‑ticket monthly retainers, and avoiding one‑off projects. He announces an upcoming insights report and live training session (Monday 10:30 AM) for agency owners, and invites viewers to download the notes at 7figureagency.com/traffic-conversion-notes.
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¡Hola! Hey guys, this is Joshua Nelson with the Seven Figure Agency, and we just finished up the first day of the Traffic and Conversion Summit, and I wanted to come to you with a quick video just with some of the highlights, some of the key insights In case you missed it, or even if you're here with us at the TNC and you just wanna kinda compare notes and see what was relevant, see what was interesting. So let me share my screen. I'll kinda go through some of the highlights and the key information. I will say the most powerful thing you get out of being at an event like this is the energy. Being around other highly successful entrepreneurs in the digital marketing space, some of the most prolific leaders in digital marketing, hearing what they're thinking, kinda seeing what tools and strategies they're using and what's going to be changing in the coming months and years. And so lots of key insights, but the thing I can't share with you really is the power of being around the others that are really making things happen and the energy of being in that environment. So let me share my screen. I'm used to having multiple monitors open, so this will be a challenge working from the hotel room, as you can see, and trying to share my screen without creating an infinite loop of videos, video feeds. So let's see how this works. So again, I mean, some tremendous insights. This is just a photo of me at the TNC. We're having a great time, learning a lot. Really, the starting session was with Ryan Deiss talking all about really how things are changing, and he actually labeled the session "crap" because Amazon, Facebook, and Google are basically swallowing up the entire internet marketing space. And what he pointed out was that almost all paid traffic is on Google and Facebook at this point. More than 70% of paid ads are coming through the Google and Facebook network, and they expect that to increase by over 29% over the next year. So what that means is advertising, getting your message out for yourself and for your clients, is going to get more expensive because supply and demand. So you have to be thinking about how can you be interesting, how can you be relevant, how can you build a brand, and how can you build some relevancy with your target audience so that you don't have to rely exclusively on paid ads on Google and on Facebook. And if you think about this for your clients, pay-per-click, social media advertising, you have to become smarter and you have to be thinking about creative ways to get your customers in front of their ideal customer. The other major thing he honed in on is that bots and artificial intelligence are really going to be taking over and a vast majority of communication is going to be handled through, through marketing Automation. So there was a long session about Messenger bots, and I remember when I was at TNC last year and the year before that, they were talking about Facebook Messenger bot being on your website, being able to engage with a customer. And I've seen the progression from, "Hey, that's kind of an interesting thing, maybe at some point that's going to become relevant," to, "It's really there, the technology exists, and we're going to roll it out." So this year they actually showed live examples. Of chatbots engaging with the customer, asking some detailed questions, and moving them from sitting on a page to having what they felt was a real conversation, to ultimately being in a live one-to-one chat conversation from the customer to somebody on the other side of the— of the messaging platform. So a couple things to really focus on here. First of all, as an agency generating leads, you're gonna need to start looking at this technology. You're gonna need to at least have some chat messaging function. But on the other side, for your clients, and as you think about how you can leverage messenger bots for your clients, we work with plumbing and HVAC companies. Right now, I still believe the majority of the customers want to pick up the phone and they want to call in. They don't necessarily want to have a long conversation with their, you know, with somebody on chat. But I do believe that is going to change. You look at the millennials, you look at the average person today, and really Brian made a big point about this. When you get a call on your phone, isn't it irritating? You're like, I don't really want to deal with talking to somebody. Couldn't we have sent an email? Couldn't we have done a text message? Couldn't we have Slack chatted about this? And that's the fact. More and more people have that sense and have that feeling. And so not suggesting you're going to be able to hide behind the technology, But if your customer's customer is more apt to do chat and you're the agency of choice that can come in and say, "Look, this is how things are moving. This is the technology that we can put in place to help automate this process," and you can help them be on the cutting edge of this stuff, that's a win for you. It's something you need to be paying attention to. There was a study that was producing— they believe almost 85% of customer interaction will be driven by Messenger bots by 2020. That's only a couple years away. So if that's the case, you need to be paying close attention to it. Ryan mentioned that conversation is the new lead. So it isn't necessarily just an opt-in. It isn't necessarily just somebody subscribing for something that you offer. It's a conversation. And so through Messenger bots, you can get them to start that conversation. It's something you want to be concentrated on. Again, people want it— they want to engage via text message, they want to engage via Messenger, they want to engage versus via email as opposed to having to have a live phone conversation. So your marketing needs to lead people into a conversation as opposed to necessarily just an opt-in where you can email broadcast to them over time. Now, one of the, one of the biggest services in this space is called ManyChat, and ManyChat has rolled out a completely free training. They announced it today at the Traffic and Conversion Summit. I'll place a link to it with this post. It's like 10 to 13 hours, something like that, of in-depth training on how messenger bots work, how to set them up. Why it's the wave of the future, and of course, you know, why ManyChat is the best service to use. Whether you use ManyChat or not, I believe spending some time in this training will help you understand the opportunity, be able to articulate it as you talk to your customers, and eventually become an expert in this topic, which is going to be extremely important for you going forward. The other major point and topic was the idea of community, and community being the new brand. And community is what your customers are saying about you when you're not in the room, and you have to be able to control that conversation. So it's not enough just to, as an agency, go out and get a client, get them great results, talk to them on a monthly basis. They want, they want community. So how can you start to aggregate your clients in your niche and get them to know each other, get them to spend time and have a true community? Around your business. And this is something Dean and I spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about. It's actually a core thought of ours as an idea in the future that we wanted to, to look into. And so what we're gonna be doing is taking our community development within our client base to the next level. So right now they get an account manager, they get monthly calls, they get their reports, uh, but we're gonna bring them together in a Facebook group where all of our clients in separate areas throughout the country will be able to see each other. They'll be able to engage with each other. And we'll have a very proactive strategy for welcoming new clients, introducing them to each other, and doing monthly calls on topics that may or may not be specifically relevant to our service. So yeah, there's going to be times where we can say, look, let's, let's do a session this month on understanding your reports, right? Understanding the cost per lead and the expected return on investment. And there's a place for that. But there's also gonna be a place for how can we help you guys convert this stuff better? Bring an expert in to talk about what their conversion rates are and where they can improve at the CSR level, at the technician level. And then we can also talk about things related to digital marketing that we don't necessarily do for them, but that could help them. So potentially shooting videos in the field and getting them to us so we can upload them to the website. but really just start thinking about how can you create a bigger community around your client base as you grow, as you expand, so that there's more to the relationship just than you providing a service. It's they're doing business with you, they know your relationship with all of your other clients, and they start to develop relationships with those clients as well. I think out of everything covered at the T&C Day One, for us, that was the biggest insight, the biggest thing that we can go out and implement. The other big thing, you know, Digital Marketer is big on mission, right? And their mission to double the size of 10,000 companies. And we were thinking about that and said, "What's our mission?" Our mission has always been to help our clients increase their sales and grow their revenues as a direct result of our services. But could we piggyback on the Digital Marketer mission and really do something like that for our business? And so what we came up with is our mission is to help 1,000 plumbing and HVAC companies triple their sales. And that's congruent for us. Our business, we have a published book, How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Internet Marketing Right for Plumbing and HVAC Contractors. So we've got lots of experience, we've got lots of case studies where we've tripled our clients' business just as a function of getting their internet marketing right, their SEO, their pay-per-click. And everything in between. So the more of that we can do, the better. And it's something I believe as we build our community is exciting. It's exciting for our clients, it's exciting for that community because they want to be part of this growth, and it's also exciting for our team. They're part of something where they're really impacting the lives of these plumbing and HVAC companies throughout the country. And so the image there is just a, it's a photograph. I slapped this over to Dean after we talked about it and it came up on his new fancy watch. It looked really cool on his watch. I thought that would be cool to encapsulate that. I'm a big fan of Frank Kern's. I've been following him for years. I bought a number of his courses, and he never ceases to entertain. That's one thing I will say about Frank Kern. He stands up there, he tells jokes, he's irreverent, but it's just so entertaining. It doesn't feel this may or may not be the case, but it doesn't feel like it's scripted. It feels like he's just throwing out random funny things and it's really interesting. But his key message at this year's TNC was to simplify and focus on recurring revenue. And if you follow 7 Figure Agency, you know that our model is: choose a niche, position yourself as an expert, get your business model right, only sell clients with a relatively high monthly recurring fee, and only sell recurring projects. Don't sell the one-off website design, don't sell the random website app. Focus on one vertical, provide a very specific service to them, get monthly recurring and see the revenue base grow. So in not so many words, that's what Frank is helping his people focus on. Choose something that you're good at. Don't do 100 things, choose one thing, one business you can excel at and then make sure you're getting recurring revenue out of that base and that it's a relatively high ticket, that way you get growth and you get momentum. So he just says it in such a, a concise and entertaining way that I thought I definitely need to mention Frank Kern's session. So lots of great insights, no way I could cover everything that was shared throughout the course of the T&C Day 1, but these were some of the key insights for me. I'm gonna be doing a lot more time thinking about this, I got a complete day after the TNC is complete where I'm gonna be sitting down with a group of other successful digital marketing agency owners and we're gonna just gonna be breaking down what were the key insights, what can we implement or, or take and implement within our agencies to go out and grow our agencies to the next level and more importantly serve our clients and get them exceptional results. So as a function of that, I'm gonna be creating an insights report with my keynotes as well as the insights for the agency space. How to grow an agency, how to execute for your clients. So if you want to download those notes and be part of that key insights training, all you gotta do is go to 7figureagency.com/traffic-conversion-notes. I'll link it with this post. Sign up for that. It's gonna be Monday, 10:30 AM, you know, whether you're at TNC or not, I'm just gonna share the key insights as it relates to growing your agency. So again, wanna join me on that Monday, 10:30 AM. Hopefully you got some insights out of these, you know, this breakdown video. Thanks for joining me, have a great night, and I will talk to you again soon. Hope to see you on Monday.
