If you’ve had a meeting with us, if you’ve had a proposal from us you may be considering taking the plunge and working with JDR Group – to have us become your outsourced digital marketing department, and to implement our sales and marketing system.
We’ve found that there are certain questions which come up on a regular basis, so here are the top five (and, importantly, the answers!).
We also have a video webinar on this subject - you can watch that here.
If you'd prefer to listen to the podcast version, you can find it on Soundcloud here, or on iTunes here.
Do You Provide References?
We used to – in fact we used to show a number of clients on our website for anyone to see. Over the years our visibility has grown, however – and we found the companies on our website were getting contacted more and more. We have since taken any specific mentions of clients off our website, but we still get asked for references several times a week.
So much so, that we have taken the decision to make it a policy not to provide references any longer. We respect our client’s privacy, and more importantly we respect their time – and we don’t see it as their job or responsibility to try and convince people to work with us.
This can seem strange – after all many marketing agencies lead their sales process with references. When we say we don’t provide a happy client to talk to, it can make you wonder if we don’t have any happy clients at all!
But if that were the case, we wouldn’t be retaining clients and we wouldn’t be growing – when we are doing both of those things, in fact our retention rates are extremely high. We recognise that as a result of this policy we may get fewer new clients but we accept that.
What you can be sure of if you do go ahead and work with us, is the fact that we won’t share details of your company and you won’t have to be regularly interviewed by strangers asking you questions about your marketing.
And after all, how much value do you get from references? How much does it inform the decision-making process? As with employee references you’ll only be given the details of people with positive things to say anyway!
How Can You Write Content For A Business/Industry You Know Nothing About?
We currently write content for lots of different industries, including product and service-based businesses, B2B and B2C. Many of our clients are in niche, technical and/or highly regulated markets so the question often comes up about how we’ll be able to write blog articles, whitepapers and eBooks in an unusual industry.
So, the first point is that not all blog articles require deep technical knowledge – if you have a technical product or service your potential buyers/customers may not be from a technical background and may not want or need lots of technical information. For example, if you sell IT services to small business owners, then very few of your customers will have an interest in the technical details – they’ll want to know what the benefits are, how you’ll work with them, etc.
Many articles do require technical content however, and we want to get to a point where we feel like an extension of your business, and when we send you a blog article or whitepaper to read, it is 99% ready to publish with no or limited changes needed. This won’t necessarily happen from day one, but we always get there - here’s how we do it:
Listening – our marketing programmes begin with an initial kick-off process which involves us getting to know how your business works on a deep level. After that, as we meet regularly, we always ask questions, listen and take notes, and even interview you or key members of your team – we want to pick your brain and apply the knowledge you have to your content.
Buyer personas – we’ll work with you to profile your ideal customers/clients and create ‘buyer personas’ so that we fully understand the intended audience. This helps us know the challenges, problems and goals of your customers and helps us get the tone/pitch and language right for them.
Your existing/current material – we carefully review your existing material, to ensure consistency of approach and ensure we are as factually accurate as possible.
Independent research – we’ll do our own online research to find supporting statistics and factual information to include in the content, as well as understanding what other people are saying in the industry on a given subject.
Two-step approval process – you get the draft content to approve before it goes live or is published, but we also confirm the topics themselves with you so you can approve the titles and concepts of the content we’re going to write before we start work.
Learning from feedback – if we send an article which you don’t feel is quite right, you don’t have to rewrite it. Simply provide us with the feedback and we’ll rewrite it – that way we learn quickly from your feedback, and from this process we can get to a point where the content is right first time.
How Much Time Will Be Required From Us?
The majority of our clients are small and medium sized business owners – people who have little or no time. So we have designed our approach to require as little input and time from you as possible, but there will still need to be some. After the first month, however, your time commitment will be for the review/reporting calls and meetings themselves, and to read/review the content we create for you.
Do You/Would You Work With Competitors Of Ours?
We don’t promise exclusivity as standard – the world is a big place and there is plenty of scope in most markets for everyone to make money. However, we do take conflicts of interest seriously, and would never take on a new client that could potentially damage an existing/current client. It’s also worth pointing out that we are non-industry specific, so if we begin work with you we will not start promoting ourselves as specialists in your particular industry and start approaching all of your competitors!
What Results Can We Expect?
There are three main outcomes from working with us:
- Get more leads – we will increase website traffic, and increase inbound lead generation
- Market to your database – we will help you build a new opt-in database of people who have an interest in your product or service, and we will help you market to your existing database
- Get more sales – we are not just a marketing agency, we know and understand sales and can help you develop your sales system and salespeople to be more effective at converting the leads you get into sales
The approach is:
- Fully measurable – we believe fully in testing and measuring every element of your sales and marketing
- Consistent – you see steady, reliable growth that builds and gets better and better over time
- Sustainable – you will be investing in digital content ‘assets’ (a bit like the difference between paying rent and paying a mortgage, by investing in content the articles and guides we produce will be around and helping you for years to come)
We don’t do forecast reports as I have yet to see one that accurately predicted future results – but we can share some examples of client results (in our case studies section), and we also recently completed an analysis of our average results over the first 12 months.
On average, we increased website traffic by 191% and the number of leads/enquiries each month by 654% for our clients.
