 These are the things that good companies do over and over and over again to build sustainable businesses. Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where you'll learn our marketing agency insights, best practices, and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder and chief strategist of Slam Agency, a small but mighty full-service digital marketing agency designed to help you captivate, motivate, and inspire people to action through advertising. Today I want to take it back, break it down, and show you how to generate revenue through customer acquisition. So I teach class at Miami-Dade College. It's called Marketing Agency Secrets. And in this class, I've kind of designed this class to share the insider tips, tricks, tactics, and strategies that a marketing agency would use over and over and over again. These are the types of things that we're doing day in and day out that don't always make it to the blog recipe. They don't always make it to the how-to article or the how-to video. And even when they do, even when that recipe is written out word for word, there's a lot of things that are written or unwritten that are unspoken in between the lines, in between the lines of that recipe to where I could give you the exact recipe that I use for filling the blank, SEO, SEM, PPC, whatever the case may be, and you're never going to produce the same results I produce. Why is that? It's because of those things in between the lines that are unwritten. And those unwritten things just come by experience. They come by doing it over and over again. Practice makes perfect. Now if you're a business owner, if you are a marketing director, if you are a director of a nonprofit, this is a video that you need to save and continue to watch until this stuff just kind of gets in you because this is important. Now in the class, I share these secrets and I've broken them into four distinct groups, which I call the four pillars of customer acquisition. Now let me share with you where this came from. So a few years ago, I was just looking at how do companies increase? How do they acquire revenue? How do they generate revenue? And I started to see these patterns, like these are the things that good companies do over and over and over again to build sustainable businesses. Now when you think about revenue, there's generally two ways as a customer-oriented organization to drive revenue. Those are acquisition and retention. Now when it comes to retaining customers, customer retention, we all know that we need to do a really good job at providing a high quality product, a high quality service. We need to create a good customer experience, like a great customer experience. We need to deliver on our promises and we need to make sure that the value that our customers receive is greater than what they are paying us, right? So the cash payment that we take in, the value should always be greater than that. That's retention. That's easy to explain. I think that's common sense and you have to have those things in place if you want to have a successful sustainable business. But on the acquisition side, a lot of times it's a little bit harder to pinpoint. And it's more difficult to pinpoint because this isn't necessarily something that we're consciously thinking about and that we're doing on a day in and day out basis. When I think of marketing agency secrets, I think those marketing agency secrets are the good marketing agencies reside right there in that customer acquisition part of the equation. And it breaks into four key areas. I call these the four pillars of customer acquisition. And I've beaten this up just about every which way that you can think of and it just keeps coming back to these four. These four things have to be hitting. You have to be getting these on consistently in order to drive revenue consistently. In order to predictably drive consistent revenue, you have to have these four things. And they kind of go in order. And the first is what I call strong brand. Now I could spend all day talking about brand and the importance of a strong brand. That's not what I'm going to do in this show. As a matter of fact, I'm just introducing you to these concepts to these pillars. And if you think that you might have a weak brand, if you think that your brand might need some work, then this is the first thing that you as a marketing director need to address. And typically, this is something that needs to be done by professionals. I'm always about giving away free information. I'm all about making sure that you have everything you need to succeed without having to pick up the phone and call us. And there are a lot of amazing branding agencies in this city and in all the cities which we serve, currently over 67 markets we're in. And there's a lot of amazing branding agencies out there. And go pick one, work with one because you have to have a strong brand in order to do anything after that point. The strong brand is what guarantees that the rest of these pillars are going to work. The strong brand is that message. It's that promise. It's the promise that you can make to your customers and the promise that you can keep. The strong brand, it's what ties it all together. It's the visual aspects, the visual identity. But more than that, it's the feeling, it's the emotion that is a vote that connects with real humans. And that is the foundational pillar for driving customer acquisition revenue, strong brand. The second pillar is market awareness. Now you can have the strongest brand that there ever was, but if no one knows who you are or what you do, then what's the point? It's kind of like you can build a website, but without driving traffic to that website, what's the point? So the market is aware of who you are and what you do. It's that simple. If your market is aware of who you are and what you do, then you've nailed that second pillar. Here's the thing. A lot of times we want to make a lot of people aware of who we are and what we do. But in reality, our market is not everyone. If you try to be all things to all people, then most of the time you're going to fail. Now the third pillar of customer acquisition is targeted lead generation. And in this day and age, we can actually target the right message to the right person at the right time and in the right place. This is where customer journey mapping and buyer's funnels and buyer personas, where all this stuff, when we talk about marketing, really starts to take shape and come to life. Right message, right person, right time, right place. What is this? This is the holy grail of marketing. This is targeted lead generation. In order to target leads who will end up being customers, what do you have to do? You have to make sure you have the right person. Like I said, you can't advertise to and be all things to all people. It just doesn't work that way. Fine tune your approach, fine tune your pitch, fine tune your service and your product and make sure that you are hitting just the ones that will convert on your offer. Okay. So this is making sure that you're targeting the right customer, right person. You got to have the right message. And in order to do this right message, you got to make sure it's right time and right place. Okay. This is where the customer journey mapping and the before and after grid and all these cool things start to materialize and come into play. Because in order to do targeted lead generation correctly, you have to know these things. For instance, buyer's journey, not everyone on your site, not everyone that comes across your marketing material is a buyer right now. In fact, according to chat homes, author of the ultimate sales funnel, which was the precursor to inbound marketing, only 3% of people, only 3% of people that are on your site that are coming across your marketing are now buyers, meaning that they're in the market right now, they're ready to make a purchase. The way that you create content or you create the message for the people in that timing and that place, it's different than how you would project a message or create a message for somebody that is not ready to buy now. In fact, 6 to 7% of people are not ready to buy now. And if they're on your website and they're not ready to buy now, but they're in this group of 6 to 7% that they would buy now, but there's something holding them back. And so, you know, your message, your strong message of call this number, fill out this 18 page form and buy from me now is a lot different for that 6 to 7% that is being held back for some reason. Typically, that reason is trust and credibility. So, the message that you need to deliver at this point in time is a message that reinforces that you are a credible brand, whether it be a BBB affiliation or a testimonial or a review has to be something to kind of increase that credibility, increase that trustworthiness. But then when we think about the rest of the people, you know, outside of that initial 10%, that aren't necessarily ready to buy now just because they're not customers or customer material yet, what type of message are you going to deliver to them? I mean, you're not going to tell them to fill out an 18 page form and pick up the phone and give you a call because they're never going to do that. Yet, you have a website and you have content on that website. And so, you have to begin to think about how do I develop content that will engage these people, captivate them, motivate them, inspire them and get them into a system, into a funnel, into some sort of constant communication or drip email marketing or something to this effect that will keyword nurture them until they are ready to buy. So, these are all types of people that are your ideal customers but just at different stages in time, different needs, different points of awareness and they're just not ready to buy now. So, you got to think about that when you think about targeted lead generation and here's why. You don't want to spend all of your advertising budget on people that just aren't ready to buy now even if they exactly match your ideal buyer persona profile. If they're not ready to buy yet, then you're just paying to educate people. You're just paying to kick that can just a little bit further down the road and that ROI is not going to return to you anytime soon. So, when we think of targeted lead generation, it's more than educating, it's more than driving brand awareness or market awareness and now it's a matter of let's go and let's find the people that are ready to buy now and let's bring them on to the site, let's bring them into the showroom, let's get them to pick up the phone so that they will buy now. Now, if you're doing this, first three pillars of that customer acquisition, strong brand. So, that's that core message, that brand promise and the outworking of that visually and in storytelling. The second is market awareness. This is that the people who are qualified to be your customers are aware of who you are and what you do, market awareness. The third is targeted lead generation. This is when you're going out to the web and you're pulling people in through advertising, you're generating targeted leads and you're bringing them back to your website or into your store or you're connecting with them somehow. So, what's the fourth pillar? Before I share that with you, imagine that all three of these pillars are just hitting on all cylinders and for some reason you're just not closing any deals and you think to yourself, well, I don't care how good the marketing is, obviously, there's a problem and somebody is to blame. Typically, that person is you. So, if the boss says, you know, I know that that we've been spending a lot of money in this area, in this area, and seems like we have a lot of traffic, it seems like they're qualified, you know, I mean, everything's looking nice. It sounds right. People are saying, you know, that they see is everywhere and all of these things. So, on the surface, you might think that you're doing a pretty good job and I know that you are, but here's the thing. If at the end of the day, your boss is not seeing the revenue, remember, we're talking about customer acquisition. If he or she is not seeing the revenue, then guess what? You're to blame. And as a marketing agency, we're to blame too. And so, the fourth pillar, always the fourth pillar of customer acquisition is sales proficiency. And it sells proficiency because it's in your best interest to make sure that deals are getting closed, that people are converting on the website, that your offline sales teams have what they need to close the deal, whether that be collateral or the proper systems. Now, I understand as a marketing director, you might, you're not a sales director and you don't necessarily know what's needed. But the first thing you have to do when it comes to sales proficiency, if you're in an organization where there is a sales director, you have to connect with that person. You have to make sure that marketing and sales are aligned, that you have a shared terminology, shared goals, shared KPIs. And if you're spending thousands of dollars a month on marketing, if you're spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on advertising, then you have to be able to draw a line between that spend and the sales that that spend is producing. This is results driven marketing. And without that sales proficiency, without that fourth pillar, you're always setting yourself up for failure, because there's always going to be moments when sales aren't what they should be, or aren't what I as the boss expect them to be. And because of that, and because you're spending all the money, the blame is always going to fall on you. And as a marketing agency, we know that if we are helping you to spend all that money, then that blame is just going to roll downhill. And it's going to, the finger is going to be pointing at us, regardless of how strong the brand is, regardless of how well the market knows who you are and what you do. And regardless of how many leads are actually being generated, if the salespeople or the website isn't closing the deals, then it always falls back on marketing. And so that fourth pillar sales proficiency ensures that your eyes are on the prize and that you're doing everything that you can to make sure. And as a marketing agency, we're doing everything that we can to make sure that those deals are getting closed because at the end of the day, that's the number that determines the revenue when it comes to customer acquisition. That's the number the boss is looking at. That's the number that matters. So these are my four pillars of customer acquisition. And I hope this was helpful for you. Just to think about all the things that go into driving and generating revenue specifically through customer acquisition. Now, once you have those customers in, remember, it's time to start retaining them and focusing on retention. And really the only way to do that, like I mentioned at the beginning of the show, is that you're doing what you promise and providing a high quality service. Now, if you are looking to increase your customer acquisition to grow your customer revenue, and you need help with that, I believe we're the perfect partner in that regard. Contact me. I want to talk sales and marketing with you. You can find me at slamagency.com, click the free consultation button, and I'll be happy to share a few moments just chatting with you about sales and marketing. One of my favorite subjects. If you've enjoyed this show, do me a favor, subscribe, rate, review, share with a friend. 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