Why HighLevel for Digital Marketing Agencies

I get all the time from digital marketing agencies is, why go HighLevel software, right? There's been software marketing automation systems, CRMs, funnel automation platforms in the industry for a long, long time, right? Everything from Infusionsoft and ClickFunnels to ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, and everything in between. And so why do we need another software? How does this fit into our digital marketing agency? Why is it even important? And Since I use GoHighLevel software for my agency that's grown to multiple 7 figures, made the Inc. 5000 list 4 years in a row, and I've helped hundreds of digital marketing agencies leverage this platform to land more clients, to deliver better results, and to retain the clients they have at a higher level, I thought it would be really valuable to record a quick video with my thoughts on why this software is important, why, you know, it's, it's going to make you more money, more sticky, and more profitable. In your agency. That sounds good. Type yes in the comments. Stay tuned. I'll try and make this as quick and actionable as possible. Try and give you all of the insights on where this fits in, why it fits in, and how it's going to, how it's going to help you. So, um, this is a screenshot from their, from their website. Basically, there's lots of tools, right? Um, in order to do marketing automation for yourself or, um, for your clients, there's lots of tools, right? And for, for me personally, I kind of walk through the tools that I was using in our agency day in and day out that had pretty high costs associated with them that we were able to replace with HighLevel. But before I get into that, really, I'm thinking about two things when I think about software for my agency. Number one is how can I deliver world-class marketing to get in front of my ideal prospects, to impress them, to get them to raise their hand, and to get them to schedule in on our calendar and kind of come to us pre-positioned to buy? That's the first thing. How can I use tools to generate those great results? And then the second thing I'm always thinking about is how can I generate better results for the clients that we have? To generate better results for them, to get them more return on investment, and ultimately get them to stick around longer, to get them to more likely to refer us to others. And really, HighLevel's helped us accomplish those two things in our marketing agency. So this was our old tech stack. This might be a little bit hard to see, but I'm using it more as a visual than anything else. I was a big-time Infusionsoft snob. Keep Software, as they call it today, because it was the expensive software. It was the first marketing automation platform that I really got involved with. And it was awesome because we had the ability to send out emails and the pre-sequenced messaging and to bill our clients on a monthly basis. So I used that, and then I used a bunch of different things, right? I wanted to be able to do two-way text messaging to communicate with our prospects, to communicate with our clients. But Infusionsoft didn't have that. And so I I used Fix Your Funnel in order to have two-way communication syncing so that I could send an email, I could send a text message. But if somebody replied back to a text message via our marketing automations, we'd have to have Infusionsoft open here, our email system open there, and then another Fix Your Funnel app opened over here to manage the two-way text message communication. We wanted to have a pipeline in order to see like, what are our opportunities in play? Who's opted in? Who's scheduled in? Who's in our hot lead follow-up process? And, you know, in Infusionsoft, you know, we hired expensive consultants to try and figure that out and to try and, you know, use different things. We used PlusThis, was another expensive software that we needed in order to really be able to kind of visualize our pipeline, but we never really could do that very well. We use ClickFunnels for our landing pages, right? In order to opt in and to confirm and maybe to do our free plus shipping funnel and stuff like that for marketing our agency. We use Calendly in order for someone to schedule in and book that time on the calendar. We used EmailMeForms as a pre-appointment questionnaire. We wanted to know like how much revenue they were doing, whether they were a good fit for our services in advance. And then of course we would use, you know, call tracking and through CallRail and RingCentral in order to track our calls, right? And this was just for marketing within our agency. I didn't do the math on this, but we spent a lot of money on these tools. And what was frustrating is we'd have to hop from Infusionsoft to Calendly to, uh, Fix Your Funnel to ClickFunnels, and we're hopping between multiple different platforms and spending a lot of money to get visualization on our own marketing. Enter HighLevel. It has all of this stuff built into it. So literally our funnels sit on HighLevel. When somebody opts in, the email, the SMS, the voice, uh, the ringless voicemail, all of it pushes out through HighLevel. Our calendar system, our survey form that they fill out in advance, our call tracking, we're able to do all of that within one platform. And so we're able to roll out world-class marketing in a centralized platform at a lower, lower cost, right, than we used to spend in all of these different tools and all these different platforms. It made us better at the way we attract clients. Into our business. If that makes sense, just for your own marketing as an agency, this tool is the best option, right? If nothing else, just for the two-way text messaging and the pipeline automation, right? Because what we found is email's a great mechanism to communicate with prospects, right? We want an email list, but the reality is our best prospects have their cell phone, they're responding on their cell phone. And so if we can text message them and then they can text message us back, literally have a two-way conversation, That is the best play. All the other marketing automations we tried to work with didn't have that. The other piece is just being able to see where our opportunities sit, what's in the pipeline, who's really interested, and be able to visualize the pipeline and manage our deal flow was a game changer for us in our agency. And again, I think really helped accelerate us to multiple 7 figures and, you know, to make the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in the United States. So better marketing for us inside of our existing agency. Now, the second piece of it is better results for our clients, right? As a digital marketing agency, what we're focused on, getting them ranked, driving traffic, generating leads, right? Making it rain for them, giving them lead flow through our services, right? Ideally, to the, you know, to a great return on investment, like whatever they spend with us plus ad spend, the amount of revenue they generate needs to be net positive. Positive, right? That's our whole mission as a company. Now, what we were finding was we were generating leads to the clients, we were generating phone calls, we're generating web forms, we were generating, you know, inquiries on the website, but they didn't often convert those opportunities into sales. And so the question was, what can we do to help them generate better results? What can we do to make sure that more of those leads convert into booked jobs? And on the surface, the most basic, powerful stuff was to put marketing automation in place for for the client. Now in the past, I knew how to use Infusionsoft, I knew how to set up ClickFunnels, I knew how to do all that stuff, but in order to set that up for a client, and we work with plumbing and HVAC companies, it would be cost prohibitive. Like it would be like, okay, I'm gonna sign you up with your own Infusionsoft account, I'm gonna configure it, we're gonna pay the setup fee, we're gonna pay the monthly fees. And I was like, you know, they didn't wanna pay for that and it was too much cost. There was really no meat on the bone for us as the agency. Now, HighLevel gives us the ability as digital marketing agency owners to set up marketing automation for our clients at the same level that we do for ourselves at no incremental cost, right? So the— for the amount that you spend basically to have HighLevel and the valuable marketing stack for your own digital marketing agency, you can set up a world-class marketing automation system for your clients You can white label it so it looks like it's completely proprietary to you. We call ours Conversion AMP, we're gonna help amplify the conversion rates. And it absolutely generates better results, more stickiness with the client base, a differentiated offer in the market because it's like, okay, we're not just generating leads, we're putting systems in place to help convert those leads. And a, and a drop sell for the inevitable client that can't the service or the client that won't stick around with you long-term because, hey, well, let us at least put this system in place to help you maximize the conversion of the leads that you are generating. Give me a yes in the comments if this makes sense and you're kind of seeing how you can use this for your agency, but also why it's so powerful to have a whole new solution that you can bring to your clients and to your prospects that's going to make you more sticky, make you more profitable, have those clients not just stick around longer, but be happy to refer you to others, be happy to speak highly of you, in the industry events and associations and groups that they're a part of. So the way we use this marketing automation is all about speed to lead. We work with plumbing and HVAC companies. We need to make sure that every lead they get, whether it's an inbound call or whether it's a web form, is followed up with in 5 minutes or less via email, but also via SMS and via the phone, right? And so we're able to put what we call smart forms in place where every single one of the leads gets an immediate text, an immediate call, and calls into the office where it says press 1 to connect with the customer. It just eliminates the lack of follow-up and follow-through. Speed to Lead in and of itself more than pays for our entire investment in HighLevel many times over because our, our clients convert more of the leads that we generate. The other place is live chat, like on their website, on their GMB, on their Facebook profiles. Clients want to be able to communicate via chat. And most of our clients didn't really have a mechanism for that. And so in HighLevel, we're able to put the chat widget on there, both on their Google My Business, GMB, as well as their Facebook Messenger, and get more inquiries that turn into leads, that turn into sales for their clients, for their businesses. The other thing we do, we're always thinking about how do we generate quick wins for our clients? How do we come out of the gates quick and show them a tangible, measurable return on investment? Something we learned from Rob Bailey was this idea of database reactivation. So these clients, plumbing, HVAC companies, whatever niche you happen to be in, they have past customers, they have inquiries that didn't convert. And one of the easiest things you can do that will have an instantaneous return on investment for them is get the names and phone numbers of their existing customer base and make them an offer. Hey, we're gonna be in your area later this week. We'd like to offer you a $59 in-home inspection. Would you be interested in that? And you'd be amazed when you set this up correctly, they're gonna get responses, they're gonna get foot in door, and they're gonna get leads and sales without having spent an additional dollar on their paid search campaigns. And so we do this as part of our overall strategy for the client, right? They sign up on a $3,500 a month program. We're gonna build their website, we're gonna do their SEO, we're gonna run their pay-per-click. We're gonna put the marketing automation to help convert those leads. But in order to get a quick win right out of the gates, we're gonna do database reactivation. We're gonna continue to reactivate that database on their behalf so that we can get low-cost leads. The cheapest customer for your client to get is their past customer base. And almost none of them are doing anything with it. It's a major opportunity, very easy to do inside HighLevel. Now the other thing, The other reason clients leave, the other reason clients get frustrated is they feel like they're spending money, but they either aren't getting an ROI or they don't know what their true return on investment is. And so what we're able to do is take all of the leads that they generate, drop them onto a pipeline for them, right? And be able to show them, hey, you spent $3,500 a month with us, plus $5,000 in paid search. Well, for that, you generated 270 inbound leads. "Right, and it looks like, you know, 72 of those were booked, which generated, you know, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 in revenue." We can actually show that for them. And what's beautiful is because HighLevel works on a snapshot basis where you can create a best-in-class campaign for your client in your niche, you can quickly iterate that from one client to the next. And so it really gives you the ability to go deep within your niche, put a really strong marketing automation strategy in place that converts those inbound opportunities, puts nurture campaigns in place to follow up with the jobs or the opportunities that didn't convert, which ultimately makes you extremely valuable to the client, right? If you just take what you already do, whether it's Facebook ads, SEO, pay-per-click, website optimization, whatever you do today, and you can add just a little bit better result, a little bit better visualization to the ROI and really the impact that you're having on their business, you become bulletproof because you have a tangible measurable return on investment and you're bringing something to the table that they don't have, right? And what's amazing is again, you use this platform for your agency to generate leads, to get inbound opportunities, to make money, and then you also use this same system for your clients. And the incremental cost, you're not spending an additional $500 per client to do this. You can roll this into your existing service offering. You're like, this cost just gets diversified. Every additional client sticks around longer. So this is going to improve your retention. It's going to improve your value proposition. It's gonna improve the amount of referrals that you get. It's gonna improve the good word about you in the industry and the industry associations that you fly in. And it's also going to be a great drop sell, right? In our world, we get lots of people that are interested in our services, but they're not a fit, right? They're not ready to spend $3,500 a month. Well, guess what? Because hey, well, you know what? Fact is you're generating leads, you're not following up as efficiently and effectively as you can. Do you have chat on your website? Do you have two-way text messaging? Are you doing some type of ongoing email and text message nurture to your existing customer base? No? Well, hey, look, we can put this software in place for you. So you got a drop sell, You've also got a retention play, right? The whole SaaS play behind HighLevel software as a service is they've been with you for a couple years, maybe a couple months at $3,500 a month, and something changes in their business. Maybe, you know, who knows, right? They get bought out, or maybe somebody in the business, you know, steps in and wants to run the marketing and they decide they're gonna displace your service. Well, they might wanna displace your monthly $3,500 fee, but they'll gladly spend $500 a month to keep the marketing automation that you set up in place. So you're able to retain the highest profit piece of the revenue that you get from any client that you have. So I said this was gonna be quick and to the point, but to me, this is why HighLevel's so important, so valuable, and such a, an instrumental tool that you wanna have in your digital marketing agency to generate clients, to generate better results for those clients, and to retain your clients at a higher level. Now, um, you can sign up for a free trial of HighLevel by going to 7figureagency.com/highlevel. Again, 7figureagency.com/highlevel. That link is my affiliate link that will take you in and give you the ability to trial it for, for, uh, I think it's 15 or 30 days. Now, some of you guys are like, well, what's, what's in it for me, right? If I'm going to trial it through you, what's, what's What's the incentive? I have developed an appointment funnel snapshot. This is the funnel that we use to get people to schedule it on our calendar, come in prepositioned to buy, kind of get warmed up through email communication, through SMS, through social messenger. The pages, the sequences, the workflows, and if you sign up through my HighLevel affiliate account, 7figureagency.com/highlevel-snapshot. You can grab that snapshot. Um, it's an extremely valuable snapshot. I was doing the math. We've closed almost $32 million in agency revenue bringing people through this process. And so that's at 7figureagency.com/highlevel-snapshot. You say, well, Josh, you're giving you the whole thing. No, this is our appointment funnel. We have you know, what we call the ultimate agency funnel, which is everything from the lead magnets to the follow-up sequence, uh, to the hot lead follow-up and everything in between, um, that we reserve for our paying members, right? If you want to learn more about 7 Figure Agency, our coaching, our mentorship, we give you our entire HighLevel setup from soup to nuts, along with the emails, the sequences, the workflows on how we land the client, how we onboard the client, how we nurture that client experience through a HighLevel client management snapshot on the back end. But again, you know, start with the appointment funnel. And if you want to actually have us set this up for you and really configure it in your business, we'd love the opportunity to chat. Hopefully this video has been useful, whether you wind up checking this out or not. Hopefully you got some new ideas and insights on how you can leverage HighLevel, why it's so important, why it's been able to help us streamline our operations, reduce our cost of software, eliminate some of the tech frustration of jumping from tool to tool. And at the same time generate better marketing, generate better results for our clients, generate better retention, and ultimately help us grow and scale our agency to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies. So that's it for now. If you have follow-up questions, post them in the comments. Otherwise, grab your free trial at 7figureagency.com/highlevel, and I'll talk to you soon.