Hello my friends!
I am back with another Monthly Growth Report! March is over… and what a month it has been.
Thank you again for the feedback on my last Growth Report, it honestly means a lot to know that you are getting value from these.
Not gonna lie, I get nervous every time I share them. I always wonder what will people think?!
But we’re all friends here, right?
A Recap
At the end of February’s report, I set out my goals for March. Let’s recap on those and see how we got on.
Branding Completed – Woohoo! Finally, we wrapped up the rebrand project and it is live! This is a big weight off the shoulders.
New Websites Launched – We’re still working on this. I’ve also decided to park my personal blog for now until we get the new agency site live.
Promotional Activities – We have started this!
ClickUp – Despite me kicking and screaming, we have moved over to ClickUp from Asana.
More on all of the above below.
Agency Brand Launch… Introducing Yatter!
Wahh!
It’s live and I can finally share it with you.
We launched my new agency brand, Yatter, on the 16th March.
My brief to the branding agency was pretty simple.
Almost every time I speak to a new client, I hear the same story: they’ve been screwed over by previous agencies.
Typically they’ve:
- Worked with someone who had no idea what they were doing (ie. someone who’s bought a “how to run an agency” $997 course)
- Worked with a big agency who paid them no attention
I wanted something that is fun, exciting and stood out from the everyone else.
I get a lot of inspiration from the SaaS and Startup world, so I wanted to steer in that direction instead of the typically-fluffy marketing world.
I’m not going to go into depth on how we came to create the new brand, as I wrote an article on that here.
The feedback has been incredible – so many messages of support from people who love the brand.
One compliment literally made me jump out my seat with excitement: “It’s very what Monzo is to banking vibes”.
That’s exactly what I’m aiming for: To shake up a stale, broken industry.
Website Launch
In an ideal world, the website would have been ready for launch.
In hindsight, that was never going to happen. I vastly underestimated the work that was required.
The awesome agency we’ve partnered with to create the new site, Melt, are working hard behind the scenes to get it live ASAP and fingers crossed I can share that with you in the next growth report.
What do you think of this initial header concept? I think she’s looking great!
Because I knew the website wasn’t going to be ready for launch, I quickly mocked up a holding page myself, which you can see at: weareyatter.com.
Moved From Asana to ClickUp
My operations manager pushed through a big operational change this month: moving us over from Asana to ClickUp.
As we grow and start to create (and improve) our SOP’s, we needed somewhere to store them. Previously we used Asana and Google Docs but that wasn’t really doing it for me.
I found that Google Docs were created and left to gather dust… and Asana felt a bit clunky for storing SOP’s.
So after some research and speaking to other agency owners, we decided to go all-in on ClickUp.
We’ve started moving all of our SOP’s over to it and so far, it’s been relatively painless.
Here’s a peak of how one of our processes looks in ClickUp.
When we made the shift over, I had a throw-the-dummy-out-the-pram moment to Michelle, my ops manager… but I’ve since started to get used to it.
I’m not gonna lie… I personally prefer Asana from a User Experience perspective. It felt nice to use and was less buggy. But ClickUp feels a better fit for the team as a whole.
Begin Full-on Promotion!
This is what I’ve been most excited about… getting the brand out there!
Over the last couple Comprar cialis generico barato en españa of months, we have done little-to-no promotion (whilst we’ve worked on the rebrand etc.). Because of that, we’ve seen a big slow down in lead flow.
My anxiety has been pretty high at times this month, especially when I’ve looked at my calendar and seen it look baron.
You only feel the effects of no promotion 2-3 months down the line and we’ve definitely felt it.
Now the brand project is finished, it’s time to get back to growth mode. Everything below is based on the fact we don’t have a website – so some of the activities are temporary measures until the site is live.
Requested Feedback – I created a one-page document with some basic sales messaging on it and reached out to some connections of mine (who would fit our customer avatar) and asked them what they thought.
The feedback was terrible. I was way off the mark and most of them said it sounded just like any other marketing agency promising results. Back to the drawing board we go. More on this below.
Funnel launched – We launched a case study funnel and although we’ve managed to book a couple of calls from it (£300 per call), they’ve been really bad leads. I’m happy to spend £300 per call booked if we can get good leads coming in. It’s very early days so stay tuned.
Content drafted – When the site goes live, we will be publishing articles every week. In preparation for that, I’ve drafted up 2-3 articles that are ready to go.
We are going all-in on creating world-class content once the site goes live. In the past I’ve been guilty of creating average content… this time nothing gets posted unless I truly believe it’s an incredible resource for our customers.
Cold outreach – I’m not overly keen on doing cold outreach, but without the website, I wanted to test it out. I figure, there’s nothing wrong with getting your name out there and testing different messaging.
It’s very early days for me to give you any results, but in my limited experience… it hospitalharrywilliams.org doesn’t feel worth it. It’s incredibly time-consuming and the results just aren’t there.
I think I’ll keep doing this till the website goes live, but when I compare the time it takes vs investing time into things like content, content wins for me.
Dream100 – As well as cold outreach efforts to potential customers, I’ve been doing cold outreach to people on our Dream 100 list.
Our Dream 100 is a list of 100 people who share the same audience as us. Maybe they have a podcast, a blog, a newsletter and I’d love to collaborate with them.
We haven’t done it for long, but already we’ve had two guest blog opportunities approved simply by asking.
I think all our cold outreach efforts will move to Dream 100 outreach, rather than client outreach.
(If you’d like to collaborate on something and have a similar audience – drop me an email!)
Back to basics
Prompted by the bad feedback I received (as above), I decided to go back to basics and do some customer research.
I created a list of 5 basic, yet important questions and spent time each day for a week answering them.
Q – What are my prospects’ biggest problems?
Q – What results are my prospects looking for?
Q – What are my prospects biggest objections to buying our service? (either from us or competition)
Q – What are the most common questions our prospects ask?
Q – How can we separate ourselves from the competition?
I encourage you to do the same.
Get a pen and paper and answer each question, one per day. The clarity I have from doing this exercise is insane.
The rule? You have to fill one full page each day.
Once you’ve done that, type them into a Google Doc and send them to your team for feedback.
Once you’ve done that, you’ve got a brilliant resource for content ideas, as well as a bolstered understanding of your customer.
Re-launched Newsletter
I thought about including this in the promotion section, but I’m too excited about this… so thought I’d give it a section on its own!
I sent an honest email to my subscribers last week (24th March).
Every week, for the last few years, I’ve sat down to write an email to my list.
And although I’ve always had the best intentions, I haven’t put as much care into them as I should have.
I’ve only really shared links to recent articles/podcasts/videos… and if I’m honest, that’s not me serving them the best I can.
So – along with our recent rebrand, I’m shaking things up with a new format.
From now on I’ll be sending one email each Monday. Those emails will be split into three sections:
- One marketing lesson or story (real lessons you can action in your biz)
- One awesome resource I’ve come across (books, tools, software, hardware)
- And to finish things off on a light note, something to put a smile on your face (most likely something immature)
That’s it.
Again, the feedback I’ve had from the initial email has been amazing compared to my previous emails, so I’m excited about where this will go.
What’s Next?
Here’s the plan for April:
Host our first Webinar – As part of our promotional plan, we’re going to start hosting expert webinars. The plan eventually will be to run these every 2-4 weeks. We’re aiming to run the first one on 27th April, but that may change!
Agency website live – I’m pretty confident we’ll manage to get the agency website live this month. Once that is live, I’ll start sharing fun stats like traffic growth, etc.
Write at least x2 guest blog posts – A large proportion of our marketing this year is going to be focused on Dream 100 and delivering content to other peoples audiences. In April I’d like to write and publish at least 2 articles.
That’s a wrap!
I hope you enjoyed this report!
If you did, be sure to drop me a message on your favourite platform and let me know (@mrgavinbell everywhere) although I’m LOVING Twitter just now.
If you’d like to keep up to date with these monthly growth reports, pop your name and email in the form below and I’ll email you with the report each month. You won’t get any other emails from me (unless you opt in to those separately, of course!)
See you next month ?
Gavin
