Hello everyone, and welcome to today's live stream by me, Farzana of SF. Today's topic is going to be all about inbound marketing strategy. Before we get started, welcome to any new viewers today. If anyone that isn't, um, if you want to put any comments in the comments box, we will be looking after those throughout the session. Um, if you have been with us before, then welcome back. I do hope you'll think, um, yeah, I think we're running.
So without further ado, let's get started, and today I'm going to be covering inbound marketing and looking at the flywheel methodology, how you can implement that's sad. And before I get into the topic itself, um, the week never stops at SF Digital. Um, we just wanted to share some of our wins.
So, um, to summarize, our content management calendar is finally fully working. Um, it's been a number of weeks of hard work, just that we have a lot of content out on the day, and that's taken a look sure that the process is comfortable. So we're really pleased, thanks again, almighty heart.
Um, also our internal systems, we're actually creating all our videos and sub videos that are from a masters like today, that's also complete. Um, complete as much as anything ever is. Um, no such thing as perfection, if it's no today, so there will still be tweaks, I know that for sure, but, um, in, in essence we are done, so very pleased.
And the third win is that we've recruited a social media manager in the case. Um, she's doing amazingly well and, um, has already helped gain more subscribers and followers, which again is boosting our work and helping us to reach out to our audiences.
But, uh, I'd also like to share our biggest win, um, which is that we have managed to beat some of the leading names in the market world, and have, um, managed to get ourselves ranked in Google for quite, quite a lot of our videos. In fact, over 100 of our keywords now are ranked on Google, um, in video terms, and as you can see, these are known as three packs.
And we, um, are already here on certain keywords. Obviously this must have been micro macro goals, and you can see that we are featured on all three slots for videos in that spot. Um, rather rude of, uh, Google to take the number one spot, how dare they, their own platform. Um, but as you can see, we have taken the following two spots. Oops. And again, we have, um, taken some spots here.
Um, but the, the best one probably is this one, where we have come ranked above leading names, and these are industry leaders: HubSpot, WordStream and indeed Google. We are above them on that particular. So really what we're demonstrating is that consistency in posting and systemizing your outputs, the traction will build. This hasn't happened overnight, but it's not actually been that long either.
So it just goes to show that consistency, you can also achieve this. And we are not a big agency, we are a small but growing agency. Um, we are certainly not big boys, but hey, let's see where we end up, maybe soon turn into one. Um, how are we doing all of this? Well, it's really by implementing systems and working through our workflows and our process, and that's taken time. That's not something we've done overnight.
But we can only do that if we actually understand the theory behind what we're trying to achieve. So today, hence, I've chosen to pick this topic about how we can actually encourage inbound marketing, and also, like I say, using that model of the flywheel method, just demonstrate to you how you too can start to achieve some inbound results.
Now, if you talk to any business owner, including ourselves, over these last 18 odd years since we started business, you'll often find that, you know, businesses have changed completely from where they started to where they may be today, and that's certainly true of us. Where we started in 2002 with a, a part-time photography business, there's no resemblance to today.
But that's not just down to the activity of our business, the output of what we're doing. Actually, the real reason that change has happened is because of our customers, our clients. Because if our business is to change, it's actually going to be led by the clients that we are servicing, and if I was to look at the clients that we had, the customers we had at the very beginning, there's photography, mainly portrait, event photography side of the work, they are totally different people that we are looking after today.
But we also have to be very conscious that today's customer is extremely knowledgeable. Thanks to the world of Google, knowledge is at your fingertips. You might have to search through it, but certainly anyone can become an expert almost immediately, just by trawling through the huge amounts of info out there on the internet.
Um, they also have high expectations, because they're able to compare notes, they're able to review different bits of knowledge, services, products. They can actually then do their research. It's not just a case of which TV advert won, or which magazine published an advert. Now they've got a world of information up into.
As customers, we're also very good at tapping into our networks. We don't always just rely on the information presented to us. We are probably more likely, I know I certainly, take our conversations a little bit offline. So recently, for example, I need the services gardener, and although I'd seen a Facebook testimonial and recommendation, first thing I did, take my company offline. Who is this person, and they'd be relied upon, are they any good? Or, you know, that's, that's another conversation and another touch point of how I would have done my research before commissioning this person.
And probably most importantly, we're no longer looking for just a monetary transaction. We are a little bit more discerning, and dare I say it, over these recent weeks and months, as we've all been put under the microscope with our businesses and the services that we offer, people are only willing to part their money if they really do feel that you've engaged with them as a customer and that you are able to give them great service and look after them.
Because at the moment, for many businesses, earning that money and getting that out of our pocket as a customer is hard work. You know, we maybe have, many people, their disposable incomes may have shrunk a little bit, or times may be uncertain if they're facing redundancy, so we're not as free to spend our money. It has become even more important to be really, really customer focused and really look after what they need by our values.
Um, a little risk to all our businesses: if you do something badly, our customers will have no problem spreading that word very quickly, and we can lose all the hard work of months and years that we're building with our business with just a few bad words on the internet. Sometimes, once it's out in the public, very hard to put back. Yes, there are, you know, fake reviews, trolls, all that kind of thing, but once it's out there, sometimes, you know, customers may think there's no smoke with fire, so they may actually, you know, do a lot of damage.
Again, I'm sure all of us have had experiences where we don't get great customer service, and we will grumble, we will, our friends, our networks, our working communities and beyond. So it's really important to, to weigh that up when we're considering our customer and what they mean to us.
Now, the flywheel model. Now, if you think of a, a flywheel and what that actually represents, it's actually a really efficient, energy efficient device, or machine if you like, and how much energy is produced in that device will depend on its size, its speed and also its friction, so things obviously working against the energy.
And to activate that flywheel, in terms of marketing terms, we would start where I've just placed this arrow, with basically a stranger. So I'm demonstrating this model assuming that this is, let's say, day one of your business. You have zero customers, and we would obviously would have to start with strangers to engage with us.
Of course, more mature businesses, you could be anywhere in this journey at any moment in time. There will be some people, some potential clients, that are still strangers to you, there'll be some that are already turning into prospects, there'll be some who are your customers, hopefully there will be many, many who are so thrilled with your services they themselves will become your promo in time. That's how you.
So the strangers side of things, we need to put a bit of energy in, we've got to engage with them, and there are a number of ways that you may choose to do that. So you may go down the paid advertising route, you might decide you're going to go through the customer referral program. Again, that's a little bit tricky with strangers, because until they become your customer, that's going to get hard for you to actually start from a zero point with them. You might choose to go through content marketing and indeed video marketing. Excuse me. There we go. Uh, okay, so, um, acting, okay.
Uh, in our case, we, as you all know, for those of you that have been with us many times before, video marketing is a key core activity for us, and all our strategy has been devised now very, very tight, tightly around video market, and that is our main floor of activity that is bringing and mark our inbound leads.
Moving on from there, strangers to, to then becoming hopefully your prospects. So they've not quite turned into your customers yet, but they are looking to possibly engage with you. So again, you might think about setting up, um, good sales teams, um, systemizing how you're going to follow up, you up your leads, and just creating a structure in.
Now, one of, I don't know about you, but one of my pet hates, um, if I was to go to a trade show, or I ask a salesperson to contact me in, let's say, four months time, for whatever the reason, and they don't, they've lost me. Because I asked them to do something, I, I'm, I, I'm half ready, but I wasn't quite ready, hence I've given them the heads up, I'd like a contact in four months time, but they don't bother to follow up. So this becomes crucial to actually making sure you never lose a lead.
Now, depending on which country you're in, culturally this can be a tricky fine line, tightrope to walk. If a customer or a prospect doesn't give you a timeline, it's very difficult to know, am I calling too soon, am I calling too late? And so it, it does become a little bit personal as to how you're going to actually deal with that.
Now, in the portrait photography business, yes, I would have lots of, uh, families, particularly the mums of households, who would say, you know, they're busy with xyz, call me in two weeks time, or certain time of the day. Everything would go into the CRM system, everything would be marked with a date or a time, and it would all be set up as a task. I would never forget the ring back, when someone to ring.
Now, of course, I may still need to be follow that through, they may still put me off till the next call. Not a problem. My theory would always be, it's never a no until it's a no. Until then it's always a maybe, it's always worth pursuing and checking that prospect out. Hopefully you will convert them to a customer, and here again it's really important to have your systems in place.
Um, we certainly are, um, quite, um, serious about client account managers and putting a personalized contact into place for our client. Um, again, for that to happen efficiently, we need to have workflows and of course processes. So it doesn't matter whether, you know, Uzair or myself, we are the first point of contact for our clients, if it goes on further down the line to our teams, then they are able to handle and know work that has been done so far, because it's all been systemizer program.
Um, for those of you that were with me on my last presentation, you know that I talked about Asana and how we use that to say, um, communication, strong communication, both internally and externally. I really do believe, eat sure that you're, it's a fantastic journey with you and, and stays with you. Um, so it doesn't really matter who that contact is being looked after, that really go a long way.
Reaching the next stage, where your customer has had such a wonderful ex and have been looked after by you, they themselves will become your biggest evangelist, they will become your pro. And so as they go out and give you rave reviews, bring in other people who are strangers to you, it then completes the wheel and brings you right round back to strangers. And this, in essence, a nutshell, is how you can create that flywheel of activity, to just move from stranger to prospect, customer to promoters.
Of course, there are obviously risks to these. We will have things thrown at us. We as a business, as SF Digital, are not, uh, immune to the frictions that can. So for example, let's talk about the first few things, um, that have been maybe friction in the business. Not enough systems. We go back only six months to where we were with our video marketing, there was a basic system, but again, as I touched on last week, things had just become a glorified list.
They weren't actually automated, and I call it the baton passing between different members of our team and our staff was very, very manual, whereas we have reinvented, make sure that everything can be. Um, your risks might be the situation we are all in, an unexpected major disruption to our business. We may not, most, none of us could have predicted the risk that we're all facing right now, but we certainly wouldn't had anything in place.
It would have been really important pick up where our business, assess those risks business immediately and plug those gaps as soon as we. A little bit of fire fighting, but hopefully by recognizing, you can then get proactive about actually thinking ahead and thinking, okay, we will never put ourselves in this.
Now, of course, as you're putting all this, these systems in place, it's really important that you're, you're still able to connect with your prospects and your, hopefully your clients, in the manner that they wish to do. Now, this is quite a tricky one, because as our, as our world has become faster, as our prospects want immediate answers to our questions before they'll convert, if they don't get that answer, they move on to the next supplier.
They're, they're often communicating through all sorts of channels. It might be a WhatsApp message, Facebook, Insta, your own email, subscribe, an email, a phone call. We've got, we're bombarded with the route that they choose to use, and we can't almost roll that, or dictate how our preferred method is.
So it's up to us, that as a business owner, to make sure that, yes, all the bases are covered, but no matter which angle they choose to engage with us, they then are fed back into the system and back into the process. Because if the process is modeled up, we will spend more time trying to manage that lead and inquiry than actually system being able to follow through in a neat way.
So for example, if we were to get a website inquiry, yes, that will come through whatever inquiry channel that it does, but immediately it will go into our website quoting system, where we would be analyzing what's the scope of the job, where are the recommendations, what are the audit side of existing websites that we're going to have to do, how much information are we pulling. All of that gets fed into the system, then we can accurately quote, and then we can accurately class as to which is the best route.
So if we're going to work with increased speed and decrease the, the friction in our business, hopefully we will end up with more promotion or business. Because the more smoothly you can operate, from a client perspective, they are going to see you, you as the business, um, servicing them as being highly efficient, able to meet their needs. And at the end of the day, we are there take away the pain, it needs, and deliver great exception, hopefully.
If we then move in to the inner ring of this, we will see that we have three stages. Now we've moved them on into being customers, and hopefully, but we now need to make sure that we nurture that customer, and we do that through attract, engage and delight.
So the attract phase. Obviously we need to first get them into our system, and how are we going to do that? So we might be looking at putting out content, um, making sure that there aren't any barriers to it, to the, the information that somebody's looking for, educating them on what our services are, but in a nice way. And that could come through, uh, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, paid advertising, conversion rate optimization. You might look at remarketing. The list is endless. There are so many digital ways in which you can actually attract your, um, clients.
We would also then want to then hopefully engage with them, and again, this is really important, that having attracted them to you first place, we don't then hiccup was a break in that system. So you might want to look at things such as email personalization, database segmentation, lead scoring.
So for example, you might work out that if a lead comes through to you direct email, that in effect they would earn them more points, but if it's something that was a quick one-liner on Facebook, that might be worth less points. Because when you analyze your figures, you will see that the leads that come to email tend to, uh, convert at a faster rate than our Facebooking.
And as you analyze your figures, you will be able to assess, okay, if I've got limited resources, if I was to change, chase every single lead with the same quality, same amount of effort, actually, realistically, the email ones are the ones are more valuable, because they're more like, and there are higher value conversions as well. Not saying you would neglect the Facebook ones, just saying you would be able to weigh up and assess which ones are more valuable to you.
Um, it's also important that we, um, probably think about the words open and close, and open feels so much nicer. You know, open your conversations with potential, be open about building a relationship, be open about making a connection with. Because it's actually through finding a common ground and that connection, you are more likely to convert that client.
Whereas when we talk about closing a deal, it does feel like that's an end point, and actually I don't think in a, good relationships are about being open, and, and that goes far further than just a transactional, one transaction moment by closing a deal. Because actually, um, that's missed opportunities on both halves. You are only viewing it as that one.
And then we come to the delight phase. So by having won the business, if you're able to support, help, nurture, educate your customers along the journey of what you're doing and why you're doing it, you will find that they themselves will become so engaged in the process, the pain side of what you are doing for them will just disappear. They will feel supported, they will know that you have their best interest.
And, you know, in the, in, let's say, in our example of when we're setting up campaigns for business, why do they come to us? Because they may have used other agencies and it's been painful, they may have tried to do it themselves and extremely painful. Google AdWords in particular is not for the faint heart. It is not some recommend DIY project. There's a, a lot of subtle things in there which really does require expertise, very best out of ads campaign.
But if by working with your client, and in a, in a nice way giving that education as to why you're doing something, and to a degree sometimes explaining how you're doing something, suddenly your client's fully on board. They get it, they get it that you get them, that you're looking after their best in.
And just from having this belief and, um, sort of our mission statement, how we like to work within, we have gone on to, to gain huge amounts of work with what started off a simple transaction, and that's purely by looking at, um, the delight phase. How do we manage that? We can do that through using dedicated account managers. That's something I touched on earlier, where someone is actually looking after that client for all their needs.
Um, you might want to have communication channels open. It doesn't matter how your client chooses to work, they can reach you however they, they are willing to reach you. It's not for us to dictate, well, please don't WhatsApp me, because, uh, please would you stick to an email. That may not work for them. They may be working off their phone and they like to use that. Doesn't matter, all the information still gets fed into our system, where communication isn't lost.
Um, you might have some really good systems in place, and should have some good place for onboarding. So the, the contract, the expectations, the scope of the work, the variations that may happen, terms and conditions, payment terms, all of this needs to be as part of your onboarding, again giving your client confidence that you know what you're doing, and it's a very open, clear letter as to how your work.
And then finally, if we move right to the center of our flywheel, and if we're doing all these activities on the edge of the flywheel, in the middle ring, we should hopefully manage to get some growth. So by analyzing your data and keeping an eye on those numbers, providing excellent customer service, you'll be able to adjust your strategy yourself.
So for example, for us, um, often, as, as you all know, Uzair being on videos, um, daily, he will get inquiries coming through asking him specific questions about Google Ads. Now, at this moment in time, he thoroughly enjoys looking after those, and much as we've started to discuss, well, should that not be through a different way of managing those, personally he actually enjoys doing that, because he's able to connect with that person immediately and give a really clear answers to what they're looking for.
So for us, that's a really important part of that excite phase, of making sure that we are hopefully getting our prospects engaged with us. So it's important just to look at these different things to see how you get to your growth, and in time you'll be able to make decisions differently. If we hadn't have used these principles, even though slightly informally in our earlier years, we were probably doing these things without knowing that we were doing these, not consciously, uh, we couldn't have assessed our decision-making pro.
So probably one of the biggest ones, there have been a number, but probably one of the bigger ones in the last two years, was deciding we are not running a portrait studio anymore, social photography. We couldn't have made that decision, we weren't able to look at our numbers and know where the business needed to go, what our strategy needed to be for the business, where our strengths are and how we're going to service our customers.
And this goes back to what I said at the very beginning. If we were to review our customers, they have completely changed over 18. And so now we can understand, these are the customers we are looking for, this is the content we need to put there to find those custom. No use making videos about topics that we are not interested in attracting them.
Um, I would just like to summarize that the key to all of this is really reviewing your processes really regularly, systemizing every single stage of that process, and strong internal and external communication, and ultimate the customer focus, that is really, really.
And I'm going to just round off with one very quick example of something that happened in the business just yesterday. Now, we have a particular sequence of events we have, which is all about, um, creating the videos. Normally that goes to the, um, video editor, and then we create some custom images and some cards. Now, yesterday we decided we need to change the order in which something is actually devised.
So that immediately got alarm bells ringing, that for that process to happen, we needed to, um, switch the order in which different members of the team received the information. So immediately we needed to go back into the system and move the order around, move the dates around, for that to be able to happen. So that's why we were able to do that and implement that within 24 hours, because the system was already in place. All we were doing was adjusting it to meet the new needs. So again, this is what I mean by constantly reviewing your systems, and you'll be able to react much, are in place.
And that brings us to the end of the actual presentation of today's episode. I hope you've enjoyed the topic. Today was a real overview of the flywheel structure. In coming weeks now, I'm going to be doing a slightly deeper dive into each of those areas and talking about how we can actually implement, uh, different parts of the energy that flywheel.
So I don't like theory, I will be get to giving you real life examples, actual real-life action, because, um, we don't like geek speak or techno language or anything like that at SF Digital. We want to present the information to make it meaningful and give you some direction, actually take some action.
Now, I'm not sure if there are any comments coming through. I'm just going to ask, bear with me while I just scroll a little bit, just see what we've got coming through. Bear with me. Yeah, just a quick check. Apologies for the sound issues at the earlier start, I think Uzair must have solved those. Yep, I think most of these have been picked up by Uzair in the background, so he has dealt with anything, especially if there's anything specifically on Google Ads.
Yeah, thank you Emily for your lovely comments, and thank you Mike as well. Thank you, um, Sandeep, for joining us again today, and I think we've picked up everything. So if you suddenly have a flash of inspiration and want some insight on something, always very, very happy to help. Would be delighted if you're able to give us a review on Google My Business, and as a thank you, I'm more than happy to hop on a one-to-one with you and just give you some ideas and, and do the card if necessary, and just talk about some ideas.
Uh, what would you advise for a startup company? Oh, you picked the last minute, Nikhil, to ask me that. Um, I don't know what you specifically mean in terms of advice for startup. I think you probably mean how to actually get going in terms of customer leads etc. Um, Nikhil, if it's right with you, can, can I ask you to make contact with us through any other channel you wish, uh, email or, or WhatsApp or any, any other channel? I'm more than happy to have a chat with you, uh, one to one, actually get a better understanding of what you're asking.
That's a huge, huge topic, but like I say, in future weeks I will be covering individual areas of flywheel as discussed today, and I do hope you'll, um, join me again and hopefully learn something that might be of use. Thank you once again, and I look forward to seeing you all again soon. Thank you.
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