Marketing Return on Investment

Most companies can’t clearly report ROI on their marketing. That’s why we developed a strategy to not only track marketing spend, but also to identify which channels are most effective.

Because marketing is not a guessing game. You need to be able to make data-driven decisions on how to grow and scale your business with clarity.

Farotech was founded in 2001, and as we’ve grown, one thing has always stayed the same—we’re still just a bunch of marketing nerds that get excited about helping our clients win.

And in this article, we wanted to lay out for you exactly how we help clients transform their marketing to get dependable, predictable results.

When we first started out, we were just building websites—and we were good at it. But after developing great sites that were ranking on the first page of search engines, our clients were still not getting enough sales leads or opportunities.

That’s when we decided to focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO), or what we call “conversion science.”

Marketing Vision for our Clients

Over the last 20 years, we have been able to help a number of really successful companies build a systematic approach to generating leads, nurturing leads into clients and converting those clients into brand ambassadors.

Benefits of our System

Our approach, implemented effectively, provides clients with:

• A comprehensive marketing system (instead of independent solutions)
• A 3-5 year roadmap to 5x-10x sales and lead opportunities
• Our team-based approach that provides access to subject matter experts whenever they are needed
• A revolutionized hiring process for marketing personnel
• The ability to make data-driven decisions rather than relying on hunches, trends, or fads
• A clear understanding of marketing ROI and ability to scale effectively

Marketing System that Works for B2B & B2C

As a company, we are in a very unique position. Our client base is evenly distributed between B2B and B2C. Our approach is designed to work for business-to-business as well as for business-to-consumer clients.

How to change your marketing funnel to a fly wheel

When quality work and precise execution meet a bonafide referral strategy, your marketing efforts become self-sustaining and your results often compound.

According to Harvard Business Review, it is estimated to be 10x more expensive to sign a new client than it is to keep and upsell an existing one.

So while we are going to help you sign new deals, we are also going to help you create more revenue from your existing clients by increasing their lifetime value.

How do we do this?

Well, as opposed to most other marketing companies, our vision is to have all of the services that are commonly siloed across several vendors all under one roof.

• Branding Strategy
• Web Development
• Video Development
• Sales Cycle Optimization
• Inbound Marketing
• Outbound Marketing

Marketing is Moving Fast

Did you know?…

There are over 2 billion blogs on the internet and over 400 hours of video are uploaded every single minute to YouTube!

That’s what we call content overload.

These days, marketing is moving fast, and the truth is—it can be hard to keep up.
That’s why we’ve designed the ultimate team-based approach to marketing.

Our system allows you to:

• Have access to subject matter experts when you need them
• Work within a cohesive marketing strategy (instead of with disconnected vendors)
• Save lots of money on bringing your marketing under one roof
• Maintain a competitive edge in a crowded online space

we’ll explain exactly how our Unique Process solves your biggest marketing challenges!

Let’s face it. These days there is one phenomenon that is unavoidable and that is…

Marketing is moving way too fast!

So what do we do about it?

The Mistake Most Companies Make

Traditionally, companies hire someone internally that handles their marketing. For the sake of this analogy, let’s call this person “Marketing Mary.”

It is very possible that Marketing Mary is excellent at her job. The problem is that because marketing is moving so fast, even if she worked 120 hours a week, there would still be no possible way that she could keep up with all of the demands of the market and expectations of her clients.

So, Mary will either have to focus on one or two areas, and ignore everything else …OR she will try to tackle all of these digital marketing initiatives, but with very little depth.

Quite simply: she doesn’t have the time to do them all effectively.

Content Overload Crisis

But there’s an even bigger problem. If you’re following the content marketing industry, you’ve probably already realized that we’re in the middle of something that’s being referred to as the “Content Overload Crisis.”

As of 2020, it’s been estimated that there are over 2 billion blogs on the internet.

That’s 1 blog for every 7 people!

And there is a tremendous amount of new content that is constantly being produced online.

For example, according to this Infographic by Go-Globe, there are over 400 hours of video uploaded every single minute to YouTube… think about that.

Marketing Crossroads

So now, back to Mary’s story. Mary has a choice and finds herself at a crossroad.

She can either try to handle everything on her own, which we’ve already concluded is practically impossible…

…or she can delegate by adding more staff and using multiple vendors, which gets extremely expensive and causes the process to lack cohesion.

For purposes of the example, let’s say she chooses to go with option #2: delegate.

Look at what the common 3 to 5 year journey looks like for a marketing executive in this case.

Commonly, the first person she’d hire would be a content writer because she’s going to need someone to develop blogs, as, and website content, as well as help out with presentations, etc…

Next on this list, she is going to need to hire someone internally or use an outsourced vendor to help with social media.

Then in order to outrank her competition, she’ll have to hire a qualified SEO specialist.

By this point, she is taxing her web developer.

And, of course, all of these marketing materials need to remain brand consistent, so she will need to bring on a graphic designer.

When she first started this journey she probably never thought that it would require this much overhead to handle all of the responsibilities involved in doing marketing effectively.

But what’s Mary’s alternative?

Her alternative is to hire an agency that utilizes a team-based approach.

Team Based Marketing Approach

With a team based approach, she has access to subject matter experts only when she needs them.

And now she can get more done with less hassle simply because a team like Farotech has the time she doesn’t have and the subject matter expertise right on hand when she needs it.

And when she compares either outsourcing to multiple different vendors or hiring internally…it’s really no comparison.

But wait! There’s more!

Want to know what else is great about a team-based approach?

Traditional Approach vs. Team-Based Approach

By utilizing an agency model like Farotech, the cost commonly comes out at a deep discount.

The heart of what we do comes down to helping our clients make data-driven decisions.

So, it’s no surprise that Farotech spends nearly $7000 a month on software and analytics tools to make sure that our clients maximize every opportunity.

The Farotech Digital Marketing Unique Process

So, now that we’ve explained WHAT we do, let’s talk about HOW WE DO IT.

What you see here below is our Unique Process. We have built this approach over the last two decades of working with a wide variety of clients.

We don’t believe that marketing should be made up of independent solutions, but rather a system of solutions working in harmony with one another.

We can’t wait to show you in more detail exactly how all this works!

The following chapters are each dedicated to one aspect of our Unique Process:

• Gap assessment
• Usability Conversion analysis
• SEO
• Content Strategy
• Lead Nurturing
• Social Media
• Paid Advertising
• Video Development
• Analytics and Reporting

Gap Assessment Overview

A Gap Assessment is a 10-week deep dive into your company’s goals, KPI’s and growth opportunities. It’s also a way to look at your total marketing potential in relation to the size of your industry and how much market share you need in order to reach your goals.

A Gap Assessment is an extremely thorough research process that happens at the beginning of a client’s journey with us.

The data that is extracted from this process serves as the backbone of the system that we build for our clients.

It is our vision to help companies:

• 10x their business leads and opportunities
• Identify critical gaps in their marketing approach
• Develop foundational marketing assets to scale campaigns
• Create and maintain a marketing scorecard
• Identify their quarterly priorities and goals
• Review their competition
• Identify the lifetime value of their current and prospective clients
• Establish an ROI model that scales as their business grows

Short & Long Term Marketing Approach

Our approach is designed to establish a foundation for our clients’ marketing that can scale to meet needs over time.

To maximize the benefit of the compounding power of our comprehensive approach, we focus on a balance between short and long term goals.

Building a system takes time, and there are a variety of elements that shape our long term process such as:

• SEO
• Building domain authority
• Brand establishment and messaging

These are just a few of the factors that are always being tweaked and improved along the way.

And while these are more so long term functions of a marketing plan, our system is also designed to generate quick wins and capitalize on low hanging fruit.

Ok, so let’s walk through some of the highlights of what we cover in the Gap Assessment.

Branding Beyond your Logo

Obviously, the first place we are going to start is with your brand.

When we talk about your brand, we don’t mean just your logo, font and color scheme.

While all of that is important, we are referring to how you establish and refine your message to target a variety of different audiences and buyer personas.

We utilize a scientific process to accomplish this.

Farotech Story Guide

And to help us with that, we lean on a proven outline from the book, Building a Story Brand.

In this book, Donald Miller outlines a turnkey approach to help your company clarify your message to maximize engagement.

We have taken his approach one step further with our Story Guide exercise that allows us to apply your newly refined messaging to our comprehensive marketing approach.

Identifying Buyer Personas

The next step of our process is to identify all of your ideal buyer personas (as well as influencers) who might engage with your marketing.

Buyer Persona Example

As an example, let’s take a look at the approach we used for one of our most recognized clients:
The Rothman Orthopedics Institute.

According to US news in End World Report, Rothman Orthopedics is one of the largest orthopedics practices in the United States. We helped lead their Digital Optimization Strategy for nearly a decade.

At the time, Rothman had a very successful marketing campaign called “Rothman First.”

We piggy backed on that campaign to create a wide net approach.

The wide net approach allowed us to create generalized messaging that would apply to anyone who had pain in their hips, knees, spine etc…

“If you have pain, think of Rothman First.”

But that was just the beginning….

We decided to take it one step farther.

Rather than trying to sell orthopedic services one client at a time, it was our vision to sell orthopedics to one COMMUNITY at a time.

And here’s the logic behind it.

If we’re trying to target individuals with back pain, it’s going to be pretty difficult to do that because nobody advertises to the world that they have back pain.

But they will advertise things about their life, such as their hobbies.

In this case, the hobby that caught our attention was cycling.

In Philadelphia, cycling is HUGE.

It turns out, orthopedic practices like cyclists a lot because…

Well, they tend to hurt themselves frequently. And they’re often plagued by chronic pain.

So, we identified some of the most common sports and activities that eventually lead to joint pain and deterioration.

We knew that if we established Rothman as a thought leader in those communities and if we found ways to service influential people in those groups, it would just be a matter of time before the large majority of cyclists in the region would think of Rothman first whenever they had joint pain.

By investing in the entire cycling community and creating inroads with cyclists, we positioned Rothman as a thought leader in their circle.

Influencer Buyer Personas

Not only were we marketing to the cyclists, but also to influencers.

Because everyone knows… for every cyclist that has a bad back, there’s a spouse who is tired of hearing about it.

Performing Buyer Persona Exercises

So, how do we do buyer persona exercises?

Well, this is one of the most critical parts of marketing, but it’s also one of the things that many companies don’t do. Why? To put it bluntly: because it is hard.

In order to effectively create buyer personas, we conduct something we call “war room sessions” with the subject matter experts from your team.

In those sessions, we ask a series of really important questions about your products and services. And then analyze how the answers to these questions vary from one buyer persona to another.

Because what we don’t want to do is market to all the same potential targets with just one message.

Right Message, Right Client, Right Time

Let’s say, for example, you have a torn ACL. But then you start to get messaging from an orthopedic practice about how they have the best spine center in the country.

It’s probably very unlikely that you would even open up that email. Why would you care?

But if the same orthopedics practice did proper segmentation of their list and sent you messaging about knee pain, well then there’s a really good chance you would open it!

So, the goal of the buyer persona exercises is to get the right message to the right potential client at the right time.

The Godfather of Buyer Personas

The best examples we have seen of buyer persona-specific messaging come from Jack Canfield. We call him the Godfather of Buyer Personas, but you probably know him as the author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.

Now, writing a bestselling book is not why Jack is considered a genius. Jack’s brilliance was in his realization of the power of creating highly-tailored messaging for a specific target audience.

Veteran?
Student?
Firefighter?
Teacher?

No matter who you are, you can find a Chicken Soup for the Soul book that will leave you feeling like the content was written just for you.

Segmentation and personalization work. So it’s no wonder that companies that leverage both usually outperform their competitors.

Alright…beyond branding, messaging, and buyer personas, what else is critical to nail down at the beginning of your marketing process?

Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategy

In our Gap Assessment, we take time upfront to look at how your sales and marketing are integrated.

We believe that when sales and marketing are working together with their messaging, automation, analytics, and CRM…great things happen.

Now let’s walk through how buyer persona specific marketing can impact sales.

Let’s stick with our example from the orthopedics industry.

Here is how we market to orthopedics practices’ CMOs and physicians.

Sales Cycle Optimization

We use a sales cycle that clearly identifies every touch point that we have with a sales target—in this case, a primary care physician.

After a first and then a second appointment, with lots of content and resources provided in between, we write a proposal. And finally, that proposal is either accepted or rejected.

Of course, there are always those times in any sales journey when everything is going really well, you’ve had a couple of good meetings, the client seems to be resonating with your message, and then…

For some reason or another, that potential client just disappears, or becomes a ghost!

They don’t answer your emails, calls, or texts. They essentially “slip off the hook.”

We call that phenomenon “dropoff.”

So, how does this all relate to the info we collect in the Gap Assessment?

Well, the goal of a well-designed sales cycle is to eliminate dropoff by creating buyer persona specific marketing materials that are engaging and keep the potential sales target enthusiastic about your products or services!

Better yet, each part of the sales cycle works in conjunction with your CRM so that you can forecast the monetization of your pipeline.

UCA Overview

When we develop a usability conversion analysis, we are going to be measuring:

• How people engage with your website
• What parts of your usability need improvement
• How to optimize each opportunity through a / b testing, multivariate testing, and/or other research methods

Heatmapping Usability Analysis

What you are seeing here below is what we call a heat mapping analysis.

On this particular website, the organization assumed that the large majority of their audience would be going to the button called Orthopedic Specialties.

The reason they believed that was because the most important information on the entire website was located there. However, what the heat mapping shows is that the large majority of the audience was confused and actually went to the services page instead.

This client also spent nearly $250,000 on ambassador videos and, as you can see, there was barely any traffic going to that particular page.

Scrollmapping Usability Analysis

This next graphic below shows a process we call scroll mapping. We use this tool to analyze how far visitors are scrolling down on the page and what part of the website is white hot.

The rule of thumb is that your most critical call to action should go in the white hot area of the scrollmap.

For this client, we were graded on one thing alone—how many appointments we could acquire. As you can see here, the slightly yellow shade means that 15% of the audience didn’t even scroll down far enough to find this button!

Down at the bottom, there is a video that we believed would bring a lot of value to potential site visitors. However, only 45% of their audience scrolled down far enough to engage with that video.

While each industry and website is unique, tracking user engagement is the number one way across the board to maximize conversion.

We do all of this same exact testing on mobile devices as well.

Click Mapping Usability Analysis

Now, let’s talk about click mapping.

With this functionality, we can monitor every single click that happens on our clients’ websites.

We can do this across a variety of filters such as:

• New and returning visitors
• How long it took visitors to click
• Which search terms brought them to the site
• What browser they used to access the site

We are able to gather a ton of information from studies like this.

For example, we might gather data that tells us that open and click through rates will improve if we email market to c-level executives on a Sunday night rather than on Tuesday morning.

This is valuable information that our clients use to make critical marketing decisions every day!

KPI Analysis

Next up, let’s talk about KPI tracking.

This analysis measures not just your major goals, but also your key performance indicators.

We put all of these micro engagements into percentage form, and we strive to improve these numbers month-over-month.

Details matter.

Whoever said, “don’t sweat the small stuff,” has no business working in marketing.

Marketers need to over-analyze the small stuff to make sure the desirable end result is as attainable as possible.

Mouse Recorder Usability Analysis

The next part of usability conversion analysis is mouse recording.

This technology tracks and records the movement of the user’s mouse throughout the website.

With that information, we are able to identify what parts of your website might be confusing your audience or limiting their engagement in some way.

We then strategize to improve user experience.

We also conduct a thorough conversion funnel analysis.

Conversion Funnel Tracking

In this process, we look at which pages are converting the most, and what attribution pages are leading to conversion.

Form Dropff Analysis

Similarly, we need to analyze the individual forms that are on various pages of your site.

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone who ever started filling out a form on your site actually completed the whole thing and hit the submit button?

Unfortunately, we know that isn’t reality.

And while we might not know the exact reason that some users abandon the process, technology can help us make some pretty educated guesses.

We can find out exactly where people are getting spooked on your forms.

Then we can use the data to suggest revisions that will result in more users actually hitting that submit button in the end.

Video Usability Analysis

Implementing video into your marketing strategy is absolutely critical. Studies show that use of emotional appeal through cutting-edge video is one of the most compelling ways to engage an audience.

The only challenge is that video can be a big investment.

Therefore, having access to highly sophisticated video analytics is essential to understanding how conversion happens. We put the effort into this analysis so you don’t waste time, energy, and money creating videos that don’t work.

We’re going to show you how we do this.

As you can see here, we are able to analyze user viewing experiences and find out where the drop-off points are.

In other words, we can find out exactly where viewers abandon the video.

This provides us the information we need to either edit that video or to have the knowledge to create more effective videos in the future.

Our technology also allows site users to opt-in to your videos by inputting their contact information on the video itself, which can then be seamlessly integrated into your marketing automation platform.

This gives us even more, specific information.

For example, once a user is opted-in, you can see their name, if/where they rewound, and where they abandoned the video.

If we have a call action at the end of a video, such as promotion of a webinar, we would want to know if a specific site visitor watched through the end or not.

In our image example above, Oliver would have seen the promotion, while Tim would not have watched long enough to see it.

In that case, our system would start to drip market to Tim about the parts of the video that he missed and possibly point him to a pre-recorded webinar that he could watch on his own time.

Growth Driven Design & Marketing

The ultimate goal of usability conversion analysis is to develop a growth driven design and marketing approach.

Let’s talk about what that means.

What you see in the diagram below is a very traditional approach to marketing.

Most companies will go out and develop a new website or hire a new digital marketing agency every 3 to 5 years. Whenever they believe that their marketing materials are out of date and they need to rebuild and rebrand, they spend a ton of money and essentially start over from scratch.

They completely redesign their website.

Or they might hire yet another digital marketing agency to develop a brand new campaign.

And they continue this cycle of periodically reinvent the wheel.

What is Growth Driven Marketing?

The good news is there is another way. We call it growth-driven marketing.

Here’s a quick story to best explain this.

It is estimated that the 1969 Apollo moon rockets that brought Neil Armstrong to the moon and safely back to earth were off course nearly 97% of the time they were in flight.

Yet they still reached their chosen destination and returned to earth – with pinpoint precision and timing.

How were they able to do this?

Through constant course corrections and incremental adjustments, until they reached their final destination.

And so it is with marketing. Any marketer who claims to have their entire journey mapped out with 100% certainty is probably pulling your leg. That’s just not how marketing works.

What we do as marketers is we take an idea based upon thorough research and best practices, we launch it into the world. And then we gauge how it works…but at the beginning, the truth is, we’re guessing.

Based on how your potential audience receives that original message, we’re smart enough to make critical course corrections.

We continue to tweak and craft your message, sharpening the spear over and over— until we get it to the exact point we’re hoping to achieve.

The reason why the traditional approach is ineffective is because those expensive, wholesale changes are commonly made based upon hunches or trends, rather than from data and analytics.

With growth-driven marketing it is our goal to establish a strong initial foundation, but then to utilize analytics tools to adjust along the way. Those tools include:

• A/B testing
• Multivariate testing
• Heat mapping analysis
• Etc.

We continuously make adjustments to get the best possible results for each of your marketing deliverables. In this way, we also maximize your original investment as we go.

While there are several different types of SEO, for purposes of this blog, let’s concentrate on just two: Local SEO and Organic SEO.

Local SEO Basics

When we’re talking about local SEO, we primarily mean SEO that is designed around geography-based keywords.

For example, have you ever looked for a plumber in your town? You normally type into the search engine:

“the service” + “the geographical region”

It might look something like:

“Plumber in West Chester, NY”

What you see in the image here are local search results that feature 3 local business listings. Those listings are called pin packs.

In order to be successful with local SEO, your business needs to be one of those three.

But in all honesty, depending on your industry, there’s a ton of competition out there.

So getting one of those listings requires a level of expertise that few companies have.

There are a number of different local ranking factors to consider.

Definitive Local SEO Ranking Factors

One of the top authorities in the SEO world is a company called Moz.

Every year Moz puts out a very detailed report of the ranking factors that help companies get found on a local level.

Our team utilizes this guide like a cookbook. We go step-by-step through the process of ranking our clients effectively for local SEO keywords.

In local SEO, the most critical ranking factor that we analyze is the consistency of your NAME, ADDRESS and PHONE Number—as they appear on your citations.

In our industry, we call this NAP.

Having a consistent NAP on online directories increases your domain authority and is one of Google’s recommended best practices for local businesses.

Below is a sample Local SEO report that we present to our clients.

Organic SEO

Now let’s talk about Organic SEO…

With Organic SEO we have designed and used a very unique approach called VOD, which stands for “volume over difficulty.”

To explain VOD, let’s walk through our skyline analogy.

Of course every company we work with would like to be on the first page of Google and Bing for keywords that drive a ton of search volume. We call those keywords skyscrapers.

However, just because you want to be on the first page of Google for skyscrapers does not mean that you have developed enough authority in the eyes of Google to secure that type of ranking.

And one of the biggest pitfalls companies make in marketing is that they over reach for keywords that are outside of what is realistic for their current capacity.

Visibility over Difficulty Strategy

So you have to have a plan to get there… enter our VOD strategy.

In the VOD process, we are looking to identify keywords that have the highest visibility or search volume with the lowest competition and the lowest keyword difficulty.

SEO: Why you are not winning

The reality is that most companies compete for the top 10,000 keywords in their industry. What they don’t realize is that those terms only make up 20% of overall search.

Companies do this because they don’t know how to find the 80% of of keywords that are more specific—and easier to acquire.

Our technology allows us to identify those highly specific 4-6 word phrases called “long tail keywords.”

These misfit toys, so to speak, are keywords that are often neglected by your competitors…and they’re the same ones that we’re going to go acquire and use to your advantage, in both the short game and in the long run.

Keywords that Convert

Data also indicates that long tail, VOD keywords convert significantly better than broad term high-volume keywords. That’s another perk of the system we use!

Tipping Point: Domain Authority

So, let’s go back to our skyline analogy.

Rather than going after skyscrapers right off the bat, what we want to do is go after all the other real estate. Those buildings are the VOD keywords.

Because once your organization can get on the first page of Google for hundreds, or even thousands, of these VOD keywords…then what you’ve done is reach a tipping point.

The tipping point is essentially when your website has developed enough domain authority, and Google recognizes it as providing thought leadership in your industry, that now you have gained the ability to go after those highly coveted skyscraper keywords.

And your website is able to rank for those skyscraper keywords bigger, stronger, faster than your competition because, as far as Google’s concerned, you’ve earned the right to be heard.

So, let’s take a look at how this plays out in a real life case study.

This diagram here shows the keyword growth we were able to achieve for one of our larger healthcare clients in a 4 year subset.

A typical SEO company is going to look to increase the number of keywords on the first page of Google on average by about 25% per year.

As you can see, in just 4 years, we were able to increase this client’s keywords that were on the first page of google by a whopping 408%!

And the keywords that were ranked in spot #1 on page #1, we increased by over 247%!

Obviously, that is a big increase, but what we really cared about is how that all translated to patient acquisition.

SEO Case Study

In Google Analytics we measure qualified traffic

As you can see this data is just from the clients’ blog alone.

First let’s look at entrances. Entrances are essentially visitors that came to our client’s website through, in this scenario, their blog.

As you can see, we increased entrances by over 1000% —from 63k to over 1 million!

Those results are really powerful!

But you’re probably wondering, “Well, was that qualified traffic?”

To answer that, we look at pageviews.

Here, we can see how we were able to increase page views by over 1100%+ —from 100k to 1.3 million!

But still, the most important question to ask is: “Did it work? Did this client get new Patients?”

So, let’s walk through that.

In a 3 year subset, we were able to generate 2,911 conversions from their blog alone. That equated to over 873k worth of revenue.

How did we get there?

Our client estimated the value of a first time appointment at $300.

So, if you do the math, we have 2,911 conversions multiplied by $300 = $873k worth of first time appointment revenue.

Why we are Unique: SEO ROI

Take into account that this number was solely generated off of the revenue accumulated from first time appointments and initial consultations ONLY. These revenue numbers did not even factor in subsequent treatments or surgery.

And here’s why what we do is so unique:

Most SEO companies promise to drive traffic to your website. But they do so with little to no guarantee on quality of traffic or concern over whether that traffic will actually convert.

That’s where we’re different. We not only bring the horse to water, but we’re accountable for if it drinks or not.

Consistent Results

Our approach works for all types of businesses – whether you are b2b, b2c, small, medium, or large.

What you can see here, in case study after case study, are the success stories we’ve been able to achieve for our clients.

Now that we have shown how our conversion science works, the next question we get asked is:

How long does it take to Rank?

How long before we start to see results?

That’s a great question. Unfortunately, the answer is, “It depends.”

In order to explain, let us introduce you to Neil Patel. This handsome gentleman is like the Elvis of digital marketing. He did a data rich study to find out how long it takes to rank for critical keywords.

Keep in mind that there is a lot of complexity involved, but essentially, the VOD keywords take approximately 121 days to rank while medium volume keywords take an average of 304 days.

High volume keywords (skyscrapers), which are extremely competitive, take approximately a year.

That is why we spend so much of our time chasing down unique keywords that are in the low to medium range. There is less competition, and it will benefit you more in the long run.

Over the last 20 years, we have relentlessly studied how written content and marketing automation impact conversion rates.

And what we have discovered is that one the most critical elements to your content strategy is not only creating great messaging, but doing it through a compelling and engaging story.

And this is where we go back to the idea of building a “Story Brand.”

In the Story Brand approach, we break down the critical components that are required to create a great story.

• How to reduce noise
• How to develop frictionless messaging
• How to speak to your ideal audience’s pain points
• How to use verbiage that’s STICKY

By the way, “sticky” is a way of describing that your products and services stay top of mind for your potential clients.

But let’s face it, even if you told the best story in the world, if it is not optimized for search engines, it simply won’t be found.

That’s why our approach takes your story a step further by optimizing your content for specifically targeted keywords, and then nurturing those visitors down the funnel. In this way, we are able to turn cold leads into warm or even hot prospects.

Ultimately, qualified prospects will end up at a landing page like the one that you see in the image below.

On a landing page, we present the opportunity to download a content upgrade. Essentially, prospective clients will trade their contact information in exchange for:

• Ebooks
• Whitepapers
• Exclusive video content
• Infographics
• Any other materials/resources they are looking to acquire

When they provide their content information and select submit, they are opting into our automation system that places a tracking code (called a cookie) on their computer or mobile device.

That cookie allows us to track every engagement they have with our marketing!

Inbound Marketing Conversion Path

Let’s walk through what that looks like.

This is our Hubspot Marketing Platform. And here is one of our prospects, Jim Halpert.

Jim is an avid cyclist, living in Philadelphia, PA.

He has been having nagging back pain for over six months, and he finally wants to do something about it.

Jim found this orthopedic practice through the keyword: spine specialist in Philadelphia.

From there, he went to the Spine Speciality web page. On the spine speciality page, he downloaded the Back Pain ebook for cyclists.

In downloading the ebook, Jim got a cookie or tracking code on his computer. Our system automatically began to drip market to him. The process went like this:

• The first email was called “5 Back Stretches That Relieve Back Pain,” which he opened.
• The second was “Non Surgical Options for Back Pain,” which was delivered, but not opened.
• And the third one was, “Understanding a Spinal Assessment,” which was opened.
• Finally, our system put him on a list to receive a back pain newsletter.

And that is how he went from a lead score of zero…to an 80.

Now, we can’t talk about drip marketing and lead scores without also talking about something we call the “Buyer’s Journey.”

Remember when we talked about buyer personas? The ultimate goal of those exercises is to get the right message to the right potential client at the right time.

And we do this by recognizing that not everyone is currently in the position to buy your products and services. (I know, I know…it’s hard to believe!)

There are, in fact, countless reasons why a prospect may choose one product over another…or choose to wait on purchasing altogether at a given time.

Buyers Journey: Why People Buy

So, let’s walk through the psychology of not only WHY people buy, but WHEN people buy.

The Buyer’s Journey is traditionally broken down into three stages:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision

To best illustrate this, let’s use the analogy of buying a car.

When you go to buy a car, you never just buy the first car on the first car lot that you see… it is (obviously) more involved than that.

Usually the journey begins for a particular reason. Maybe your current car broke down or you’ve decided it’s time for something new. That is the awareness stage.

In the consideration stage, you are asking yourself what kind of vehicle you’re looking for.

Am I going to get a sedan?
An SUV?
Or maybe even a sports car?

Then maybe by the decision stage you’ve determined what type of vehicle you’re going to get—let’s say it’s an SUV. Now, you just need to figure out some specifics.

What make, model, color, dealership, etc. will you go with?

So in the Buyer’s Journey, all of this goes on in your subliminal and that is how you ultimately choose the car you are going to buy.

Now, that’s not exactly rocket science.

As marketers, we use these psychological techniques all the time—whether we’re trying to sell a new car, or in our previous example, trying to give people information about spine surgery.

Buyers Journey Example

So now let’s look at the buyer journey specifically for orthopedics.

In the awareness stage, you have developed nagging back pain that won’t go away and you’ve finally decided to do something about it.

Next you research your options online and you find out which provider accepts your insurance.

Then, in the decision stage, you choose one provider over another.

So you are probably thinking… yeah, this is Marketing 101.

And you’re right. It’s pretty basic.

The problem is that most companies end up building their website without taking into account the basics of the buyer’s journey. Most sites contain a limited amount of awareness content and maybe one or two decision level pages, such as a Contact Us page.

We talk all the time about pushing clients “down the funnel,” but we rarely create content that nurtures prospects through that process.

How can you push them down a funnel that doesn’t even have a middle?
The answer is: you can’t.

But that’s how average companies build websites.

How Great Companies Create Funnels

But great companies commit to developing an editorial plan that builds out awareness, consideration, and decision level content.

Now, here’s where it gets really exciting! (Remember, I gave you fair warning up front that we’re just a bunch of marketing nerds.)

When we connect your buyer’s journey to your marketing automation, that’s where you really start to build momentum.

Target Page Functionality

Let’s say a prospective client is interested in your products or services and they visit a consideration level page on your website.

Assuming they have a cookie on their computer from previous efforts, when they leave your site, a marketing automation email is sent out to their inbox.

That email would contain more in depth content. For example, it might include an opportunity to download a decision-level ebook or maybe watch a bite-sized video.

Essentially, the automated follow up pushes them down the funnel from awareness, through consideration, to decision. And all of this is possible—as long as you have the right kind of content developed.

Proactive vs. Reactive Marketing

So how do you keep track of what kind of content to create and how, when, and where to publish it?

Well, the single most important part of a content strategy comes down to developing an editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar allows our clients to go from being reactive marketers to being proactive marketers.

When Henry Thoreau said that we live lives of quiet desperation, he must have known a CMO or two.

We all know how easy it is to fall into the sprint-break-spring-break marketing game.

Maybe you have a trade show coming up, so you sprint to get ready for that. Then after the trade show, you sort of go back to your regular responsibilities and take your foot off the gas.

Then a few months later, Christmas season comes around and you go right back to sprinting again. Then after the season, you might relax again for a bit.

This is textbook reactive marketing…and it doesn’t work.

Proactive Marketing

Our goal is to be as proactive as possible.

As a proactive marketer, you will be able to plan what content is going to be published in the next month, quarter, or possibly even the next year.

We design our editorial calendars to be about 80% structured and about 20% nimble, so that some flexibility is maintained for inevitable changes and unexpected needs that arise.

The calendar is customized to meet your company’s content needs, but often it includes:

• the content type
• what mediums it will be used in
• what keywords we will be optimizing for
• where it fits in the buyer’s journey

Maintaining a calendar also helps identify over time what kinds of content and what sort of publishing schedule it’s going to take to reach your goals.

When you communicate consistently with quality content your results compound. We have seen this play out countless times with our clients.

Your editorial calendar will be connected to collaborative documents such as the Google Document shown above.

In this document, you can see that our content writing team has written content that is designed to rank on major search engines.

What you’ll also notice is that we optimized this piece for certain keywords. In this instance, it was for the longtail phrase “back, neck and spine problems.“

Once the content has run through an internal audit, the technology we use also allows us to do some pre-publishing assessments.

Our software is able to analyze what companies are in the top 10 results on the first page of Google for the keywords we are trying to target.

In the example above, it shows that we have a very poor chance of beating your competition with the content as is.

It scored our content as a 3.7 out of 10.

So, we know that we have to go back in and make adjustments to improve the content before we publish.

This software also assesses readability (in relation to your competitors’ content) and provides a gauge for recommended length/word count.

Then finally, it looks at the keywords that we’re trying to optimize for. In this case, the score indicates that we need to improve the keywords usage and metadata, etc.

Once our software does the analysis, the content piece gets sent back to our writing team to make the required revisions.

Then we send it to you, the client, to give it one last look and bless it for publishing.

Once it’s been approved, we publish the content on its schedule date, and update the editorial calendar accordingly.

So when it comes to content writing, we want to share a question we commonly hear from our prospects. It goes something like this:

“How can I know that the Farotech team can write according to the sophistication or to the technical level that my particular industry requires?”

And that is a very good question.

There are two major ways that we ensure our team is prepared to deliver great content for our clients.

• During the Gap Assessment and onboarding process, we take a tremendous amount of notes and add them to our Case Notes file for your company. Our writers constantly refer back to the case notes to understand all of the critical details about your company, from industry specifics down to essential buzzwords.
• We also spend time interviewing the subject matter experts from your company on a recorded line. The average 1 hour phone call can result in about 60 to 90 days worth of content when our writer’s put it that information use within the schedule of an editorial calendar.

Focus on Low Hanging Fruit: Conversion

Before we wrap up on content strategy, we need to make one more important point about conversion.

We’re going to do a little math here, so just hang on.

Let’s say you have a website that gets 10,000 visitors per month and you have a 2% conversion rate. This would equal 200 leads.

But let’s say your goal is 300 leads per month. Your knee jerk reaction might be to crank up the lead generation and bring in 15,000 visitors to your site.

But in actuality, that’s more difficult, significantly MORE expensive, and will likely take more time than we have allocated within the scope of your project.

But you know what makes even MORE sense and is significantly LESS expensive?

If we look at improving your conversion rate.

The #1 way to do that is to go back and rewrite your existing content in a way that is more engaging.

With this approach, increasing your conversion rate by a mere 1%, will allow you to hit your sales goal of 300 leads with the same amount of traffic.

Pretty cool, huh?

That’s why killer content is so important.

Lead Nurturing is a fairly sophisticated process, but using a quick example will allow us to see it in action.

Imagine a potential client engages with your website, and we drop a cookie on their computer or mobile device.

This means that they are in our system and will start receiving marketing automation emails.

(Note: The time frame between emails is based upon the aggression level of the client.)

Over the decided upon time frame, the average prospect will get a certain set of emails, each with a unique focus:

• Overview
• Features & Benefits
• Cost of Procrastination
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Testimonials & Case Studies
• Invitation to the next opportunity to talk

Now, If the prospect graduates through all of these drip marketing emails, our system puts them on a lead newsletter list and that list is segmented and send out in tandem with your other marketing initiatives.

The Power of Slippage Campaigns

Slippage campaigns are automation workflows similar to the standard drip marketing emails.

However, these emails are designed to re-engage potential clients who had a very good experience with your sales team, but for one reason or another, they simply “slipped off the hook.”

Slippage campaigns are designed specifically to drip market to leads that have run cold.

The most effective way to do that is to design your email sequences to answer the most commonly raised objections that you heard in your sales discovery process.

So, for example, if someone says, “Now is not a good time,” our system would send out a pre-developed slippage campaign on the topic of the cost of procrastination.

If someone says, “Your product is too expensive,” the system will drip market to them about value versus price.

When we proactively answer questions before they are even asked, it establishes confidence and trust with your potential client.

To get the best results from marketing automation emails, we strive to always bring value.

And the best way to do that is to include either bite sized infographics or Video Snippets specifically design to engage your potential client.

In fact, according to SEOMoz, adding the ability to watch a video from within an email increases open rates by a whopping 35%.

Social media is a critical part of our Unique Process.

But, we feel the need to tell you the truth about social media…
Social media rarely works.

What we mean by that is it rarely works without combining it with paid advertising.

Let us explain.

Social Media Tricked Marketers

When social media first got its start, organizations like Facebook were able to gain tons of active subscribers to their platform.

However, once it reached a critical mass, Facebook did something brilliant.

They gave companies unlimited free access to the social network.

And companies came in in droves.

They thought, “Wow, this is a goldmine! One website where all of our potential clients will tell us everything about themselves… where they live, who they associate with, what they like, what they don’t like.”

It was the perfect place to market your products and services to a targeted audience. Just simply get people to like your page, and now they are exposed to all of your content—whether they like it or not.

And then practically overnight, Facebook turned off the water. Suddenly, all of the free visibility companies were getting…was gone!

And your audience—including your fans, likes and connections—went from constantly seeing your content in their timelines, to seeing practically nothing. (It’s estimated that your organic social media reach went from 40% of your content being seen by your followers down to an astonishing 2%!)

And as this Forbes article explains, Facebook made billions.

90% of Social Media is Pay to Play

So, how did Facebook monetize this change?

Well, they said “Hey Mr. Company, you can still have access to that audience, but now you are going to pay us for the privilege of marketing to them.”

…Enter the previously mentioned and now critical role of paid advertising.

Now, this change doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t still want to actively generate more fans, followers, likes, and connections.

Social Proof

People like big numbers.

So, those numbers that used to hold so much value still have the benefit of something we call “social proof.”

For every “like” a product or service gets on Facebook, it improves it’s perceived value.

But to be clear, these numbers rarely help your actual organic social media reach. That can only be acquired now through paid ads.

What Social Media Platform is best

So, with that being said honestly up front, let’s dive into some specifics of using social media as part of your marketing strategy.

Social Media for B2B

If you are a company that specializes in marketing in a business-to-business environment, choosing the right social media platform is very important.

Usually, this would mean investing significant time, energy, and money into LinkedIn.

Farotech went through extensive training with one of the best LinkedIn coaches in the marketing industry, Brynne Tilman.

Dream Rolodex

Brynne told us a story about when she was starting out in sales. One day she had the privilege of sitting down with one of the most connected and influential people that she had ever met. On his desk was a large rolodex.

She knew within that rolodex were some of the most powerful and wealthy individuals in the world. She thought to herself that if she could just borrow that rolodex for an hour, she could make a fortune with access to people like that!

Well, that dream rolodex exists today… and we all have access to it. It’s called LinkedIn!

The problem, however, is that in order to use it effectively, LinkedIn takes time and a sophisticated strategy.

Automation: Working Smarter not Harder

To win with LinkedIn, you have to work smarter, not harder.
And the best way to do that is to use automation.

The challenge we had was that we couldn’t find an automation platform that would fit our approach.

So, we built one.

Our LinkedIn automation platform allows us to take a custom, pre-selected audience and systematically market to them through drip marketing sequences.

Our platform can do a variety of things to simulate human behavior.

However, the most effective approach has been to do something similar to the following sequence:

Day 1: Follow an individual who you would like to do business with
Day 3: Send them a direct message about your Unique Selling Proposition
Day 6: Do a connection request
Day 9: Request an invitation to talk

Our system, at its peak, can effectively reach about 1,000 people a week, or roughly 4,000 a month!

That is something that could never be accomplished doing outreach manually.

Social Listening

Our software is also designed to do social listening.

Here’s how social listening works. We obtain your company’s keywords and apply them to our social media tools.

If someone in your social network uses one of those keywords in their social media posts (in the example shown above, the keywords was “knee replacement”) then your organization will get a notification.

This automation gives you the immediate notice you need so you can reach out to them directly.

Just like with your content strategy, social media comes down to consistency.

80/20 Social Media Publishing Schedule

We implement an approach called 80/20.

80/20 means that, as a general rule, we recommend that 80% of your posts be about establishing you as a thought leader. This is where you share statistics, stories and compelling images.

The purpose of these posts are to simply add value for your followers and establish yourself as a trusted resource.

While the other 20% of your posts can be used to talk specifically about and promote the features, benefits and highlights of your products and services.

When it comes to leveraging the power of social media for marketing, the magic is in the details.

Sweat the Small Stuff

Whoever said “don’t sweat the small stuff,” was obviously never in marketing.

We tirelessly review your social media analytics to figure out what’s working, what needs to be tweaked, and ultimately, which platforms and posts convert the best potential clients.

For the purposes of this blog, when we refer to paid advertising, we are mainly talking about Google Ads and Paid Social Media Campaigns.

There are numerous pros and cons when it comes to Paid Advertising. However, we would just like to highlight a few of each.

The Common Benefits of Paid Advertising:

• Speed: In the ideal sense, you can get your paid ads up in a fraction of the time it would take to optimize and index in SEO.
• Targeting: Google and social media channels specialize in providing data and the ability to reach specific audiences with custom messaging.
• Consistency: Retargeting allows your message to stay in front of your ideal audience.
• ROI: It is much easier to calculate your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).

The Cons of Paid Advertising:

• Cost: The investment in paid ads is usually more significant compared to SEO.
• Budget Dependency: If your ad is not set up properly, when your budget is depleted for that month, your ad comes down. Unlike SEO, where results compound like an annuity, the results from Paid Ads campaigns end when the campaign ends.

Which Paid Ads Platform is Best

The big question you are probably asking yourself is WHICH paid ads platform is best for me and my business?

That’s a loaded question, so let’s walk through it step by step.

When it comes to Paid Advertising, people often think the most important factor is whether their business is B2B or B2C.

What is B2P Advertising?

We like to think of this instead as B2P—business to person.

Allow me to explain.

If you run a business-to-business company, you might be assuming that advertising on Facebook is a poor use of your investment.

However, you have to realize that every business is made up of people. And when prospects are not actively looking for solutions to their problems, they are doing things that normal people do … like checking their Facebook account.

While we certainly agree that your clients are probably NOT going to Facebook with the purpose of looking for your products and services, your ads will follow them wherever they go on the web if you’re using a retargeting approach.

In this case, your ads would follow them even onto Facebook.

This means that your business stays at the top of their mind—even in their down time.

Most Agencies do Paid Ads Wrong

One of the top complaints we hear from potential clients is that they’ve already tried paid advertising in the past and they wasted a lot of time, energy and money doing so.

Often, they express confusion about how to set up campaigns or how to understand what is working and what’s not working.

One common issue is that noisy advertising analytics make it difficult to know how to make specific adjustments to maximize results.

In other words, they were getting reports that looked like this.

I know this looks confusing. And believe me, we do this for a living and sometimes I don’t even understand these reports.

Metrics that Matter

So, we take a different approach when it comes to analytics.

Our job is to present simplified reports, using four key data points to show you how we are doing in reference to the following goals:

• Reduce cost-per-click as low as possible
• Boost Impressions
• Increase conversion
• Improve clicks and click through rates

Essentially, what we are doing is optimizing the process to get the best possible results at the cheapest price.

Sophisticated Targeting

In order to do that, we have to understand your ideal buyer persona.

As an example, let’s say that we are trying to target shoe enthusiasts.

So let’s focus on social advertising first.

To do that, we put a piece of tracking code on your website so that when potential clients come to your website and then leave, we are able to create specific ads that follow those prospects around wherever they go on Facebook.

Look-alike Audience Targeting

But more importantly, this pixel also provides Facebook with the demographic information of your ideal buyer. That information can then be used to create “look-alike audiences.”

These are individuals or companies who might not yet even know that your brand exists. But now through Facebook, we have the power to target them directly with very specific messaging about your products and services.

So, once the pixel is placed, the process is simple. We do a targeted advertising campaign to people who are on social media that share the same demographics as the individuals who have been to your website in the past.

Retargeting

We also like to couple this strategy with an approach called retargeting.

Let us explain…

Have you ever gone to Amazon to look for a pair of shoes, and when you leave Amazon the ad for those shoes follows you around the internet wherever you go?

That’s the power of retargeting at work.

These ads can be displayed through social media channels and throughout other websites in the Google Network.

They can also be shown in video pre-roll format on YouTube and as a 15 minute clip that is shown during Facebook Watch videos.

While there are a number of additional approaches that are effective to use for paid ads and social advertising, we’ll just cover one more for now.

Geotargeting Advertising

The last approach we want to show you is called Geotargeting.

Geotargeting functionality allows our team to create a circle perimeter around a specific geographical area that you would like to reach with your marketing.

Within that circle, your ads will be displayed to target potential clients.

For example, if there is a large convention that will be attended by many of your ideal prospects, our team can put up a geofence around the location of the Convention Center during the event and market to all the attendees inside of the building.

Here’s a question for you:
What is the most effective call to action in the world?…

The answer is: the play button.

The value that video brings to marketing is incalculable. And that is why it is always at the heart of our approach.

Not only does video content create an emotional and engaging experience, but it also keeps users on your website longer, and search engines consider “time on page” to be a key ranking factor for SEO.

Using video in marketing at this point is table steaks. In fact, it is estimated that over 400 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every single minute.

But HOW you utilize video matters most.

How to use Video Marketing Effectively

When done effectively, video should help you maximize your online visibility.

Our video SEO technology allows us to know what keywords a user might type in to search engines to generate a video-based result.

As you can see in this example, when a user types in “information about knee replacement,” our client’s videos show up at the top of the search engine results page.

Microcontent Videos

Another effective way to utilize video is to take one longer form video and cut it up into a series of shorter videos. We call this process microcontenting.

We use microcontented videos all throughout our process.

They’re very effective in:

• Marketing Automation Emails
• Embedded into blogs
• Social Media posts
• Paid Ads

Asset Pages

However, the best way to use microcontent videos is to put them all on one page.
We call these powerhouse, content-packed pages, “asset pages.”

They’re long web pages, organized by a macro topic. On these pages, we answer the most frequently asked questions and address common objections of your potential clients.

And we do it in both text AND video format!

Pages organized this way index in Google very effectively because the content is often keyword rich and the videos keep users on the page longer. It’s a win-win.

As with many parts of our Unique Process, video development is both an art and a science.

While we have covered the science portion of explaining how to maximize your online visibility and how to organize your video content, it’s also important to walk through the art of good video development.

Trust the Process

Video gives marketers a way to communicate about products and services in a story format that is compelling and engaging.

We have been measuring the effectiveness of videos in marketing for nearly 2 decades.

And what we have discovered is that the most effective videos often require the most preparation.

Farotech takes the guesswork out of the video development process.

Our team handles:

• Script Development
• Storyboarding
• Video Production
• Post Production
• Publishing
• Promotion

We develop our videos in a wide variety of formats including traditional video, explainer-based videos, and vector animations.

We’re excited for you to start adding video to your marketing strategy.

Because when compelling storytelling is combined with conversion science, really great things happen!

Our #1 top priority is helping our clients make data-driven decisions.

Analytics and reporting are truly the foundation of what allows us to transform your marketing.

New marketing ideas are a dime a dozen, but the ability to understand data, pivot, and reassess—now that’s what makes good marketing great.

Death by Data

When it comes to reporting, there’s a common mistake that we’ve observed so many companies making over the years. We’ve given this phenomenon the name “death by data.”

So, what is it?

Well, rather than getting too little data, you get information overload.

That is why we provide three types of reporting to keep you up to date, but not overloaded:

• Monthly standard reporting
• Quarterly deep dive reports
• Real-time access to your analytics dashboard

Real Time Data

On your real-time analytics dashboard, we try to focus on the essentials to you get an at-a-glance look at the metrics that matter most:

• How many site visitors do we get and how did it compare to your goals
• How many leads did we get and how did it compare to your goals
• How many clients did we close and how did it compare to your goals

And once we know that we’re able to determine where Leads came from:

• Organic Search
• Direct Traffic
• Referrals
• Social Media
• Outbound Marketing
• Paid Ads
• Paid Social

Account Management

Now, let’s talk about account management and what role it plays in our relationship with our clients.

We take partnership very seriously.

And we believe that the cornerstone of a successful outcome for our clients’ campaigns depends on the synergy that their team has with our account manager.

That is why Farotech limits the number of clients an account manager services so that each of our partners gets quality time with their account manager and they’re never spread too thin.

Here is what our clients should expect in working with us:

• A weekly touch base call to review deliverables and editorial calendar
• A monthly meeting to review analytics at a macro level
• A quarterly deep dive meeting to review the campaign analytics in great detail and set goals for the next quarter
• Bi-annual, in-person meetings
• Real Time access to Hubspot dashboard & CRM

Your Time Commitment

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “This sounds like a big commitment on your end, but how do I know that you aren’t going to take up too much of my team’s time?”

That’s a great question.

On average, clients working with us as their marketing agency should expect to spend about 1.5 hours a week with our team.

Remember, our approach was created for clients like you.

We know you’re busy.

That’s why we become the time that you don’t have, and we fill in any gaps for marketing subject matter expertise that your team needs.

Collaboration is Key

We also encourage our clients to come join us in our office in Conshohocken.

We’ve worked hard to create a collaborative space that is both welcoming, but also conducive to the kind of dreaming, planning, and creating that we love to do together with our partners.

It’s amazing what can happen in an environment that’s NOT your everyday office.

So, consider yourself invited! Come spend a productive day with our team.

So, at this point you’re probably excited about how our Unique Process can provide you with a proven marketing strategy.

But, you may be wondering where you should begin.

Commonly, our clients are very anxious to get started and want to jump right into their campaign. And believe us, we are always very excited for that too.

But the whole “jumping right in” part—that is actually where most marketing agencies get it wrong.

After years of trial and error, we’ve found a better way.

At Farotech, we start out with a Gap Assessment. This is what makes us unique and allows our results to stand apart from other marketing agencies.

We’ll lay out more details for you in just a minute, but first, let’s consider a helpful analogy.

The Biggest Mistake you can make

Imagine you go into your primary care doctor for a routine, annual physical. The doctor does a quick checkup and without any extensive tests, x-rays, MRIs, or scans, the doctor says, “You know what? I think you would be a perfect candidate for open heart surgery!”

Wouldn’t you be like, “What??!!”

You would be shocked!

Wouldn’t you want to know that the doctor has tested and analyzed everything and considered all courses of action before he jumps to such a dramatic option?

Of course you would.

But in our industry, this exact thing happens all the time.

Our clients go to other marketing companies and they MIGHT spend an hour to tell them about their goals and issues. The average marketing company might take another 2 or 3 hours to do their surface-level research and analysis, and then write you a $100k proposal.

2 or 3 hours? That’s to write a proposal for the next 12 months that could make or break your business.

Yes, we think that’s crazy.

The Gap Assessment

That’s why at Farotech, we take a much different approach.

To build a great marketing campaign, it takes great research and great understanding at a comprehensive level. And that’s why we developed the Gap Assessment.

A Gap Assessment is a 10-week deep dive into your company’s goals, KPI’s, and growth opportunities.

It gives us a way to look at your total marketing potential in relation to the size of your industry and how much market share you need to reach your goals.

It is our vision to help your organization:

• 10x your business leads and opportunities
• Identify critical gaps In your marketing approach
• Develop foundational marketing assets to scale campaigns
• Create and maintain a marketing scorecard
• Identify your quarterly priorities and goals
• Review your competition
• Identify the lifetime value of your current and prospective clients
• Establish ROI model that scales as your business grows

The end result is this….

This isn’t a white paper or a one-size-fits-all report. This is a sizable book—fully customized for your company. And THIS will serve as your marketing road map for the next 3 to 5 years.

Now, let’s go over some of the highlights of the Gap Assessment.

First, we’re going to review all of your current lead generation, lead nurturing, and conversion strategies, the software that you use, your vendors and partners, and most importantly, the growth potential in your industry.

We will also analyze your inbound and outbound marketing approach, how your SEO stacks up against your competitors, and your brand penetration in the marketplace

Lastly, we conduct a very comprehensive competitor analysis so that we know exactly what will be required for you to win in your industry.

We take all of this marketing intel and is tie it together into what we call your scorecard.

Your scorecard becomes our team’s workbook for the next 3-5 years. It scores all of the critical parts of your marketing across five key areas:

• Marketing message
• Website performance
• Content
• SEO
• Sales & Marketing

Scorecard

The scores are color-coded to indicate level of priority and what we believe will have the most impact on your results. It’s our mission to turn everything from red to yellow, and from yellow to green—always turning the dials to get the best results possible for your campaign.

Henry Ford said it best:
“Vision without execution is hallucination.”

At the end of the day, your results come down to creating high quality deliverables.

Strategy can only take you so far.

Without timely execution, you will never reach your goals.

That’s why in the Gap Assessment, we outline your deliverables quarter-by-quarter. Our approach is designed to provide structure, while remaining nimble enough to adjust to changes in your company, your industry, and your goals.

Timeline to See Results

When we’re talking to clients who are ready to get started with us, another question we usually get is, “How quickly will we start to see results?”

While results will vary based upon how effective your current marketing strategy is, we commonly see more of a hockey stick-shaped curve around the 6 month mark after onboarding.

However, this process can be sped up if it is combined with an outbound marketing approach or paid advertising campaign.

Now, most people also have money on their mind.
So, let’s walk through a typical financial projection.

Investment Breakdown

Usually, clients tend to make a larger investment in the beginning to develop critical assets such as updating their website, developing video content, setting up new software connections etc.

However, once this initial investment process is complete, the system starts to kick into high gear. At that point, our team is actively managing your account, utilizing your editorial calendar to consistently develop quality content that:

• Generates leads
• Nurtures leads into customers
• Converts customers into brand ambassadors

The final stage is where our clients really start to see a return on investment. Even when working with our clients that have very aggressive growth goals, we have been able to develop such a clear ROI, that they have been willing to invest more and more into their marketing.

That is the type of win-win scenario that we are looking for with our clients.

So, that is our Unique Process!

We have built this process over the course of the last 20 years. We firmly believe that our system is the most effective way to transform your marketing and grow your business.

We appreciate you taking the time to read through this blog, and we welcome the opportunity to learn more about you and your business. Please get in touch to schedule an introductory meeting.