Case Studies

Leveraging Digital Marketing from Beginner to Big Bucks: Lead Gen Ballers Agency Case Study

Summary:

With in-person meetings and events grinding to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic—incidentally ushering in a new virtual norm—, businesses began turning toward digital marketing more than ever before. A seasoned sales and marketing pro, Rob Johnson began receiving inquiries from businesses seeking his help developing email marketing and LinkedIn marketing strategies.

Seeing this growing need for assistance with digital marketing, and sensing a window of opportunity, Rob Johnson founded Lead Gen Ballers as an agency offering services in lead generation, demand gen, email marketing, Google retargeting ads, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

As the business grew, Lead Gen Ballers needed a way to manage the influx of its leads and a way to add new services like website visitor tracking, customer journey mapping, and building opt-in lists. And that’s where SharpSpring came in.

Using SharpSpring’s full-funnel marketing automation and sales CRM platform, Lead Gen Ballers organized clients’ marketing and sales campaigns, maximized digital marketing strategies to set clients apart from competitors, and generated more leads for clients.

Johnson shared how his agency helped clients get on the road toward digital transformation using SharpSpring to generate leads and track each touchpoint of the customer buying journey through to the sale:

“I started out with email and LinkedIn, but then expanded into paid ads. So LinkedIn, Facebook, Google retargeting ads. Then I also found the need to help clients track website visitors, the journey of a lead, and how to build an opt-in list. And what I came up with after researching was that SharpSpring did all of those things in a nice, neat package.”

Challenge

Lead Gen Baller’s clients were:

In need of digital marketing guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Missing a personalized customer journey.
Lacking new high-quality leads that convert.

Solution

Using SharpSpring’s comprehensive platform, Lead Gen Ballers got clients up to speed by digitizing offline data, using the data to track the customer journey and campaign ROI, and generate quality leads that converted.

“I like the comprehensiveness of SharpSpring’s software, as that’s what I was really looking for. There’s a lot of tools that can do little bits and pieces, but to be able to have everything all under one platform is very powerful. Because I do a lot of stuff on LinkedIn for clients, and I think being able to track and have that engagement tie into the people I have in the database within SharpSpring, I would say that’s the number one thing that I couldn’t live without at this point. It’s been really useful.”
– Rob Johnson

Campaign

Tactic: Digitize Client Data

Businesses small and large turned to Lead Gen Ballers during the pandemic for help building and executing digital marketing strategies for their businesses.

“Up to this point, most of my business has grown organically. I get approached by large organizations (when I say large, I mean maybe like a hundred to 200 employees). But then I also have conversations with startups. Companies that are just literally waiting for funding to come in to kick things off. They want to get started. And they want to know what type of software to use to start their journey as far as branding, and to really get a solid base for marketing,” said Johnson.

Tactic: Map the Customer Journey

Without a digital marketing strategy and a functioning tech stack, Lead Gen Ballers clients were missing out on key insights into the customer buying journey to inform where to personalize the marketing and sales teams’ lead nurturing touch points throughout the entire funnel. Using SharpSpring, their clients can now personalize their outreach to reach leads where they are and at just the right moment.

“By increasing activity on LinkedIn and being able to track who’s interacting with that content, we can then attach that activity to people they have in SharpSpring that they’re following. And then we leverage that. First of all, we can see as far as a lead journey, who’s going to the website and then we start to see who’s clicking on and engaging with certain assets the company has, certain webpages, certain articles, all of that. And what we do is help, we start to see by lead scoring who’s bubbling up and who the sales reps really need to reach out to. So LinkedIn is just one portion of it, but then that expands into this whole other area where we can do retargeting ads, we can take and segment certain people and build real concerted campaigns depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey,” explained Johnson.

Tactic: Generate new leads and business for clients

Many of Lead Gen Baller’s clients weren’t successfully carrying out demand gen strategies via email marketing, LinkedIn, or retargeting ads. While helping clients create and optimize their digital marketing strategy, they also tied in the SharpSpring platform to efforts across channels.

“You can’t look at all these leads as being equal because, typically, you have BDRs that are just kind of smiling and dialing, too. And they’re finding semi-qualified leads. But when they’re coming through SharpSpring and you’re able to leverage personas and all the leads and all that interaction, then they finally get to the point where they are high intent hand raisers. And I mean those are some really qualified leads,” said Johnson.

“Content is king right now. Even in outreach or whatever’s out there, people are posting on LinkedIn and engaging. The key here was to help clients create really good content, to establish themselves as thought leaders in the information around what their ICP, their target audience was interested in. And it wasn’t beating them over the head with what their product overcomes or helps with. What we really did was to build great assets to be used, like an ebook, a white paper, etc., just different things that came more from a thought leader space. And that gave us content to go out on LinkedIn with. And then that kind of fed the engine of SharpSpring. Because everything’s being tracked. So now you have people engaging on LinkedIn, you have people checking out the website. Then we also have some paid ads going on in tandem. We’re building an opt-in list for newsletters and then having all that in SharpSpring and being able to manage all that. And bubble up those leads that have high intent. We just started to get that machine rolling as far as producing some high-quality leads for clients’ sales teams to go after,” explained Johnson.

Results

By digitizing data, mapping and understanding the customer journey, generating high-quality leads through content, and using SharpSpring’s all-in-one marketing automation platform, Lead Gen Baller’s clients are now successfully leveraging digital marketing to grow their businesses at a much higher rate.