Sarah: We are here, we are ready. We've got a really, really great show today and I'm so excited to talk about this because if there's one thing that Fusion One Marketing loves is getting our clients more calls and more business. That's our mantra, that's our slogan. So we think today it would be kind of fun to put that slogan into action and show you some real-life case studies. These are just success stories that we hope will help give your own business some inspiration and some tools to help. So let's just dive right in.

Glyna: Welcome everybody! Welcome to Marketing Mix. Every week we're going to mix up digital marketing segments. It could be tips, trends, Q and A. Today, we're going to do a really cool thing I think you're all going to enjoy. We're going to go over some case studies so that you can kind of see does my business fit in any one of these? And maybe it will help you take your game to the next level. So let's look at our broadcasts quickly.

Sarah: Yeah. Before we get going today, we want to just remind everyone that we go live every single week on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Don't forget to check out our podcast Marketing and Mic, and always follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn because this show replays on those social platforms. And one more thing, our YouTube channel! You want to go on there because as we say, every week, we're putting up new videos and these are all free resources for you to help your business in digital marketing. So, guys check it out. Subscribe. Glyna, you've always approached new clients with the mindset of providing them only what they need. I think that's so valuable and important to have that personalized approach and I feel like clients really appreciate that. So, what's your strategy with that?

Glyna: Well, you're exactly right. We do so many things. And when you talk about digital marketing, there are so many different aspects that go into that. It doesn't necessarily mean that's going to be a fit for every single person that we talk to. Rob and I have always taken the approach of, "Let's go talk to the potential client and really listen." We're not going to shove things in their face that first of all, are going to cost them money that they don't need to be spending, but it's not really going to help them overall. We'll sit down with them, take a look at everything that they have and sometimes we just make tweaks. We find out exactly what their goals are. That's very important. It may be a complete overhaul if they're interested, and even if it's a complete overhaul, we may take it step-by-step, if that's what fits them the best. So, it could be that, or we could just be doing a website or we could just be doing social media. It's really all in what the customer needs. I think what's so exciting about this segment is you're going to see all the different things that we've done for people. And it may not be a whole overhaul, but we've been able to make adjustments for them and increase their business. So, hopefully, you can find yourself in one of these cases.

Sarah: Yeah. That's what we thought would be helpful is to just cover all of - we have a wide range of services, but we want to touch on particular clients that they needed some little tweaks. So they had some particular pain points and hopefully, this can help you if you see anything that could help your own business. So, we're going to go through this one by one. So let's start with...

Glyna: Branding! All right, branding. And again, you can think of your business along these lines when we're talking about these things. Branding means getting yourself out there, getting your brand out there, your logos out there, what you stand for. You may have a problem that nobody knows you exist and in this case, we checked searches and that kind of thing, we checked SEO and it didn't seem like a real good fit for him. We decided to basically just do a branding package and make sure that we could get his name out there. So, here are some of the things that we worked on, and these are some of the things that you could work on if you have the same problem that nobody knows that you exist. So, in this case, it was a franchise owner and he was brand new and he needed to establish himself, or he needed to establish his name. He had limited marketing resources from corporate and really no guidance at all. A lot of times franchises just put you out there and you're kind of on your own. So again, he wanted to make a name for himself and we needed to do it as fast as possible and build that brand awareness as quickly as we could. That was a challenge.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. He needed that name recognition as quickly as possible. So our solution is really tri-fold. We want to do heavy social media, branded graphics, and some Facebook ads. The big key here was to just make sure that he had a presence on social media and how you do that is you really brand all your content, all of your posts and we did real customized graphics. Everything within those graphics was showcasing his work because he wanted to get it out there as quickly as possible, "Here's everything that I'm doing so you can see it." Utilizing Facebook ads was huge. We've touched on Facebook ads before, but that is a great way to reach an extended audience, it's really great for building that brand awareness and that name recognition, which is exactly what he needed. Facebook ads are so great because you could reach an extended audience. It was the perfect platform for this because you wanted to get eyes on it quickly. We were all about it, we were going to put his social media and take it to the hills and really get it out there.

Glyna: Part of the consultation, again, when we talked to him is that we determined that his demographics or the people that he wanted to target, they spend most of their time on Facebook. Those were homeowners that maybe had a little extra money to do cleanup and have things hauled away. We really paid attention to his demographics and determined Facebook was the best place. Now, could we have spread them out to other places and spent a lot more money? Well yeah, but he didn't have it. It was a brand new business. So we keep those things in mind. As a result, we did flood Facebook. Let me tell you. The results were amazing. Now I'll tell you, he helped a lot and I'll get to that in just a moment, but in just a short amount of time, we increased his social media followers particularly on Facebook 203%. That's huge. We determined that he wanted to be known in Shelby County so that's what we targeted. We were able to reach over 14,000 people by doing Facebook ads. Again, putting Facebook on steroids, basically. And then, he is now booked out for weeks. He now has a constant stream of new customers because we keep doing this and that's the key. You have to be consistent. We always talk about consistency and in anything you do, especially social media and Facebook ads, you have to be consistent. Now, as I said, he helped a ton. We do what we do and we can get results, but if we have a partner, we can partner with a customer and say, if you could just do these little things, it would really take it to the next level." So he was very good at doing that himself and wow, it just made all the difference in his business. So yeah, that's an exciting one. So branding, we determine where we need to put you and we put you there and put it on steroids basically.

Sarah: Let's talk about our next service: pay per click campaign. Pay per click, it's really great when you need to reach a wider audience. A lot of times with Google and search engines, when you do a search, it'll limit you. It'll limit your geographical location. Sometimes it's really helpful to use a pay per click campaign to reach an audience really fast and have a way to really fine-tune and target your demographics because pay per click is excellent at really getting down to the specifics of exactly who your target audience is and then developing those keywords that are going to match with it. Let's talk about the challenge. This particular business wanted to reach a larger area of prospects. They had their services, but their services were limited to their location. So they wanted to reach a wider audience. They needed a quick solution. He needed something quick and affordable that could get him fast results and then he wanted to target his audience directly. So, "I just want to find where my ideal customers are and that's who I want to zero in on." Our solution with that was the pay-per-click campaign. Specifically, with pay-per-click, we did Google Ads, and then we did an extensive keywords list, which was huge. We really wanted to create an extensive keyword list with robust, negative keywords designed to really only appeal to his ideal prospects. And then along the way, just fine-tune his campaign based on clicks and conversions and we would just analyze the analytics on how the ads were performing, just to make sure that we were constantly capturing those key demographics.

Glyna: Yeah, exactly right. And again, the consultation, huge key for the situation because when this guy called us, and he found us on Google, Rob and I were talking about it. I'm like, "This is dirt. We're selling dirt."

Sarah: "Help me sell dirt!"

Glyna: Rob will tell people, "We're so good, we can sell dirt," but it's really a lot more than that. He sells specific dirt and I guess materials for tracks and baseball fields and the warming track that goes around them and so it's a little bit more than that. I was like, "Really?" So, if you think that there's not a digital marketing campaign for you, you are probably wrong because it's working. His problem was SEO wasn't going to work because we couldn't cover a big enough area for him. He wants to cover the whole Southeast and he even has some customers up North, so that wasn't going to work. Pay per click was really our only option for this. So yeah.

Sarah: And boy let me tell you, he got some great results.

Glyna: Yeah, he always does. I can tell you that we know when things are working without even looking at results because we can never get him on the phone, he's so busy. That's always a good thing, but yeah, he averages 47 leads per month. Now think about that. This is the stuff that he's selling tons of this dirt at every lead that he gets. So that's a lot of money. 47 of those is huge. He averages about 268 clicks to his website, but that's again, not really where the people are coming from. They're coming from the ads and they're clicking right through to call. Keywords, a good percentage on a pay per click campaign is 4% to 5%, even 2% to 3%. What click-through-rate means, somebody sees the ad, they click on it to come to either a landing page or in this case his website or wherever we're sending them. We're getting a 10% to 20% click-through-rate for him. So again, you can see how that all adds up. And he's thrilled, we're thrilled. Again, it's not really to toot our horn so much as to say that pay per click can be very powerful in the right situation.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. And that's really the whole purpose of this is to take apart these services because each one of them needed a really unique solution.

Sarah: Alrighty, social media. This was another fun one. With this particular one, it was a real estate industry. We all know that with the real estate industry, you really got to find a way to stand out in that cluttered market so to speak in that industry. What this particular client wanted was a way to create a presence for herself that was unique, that was separate from the saturated industry. She also wanted to get the message across of what she was about to potential buyers. She wanted them to understand her values and build that trust, so a little bit of that branding. So she really wanted to get that message out to the potential home buyers.

Glyna: Let’s look at her challenge. And again, if you're in the real estate market, mortgage, all of those people, there are so many of them that it's hard to stand apart.

Sarah: Well, her challenge really was just that she wanted to develop that consistent messaging that focused on telling her story and her brand values and then through that, connect with potential home buyers and make a name for herself.

Glyna: Yeah, you're exactly right. We had so much fun with this because anytime you bring up social media, video, and StreamYard, Sarah and I are all over that because we love it. And we're using StreamYard for this broadcast right now. So yeah, we had to do some stuff to make her stand out. We launched a video campaign through StreamYard. and Sarah had a lot of fun creating all of her cool graphics and everything. We helped her put together weekly videos where she would highlight her community. I thought this was so cool. Now, there may be people doing this, but there's not a lot. So, it really made her stand out. She concentrated on a smaller community, but went and made them feel part of it. So right there, she already had an audience that she was cultivating. She highlighted those stores and the cute little shops and everything. Then she took the video to the next level. And again, this is something that Sarah and I put together for her, an actual plan. It wasn't just like, "Hey, go do videos." No, we actually had a step-by-step plan and what days and times she had to get these done. She also took the video to be able to offer tips. Now can any realtor offer tips? Yeah, obviously. But when you're doing it on video, you get a bigger audience that feels like they know you. They get comfortable with you and then they get to think, "That is the professional I want to deal with because they are obviously an expert if they have all of this knowledge." Then we developed a monthly series where she could help prospects understand each stage of the real estate transaction, which I think is huge. If you've ever bought a house, you don't know everything that's involved. So, it was just really fun. We had a blast.

Sarah: It was really fun. And I think that the whole mission was for her to be a trusted resource and not to be somebody that was just like, "Look at all my numbers, look at what I'm selling. Look at what," just me, me, me. She really didn't want that message. Hers was more of like, "I want to talk about how I'm a good resource. I'm going to walk you through the process." The results were wonderful. She really built that reputation. She had so many that would contact and reach to her as just a knowledgeable expert. Her videos did absolutely great as Glyna said before. She would do community highlights. She would talk about upcoming neighborhoods. It was so educational for the viewers and they reached an average of 200 to 500 views. And then her social media got quite a boost with a 30% increase in followers. So, that was tremendous.

Glyna: Yeah. So if you're in an industry where you're sitting there and you're like, "I'm surrounded by thousands of other people who do exactly what I do," you might think about delving into video marketing. We really say we love to brainstorm, we really do, and come up with different plans for people. So anyway, if you find yourself in a saturated market, you can stand apart. That's the whole point of that case study.

Sarah: Absolutely. Okay. SEO.

Glyna: Oh my gosh. My favorite!

Sarah: Glyna's favorite!

Glyna: Yes, SEO. All right. If you find yourself, this is for these businesses, think about this if you're in this situation. If you're getting some business, but you're also seeing your competitors getting a lot more business, you probably need to come to us and have us do an SEO analysis because there's probably a reason they're getting more of the piece of the pie than you are. It probably has to do with SEO. Especially in-home service industries, it is a huge competition to see who can get most of the business in the area. So, in this situation, it was a moving service, but you can insert basically any home service industry. They were struggling to promote their business online because they don't have time and they don't know where to start. Customers were definitely searching for them but were finding everybody else except for them. So we did an analysis and the bad thing about this, Sarah, is they were actually paying someone for SEO services but getting little results or no results.

Sarah: That's so discouraging.

Glyna: It's so discouraging and it was kind of a big challenge for us to say, "Well, we can do it better."

Sarah: Yeah.

Glyna: Because they did not see any good results. So anyway, that was their challenge. Get more eyes and leads on their business, improve their online presence, set themselves apart from their competition. Again, because they weren't seeing any results, it was kind of a hard sell and it took me a while to convince them that we could do it better.

Sarah: Yeah, that's always hard when they've kind of been burned so to speak a little bit. They felt like they tried something and they didn't see the results. They're like, "I just don't. This isn't working." But yeah, that's the beauty about SEO is that if you're finding, "Why is this other business everywhere? Why am I not seen? Why is everybody seeing my competitor and not me?" It's SEO, and that was our big solution to this was to just do a really comprehensive SEO strategy centered around positioning their brand as a brand authority in the industry and get more visibility in the search results to capture those leads. Convert them into customers, improve those keyword rankings and search volume in order to get that traffic. That was the main goal. We wanted to get eyes on their business, show what sets them apart. When people are searching for them, they wanted to be visible. That's what they weren't getting. That was our main driving force and this was another one that was so great. So great.

Glyna: It was great, especially once we got started. As I said, it took a little convincing to say, "Just give us a shot." And I will give us a little plug. Because we don't have any contracts, that helped. We're like, "Let us just prove ourselves for a few months and show you." So basically, the results were absolutely wonderful. Again, this is why SEO is my number one thing that I love so much. It's because we can help businesses grow, get the revenue in that they need. They were struggling a little bit. So check this out. All right. They're a moving company. When he told me this, I was just floored. So last year, they were averaging 25 moves per month. Now they are averaging 25 moves per week. So, obviously, they needed more trucks so they had to add more trucks to their fleet, but what's even cooler is they hit $1 million in total revenue for the first time ever. That first month, it was just, this was golden. This was just golden!

Sarah: Yeah and didn't they get something like 200 calls the first month?

Glyna: It was crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not saying this would happen for everybody. This was kind of on steroids. We would bring you in some calls for the first month, but yeah, 200 was really crazy. So, it was like the perfect storm.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, and adding more trucks. That's the thing that I love. I know you and Rob get so excited about this, but you were like hey if we're trying to reach them and they're like, "We can't talk. We're so busy!" It's the greatest feeling. That's what I love is our goal is exactly the same as our clients. We want to get you more business. We want to get the phone ringing. That is what we strive for. So, it's so exciting when they're just seeing these amazing results. We just love it. We love it for them.

Glyna: It's so fun. So, if you find yourself in that situation, SEO may be the perfect solution for you. Now we did pair it with social media, we'll say that because that is part of our SEO package. But yeah SEO can be very powerful in the right solution. It's not for everybody, we will be the first ones to tell you that. So, anyway. I guess we can move on.

Sarah: That was a real feel-good one, wasn't it?

Glyna: Yes.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Let's move on to custom websites. We've got two more of these that we want to highlight. This is a property management business. Let's talk a little bit about what their challenge was with the website situation.

Glyna: Again, our business is so cool because every day, every customer, every potential customer we talk to is different, but this one's really different. This was not a company struggling. They weren't brand new. They've been around for years and years and years and kind of in the good old boy network. Everybody was referring them all over the place. They were managing huge properties. We're talking, like a Home Depot kind of level. So they weren't used to losing at all. This lady called me and she's like, "You've got to help me." She told me the whole story and she said, "We lost our first big," and she goes, "I don't mean big, I mean HUGE account, and this has never happened to us." And the number one reason is that the company said, "You don't look legitimate. You don't even have a website. If you're a legitimate business and so-called do all these wonderful things, why can't I find you?"

Sarah: Wow.

Glyna: So, she's like, "I need a logo." She said, "We don't even have a logo." She said, "I need a logo. I need a website." So it was really hitting their credibility online. I talk about this all the time. First impressions are huge. First impressions are huge with people, they're also huge with your business. The challenge, again, she needed a website to gain credibility and that first impression. You have to start there to build your reputation online, otherwise, nobody knows you're there. They had so many services, Sarah. Oh my gosh, that you wouldn't even know all the things they offered because you couldn't find it anywhere. We had to make sure we could highlight all the things that they did and create more opportunities and ways for people to find them online. We built them a beautiful website. You have to start somewhere. Anyway, that's my preaching on first impressions, but you have to start there even if you do nothing else.

Sarah: Right. Yeah, absolutely. To talk about our solution, the first and foremost was to create a nice custom website. They needed a redesign of their logo so we did a new logo design. All of this in the hopes that "Hey, look. We've got to get this website up to create more visibility so that it gives an opportunity for people to find them online and ultimately get some more customers that way." As you said, they needed to get all their services out there. Nobody knew what all they did. The main thing was just we got that real user-friendly responsive website, new logo design and they also saw some really great results.

Glyna: Yeah, exactly. And just from a website. But in their industry, that's what people were checking out. They already knew their name. Anyway, so they wanted to make sure that they looked legit. So results...Online presence, obviously, so people can find you and at least check your business out. You want to establish your credibility and then it gives you more opportunity if you have one central location where people can find what you do. That's so important. We talk about the website is the hub of your whole business. If you can't afford to do anything else, you need to have one, even if it's just a one-page website. You need to look like you know what you're doing until you can actually prove you know what you're doing.

Sarah: Yeah because everybody's going to check you out and they're going to do their own little research and if they're trying to and they can't find you, it's going to end real quick.

Glyna: Yep.

Sarah: Okay. So our last one and they're all exciting, but this one was a real doozy.

Glyna: Yes. Let's talk about digital optimization. When we talk about digital transformation or digital optimization, what do we mean? This means that we're throwing the whole thing at them. We're throwing the whole recipe at them because we've done our analysis and they basically check all the boxes and if we do the right recipe, then we know it's a no-brainer. This is our complete package. All right, so here's the challenge. And I will say it was a pest control company I don't know if we mentioned that again. But again, home service industries, this is a golden solution for you. So if you're in that industry, think about this. Think about if this is you. You have zero online presence. If you're not on the internet anywhere, this could work for you. We needed to build more brand awareness, make sure that people knew they were out there, and obviously bring them more calls. What do we say? We always bring more calls, which means more business. That obviously was the challenge that we needed to handle.

Sarah: Yes, absolutely. So the solution here was just to really build that online presence from scratch. It was everything but the kitchen sink. We might have put the kitchen sink in there, but implementing everything, I'm talking SEO and social media. All of this was the goal to just increase visibility, get them out there, drive customers to their website, drive customers to their business, get the phone ringing, increase traffic, get out there. Get out there, and again, the SEO was a key thing too because, with SEO, it's like building equity. They really want it to sustain that with themselves of that online visibility of getting customers seeing them everywhere. They wanted one company to do everything. They didn't want to have to call around like, "Oh, you do this but you don't do that?" They were like, "We need it all. We need one company to do it all."

Glyna: Yeah. And with digital marketing, whether it's us or anybody else, you really need to stick with one company that you can trust and is bringing you results because the last thing you want to do, and we've talked about it on other Marketing Mixes, is getting too many people involved because you don't want to confuse the internet. You need to have a cohesive message and make sure that you're doing everything in order that the search engine gods want you to. All right. So we started off with one site and with this kind of package, and if you're a home service industry, we can make you appear that you have multiple locations whether you do or not so that people can find you in every area. We started off with one site, one location, and now we're up to 11 locations that we have created for this company because they wanted to grow throughout the state of Alabama. We average, this is absolute craziness, and I will tell you out of those 11 locations, we're just now getting two or three of them set up. So those 420 calls per month don't even count the new ones that we have coming in. So this is craziness. This is crazy amounts of calls. They've had to hire several people to even be able to answer all the calls. Then they get over 1200 new visitors to their website each month. Because they have a really nice website, those 1200 visitors are looking around. We have all the analytics. Again, we track every single thing. The average number of pages that each visitor is looking at was four to five. So, they're interested in what this company has to offer. This company is busy and has grown like crazy. But I will say this, they've been with us for several years. So, with this type of solution, things just build and build and build and build. It gains more as you go along, too. It's great. So yeah, if you're there and you need more business, this might fit you, this whole digital optimization package.

Sarah: Yes. Yeah. And really sometimes you just don't know what you need. The bottom line is, "I want more business, but I'm not quite sure what route to take." It's okay, you don't have to know. If you see some of these services that we've gone through and some of these, really the situation that they were facing, the whole key of this is if there's some of them that you're like, "I'm kind of feeling that with my business..."

Glyna: Yeah, exactly right. And again, it's been interesting showing this to everybody but put yourself in these positions. And as always, we would love to talk to you, love to do a free consultation. And like we mentioned a little bit ago, we love just brainstorming. There are some things that you can do on your own to get yourself started. We realize not everybody starts off with a big budget, so we might be able to get you started and down the road a little bit, but I'd love to have a conversation with you. So I think those were the solutions we were going to present today and I hope you got something out of it and saw yourself in those examples.

Sarah: Yes. Yeah. So that's it for us today. Appreciate everyone watching. And next week we've got another new show. We've got another fun one coming up. We're going to have more faces on here next week.

Glyna: Yes, we are! It's going to be awesome.

Sarah: Yeah. So we're going to do a little fun one next week, so don't miss out on that one. So thanks for tuning in everyone and we'll catch you next time.

Glyna: Bye!

Sarah: Bye!