If you’ve frequented this website recently to check out our articles about inbound lead generation strategies, you may notice that things are a little different around here. As in, we revamped the entire website. In doing so, we realized that some of our highest performing articles were my monthly income reports from way back when I was still a financial writer. Upon seeing this, we realized we should bring them back in some form.
While I can’t share income numbers like I used to because of privacy and not wanting to give out sensitive information, I can do the next best thing. I can break down how all our of our marketing, sales and systems are working on a monthly basis. My hope is it will teach business owners how to build marketing and sales machines, get them thinking way bigger and help them work smart instead of hard. Plus, we’ll show you our marketing experiments in real time.
Why I’m Doing Monthly Digital Marketing Trends Reports
Aside from the reasons mentioned above, I also have to do this for the business anyway so I figured I might as well share as much as I can.
One thing I’ve become very big on in the last couple of years is building a machine of a business that is mostly automated and focuses on inbound lead generation strategies. That way, my work becomes to spend most of my time marketing and I can just optimize the machine for better results over time.
In 2023, I flipped my business from 80 to 90% outbound sales to having over 60% of the business come to us. This happened while we were traveling, while I moved to a new country, while we renovated a house and while I went through massive life changes – which means the machine was working because I could barely focus on work last year.
Now, in 2024, we started tracking each point of our marketing funnel so we can optimize and improve what is already working. Each week, we review the data and each month I’m going to summarize it for you, our community, so you can learn something from it.
What Worked In February 2024
We Rebuilt The Entire Website
February 2024 was an eye opening month because we essentially took apart the entire website and found a lot of data. In this post, I’m going to share that data with you. Here’s what we discovered:
- We’ve had over 100k hits on our opt-in landing pages over the years with an over 60% conversion rate
- We require phone numbers on our opt-in pages and we still have super high conversions
- Most of the traffic came from search engine optimization from this site, YouTube, referral partners and media interviews. Notice how I didn’t even mention paid advertising.
- We’re ranking #1 on Google for several search terms
This showed us we need to triple down on YouTube and our other inbound lead generation strategies, which is why you’ve been seeing a lot more YouTube content. It also showed us that, ultimately, we need to treat the front end of the business as if it’s a media company. Meaning, all content all the time.
After re-vamping the website and optimizing it for all the traffic we were already getting, we immediately started seeing improvements in the machine. Here were some of the improvements:
- Up to a 500% increase in opt-ins and new leads PER DAY which means our inbound lead generation strategies were working
- Much faster speed and loading time which Google likes
- We 10’xed our website traffic this month simply by posting more YouTube videos as our main inbound lead generation strategy
- A 300% increase in sales calls being automatically booked from our marchine
- Our thank-you page after some one opts in has a nearly 17% call booking rate which is actually quite high
Inbound Lead Generation Social Media Experiment
The other thing I experimented with was posting on social media at least three times day across all of our accounts. This was a lot easier said than done because of all the work we had going on behind the scenes,, but I committed to experimenting some of the month to see what it would do. Below you’ll find some screenshots from the month. As you can see, posting more obviously lead to more attention.
Here’s what else happened thinks to focusing on posting more on social media:
- I noticed that our highest converting social media posts were the ones where I shared data. Much like I’m doing in this longer form post. I think this is because people want receipts and are tired of the typical “look at how much money I’m making” marketing. I was recently chatting with a podcast guest about this and we both believe that kind of marketing is on it’s way out and/or attracts desperate people we don’t want to work with anyway.
- We had a 600% increase in people booking sales calls and sliding into my DMs asking about our offers just from posting more
Email Marketing Trends
While most people’s email marketing was ending up in spam because of the new Google requirements, ours wasn’t.
- We have an over 60% email open rate. This is thanks to Justin and his help in getting us ready for all the recent Google and Yahoo changes.
- Our click through rates are between 1% and 3% which is on par with industry standard. If we send out a video to watch, the clickthrough rates are the highest.
- We’re having better results sending people to content that prompts them to sign up for a free gift or book a call than we are selling directly from email
Email has gotten harder over the years because people are overwhelmed and oversubscribed to stuff. Plus, Google, Yahoo and other large email service providers keep making stricter requirements for deliverability. That’s one of the reasons why we also ask for phone numbers and are active on social media.
What Didn’t Work in February 2024
Just like we found a lot of really great stuff from revamping the website, we also found a lot of challenges and areas of improvement. They are as follows:
- Lots of broken links to high traffic pages because I’d deleted them following the advice from so-called blogging experts telling us to do content audits back in the day. Moral of the story: Don’t ever delete anything!
- Parts of our backend funnel needed to be updated and optimized also due to broken links
- Although we execute quickly, revamping the website and the funnels did take time away from marketing and sales activity so our sales numbers for the month could have been higher. The good news is we optimized everything on the backend so we can properly capitalize on all the attention coming our way. Since this huge project is out of the way, then we can focus more heavily on digital marketing and inbound lead generation strategies.
- We didn’t have all of our websites and social media channels cranking out content simultaneously which is something we’ll be working on in the coming month
- I got quite lazy on Instagram and TikTok. It’s okay because they aren’t our best sources for leads, but I’d like to improve upon our short form content strategy.
Biggest Lessons Learned in Digital Marketing This Month
As I mentioned, this month was especially eye opening because we took apart the entire website and found a gold mine of data. Here are the biggest takeaways for us:
- Our marketing and sales machine IS working to bring in leads, warm them up and eventually get to a sale
- We need to tweak our messaging to attract more higher quality buyers
- More marketing = more attention = more money
- Making small tweaks and optimizations to a website, landing pages and a funnel can lead to BIG payoffs and improvements in a very short period of time
The biggest lesson of all is that consistency is key, especially consistency over long periods of time. That’s what causes a snowball effect which is what we’ve seen with the website traffic, social media growth and inbound leads.
The problem is people can’t be consistent and I believe it’s for two main reasons. The first reason is they give up too easily. People give up after a week of not seeing any results so they never put in enough reps.
The second reason is because they don’t have a machine of marketing automations on the backend of their business, so as a result they aren’t able to focus in on what marketing efforts are working because they don’t know. Additionally, because they don’t have marketing automations and systems in place then they don’t have the time to pump out high quality content at high enough frequency.
Building marketing automations and machines is what we help our clients do in our Effortless Sales Engine program. Click here to learn more and apply.