When we craft our clients' marketing services, we believe that tactics are only as good as the strategy behind them. Being on the first page of Google will help you get traffic, but turning that traffic into qualified leads is only done by knowing and understanding your target audience.
The Strategy Behind Building $14,818 in Leads Per Month from No Online Presence: Video Summary
In this case study, we take a look at one of our clients who grew from having ZERO online presence to a lifetime of $64,000 in lifetime lead value.
If you understand your buyer persona, your website can act as your number one salesperson. What we were able to do for our client is nail down the strategy to appeal to their psychology and compell them to either pick up the phone and call or fill out a form on his website—in fact, 1 out of every 4 people who touch his website converts in this way.
When our client started with us, he had NO ONLINE PRESENCE, and we were able to grow that into a lifetime lead value of $64,000. This didn't start with implementing SEO or paid advertising; it began with knowing his target audience and speaking to them in a way that resonated. Then, the goal is to:
- Generate traffic
- Convert traffic to leads
- Nurture the leads that aren't ready to pull the trigger
- Get reviews and testimonials (social proof) from happy clients
- Continue to delight those clients to make them brand advocates
- Build a system that scales for growth
Just executing on best marketing practices won't account for all of those things. Your competitors know what they're doing, too, and you can't just expect them to step aside for you to achieve success. Our client was able to achieve this level of success strategically and over time.
However, the first step is to find that right buyer persona and work to get immediate traction in the market.
Watch the video above for a more in-depth look at the results we were able to achieve 142 leads over 30 days for this client, which amounts to $14,818 worth of leads in just one month.
Full Transcript
Hey there, my friend, I’m really excited to be coming to you today with another case study and results-based video, coming right from an Analytics account of one of our existing clients.
And my name, by the way, if you’ve never come across my video before, this is Darrell Evans, co-founder or Yokel Local Internet Marketing here in Las Vegas, Nevada.
And in today’s results and case study video, we’re going to be covering some of the results for a family law attorney. Now, if you’re not a family law attorney, but you’re a professional service provider of any kind—professional services, home services, where traditionally, somebody is going to come to you as the professional to solve a problem for them—then this video is going to be applicable to you.
It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be in the legal space because what we’re going to be doing is talking about the structure of our 6-step process, as it pertains to this particular attorney, this particular client. And I’ll let you know a little bit of background on his situation, but if you haven’t had a chance to grab our 6-step playbook, you can get that at YokelLocal.com/Playbook. Along with that, you’ll get a 6-part free e-mail course that will break down all 6 of those steps on that one-page document.
So it’s something that seems to be one of our most popular downloads on our website, gives a lot of great value, and explains all of the 6 steps that we don’t have all of the time in the world to go through today. So we want to keep this video relatively short, show you some real, hard proof, and give you the methodology around how we helped this attorney who had no internet presence whatsoever in January of 2015 and here we are, January, 2017.
So let’s go ahead and dive in. We have a saying in our company. Just so you know, obviously, I’ve got the clients name blocked out, but you can see that I’m logged into my account here in our analytics master account. And I like to always start with, when we talk about this, we like to talk about goals. We like to talk that our job, as a marketing agency for our clients, is to get them results, and so many business owners out there get caught up working with companies—people are measuring the wrong things. So if you’re going to win in this game in online business, you’ve got to measure the right things.
So we’re going to start by measuring. Number one, let’s look at the date range we’re talking about here: December 21st to January 19th. We’re recording this on the 20th. And let’s talk, first of all, about the type of results that are coming in. We can talk about the strategy and the high level in just a moment, but in the last 30 days, he’s gotten 142 goal completions—and just so we’re clear about that, goal completions are simply leads. Those are leads. Those can come in a couple of ways.
Now, I’m going to show you in just a moment, you can see that a good chunk of those leads have come in by phone call. A lot of our professional service providers, home service providers, consultants, they really thrive on those phone calls. The consumers are not as apt to fill out forms for their industries. And as you can see on the right-hand side here—let me move my video monitor out of the way—in this particular case, the contact form, which is another lead capture form on his website, has 31 of those leads.
So 142 leads over the last 30 days.
And what does this goal value mean? This is another thing that’s extremely important. We talk in our agency a lot about how to make your website the number one salesperson in your organization, which means, in this case, 26% of everyone who touches his website—that’s 1 out of 4—people are raising their hand and either picking up the phone and calling him or filling out a form on his website. Now, I’m going to tell you something, this is a really astronomically high number. I will tell you that if you are experienced in this, 26% is really, really high. I’m not telling you we’re lucky; I’m telling you we’re very strategic. And I’m not going to get into how nitty-gritty and strategic—I will give you a little bit of the insight here in just a moment, stick with me, but I can’t give you the secret on this. This has been an astronomical scenario.
Now, let’s take a look at month over month. Let me do this really quick—what does this goal value mean? Obviously this isn’t an e-commerce business; it’s a service business—he’s an attorney. Obviously, he charges by the case, and so forth—I don’t even know how he charges, by the hour or by the case, he’s a family law attorney. But as you can imagine, what we do, we try to assess the value of a lead. And what’s important about that is if we know the value of a lead, which means if we know we get X number of leads through the portal, that we’re going to get X number of sales on the backend. And whether that number is 1 out of 10 leads we’re going to convert to a case, or 2 out of 10 leads are going to convert to a case, then what we now have is we have an arbitrage opportunity to lay out a certain amount of money from a digital marketing standpoint, whether it’s advertising, search campaigns, whatever that might look like. So we can arbitrage that. If I told you that for every dollar you gave me, I’m going to give you back two dollars, well how many dollars would you find in your pocketbook to give me? You’re going to play that game as many times as you want. And a lot of marketing companies and agencies, they talk that talk. But what we’re showing you here is we walk that talk.
And what’s important about this is this $14,000. What I can tell you is, on an average monthly basis, our client is getting somewhere, as he reports, between 13 and 18 cases per month. So if you know anything about law, and you know, if you’re watching this and you’re an attorney, just do the math on that. The average case is probably in the neighborhood of a couple thousand dollars. So his arbitrage is quite strong.
Let’s look at how this performs over the previous 30-day period, because again, we’re in the constant, never-ending improvement business. When people hire us, when companies hire us to do marketing, one thing we don’t do is we don’t just set it and forget it, we don’t just do something one time and start seeing some results. So how does this perform over the previous 30-day period? You can see that just that number alone is up another 49% over the prior month. Now, he does have some seasonality, there’s a little bit of seasonality in the family law space, that a lot of people around the holidays don’t tend to get divorced, so things start to slow down and a lot of the things in his particular niche, every business has different types of seasonality issues. So there was a slight drop there, so we’re going to attribute a little bit of that to seasonality. But what you would see is, even if you look at the prior month, his prior month conversion rate was at 15%, roughly. So that’s still an astronomically high number, so we’re looking basically at the types of results.
Now let’s go in and take a look at the channels because this is all we really want to talk about. When we talk with business owners, we talk about having a holistic strategy. It starts with understanding who the buyer is and then
- Figuring out how we’re going to get traffic
- Figuring out how we’re going to convert them to leads
- Nurturing those who are not ready to buy yet
- Getting reviews, testimonials from happy clients
- Delighting our database of our happy clients
- Building a system that scales for growth
So when this gentleman started with us, he had no online presence. So let’s just keep this really, really simple. And I’m going to go ahead and cut out this comparison just so I can kind of bring this into picture for you, into focus. Not all of these leads are coming from the same place, and this is where a lot of business owners make mistakes. They say, “Well, I want to rank on the first page of Google,” or “I just want to run paid advertising.”
Well, if you look at this gentleman’s campaigns, you can see that he’s got a healthy mix of where those leads are coming from. You can see here, the lion’s share of the leads are coming from organic, direct traffic. Now, here’s the interesting thing about direct that you have to know and be aware of, is that direct traffic is not always direct, meaning someone typed in www. That could be direct because of our re-targeting campaign, which means somebody came to the website, via pay-per-click, or Google, or a referral site, they didn’t convert at that time, and then we followed them around the web to get them back to the website. It could also have been that someone bookmarked the site because they were what we call a top of the funnel visitor, and they weren’t ready for a consultation, they weren’t ready to discuss their case with him, and they came back to the site later, and they bookmarked it and came in direct. We also know that part of search results just shows up as direct. It’s proven that we can’t exactly track exactly where everyone comes from, Google cannot, so we do get some of that direct traffic is also really organic, but unfortunately, we can’t differentiate it. And then we do have a paid starting to ramp back up in his campaign—he does run a paid campaign.
But what’s really interesting here is I want to just open up organic because so many of you out there are just misguided on what it really takes to build your presence online. And I’m going to prove to you he had no presence online just at the time period that I mentioned before. So let me go back to 2015, and I want to show you he had no presence online, literally. Just take a look at this. Some of you are so microwave-minded that you’re not willing to be patient as things go on. So in our process, after we’ve determined—and you can see here, I’ve moved over to the organic side of the ledger, because this is the number one reason why people come to us. They literally believe that, “If I’m on the first page of Google, I’m going to crush it.” Well, it’s a start. It’s a good help, but unfortunately, just because you decide you’re going to get on Google that day, or you decide that you’re going to take online marketing seriously, doesn’t mean all your competitors are just going to move out of the way, it doesn’t mean Google owes you a slot on the first page of Google.
So what we do in the process, and this is what we recommend that everyone do, is we, number one, identify the best buyer persona that we can go after. And what we mean by a buyer persona is, let’s look at it this way. In the legal business, and particularly his niche, which is family law, there are all different types of cases. There are cases that have custody issues, there are cases regarding certain levels of property that has to be decided on, there are certain cases where there may be businesses involved, different various levels of assets involved.
So the question becomes, “Where can we enter the market and get immediate traction?”
So what we are trying to do is identify, because again, the bigger competitors in town, the larger competitors, or even just the competitors who have just been playing the game longer, they’re not just going to move aside so you can get on the first page of Google. And it doesn’t matter how good of a company you hire. Whether it’s us or somebody else, you just can’t walk onto the first page of Google. So we have to come up with a strategy that creates this type of growth curve. So in the beginning, we’re looking for that number one buyer. Of all the different types of cases that he could handle, of all the types of scenarios he’s handled in his career, what can we narrow down and go after one target initially? How narrowly focused can we get on his website, how narrowly focused can we get in his buyer persona so that we can draw the right visitor to his website. That’s why you’re going to see the scenario where you see a high number—and this is overall. Look at this, this is lifetime on the campaign. So from January 1st of 2015 to today, lifetime, he’s got 16% of everyone who touches the website converted.
Now, I’m not sure where you are in your business, I’m not sure if you’re getting these kinds of results. If you’re getting better than 16%, God bless you. I’m extremely happy for you. But most of the clients we talk to are just not getting these kinds of results. Now, I will tell you that the arbitrage that he’s got coming in through this process, he’s got $61,000—or I should say a total of $64,000—in lead value coming through his campaign lifetime. And what’s exciting about that is he’s got exactly what he wants. He wants to show up every day and do law. He wants to show up every day and solve problems with families. Unfortunately, the situation of divorce is tough, custodies, divorce, and all these other types of things that he does inside of his practice. But it really comes down to understanding and building a strategy before you start running into the tactics.
So once again, you’ll get more of an understanding of how to build this if you’re not seeing these kinds of results. Number one, how to start with a buyer persona that you can go after and target. And you may have four, five, or six buyer personas in your particular niche, but understanding the psychology of that buyer and what’s giving them pain. They just don’t want to get divorced. If you’re a family law attorney, your people just don’t want to get divorced. There’s underlying psychology behind what’s going on there, and if you can speak to that, then you’re going to attract the right visitors—qualified visitors, qualified people—who are then going to convert. And there has to be a specific conversion path, and then you’re going to finish the process by getting them through to a nurturing cycle. One of the things that we loving working with professional service providers is they just love what they do, and they’re happy to tell us who their ideal customer is, and it’s not just a new case.
So that’s really the essence around a campaign like this, but I want to wrap this up—I’ve kept you long enough—but I want you to think about the type of traffic coming to your website. Are you getting the type of lead conversion on your website? 16% in this particular example, of every person who comes to the website, is either picking up the phone and calling him from an organic or paid type of modality, and it just makes for a strong online presence. And you can see that he started from nothing. So download the document if you haven’t gotten it: YokelLocal.com/Playbook, and I’ll see you on another case study and results video. Take care.
