Before I started BlueSoft or even had a career in the internet marketing industry, I began by reading books on search engine optimization, how to build a website, and internet marketing in general.
Not long after, I had a few of my own websites generating some recurring ad revenue.
And soon after that, I got the opportunity to work for a larger marketing agency that specializes in the travel industry.
I was quickly put in charge of their internet marketing department and given a good sized budget which allowed me to build a talented team of designers, developers, writers, and other internet marketers.
The company we were working for was hungry for growth, so we ran a lot of experiments to figure out what worked and what didn’t.
We had amazing tools and software that allowed us to not just track a particular campaign’s ROI, but also make incremental improvements to them over time to constantly improve the ROI.
It was truly a great experience to collaborate with a large team that worked closely to create and execute large marketing campaigns and track the ROI with such precision.
However, after many years of dedication and hard work with this company, it came to an abrupt ending when the company was met with serious legal issues.
After a few years of working miscellaneous projects for people within my personal network, I decided I was going to start my own company.
Starting My Own Company
I wanted to help small business owners leverage technology to grow their business. I was going to help them create a website and internet marketing campaigns that produced insane amounts of highly valuable leads for their business.
After jumping in head first, I soon figured out that I had no idea how to talk with small business owners about the technologies available and how they could help them.
I really felt like business owners deserved better transparency between them and the marketing agencies that served them.
It seemed like most solutions providers in our industry didn’t care about the success of the very businesses they were serving. And they never held themselves accountable.
While we knew our methods worked, it was becoming increasingly difficult to educate clients on our process.
In fact, at times, my business partner and I would give our elevator speech, and be met immediately with the question “So… what do you guys do?”
I had no box or one size fits all flat rate package with a big red ribbon that everyone seemed to want.
I began to think I was doing something wrong.
Then I Realized…
Over the years of working with small business owners, most didn’t maintain a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Most had no idea how many leads they had been getting from their website.
Most didn’t keep track of their lead source.
Most had no idea of what their actual return on investment was on their website and other internet marketing campaigns.
This, understandably, makes business owners very wary about spending money on internet marketing of any sort.
The problem was that business owners didn’t actually know how to hold their marketing teams accountable. Again, understandably so. The technology available to track this kind of stuff can seem confusing and overwhelming.
But that was it! I realized that I had a lot of these tools readily available while at my old job. And business owners would HAVE TO utilize them to ever gain any kind of control over their marketing efforts.
So we set out to develop a consulting and discovery process that would not only help to uncover opportunities within our clients’ current marketing efforts, but also create more transparency and accountability.
What We Learned
While our methods work, they’re not for everyone.
We found that if the business owners themselves were not willing to invest the time and energy into properly maintaining a customer relationship management (CRM) system, they were unable to see the exact ROI on their marketing campaigns. This made them unable to see the true value in the services we provided and ultimately created unnecessary tension in the relationships.
Armed with the lessons learned over our many years of experience, we’ve now created a process that is fun, collaborative, and insanely productive. It promotes transparency and accountability with our clients so that we can continue to help them grow their business.
Our simple but innovative approach has helped us enrich the lives of our clients, their employees, and the communities they serve.
Our experiences have helped us to understand what many business owners are currently struggling with in terms of their internet marketing efforts.
So while our internet marketing strategies are vital to our success, so is our ability to educate the clients we serve.
