Boost Your Business!
How To Keep Clients (and keep them coming back for more) Webinar Transcript & Video
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Webinar Transcript
[Downloadable version of this transcript, the presentation deck, and other materials are also available in the Dashboard Resource Center]
Bernard:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Boost Your Business webinar. My name is Bernard San Juan. For all of you first-timers here, welcome. For all the second and third-timers, you know, welcome back.
So with me today is Tim. He’s our newest business developer, and he’s been a project manager with us for a couple of years. I’ll let Tim do his introduction. Tim?
Timothy:
Hey there, guys, my name’s Tim, and I’ve been with SEOReseller.com for about two years. I’ve done project management, and I’m currently doing business development for SEOReseller.com.
So, I’ve already been in the digital marketing industry for about five years. I’ve built partner relationships with our key partners and retained about 500 projects already in my course of experience in the digital marketing realm.
Bernard:
And, of course, again, I’m Bernard. I’m a web professional of 18 years and work for you at SEOReseller. Now just for a bit of background. I asked Tim to join me on this webinar because, among our project managers, Tim has some of the highest retention success rates.
He retains an average of about 14 months which is impressive. And I think the perfect person to discuss the challenges you face to retain a client would be the person that’s got the art down.
Before I move on to the meat of the conversation, this is the period for Bernard’s shameless plugs. I’m going to do a few quick ones. We have a few recent dashboards features up.
We launched the mockups and the Proposal Creator right after the previous webinar. The Mockup is a web design mockup creator, and it allows you to incorporate client feedback in real time.
It works hand in hand with the proposal creator because the mockup you build can be added onto a proposal creator with a contract, and so on. That allows you to provide professional-looking documentation to your clients after a conversation. You have to get them to sign on the dotted line.
Remember that we regularly add new design sets for business categories for more mockup options. Soon, we’ll be deploying the web design project to allow you to launch one with us as easily as a click of a button.
Now my second shameless plug is the resource center.
The Resource Center provides you access to templates, brandable documents, and client management materials. This allows you to train your sales team by providing them with guides, methodology explainers and product sheets. We’re constantly adding new material to the resource center, and now it’s available in US, UK and Australian English. So be sure to check that out right after the webinar.
The dashboard feedback module is the last plug, and I believe Tim will have one in the webinar. Coming soon, we will enable small businesses and your customers to gather their positive reviews and grow their online reputation from the dashboard.
The feedback module is just one component of our complete online reputation management suite. It’ll include online reputation monitoring, citation listings, and review management. As soon as that’s up, we will communicate it with you guys post haste.
Before I get into today’s Boost Your Business webinar, I just wanted to briefly cover what we discussed in the previous Boost Your Business webinars in case some of you missed it.
On the first Boost Your Business webinar, the one that I did with Itamar, we talked about becoming a powerhouse in less than a year. There are a couple of key points I wanted to highlight.
First is knowing when to take it seriously. When do you moonlight being a digital agency, and when do you treat it like your career, like your business? You need to know when it’s that valuable to you.
The next one is to begin with your close network. Once you decide that it’s more than just moonlighting, more than just freelancing, where do you get your first set of clients?
We’ve been getting these questions a lot. The answer is your first set of clients is closer to you than you think. They would be people within your close proximity, within your network, or your personal network’s close personal network.
The next one is to automate as much as you can. That’s just you using the dashboard because when you start out, you will be a one-person show but you don’t need to appear like a one-person show.
Automate as much as possible because it’s hard to balance being your own salesman, project manager, and business owner. Then educate yourself.
We understand that some of you are pros, but some of you are not. Feel free to educate yourself on the material we’ve got on the dashboard, and if there’s any material of interest to you, ring our project manager.
Also, know when to get help. When are you larger than a one-person show? Know when it’s time to hire help. You can’t be your own business owner, salesperson and project manager for a prolonged period of time.
The next one is a growth hack, and it’s simply “niche.”
It is easier to be the master of one niche than to be a jack of all trades. Of course, use a system and methodology that works or works with us.
On the second webinar, we talked about acing your next sales pitch. There are a few bullet points here.
The first one being an instant expert. Know the little bits and bites of data that you can call off the top of your head to appear like an instant expert. Know the little tidbits, the little facts, the latest news.
The next one is to look big by thinking big. Meaning everyone starts as a one-man show. You don’t have to look like a one-man show. Use the dashboard to show them that you’re invested in the technology.
Do not report with Google Docs or Word documents. Leverage the technology to make you look like you are well entrenched and invested in digital marketing.
The next one is knowing your prospect. I’ll coin Eric Schmidt here. In the internet century, they are Googling you if you’re not Googling them. Respect the time of your prospect.
Know who they are and prepare for what their needs might be. Listen while you’re in the pitch. Make sure you’re listening to them.
The last bullet point I wanted to discuss on acing your next sales pitch is about creating desire. Creating desire, you know more than just adding value, meaning giving them a service that works.
You have to give them something they’re not paying for. You educate them on the industry and why you’re doing certain things. Give them educational material; give them access to the dashboard. All of this before they spend the first dollar with you. People like to reciprocate goodwill. You can use that to your advantage to close the sale.
Now, let’s get to the meat of this conversation. Before I do, let’s dig into some stats. Did you know our beginner agencies have an average retention rate of about 4.25 months?
In contrast our powerhouse agencies, our powerhouse partners have a retention rate of a year and a half to two years. That is a stark contrast. A factor of more than 5 in terms of retention capability.
Some of our accounts here at SEOReseller are over four years old. Some of them have a tenure that’s longer than mine. SEOReseller’s retention rate averages over a year and that’s, considering we intake hundreds of month-1 campaigns every month.
They sort of drive the average down, but our average retention rate or average batting rate once we take on a campaign will – most of the time – retain them for a year or better.
Powerhouse partners execute a growth hack to retain their customers, and this is by putting them in a contract. Tim and I will discuss this further as we progress through the presentation.
I guess I’ll start us off by asking Tim a question. Tim, you are regularly in touch with clients. What do they usually face in terms of retention challenges?
Timothy:
I’ll answer that question based on my recent conversions with partners. One of the biggest challenges they encounter in their retention is client fallouts and sudden cancellations of their campaigns. You could factor those into some issues.
One of which needs to be able to put them on contracts. They take you by surprise. They cancel after months 2 and 3, and they’re gone.
The other issue I usually get from our partners is that they need to set their expectations properly. Meaning they weren’t on the same page. So those are some of the reasons why they are having problems with their retention.
This is great because what we’re about to discuss with you in this webinar is some key pointers on keeping your clients and them coming back for more. Like what it says in this slide, we want to share some insights and tips on retaining your clients and fostering loyalty to your business.
Know your baseline, set goals, highlight success, add more value to your clients, and never stop looking for ways to drive more business.
Bernard:
At the end of the webinar, we’ll have a Q&A session, but I just wanted to remind everyone. Feel free to send your questions in advance using the WebEx chat.
You don’t have to wait till the end of the webinar to start typing in your questions. You can do that at any point in time in the presentation. I promise Tim, and I will not be interrupting.
We’ll move on to the next topic, which is knowing your baseline, and I want to start it off with a case study.
We want to talk about us and our history for our first case study. When SEOReseller started in 2011, we wanted to grow. But we didn’t want to be lucky. We didn’t want to grow incidentally, we wanted to grow deliberately. Meaning we wanted to be consistent, we wanted to be predictable. We wanted to be successful by design.
What we needed to do was we needed to figure out where did we stand in terms of our ability to retain our customers, and let me tell you. We were shocked to realize that whenever we took someone’s business, we could work on their campaign for about an average of three and a quarter months only.
It was a real eye-opener, and then we had to strategically figure out the ideal life cycle and the ideal life span they should spend with us to achieve the best results for SEO. So, we all mutually agreed it was six months.
So, we set a goal for ourselves to reach a lifespan goal of six months for every campaign. Within the same year, our average retention rate went from three-point twenty-three months to seven months.
We beat our goal, which meant a hundred and fifteen percent increase within the same year. Today, our average retention is whenever we work on a campaign. We will probably work with them for a year or better.
That is nearly triple an increase from our initial year. That’s about four times, almost four times increase from our initial year. And we’re very proud of that.
Timothy:
More about knowing your baseline. Bernard was discussing earlier how you need to know what you’re starting point is. First, you must calculate the number of clients who signed up and remained with the agency.
In the previous webinar, we discussed identifying and establishing the niche you want to target. This is also important in being able to identify how you are going to be able to retain your clients.
You have to know where you’re going to start before you retain. You need to know a baseline of your clients. Every business has a closing ratio. If you’re not closing a certain percentage, you don’t know your baseline.
So, you need to know which clients you want to take care of and retain to grow with you.
The second bit is an important question that everyone should ask themselves. Especially small business partners out there. How do you avoid client cancellations and fallouts?
I answered this earlier in my answer to Bernard. But there are three things you need to know. You have to put your clients in a contract.
Now I know some clients get scared when you present them with a contract, but the truth is it costs seven times more to gain new clients than it does to keep your existing clients, so you better get them on a contract.
Bernard:
Now more than that, we all also underestimate that most businesses you engage in will expect to be put in a contract. That’s first things first. There’s nothing bad about making customers easy to enter and exit.
But we try to teach you guys to put clients in a contract because it’s a growth hack. Learning how to sell a contract is far easier than becoming an SEO or digital marketing expert overnight.
After 18 years of experience, I can’t claim I know everything about digital marketing. But I can teach you how to sell contracts in one to two sessions. It’s way easier to learn how to get clients to sign the dotted line because contracts offer security and commitment. I’ll let Tim move on to the next one.
Timothy:
Set expectations. This is what I said earlier about you and the client or your customer meeting eye to eye or being on the same page. You have to know what your client’s goals are.
You have to be on the same page with them, so you don’t promise them the moon and the stars. You have to tell them exactly what you’re going to deliver and what they should expect at the end of the campaign.
The last bit would be constant campaign updates. We will expand on that later. There are many things we provide here at SEOReseller.com that help you provide your clients status updates.
Bernard:
Now, if you’ve not set a goal for yourself before, it would be fair to set an acceptable average retention rate of six months for you because this is where the effects of SEO can be felt.
Now, pro tip. You can’t improve if you don’t know where you are. You cannot move forward if you don’t know the starting point. And the other thing that we wanted to put is that it costs seven times more to get new clients in the door than it does to keep the ones you’ve got happy.
On setting goals. We’ve got another case study to discuss with you.
This one was with a budding agency we were working with within Australia. They began exclusively as a web development solutions provider. So they were a web design company.
The problem with being or with offering only web design is that it’s a revolving door. Revenue comes in, and revenue comes out. You’ve got to have a salesman on the field. You don’t make recurring revenue next month if they’re not closing.
They needed a model that secured and made the revenue predictable, so they moved on to an adjunct industry, SEO. When they got in, there was no in-house SEO expert, and they frequently got themselves into hot water by over-promising because they were trying to learn how to become experts overnight.
To solve the problem, we had to go into a program with them to teach them how to get clients signed into a contract. It wasn’t an easy conversation because they weren’t used to it. They were used to web development SLA, which lasts thirty days.
But getting people to sign a relationship with you for the next six months they thought would be difficult. When we taught them to overcome their mental objections and they started implementing contracts with their clients, they grew, and their average retention increased from four months to six in the next hundred days.
As of today, they are an 80% SEO revenue-generating company. Pro-tip, know the strengths of the methodology. Don’t try to be an instant expert overnight. Learning how to sell a contract is easier than learning to be an expert in a few days.
Know what the methodology can do. Understand the goal and marry the goal to the expectations that you set.
Timothy:
Let’s talk more about setting goals. The first thing you need to understand is that you must know the methodology you’re working with.
In essence, this is also being able to communicate directly with your project manager and being on the same page with what they’re recommending to your clients.
You have to ensure that this translates to properly setting customer expectations. If you understand your client’s goals for their business, for example, we’re talking about revenue. We’re talking about return on investment or conversions, then ask the expert.
You will then know what strategies are needed on your end or our end so we can execute based on our set goals.
Bernard:
One thing I wanted to add on goal setting is if you’ve set a goal for yourself of, let’s say, twelve months’ retention, in a book by John Maxwell called the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, he talks about the law of Mount Everest. The law of Mount Everest is quite simply breaking down one ginormous goal into several smaller, soft goals.
So, you need to figure out the activities to accomplish incremental wins. If your current average retention rate is around five months and your ideal target is 18, you’re not going to get from 5 to 18 overnight.
You must implement strategies ranging from 5 to 6 to 12 to 18. Each of those soft goals has different activities involved.
So, putting clients in a contract is just one hack you can execute to do that, which means quickly winning the six to twelve-month tenure. But it isn’t the only solution to you being able to retain clients.
We’ll show you some other tricks you can do to do that. Work closely with your project manager to ensure you choose the correct campaigns to fulfill those goals.
Timothy:
You have to work closely with your project manager to ensure that you understand what your client needs and what we are recommending.
So, for those who have recurring accounts with us already, you already have your project managers. Whether that’s Gary, Carlo, CJ, or Eric, whoever that may be. You can contact them directly if you need help.
We are available for you guys twenty-four hours a day, five days a week, so give us a call. Again, here’s my shameless plug, as Bernard pre-empted you earlier. For those who don’t have one yet, you can give me a call. My numbers are 415 625 9700 ext 1013. Add me on Skype or LinkedIn.
Bernard:
We’ll move on to the next topic, and we want to discuss highlighting success, and this is you now, getting the contract signed and then nurturing the relationship.
I see that the chat is very active, but I wanted to remind everyone to feel free to send the questions as they pop in off the top of your head.
Now, moving on to the next case study. On highlighting success, the case study we wanted to discuss is one of the banks that worked with us and started a campaign.
The campaign ran for 12 months, and when they began with us, they had only 64 keywords visible on the first page.
Through the 12-month period, they increased their first page rankings from 64 to over 2000 ranking keywords.
Guess how many times we were there to tell them to take a look at what we’ve put on the first page. We did it every time.
We made sure to do it every time because this was precisely what we were trying to do. Highlight success. Highlight the effect of the work that we’re doing and show them how it was adding value to their business goals.
So, here’s a pro tip. Be the bearer of news. And I’ve said this as early as the first webinar. You have to be the bearer of news, good or bad.
In our experience dealing with hundreds and hundreds of websites month in and month out, we’ve discovered that customers and clients don’t care so much about you bearing bad news. What they mind is when they discover bad news by themselves, and then they have to chase you up for an answer.
You have to offer information proactively. The reason we retain so well is that we’re always the bearer of news. Good or bad. Customers mind a lack of input more than they lack bad input. Make sure that you’re there, that you’re always the bearer of news.
Timothy:
I’ll dive deeper into highlighting success. The first key point to this one is establishing your client’s business goals.
Bernard:
Agreed.
Timothy:
You have to know what they want to achieve their goals in their business. You have to know what the method would be. It’s not a one-way channel. You have to make sure that this makes sense.
You’re not going to over-deliver or under-deliver. You’re just setting them the proper goals.
Bernard:
It’s also the right way to start. Like Covey says in 7 Habits, begin with the end in mind. You can’t set proper expectations; you can’t manage expectations if you don’t know what goals you’re trying to manage.
Timothy:
Manage the expectations from the start, so there are no surprises. A good example is when you’re trying to select keywords for an SEO campaign. You know that about 70 – 80% of your keyword selection influences the success of your campaign.
If you’re unable to manage your client’s expectations on what to rank in terms of your keywords, then you’ve already failed at the start.
Onto the next bullet point. Create desire continuously by communicating progress, milestones, and project status.
Bernard:
I want to jump in here quickly. The way you distinguish the three is– progress is what you’ve done better than this month than you did last month and whether it’s traffic, referrals or better rankings, or better visibility. That’s progress.
Milestones would be how you’ve progressed through the work that’s getting done, meaning did you complete all the on-page initiatives, what results did it drive, have you begun doing link acquisition, and have you begun improving their digital footprint.
Then, project status is your opportunity to hold your customer equally accountable for the campaign’s success. That’s all we mean when we say progress, milestones, and project status.
Timothy:
Much like you’re in a relationship with your partner, you must continuously create your desire with them. It doesn’t stop in month 1. It has to be month on month.
Another thing you want to remember is you have to spot opportunities for your client to leverage. This is why you have to be the bearer of the news.
We’re not telling you to lie to your clients. We’re telling you to tell them the bad news if there is. There’s bad news, tell them. Clients appreciate transparency between you. It’s a business. You have to let them know.
The last bit would be keeping your clients on board with the process, and this is more effective if you have a close relationship between you and your project manager.
Bernard:
Also, observe the progress of the campaign. Observe the progress of the project and if it’s trending well, this is an easy win for you. This is an easy way to keep them on board with the process.
Going back to the concept of a business relationship, because that is what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to solidify your relationship with your client to retain them. All of these bullets are just meant to do one thing.
Create opportunities for increased engagement. Relationships are fueled by communication and all of these bullets encourage one form of communication or another with clients.
Pro tip here quickly. Highlight the previous success to show the campaign is building momentum. If you guys have seen what our executive summaries and reports are like, this is precisely what they’re designed to do.
All those little nice green numbers, those little green arrow-up icons, what they do is they show you the incremental increase from the previous month to the current month. I’ll move on to adding more value to clients.
Remember, feel free to add any questions, and I’ll start us off again with another case study on adding more value to clients.
I’m particularly proud of this one. We had to execute a campaign for a website for a prominent figure, and his initial goal was more visibility.
His idea of more visibility was creating a second penguin-proof mirror website. This is a difficult conversation. If your customers were all experts, then yes, go ahead and do what they ask you to do.
But the reality is if they weren’t strong digital marketers themselves. To do justice to your relationship with your customer, you have to be the expert they need, and sometimes that means being the expert that tells them they’re wrong.
In this situation, it was going to put us in a tough conversation because if any of you are SEO savvy, you already know duplicate content is a bad idea. It’s a bad idea. I can’t even stress how bad enough. It’s a bad idea.
How could we add value to a guy that wanted to execute a strategy that was a bad idea? We had to wear the expert hat and have the tough conversation and guide them into the right way to drive.
We began with the end in mind, we asked the customer, and we asked the partner. What are they trying to do? What is the end in mind? What is the business goal?
We realized by asking the right questions that they just wanted more traffic. More traffic, more leads, more sign-ups. Of course, the customer had tactical goals of having another website.
The wrong way to have executed that would have been to do exactly what they said, so we changed gears and told them, “Why don’t we build you a complimentary website instead of building a mirror site?”
Of course, we didn’t want that website to cannibalize the rankings of the original branding website. Instead of driving leads and making this second website more on-page relevant for the same terms, we focus on their social presence.
Did they have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, or a Youtube channel? And pointed all of these now onto the second property.
Eventually, what we found was that we retained the campaign for a total of 14 months. In 4 months, it earned so much equity for its brand name that when you looked for the name of the prominent figure, the second website appeared on the second result next to the primary website.
It started gaining incidental rankings for terms similar to the main website. More than that, it drove referral traffic to the site from social engagement. So, the strategy was to engage strangers, engage potential customers from social channels and then conclude that experience on the website.
To add more value to clients, here’s a pro tip. But, before I jump into the pro tip, there are two concepts that I want to point out.
There’s a social concept called a moral imperative. And in Rolf Dobelli’s book, The Art Of Thinking Clearly, he highlights a thinking bias called reciprocity. A moral imperative means you always mean well, and people tend to reciprocate good intentions and good behavior.
It is so important that you change your agency’s internal language from; how do I make more money off my client, my customer to; how do I add more value?
Timothy:
One of the things, especially for SEO savvies out there. You know that you can check your client’s website’s Google Analytics data. You have to look into it and see where the traffic’s coming from.
Is it coming from Organic traffic, is it paid search traffic, is it social, is it a referral? You can spot opportunities where you can leverage and add more value to their campaign.
You need to say to your client how I can get more of your money. No. Change your agency’s internal language to how can I add more value to my client? You’ve got to ask the right questions.
It’s not about you getting more business out of them. It’s you growing with the client. Another thing is you have to be flexible. You’ve got to modify your strategy if you can add more value.
Remember that SEO is not the end game of the digital marketing realm. There’s a lot more to it. There are social media, and there’s pay-per-click. You can even consider trying to redesign the website to improve conversions. There are a lot of things you can do.
The third thing is to be proactive with your clients. I want to use the keyword proactive because we have instilled this in our company. It’s one of our core values – being proactive.
In the same manner that our project managers, all of us here, are being proactive with you when it comes to reporting or when it comes to providing status updates with your clients, we want you to translate that being proactive to your clients as well.
The last bit is highlight positive results compared with past reports. We have executive summaries. We have ad hoc updates to give your clients.
If there’s a big jump in their rankings, be the one to tell them. If there’s an upcoming algorithm update from Google, be the expert, and tell them right away. They would appreciate that.
Bernard:
Going back to being proactive. You guys have to understand that most of the time, and when I’m saying I’m talking 90% of the time, we don’t have direct access to the website owner.
We have to be extra proactive. We must be extra proactive because a digital marketing strategy only works when it’s truly collaborative.
We never get to collaborate with the website owner at any point in time in a reseller relationship or in a partner relationship. Therefore our employees have to be extra proactive, especially our project manager.
Going back to highlighting positive results, I will mention something I mentioned again. The executive summaries, and all the reports we send you guys, are engineered to highlight positive results and trends.
They are comparative in nature. Allowing you to draw from the previous success or from the current success of the current month compared to previous months’ achievements.
Timothy:
More on adding more value to your clients.
Stay relevant and find ways to add value through channels you haven’t explored yet. This goes back to you exploring other options in the marketing realm for your client and I think one tip I would advise everyone is that you have to be in the know.
You have to know what’s going on with the digital marketing industry. Read articles online, and subscribe to our blog – it’s even better. We keep ourselves up to date with the latest trends in the digital marketing realm.
You can always talk to us, talk to Bernard. We’re here to talk to you guys.
The next bit is a holistic marketing approach, more than just SEO. As I said, SEO is not the end game of digital marketing strategies. We have other options out there.
I know that some of you guys may have been doing this for years now, and you might consider yourselves, I would say, SEOs, but there’s more to just SEO. You have to explore your options.
Last but not least is to adjust campaign recommendations relevant to the following. Visibility or SERP rankings, website traffic, leads, or goal conversions. This is where I would like to cite an example of a campaign that’s reached about six months already with you.
You may know that you must revisit the keywords to find more opportunities or products and services to cover instead of the ones you’ve used. Or, in terms of leads and goal conversions, maybe it’s time to redesign the website to improve your conversions.
Bernard:
I know we’re called SEOReseller but unlike Moz, we can’t drop just drop the SEO and be called Reseller. [laughing]
Timothy:
[laughing]
Bernard:
We are talking about a holistic marketing approach and more than just SEO. This goes back to the previous presentation, the previous slides in the presentation where we were talking about understanding the marketing goals.
It’s about visibility, traffic, and leads. You also have to understand the time frame. If the customer you’re talking to is looking to generate a massive amount of leads in a short span of time against a relatively young website, then you already know SEO is not the right strategy.
But you shouldn’t be apprehensive about talking to them about alternative means of accomplishing that goal: social media campaigns, Adwords, or Google Display Network.
You can’t be afraid to discuss these digital marketing strategies with your customers. Remember, you’re the pro. Call us if you’re walking into a conversation and you feel that this is where the conversation might lead to, and you’re not entirely comfortable. Call us.
We will train you to be comfortable discussing these topics. There are experts in digital marketing galore people in the office. And we’re ready to take your call. Even on your off hours because we’re here 24 hours a day, five days a week.
The most important bit is, understanding the goal and offering a strategy that delivers the goal.
Now, one more bit, and I am attached to this section of the presentation. It’s talking about never stopping to look for ways to drive more business.
We’ve got the fifth case study in this situation, which is not the same bank we discussed in the previous slides.
In 2013 we acquired a billion-dollar bank as a client, and they had an annual budget of $24 000. Now you know, $24 000 sounds like a lot of money. But they’re a billion-dollar bank. [laughing]
Timothy:
Whoop di doo [laughing]
Bernard:
So the reactions go [pen clicking]. But we understand that despite SEO being a particularly old industry – it’s almost two decades old, for those who don’t know – some people just need to see its initial impact before they become financially and emotionally invested in digital as a strategy.
Show them that SEO can increase traffic, bring in new visitors, drive better engagement, and increase brand visibility. You will see results similar to those we saw with this specific client. They raised their annual budget from $24 000 the previous year to over $300 000 the following year.
Timothy:
There you go.
Bernard:
That is an 1150% increase in their budget or, in short, an increase in budget by over a factor of 10.
SEO is older than two decades. I’m not sure if you guys are aware, but Bruce Clay is credited for coining the term SEO. He supposedly coined the term as early as 1996, that’s two years before Google was Google.
SEO is still relatively unknown. A marketing study discovered that 90% of the websites on the World Wide Web belong to small to medium-sized businesses, and 91% need to be optimized.
This is why sometimes you will walk into established businesses or mom-and-pop shops that have been around for decades and when you start talking about digital, it either looks like you’re pulling a rabbit out of a hat or it looks like you’re staring at headlights.
SEO is still relatively unknown. You have to be the educator. Sometimes all it takes is to get their proverbial feet wet, and once they do, they start feeling the financial justification for spending more on digital as a strategy.
This is precisely what happened with the bank and us. Never stop finding ways to help your client. People reciprocate good will and good intentions, and people invest in results.
Timothy:
I’d like to add what Bernard has already established on looking for more ways to drive more business. You must ensure that you are evolving and growing with your customers.
It’s not one-way communication. It’s not a one-way relationship. You have to grow with them as they grow. Focus on more than just one marketing channel.
I can’t emphasize how much I believe that more than just SEO is your client’s main need in driving more business to their company.
You have to understand your customer’s business and marketing goals. This is you and the client seeing eye to eye on what needs to be done and what has to be accomplished for their business.
If they’re after traffic, you must implement the right strategies. The same goes for other goals. You have to intervene in a campaign when it means achieving better results.
Now, this is you not antagonizing the client. This is you wearing the expert hat and saying to the client. This is what will work with your campaign. We know the battles we can win and the battles we can’t win.
Bernard:
Sometimes that even means changing gears. When I say changing gears, I mean changing the keywords because the initial keywords are incredibly difficult to rank for.
It is significantly better to drive relevant visits from long-tail keywords today than invest 12 – 18 months’ worth of work to try to gun for an incredibly competitive keyword. The visitors they drive today add more value to the business than the customers who will come to them one and a half to two years later.
Timothy:
That’s true. One last bit. Digital is a great medium because everything can be measured.
Bernard:
Everything.
Timothy:
Yep, when I say everything, I mean it with all my heart. Everything can be measured. Some data bite on the right-hand side of your screen. The average ROI on SEO is between $14 – $22 per dollar spent. That’s according to Marketing Sherpa’s 2014 report.
Bernard:
But we will personally attest to this. We have a client with a small family-owned hotel in Australia. They attest to the effectiveness of SEO. They were saying that their return on investment was over 2000%.
Whenever we see feedback like that, I know I’m doing the right thing, which reinforces why I come here every day. I like making a difference. I believe in this Marketing Sherpa report because it is consistent with the experience we see with customers and clients.
We’re just going to sum up most of what we’ve discussed, but before I do that. I will talk about the last slide on never stopping to look for ways to drive more business.
Remember that SEO is one cog in the digital marketing strategy component. Digital marketing is just a component in the big machine that is marketing. That’s what SEO is.
Remember that it’s there to fulfill a marketing objective, and there are several marketing objectives, and there are several marketing strategies.
But four of the broadest strategies that your customers will approach you to help them grow their business with is they’ll need your help is one, growing their client base, meaning more customers.
If they are a mom-and-pop shop, it’s growing the visit frequency meaning growing the number of times a specific customer walks into the store.
The other one is growing the average dollar spent. We showed you an example of that.
The bank that worked with us increased their budget by over 10-fold. They grew their average dollar spend with us after getting their feet wet in terms of what digital can achieve for them.
They could also ask you to help them differentiate from their competition and this is a branding strategy that SEO, PPC, Facebook, and all of those campaigns could help achieve.
But the bottom line is that you need to develop a strategy and set expectations for something that addresses their priority. A word of caution, don’t try to hit all of these in one go.
Don’t try to hit all of these in one go. Gun for the ones that either add the most value or the ones that are for the lowest hanging fruit. It might be growing their client base and helping them differentiate through SEO. These might be residual objectives.
It could be visit frequency, longer retention, or more customer faithfulness. It might be social media. It might be your strategy. But these are what you need to help them achieve in the broadest strokes.
Before we wrap up, I would like to summarize the things we covered in this webinar.
Timothy:
We discussed five pointers about how to keep your clients and keep them coming back for more.
The first one we discussed earlier knows your baseline. This is you identifying what’s your starting point. You need to be able to set your clients whether they are going to be in a contract or not.
But most of the time, and this is what we recommend, get them on a contract. Get your retention rate higher.
The second is setting your goals. You need to see eye to eye on what you need to establish and what you need to achieve on the client’s end. Highlighting success is you simply being the bearer of the news, whether it’s good news or bad news.
Adding more value to your clients is exploring other options, more than just SEO. There are other channels out there. Do social, try doing pay-per-click, and maybe a redesign.
The last is to always look for ways to drive more business. We’ve discussed how to gain the client’s trust and strengthen the relationship by trying to drive more business to their clients.
Bernard:
And get them to reciprocate goodwill.
Timothy:
I hope that the baselines or the pointers we’ve discussed gave you an arsenal to re-strategize and maybe revisit your methodologies for retaining your clients.
Bernard:
Because we’re talking about adding more value to clients, incidentally, we built the Partner Progress Tracker and I really want to say kudos to our marketing team and our developers for developing this in time for the webinar.
Tracking the growth of your Agency is easy by using the partner progress tracker. You can follow the bit.ly link or you can go into your dashboard and take this from the Resource Center. It is now available.
All you need to do is enter your baseline, set your goals in the spreadsheet, and then see your progress month over month. It is incredibly important to hold yourself accountable to whatever your baseline is and whatever your retention goals are. Sometimes all it takes to achieve a goal is to have a goal.
That being said, we’ve occupied 45 minutes of talk time, and it’s time for us to go to the Q&A session.
We’ve got one comment from one of our attendees that says, I agree. The comment says the beauty of the internet, we can measure everything. And we agree.
As we go through the questions, I just wanted to start with one of the starting questions. The first question we have is:
Which industry would you say is the best in terms of retention? Have you guys identified any trends?
This one is a little difficult to answer, but I’ll answer this based on my experience. Tim, feel free to add in which industry you think is yours.
Timothy:
Yeah, absolutely.
Bernard:
For me, the easiest industry to retain is real estate. Anything that has to do with, including hospitality. But when I say real estate, brokers, people that sell houses, people that sell management rights, and these guys.
They are easy to retain because the industry is incredibly competitive. They are either doing their digital marketing, or their competitor is out-digital marketing them. It’s an incredibly progressive industry.
The other industry that I’d say would be easy to retain are, incidentally, dentists and chiropractors. They are very enterprising. And they also know that it’s very competitive. I’m constantly surprised at how savvy dental clients are in terms of looking at their digital visibility.
Timothy:
I don’t know if you’ll agree with me or some of the attendees here. Based on experience, I take into account the experience I have with the key partner we have here at SEOREseller.com. I guess law firms or lawyers would be one of the key industries with a great retention trend.
Bernard:
Also because it is incredibly competitive.
Timothy:
The competition is high, and these guys have enough money to invest in digital marketing. They also know that traditional marketing is only part of the game for their business.
They want to compete with the other lawyers in their area for digital marketing – and a lot of them are using that today.
Bernard:
To jump into that quickly, most of the lawyer websites that we deal with have a strategy of offering information upfront.
For example, they know off the top of their heads. People that are planning divorces start doing their research months ahead prior to them needing a lawyer, so them being the ones that offer that information up front makes them resource people.
That’s an incredible insight into their industry. Lawyers are also incredibly insightful in terms of their digital presence.
The next question is:
Is it possible, in your opinion, to form meaningful relationships with clients that are far away? How do you guys manage to do it?
For us, the answer is a resounding yes. A lot of you guys are far away from us. A lot of our existing partners are far away. Since we can’t shake hands with them, we have to simulate the love, and the love that we simulate is by being available on Skype, chat, on LinkedIn, email, and on the phone.
Timothy:
Yeah.
Bernard:
Five days a week, 24 hours a day. That’s how we manage to do it.
We try to simulate the care. We try to simulate the trust. Because we can’t shake your hand, we must always be there for our partners.
The next question is:
How do I balance setting expectations with closing the deal?
Timothy:
Well, the truth is, the expectations have to proceed at the close of the deal. You can’t promise them the moon and the stars. You have to make sure that what you’re delivering to them is realistic.
It’s something we can deliver. Setting expectations is very important before you close the deal, which plays a major role in retaining your clients. It builds your trust with the client and also establishes your credibility.
Bernard:
I’m moving on to the next question:
How do I get my foot in the door with a bank or similar enterprise? How did you do it?
This is a great question. For us, we executed a growth hack. What we did is we went and married a media agency.
When I say we went and married them, it means we partnered with a media agency with large enterprises in their pocket. Since digital was not their forte and it was ours, we decided to leverage each other’s strengths.
They began introducing us to the larger industries, and the other companies that were competitors of the people we were working with started taking notice. Before we knew it, people started walking through our door.
The two banks I talked about earlier, by the way, literally walked in through our door. That’s amazing. There is a question here, and it says:
I work with smaller manufacturers. Sometimes they don’t know how to access their analytics, or it’s not set up properly. Only on several pages. How can you help in this case? Will you assist in fixing this or setting up the code properly on their site?
Great question. The answer is yes. We are SEOs. For better or for worse, this is our bread and butter. If a site you enroll with us does not have analytics, we will create the analytics account for it. Since we need to see it.
We can’t help customers if we don’t see the data. Most people say Google is their oracle. We sort of takes this a few steps further. When we say Google is our oracle, we’re not just talking about the search network. We’re talking about Google, Analytics, the Search Console, and the Webmaster Guidelines – all of that.
We need to see the information about the client’s site. We don’t just help you set up analytics or set it up correctly for you that exists. We also do that for the Search Console. I hope that answers the question.
The other one is:
Where do our margins come into play?
We recommend you charge double to triple the rates inside the agency dashboard. They are competitively priced, and they are industry standard.
Our pricing is priced the way it is because it is the most feasible. I always want to say that we’re not the cheapest provider, and you get what you pay for.
We offer a premium experience, and we offer premium results. This is why we charge accordingly to those experiences as well. Plus, running an office with 131 digital marketers is a costly undertaking.
Timothy:
I want to pick up on what Bernard said about margins. That’s true. You have to mark your prices up about 2 – 3 times the price we’re offering.
If you’re offering your client a service like a one-off service, meaning it’s not SEO, it’s not pay-per-click, it’s not a recurring campaign.
Let’s say you’re offering website design, and you don’t have any guarantee that the client will continue after that. I’d say go as high as 400%. You don’t have any leverage for them to continue after that unless you put them on a contract, which we discussed earlier.
Bernard:
Another interesting, probably a sensitive question too. The next question is:
Have you had a situation where you couldn’t deliver for a client and had to let them go? When do you let go?
This is a great question. These situations have happened a couple of times, and I believe that they happened because we didn’t do the right thing at the start of the relationship.
We did not choose to become the expert, to obtain someone’s expertise. We prematurely said yes. We decided to engage without a clear understanding of where our ability to deliver was.
We realized this very quickly, and then we revisit customers with clients at the campaign’s 3 – 6 month tenure. We tell them that we need to revisit the goal, we need to revisit the keyword, or whatever it was that wasn’t done correctly.
We do it because we want to achieve results for you today. We don’t want you to wait for one, two, or three years down the line to earn rankings for that incredibly competitive keyword.
People in this office will lose sleep if we take anyone’s money without adding value. It’s just not something we believe in. So, there are times when that has to lead to a parting of ways.
We try to do it as amicably as we can. We try to deliver value for whatever anyone pays for.
Timothy:
I think it’s when we think at the onset of the campaign, upon our analysis or research, we actually make sure that we can deliver results for the client.
Some unforeseen events or maybe algorithm updates affect the strategy we’ve put in place. We’ve had to change it drastically.
There are times that we cannot deliver, and this is because we have not foreseen what will happen. There will always be a time when you have to throw the towel in and say, “we did the best we could,” and it’s time that we pause or we cancel this campaign because we don’t want to be taking our client’s money for something we are not able to deliver.
Bernard:
Another tough question. You guys are asking tough questions!
Some of my clients have a PR person who controls some of the content creation, news, press releases, etc., but they don’t understand SEO. However, they’re very critical of the quality of content for blog posts and so on.
How scalable is the quality of your content creation? Can you handle technical medical content specific to that vertical space?
Great question. I’ll answer them point by point. The ideal way to do it is to be in constant contact with the PR person. Remember, because we are the agency that executes the work, we don’t talk directly to the clients, to the customers, or to their agents.
As the partner, this is your accountability. This is your responsibility. Being sure that the PR person is collaborative with you at every step of the way.
There are ways to overcome the disconnect. These are the intake forms and the customer briefs that need to be filled out. If there are specific instructions, those can be filled out there.
I’ll move on to the next question, which is very critical as it’s about the content created for blog posts. We are ghostwriting for the client and it represents the business. It must sound like their voice.
One of the things that we try to remind clients of is remembering we don’t live and breathe those brands. The better the briefs are filled out, the more we can simulate what it’s like being in the shoes of the business owner or the people in that business.
In terms of blog posts, they’re free to send them back for as many revisions as they need until we get them right. We frequently execute calibrations between our project manager, editors, and content writers. To get the content as perfect or as near perfect as we can.
But I think it’s proper that the PR person is meticulous regarding the content posted on the client’s website. How scalable is the quality of your content creation? It’s pretty scalable.
There’s an army of writers in the office, and we produce over 6000 pieces of content varying from product descriptions of 50 words to in-depth articles of over 2000 words.
Then how do you handle the technical content of the medical industry? We have writing rules. Technical and medical, so to get a bit technical, we make sure that the readability score and the reading e-score are compliant with how technical the industry is.
Our writers do a lot of research. Our project managers proofread these. Our editors proofread this and then we submit them to the client for approval. All articles are very well-researched.
We’re going to wrap up the webinar after one more question, and I’m just trying to decide which one I should use because these are amazing questions. I guess I’ll start with this:
I don’t always have the time to spend on building my client relationships because I’m out there trying to sign new deals. Are there any hacks to overcome this?
I’ll answer this. There is a way to hack it. Use the dashboard. The dashboard is meant to simulate love and caring. It’s meant to simulate caring. That’s what we designed it for.
That’s why it’s visible with your branding, with no trace to us, with a white label URL visible from their mobile or wherever they are.
They can view their campaign’s performance while waiting for a delivery truck, to replace a flat tire, or something. But it is designed to simulate love and caring. The reports are automatically generated and sent to your mailbox.
This goes back to one of the pointers we discussed in terms of the first Boost Your Business webinar. If you’re getting more clients to fall in love with you, your business, and what you believe in, you need to know when to ask for help.
It might be time to hire a VA or bring in a partner, but something that allows you to scale your business. Initially, you’ll be able to be your own business owner, salesman, and project manager, but that’s sort of got a low lid or a glass ceiling that you’ll hit.
To scale properly you need to know when to ask for help. Whether that’s in the form of a virtual assistant or not, we also have solutions in the office that can help you. Feel free to talk to a project manager and ask about it.
Timothy:
Or talk to me.
Bernard:
Or talk to Tim. With that, I just wanted to say thank you very much for spending another hour with us. We’ll keep doing these webinars for as long as you guys keep coming in.
Feel free to schedule a call with us through the bit.ly link. They’re on the screen, which is bit.ly/getsked, and feel free to call us at any time if you guys have any questions.
Those are our U.S. and Australian numbers. You can also email us at [email protected] and ask for Tim.
Timothy:
Yep. You know my extension is 1013. Just give me a call.
I’d like to say thank you, Bernard, for having me in this webinar. It’s been a blast.
Bernard:
My pleasure. It won’t be the last time I’ll have you. And thank you very much to everybody that joined us. I’ll see you guys at the next webinar.
Timothy:
Thank you, guys.
Bernard:
Your time was appreciated.