For clients who are serious about increasing sales or who don’t yet have a marketing strategy in place, we act as an outsourced CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). With our CMO approach, we dive deep into your customer acquisition channels to create a phased marketing strategy that prioritizes the tactics that will help you achieve the most significant growth.
Our CMO approach is unique because instead of just focusing on ads, SEO, and creative like many agencies, we roll up our sleeves and assess all of the potential customer acquisition channels, rate them, and develop strategies around scaling them. Nettra sits as your quarterback for growth by deploying our team and yours to fully implement and optimize the marketing strategy.
Our goal is not to be your CMO forever. So we build marketing processes as we work together, allowing your staff to assume critical marketing and growth positions. Over time, in some cases we continue to explore new growth initiatives, and in other cases after building a solid foundation for growth we focus on specific tactics like SEO, email marketing, and digital ads management.
The Marketing Summit is our process for gathering data to understand your organization, services, goals, and competitors, then create your phased marketing plan. It consists of the following 4 meetings:
Before the meeting, we assess your current digital presence and do a competitor analysis. During the meeting, we review our findings with you and perform a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).
The real magic of our CMO approach happens during the acquisition channel meetings. Together, we look at the first 10 - 15 channels and come up with creative, viable customer acquisition ideas for each.
We finish creating ideas for the remaining channels, then rate and score each idea for its impact, our confidence in its success, and its ease of implementation. The highest-scoring ideas become phases 1 and 2 of our strategy.
Before this meeting, we determine what roles our team and yours will play and the costs of each acquisition channel we’ll initially target. We also determine relevant KPIs for each channel to measure our success.
We've invested thousands of hours in identifying every client acquisition channel and ideas that work for each one. It’s important to point out that the following list is not exhaustive for each channel. During a Marketing Summit, we provide one or two initial ideas to get you thinking about how it could work in your industry and for your ideal customers.
There are many ways to connect with and create customers.
For many companies, a handful of relationships bring in the majority of business. Business development strategies like offering complimentary services for referring clients back and forth are often responsible for over 60% of a company’s sales revenue.
Do you know which business partnerships and local businesses bring you the most customers? Do you actively make relationships with new businesses? Do you analyze your customer base to determine which are your most valuable and why? Do you take action to activate similar customers that aren’t spending as much?
If not, you’re probably wasting money on advertising!
Creating a business development strategy that involves other stakeholders is more difficult than funneling money toward ads, but it brings in double the new business.
The best form of advertising will always be word-of-mouth referrals.
Referrals are your secret weapon because they increase the lifetime value of an existing customer and decrease the cost of acquiring a new one.
We’ve taken our referral programs into the modern era with targeted outreach using IP addresses. Google & Facebook can retarget, but they routinely delete your customer data. To counter this, we use third-party analytics software like Kissmetrics to store your customer IP addresses, allowing us to hyper-target your customers with digital ads. Then we reinforce the message through emails and direct mail to tastefully stay in front of your past clients.
The ads can promote how your company gives back to your community, recent projects, and any other relevant achievement that allows you to remain relevant to customers. This is a cutting-edge process, and we’ve never seen another company managing a referral process quite like this one.
It’s not uncommon for a business using our referral program to increase its number of customers by 40% year-over-year.
PR is pivotal for two reasons: it brings your company a lot of free exposure, and it legitimizes your service or product since it appeared in a well-known publication.
But did you know that a lot of reporters ignore PR firms and prefer to talk with business owners directly? You can take control of your PR by reaching out to reporters yourself and offering tips, market predictions, and other advice that they can quote in their articles. You can also author your own feature article.
Help a Reporter Out is an easy way to connect with reporters who are actively seeking your expertise. They pose a question on the platform, and you provide an answer.
What’s another word for unconventional PR? Publicity stunts! Publicity stunts can go amazingly right and result in a ton of business for a small investment if you know how to do them.
For example, Hipmunk, a travel site, combined customer appreciation with a publicity stunt when they sent out luggage tags and handwritten notes to the first 500 people who tweeted about them. The ALS ice bucket challenge resulted in $115 million in donations and press coverage that lasted for years.
To be successful with a publicity stunt, it needs to be surprising, but it should also incorporate your core message as a business.
When was the last time you clicked on an ad and actually bought something? Yeah, it’s been a long time for us, too. Most people click on ads when researching a potential purchase, so this is where content marketing wins!
Content marketing helps you build trust with an audience so when they’re ready to purchase, they want to purchase from you. The goal with content marketing isn’t to become internet famous but to be omnipresent to the right people — your target audience.
Jumping straight into conversion-focused Google ads can be risky. Many times, you need to build trust and awareness first, and content ads on Facebook are a more affordable way to make sure your bottom-of-the-funnel Google ads convert.
SEM ads are text-based ads that appear at the top of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. They’re effective because you can target keyphrases that are relevant to your business and your ads will show up for people who are actively using those keyphrases in a search engine. The ads can also be geo-targeted to zip codes, cities, or states.
However, SEM ads are very expensive and it can be hard to get good ROI from them if they’re you’re only strategy. Usually, it takes 3-5 clicks to get a potential lead, and if every SEM click costs $15 (for example), you’re paying quite a bit of money to get the phone to ring.
Instead, we typically use Facebook or Instagram ads to generate interest in your brand first because these clicks cost much less. Then we retarget people who clicked on your social media ads with your SEM ads. It just makes more sense to hold your expensive SEM ads for a lead who is more familiar with your brand and closer to becoming a customer.
Everybody wants to talk about digital marketing because it’s trendy, but guess what? Billboard and radio ads can still make sense for a lot of businesses!
For example, if you’re a credit union offering a new checking account, about 70% of the population is a potential member. Widespread traditional ads that target a large swath of the population can generate tons of views and brand awareness for a reasonable amount of money, making them very effective for some industries.
The bottom line? It’s not smart to throw out an acquisition channel just because it’s not trendy.
Almost every company should invest in SEO, with very few exceptions.
The reason this acquisition channel is so universal is that if your potential customers can’t find you on page 1 of Google’s search results, you simply don’t exist to them.
That’s a scary position to be in for many companies. If you don’t have an SEO strategy or if your current strategy has stalled out, we urge you to stop ignoring SEO. However, keep in mind that successful SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
Foundational SEO tactics include:
Want to go viral? Of course you do! Even though the majority of videos that are made to be viral never actually go viral, there are some proven ways to get more organic shares for your content. The best way to do this is with humor.
Keep in mind that “going viral” means different things in different industries. For example, if you’re a business attorney focused on targeting successful business owners, your audience represents less than 5% of the population. Considering the size of the audience, a successful “viral” video would be one that gets 200,000 views.
What makes going viral so attractive is that people will share your video with their friends for free. Instead of paying thousands of dollars on YouTube or Facebook to reach a targeted audience of that size, people happily share your video, allowing you to reach your target audience for much less. This translates into great ROI for your ads.
Plenty of marketing agencies will sell you their marketing services when what you really need is a sales force. Great salespeople handle more than sales call appointments in their day-to-day jobs. They focus on:
Sometimes, hiring a salesperson is the first thing you need to do before bolstering your marketing efforts. We can help you consider every angle and make that call.
Email marketing has the potential to be highly effective and garner an outstanding ROI, IF you do it right.
Top-performing campaigns have:
Marketing automations, which involve pre-written, sequenced emails, take email marketing to the next level because they enable a series of communications to be triggered automatically based on the recipient’s behavior. Automations are designed to get a conversation started that eventually leads to a conversion.
If your business doesn’t have thousands of contacts on your email list, we can seek out industry-specific bloggers, associations, and other communities that have large followings and send your emails to their audience, usually for a small fee. In just about any niche or industry, there are email partnerships available to you.
Engineering as marketing comes from the SaaS (software as a service) world, but we’ve also used it with our B2B (business-to-business) clients.
SaaS companies — being the software developers that they are — will sometimes create side-project apps and tools that serve as customer acquisition channels. For example, SEO guru Neil Patel created a free SEO analyzer tool called UberSuggest that shows how well your website ranks, your competition, and potential keywords to target. Once it gives you your analysis, it then upsells Neil’s SEO service by saying, “Do you want more traffic on your website? Contact us and we’ll get to work!”
We’ve done something similar with a solar contractor client. We created a free calculator that helps prospects generate an estimate of how much solar would cost them. There are really great SaaS tools like Outgrow that make it easy to develop quizzes, calculators, and other interactive content without custom coding.
Since most people shop before they buy, this sort of content can be promoted in digital ads with the goal of capturing the email address of someone in buying mode. Then that email address can go into one of your automated email sequences to nurture the lead further down your sales funnel.
Reaching out to industry & local publications doesn’t cost you anything. The only input is your time or the fee for a copywriter.
You can get free exposure in a business journal, a popular blog, or some other digital publication. This arrangement is mutually beneficial because the owner or editor of that publication needs content, and your business would benefit from the exposure. Not only can blogging on external sites bring in immediate leads, but it can also positively impact the organic ranking of your website because this would also be considered a quality backlink.
In addition to guest blogging, you can:
We help you identify whether blog targeting is a fit for you, and if so, which outlets will put you in front of your target audience.
While companies spend around $72 billion on TV advertising and $77 billion on digital advertising, closing a deal often happens face-to-face. Are you investing in in-person marketing the way that you should be? Many B2B companies only do business with the companies they meet at trade shows, so consider them a way to get in front of the right people and establish a real connection.
When you attend a trade show, you need a strategy before, during, and after the event. Here’s how you make the most of your time at the show:
For example, Nettra was a featured speaker on Google Advertising at SXSW (South by Southwest), one of the largest interactive media conferences in the world. After our presentation, we ended up securing one of our largest clients ever.
You don’t have to be an amazing party planner to host effective offline events. You can host something as simple as a meetup where you invite different speakers monthly or quarterly, then have an informal Q&A and mingle at the end.
Meetups are a great way to get in front of potential customers in your area, especially if you make the speaker content relevant to what your target audience is interested in. For example, if you serve small business owners, you can invite speakers who are experts in marketing and small business finances.
Organizing and attending meetups is a great way to brand yourself in your industry which over time, always results in new business.
We all like a little swag. Pens, coffee mugs, notepads, refrigerator magnets… The list goes on.
If your target customer is staring at your name every day while writing their to-do list, they’ll remember you. You can pass out swag at trade shows, meetups, marketing events, direct mail, or even door-to-door.
Sure, this might not be as trendy as Instagram, but for a lot of businesses, it’s a very effective branding technique.
Webinars allow you to get in front of your target audience without having to leave your office.
There are two kinds of webinars:
While webinars are commonly used by online businesses, they can also be a fit for local businesses too. For example, a CPA might host an informational webinar about how to maximize tax savings, and an estate planning lawyer may talk about ways to protect your assets beyond a standard will.
Whether live or evergreen, our paid digital ads can target people by interests, age, and location to get the right folks signing up.
Influencers are one of the most effective ways to market because you can leverage the trust they’ve built with their audiences.
For example, insurance companies are all selling the same or similar coverages, so how do they stand out and build enough trust to get you to call or email them for a quote? They use celebrity spokespeople that already have an established brand in society. State Farm uses Patrick Mahomes, and Farmers Insurance uses JK Simmons.
While spokespeople like these are cost-prohibitive for most businesses, if you’re selling a product or service with a local or regional reach, it’s often very affordable to get a recognizable and trusted local face to represent your brand.
These people may have thousands of social media, blog, or podcast followers who are also in your target audience. In many cases, they will post about you on their channels in exchange for a fee, free services, or free products.
Networking is great because you can create strong business channels by participating in networks and associations. For example, Nettra is a member benefit service provider for the Fresno Bar Association, and this has turned into a great source of leads and connections for us.
There are likely nearby events, communities, and associations that are relevant to your business. Let us help you identify which ones are the best fit, and offer our expertise on how you can engage in a manner that prioritizes impact over effort.
Guerilla tactics focus on standing out in ways your competition isn’t by coming up with out-of-the-box ideas designed to tastefully get you noticed and eventually convert new customers.
Guerilla marketing usually focuses on highly creative direct mail and brand activations. A brand activation is when something is placed out in the wild, like a makeup brand doing quick, free makeovers in a busy outdoor promenade.
This can work for local businesses and service firms too. Guerilla tactics can include (legal) signs and physical advertising in unexpected places, pop-up shops, and ad hoc events. Just make sure to keep it on brand and helpful or interesting to your target audience.
