In this third installment of a four‑part series, Joshua Nelson of the 7 Figure Agency outlines the proactive, multi‑channel marketing system that propelled his local internet marketing agency from zero clients to a seven‑figure, Inc. 5000‑listed business serving hundreds of plumbing and HVAC companies. He begins by reiterating his three‑element framework—market, message, media—and then walks through the concrete tactics that have generated the bulk of his leads: (1) targeted email blasts to a curated list of niche prospects; (2) deep involvement in industry associations to gain member lists, credibility, and speaking slots; (3) a robust digital presence including SEO‑optimized sites, lead‑magnet content, and automated webinars; (4) “strategic cold calling” that leverages association affiliation to lead with value; (5) speaking engagements that position the agency as the expert; and (6) highly targeted direct‑mail campaigns that deliver physical assets (books, DVDs, case‑studies) to high‑revenue plumbing firms. Nelson emphasizes that no single channel is sufficient; the synergy of 4‑5 of these tactics, combined with a clearly defined niche and expert positioning, creates a pipeline of pre‑qualified, premium‑paying clients. He cites concrete outcomes—$250 k/month recurring revenue, a 28‑person team, and Inc. 5000 recognition—to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach and teases the next video on delivering client results.
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Well, hey, this is Joshua Nelson with the 7 Figure Agency, and thank you for joining me on this third video of our 4-part video series all about how we were able to scale our local internet marketing agency to 7 figures, how we were able to hit the Inc. 5000 list in less than 6 years, and now have the honor of serving literally hundreds of plumbing and HVAC companies throughout the United States and have a team of 28 full-time employees at our office. And what I've been doing throughout this video series is just kind of unpacking my brain and thinking about what was it that helped us to accomplish that success so that you can learn and apply some of that to your agency and accomplish similar results. And so the first video I talked all about the the power of niche, choosing a niche and really committing to a very specific market that you're gonna serve. The second video was around expert positioning and what you can do and what we did in order to position ourselves as the expert within our chosen niche. And on this video, what I wanna talk about is how to put together a marketing strategy, a proactive marketing strategy to go out, get in front of your ideal target market and getting them to come to you prepositioned to buy. And when we look at marketing as a whole, as digital marketing experts, as agency owners and consultants, we know there's a lot of things that come into play. And really it all comes down to 3 key elements: market, message, and media. You have to know who your market is and who your ideal customer is so that you can craft a message that will resonate with them and make them say, "Hey, this is for me. I wanna hire these services." And once you have those two elements in place, you can go out and use the appropriate media to get that message to that audience. And so we already talked about market, right? You have to choose a targeted niche. And message really is all around what are you gonna do? How are you gonna help them increase their sales? How are you gonna help them grow their business. And if you can connect to that goal within their company, you become really attractive and really interesting to them. And then you can look at the various media. And as internet marketing companies and, and digital marketing consultants, usually we want to look just to the internet. We want to look to Facebook, and we want to look to pay-per-click, and we want to look to SEO. And that's fine, but I want to share with you the marketing strategies that have helped us and have really helped drive the most leads for us. And so I'll start, first of all, believe it or not, the marketing strategy that helped accelerate us from zero clients to our first 15 clients was email marketing. And it was just a function of choosing plumbing and HVAC companies in our market, getting a list of emails, and I'm not gonna say I approve spam marketing techniques, but we used a little bit of potentially spammy techniques. We sent an email blast out saying, "Look, we're looking to work with just one plumbing company in your area." We recorded a simple video and a strong call to action saying, "Look, we've sent this video to the other companies in your market. It's available on a first-come, first-served basis. So if you want to work with us and not have us work with one of your competitors, then you need to call now." And that worked extremely well for us, and we still use email marketing as a huge part of our internet marketing strategy. So that's, that's technique number 1 from our marketing elements is email marketing. The second, which really has been the sustainable marketing strategy for us, is association involvement. This has nothing to do with online, even though online elements come into play. When you choose a niche, you can find the associations that are relevant to that niche. So whether you're going after dentists, or you're going after chiropractors, or you're going after roofers, there are association groups on a national level, on a state level, and a local level. And what you want to do was, once you choose your niche, is to find the association and join that association as a, as an industry partner, or as a vendor, or as a strategic alliance member. They have all kinds of different verbiage of how these association groups could be listed. But once you join and get involved in that way, There's an investment involved, but usually what's gonna happen is you're gonna get access to their member list. Sometimes that includes their addresses, their phone numbers, and their email addresses. You're gonna get access to use their logo and say, hey, we are members of XYZ Association, and you're gonna be able to kind of draft on that affiliation. So what we did was we joined the plumbing association, we got their list, And we were able to then mail to them, we were able to call them and invite them to educational-based trainings, and we were able to attend their events. And we did trade shows where we just kinda hung out and tried to talk with people. And over time, we used our book and our strategic positioning to speak at the front at their various events. And we still are always looking for opportunities to speak at those events, 'cause it's such a powerful way to drive new leads. Association involvement and engagement is probably one of the most powerful things you can do to accelerate your marketing strategy within your local internet marketing or digital marketing consultancy. Of course, then all of the bag of tricks that are available to you from the internet work really well. So our website plumberseo.net, we've got good SEO on there, we've got great content, we've got video training information. We've got lead magnets that bring people in. And internet marketing, when you're targeting a niche, is relatively simple, right? You set up, you know, your niche, poolcompanymarketing.com, and you put out great information on how to more effectively market your pool company, and you offer them a lead magnet, a free checklist or a cheat sheet or something along those lines, and they raise their hand. And once they've raised their hand, you can reach out to them and talk to them. And SEO and pay-per-click advertising actually work really well. Using automated webinars where you record a webinar once and you play it again and again and you let people register for it. Once you set up a good piece of training on the 7 steps, let's just say, for more effectively marketing your auto body shop online, you can use that again and again and get in front of the thousands and thousands of auto body shops that happen to be in your targeted niche, and they're gonna be interested in it 'cause it's speaking to them specifically. And there's so many untargeted niches that all of these strategies play so well. Then there's what I call strategic cold calling. So I'm not a fan of cold calling. As a matter of fact, never really did any cold calling for this particular business. Did it in other sales positions and hated it. But strategic cold calling is when you have a list and you're the member of the association and you're reaching out and saying, hey, I'm calling from Plumbing and HVAC SEO and we're associate members of the Plumbing, Heating, Cooling Contractors Association and we're putting on a training session later this week where we're gonna talk about the 7 key elements to more effectively marketing your plumbing business online. 'And we wanted to invite you because you guys are members of the association.' Can you see how that's significantly different than calling that same person and saying, 'Hey, I'm an internet marketer and I can get you more leads, you know, do you want to hire my services?' You're not leading with value. So that's what I mean when I say strategic cold calling works extremely well. Now, speaking engagements is extremely powerful. I talked a lot about that in the previous video. And you can use your book and you can put a strategic process in place to reach out to the associations and say, "Hey, I'm an expert. I wrote this book. You should book me to come speak at your event." You're not necessarily looking to get paid for the event, and they love that, but when you stand in front of 50, 100, 300 of your ideal customers and you educate them and you share great value, they're gonna wanna hire you. So that's been an extremely powerful marketing strategy that's worked extremely well for us. But the one strategy that's been a core element in all of our marketing efforts, and probably one that you wouldn't think of, is direct mail. And what I love about direct mail is that I'm able to strategically select a group of the right kind of companies in my space and proactively reach out to them. And if you're using some of the digital assets that we've recommended, writing a book, then you can mail them a copy of your book as a free gift. Hey, we wrote this book, I wanted to give it to you, um, and I'd love the opportunity to talk with you about how we can help you implement these strategies and get better results in your business. Now I get the question a lot, you know, what was more effective? Was it the internet stuff, Facebook advertising? And Facebook advertising actually works really well for us. We're able to choose people that have shown an interest in plumbing. or have indicated that they happen to be involved in the plumbing trade, and put our videos and put our ads in front of them, works pretty well. But what I really love about direct mail, and really why I feel it's worked so well for us, is that I'm able to strategically select the kind of customer I want to work with. With all of those other strategies, you're just kind of putting a net out there and you're hoping that companies are looking for you. And sometimes it's the one-man operation, sometimes it's somebody that's thinking about starting a plumbing business, and they're not really the kind of customer that we want to work with. However, if I get a list of all the plumbing companies in the city of Dayton, Ohio, that happen to do more than $1 million per year in revenue, I happen to know that every one of those would be a great candidate and the kind of customer that we would probably want to work with. And I can strategically put high-quality messaging in front of those customers via, via direct mail, copy of our book, a DVD training, a case study CD that they can listen to. I can consistently choose new cities, put great material in their hands, and get the kind of customers that I want in my business. So instead of kind of being reactive and hoping that somebody finds me through inbound marketing, which happens and I love, with direct mail I'm able to strategically choose the kind of customer that I want and really be in control of the number of leads and the number of sales that I generate. And so ultimately, those are the marketing strategies that have worked really well for us and that have really helped us to accelerate the growth within our agency, growing to $250,000 per month in recurring revenue. And making the Inc. 5000 list. And again, on this video, I just wanted to paint the picture that you can't rely on one marketing strategy to grow your agency. So if you're just sitting in BNI, or if you're just making cold calls, or if you're just putting out content on the internet, you're gonna be not accelerating the growth within your agency. But if you've got a dynamic, multi-channel marketing strategy, that piggybacks on the things I talked about in video 1 and video 2, where you've chosen a niche, so you're very specific with who you're going after. You've positioned yourself as the expert by joining the associations, by publishing your book, by being the speaker on the stage, and you combine that with an aggressive multi-channel marketing strategy using just 4 or 5 of the elements I've just covered on this video. You're going to get customers coming to you pre-positioned to buy. You're not going to have to chase them down, and they're going to be willing to pay premium dollars to work with you because you're the expert and you showed up in such a professional way. So I hope you've gotten value from this video. Really, I feel like I've revealed the strategies and techniques that have helped us market our agency to grow it to the level that it's at today. On the next video, I'm going to be talking all about getting your customers results. It's one thing to get customers, it's another thing to position yourself, but the real— where the rubber really meets the road and it's going to determine the success or failure of your agency in the long run is your ability to get your customers results. So tune in for the next video, post your comments below. What do you think about our multi-step marketing strategy? What marketing techniques are you using? Post your comments, post your feedback, post your encouragement. If you think this is useful information and you're getting value from it, just post in here, "Hey Josh, I really appreciate you putting this together." And I look forward to seeing you on the next video. Talk to you soon.
