For Johnathan Dane, his first experience of advertising and marketing was listing his car wash and waxing services on Craigslist. On a good day, it was making him between $300 and $400, despite having no repeat custom.
Although you may not want to ask him to clean your car, he is the founder and CEO of KlientBoost. As a creative pay-per-click and land page/conversion rate optimization agency, they’ve only been around for two years and already have $300,000 of monthly reoccurring revenue with a 50% profit margin.
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It all started when working as a customer service rep who dabbled with Google AdWords and PCC and then began to take over that side of the business he worked at. Back on Craigslist, he was now spreading the message of his PPC services and actually getting clients.
Whilst still at college, he was completing PPC work instead of paying attention in class. When college was over, it wasn’t long before he’s started an agency and helped it to become a success very quickly.
Find out some of Johnathan’s secret knowledge about PPC marketing, and why he actually only uses content marketing to promote his agency.
Becoming A Marketing Agency
Johnathan was soon offered the opportunity to start an agency in Utah with someone who had worked with enterprise clients at Adobe on the marketing side. So, with Jake Baadsgaard, Johnathan took the leap and created Disruptive – a PPC marketing agency.
18 months later, the agency had grown to a staff of 30. After which he sold his side of the business and moved back to Orange County is California.
With the money, he started up a new business with the hope of creating a software product. However, when people kept asking for his services as an agency, he ended up growing an agency again and leaving his dreams of a SaaS product on the backburner.
When it comes to creating any type of marketing agency, there is no barrier to entry. You just say that you do it and don’t necessarily need any proof that you’re good at it.
Because of that, and needing to stand out in a crowded market, he wanted to create a brand to then give them equity over time, and to quickly turn themselves into industry thought leaders.
Even though KlientBoost doesn’t offer content marketing services to their clients, it was the best and quickest way to achieve what he wanted. With blogs, videos and events, you are able to scratch as many backs as possible and give lots of people value.
With all the content they produce, they approach it with the mindset of making it better than anyone else’s content on the subject; much like Brian Dean’s Skyscraper technique.
Staying One Step Ahead
With their marketing efforts, Johnathan is always looking to take it up a notch. In December 2016 they created gifographics, which are just like ordinary infographics, but with moving animations.
And they’re also now looking at explainer videos using stop-motion created with paper crafting.
It ensures they’re creating content which is different to what everyone else is doing. But others will catch up, so it is important to be ahead and stay ahead of the game with what’s next.
At KlientBoost, design is important and is what sets them apart from other PPC businesses. Even the staff images on the website are unique.
In fact, his first hire was a designer who could help make landing pages which looked good and make people convert. His second hire was also a designer. The fourth was for a content creator, and it wasn’t until his fifth employee that he hired an account manager to help him out.
At the start, he was wearing all of the hats in the business, except for design. With the benefit of hindsight, he now wishes he’d made more hires earlier, but at the time was too concerned with profit margins.
You have to crawl before you can walk, so he worked with what he had, and got results with it.
Johnathan wanted to stay profitable and not hire before he needed to. But by the time you need to make more hires, it is already too late, so it is about finding the correct balance.
Fortunately, KlientBoost now has enough profit to be able to hire new people ahead of time.
Promote Your Content
After creating content, most people are not aggressive enough with it. When it comes to promoting their content, KlientBoost actually gets all of their business from content marketing.
They don’t actually do PPC marketing for themselves.
When the content solves a problem for the person, they have a good experience and but then often leave to put into practice what they learned. But they eventually come back to them when they next have a problem for even more help. It then gets to the point where the person will just hire KlientBoost to do it for them, and it goes full circle.
50% of their effort goes into creating the content, and then other 50% goes on promoting it.
They are members of various groups where the members all share each other’s content with their own audiences.
Facebook is also an important tool for promotion to target people who could possibly become customers with their content. If someone then clicks one of their links and spends more than 30 seconds reading it, they are then retargeted again with an offer.
Altogether, it helps build up likes, as well as creating social proof for the article as well.
Landing Pages Which Work
When it comes to SaaS products and lead generation, people often leave as soon as they click a link on Google and immediately see a sign-up form.
This is because when they first visit you, they don’t know who you are and want to remain anonymous while they check you out. As a result, Johnathan favors multi-step landing pages.
He will start off by first asking a question which is related in no way to their contact details. Instead, it’s a simple, easy to answer question which could be about the type of service they’re after. Then they click a link, such as ‘Get My Quote’, to go to the next step.
It’s at the second step which they then ask for the contact details. The person has already committed by completing the first step, and are far more likely to complete the second step as a result.
This goes against what is considered as best practice, which is to remove the steps which someone has to go through. But it is far more about the type of questions, and the order in which they’re asked.
Keeping Clients
With PPC marketing, it is very scalable. When they get a client, at first they want to know how they can help them to make more money. This is so they can set goals at the proposal stage in order to figure out what is important to the client.
After that, it is all about pivoting to meet these demands and to see what they can do better. The intention is that should a client ever leave, the service they get elsewhere is comparably 10 times worse.
When they hit a goal, it is then important to change it in order to help them to carry on striving, rather than just easing along.
KlientBoost ensure that they charge enough from the start to never need to charge extra when goals are changed. A client will want them to work with the means that have available to them and are then more likely to want to go ahead with new initiatives for better results.
Hot Or Cold?
When someone is ready to buy, they’re considered a hot lead. When they don’t know who you are, they’re a cold lead.
So whatever the temperature of the lead when they come to your website, you have to match it with a call to action which matches their temperature.
For an e-commerce company doing great with shopping campaigns on Google, the next step is with Facebook using dynamic retargeting on the people who didn’t place an order. When it comes to showing specific people an advertisement for a product with a discount, Facebook it great.
There is a large scale of difference between people are familiar with you, and not. Therefore, the types of thing you’re going to try and convert them with are different too.
Any PPC channel can work when you realize this difference. You can then use all of the tools at your disposal to move leads closer and closer to making that purchase.
And Finally
Check out just how good the resources and blogs are at KlientBoost, and you’re bound to learn a great deal more about PPC marketing, as well as seeing how you should do content marketing properly.
Whilst on the website, make sure to sign up for the KlientBoost emails because they’re so good that even their competitors sign up to read their insights.
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