When executing a digital marketing plan for a business, the professional or the agency need to be careful so they can deliver value to their clients, not only something flashy. Views, likes and shares are interesting, but leads that can turn to business are more important.
This week us at Website Planet talked with Robert Indries, Co-Founder and CEO of X27 Marketing, to know more about their focus on measurable results and their work with all-around marketing work.
Please present X27 Marketing to our audience.
I currently own multiple companies and X27 is one of them. Experiment 27 started with Alex Berman and me in 2015, 7 years ago. We wanted to be a company that is performance-based marketing geared towards generating leads and attaining tangible business results.
That actually mattered back then, and even today it still happens. There are many marketing companies that don’t focus on tangible business results. They focus on getting impressions, likes or engagement on posts or things like that, but nothing that actually makes money for the company. We didn’t like that. We wanted to create a company that actually focused on getting results. That’s how we started X27.
The very first client we had started on a budget of $5,000 a month. In the first three months, I think we made them over a $100,000. They immediately doubled their budget with us to $10,000 and in the first year I think we made them north of $2 million. We’ve had dozens, if not hundreds more clients since then.
The way we call the company, X27, comes from experimentation. Within marketing and sales, you never know what’s going to work. Experiment #1 might work, but experiment #27 might be the winner. So, you keep needing to test and experiment. Generating likes can be a good signal but generating leads without a doubt is better value.
How do you help companies generate leads? What do you do, without giving away your secret?
In terms of marketing and sales channels, we can do everything from generating interest in the cold market, up until money in the bank. We can do the entire sales cycle. That also gives us a competitive advantage because we know what defines a quality lead, we know how to nurture a lead, we know how to close a lead. We know the entire sequence. And when it comes to the lead generation, let’s say channels, we’ve tested all of them.
We’ve done conferences with a lot of success. We’ve done and are still doing SEO. We do paid ad campaigns, email outreach, LinkedIn. We do things on YouTube too. I don’t think there’s one marketing channel we did not test and succeed up until now.
Can you give us more details about your product specialty, your coaching program?
Sure. We came up with coaching because people wanted to learn from us. We weren’t doing it at the beginning, we were just doing marketing. Both Alex and I are hands-on marketers and salespeople. So, we love doing the work and we did it at the beginning of X27. It was just him and myself for like 6 to 12 months.
After that, we started to get more and more people in the team. At one point, people started coming to us and saying “I have my own team and I would like you guys to coach it” or “I would like you to coach me on how to manage that team or what you pay attention to”.
So, we started doing coaching at $200 or $300 an hour, I think. Then, we put that at $500 an hour, then at $700. Right now, it’s at $1,100 an hour. That’s how we get paid, either in increments of one hour or half an hour, like $550 per half an hour.
We always do a year-long engagement. You just coach them for that year, whether it’s weekly or twice a month. In that coaching program, we basically focus the discussion on gaining results. We tell them exactly what to do and how they can improve.
There are so many challenges that people have brought up over the years and we find solutions for them one by one.
How do you adapt your message to different industries and professionals in your coaching session?
At this point in time, we’ve coached over a thousand people and that’s no exaggeration. I know as a fact that we’ve had at least 300 of our direct competitors, so people are doing exactly what we’re doing. We have no problem with that. We enjoy helping people and believe in abundance. We believe that there’s more than enough business to go around.
I can tell you that there wasn’t a company or a type of company or an industry where they would ask questions and we would not have answers to those questions, or solutions. I can tell you that we can give answers to everyone because we have a very logical approach to things. We think the fundamental tools all the time because that’s what marketing professionals do. They look at the funnel.
What do you see as the most common mistakes?
The most common mistakes in organizations I see is people not sticking to the fundamentals and not using common sense logic. Whenever I talk to someone, they make decisions based on what they feel.
I had a discussion like that in one of my companies the other week, we were talking about the performance of an employee. Then, the director in that company said that these two people that have worked with this person had this to say – I didn’t care about their opinion. Even if it’s very objective, I don’t want their opinion. I want to see, factually, that that person is performing. Show me the performance metrics to prove that.
We had an entire argument, in which they stated that their opinion matters because they’re coworkers. And I said, I was not contesting that their opinion mattered, but that’s not what I was asking for. I was asking for data driven proof that they were successful in their role. If you can’t give me data driven proof, you’re missing the basic fundamentals of doing business correctly.
This is what I see is the biggest issue in all businesses, whether they do marketing, operations, HR, or other. They don’t focus on the data and they don’t make decisions based on that data.
Talking about data, which social media or tools have lots of untapped potential for companies generating leads? Is it LinkedIn? Is it still email?
We do all channels, from email and social media platforms to old school phone calling. We do LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and various others. I can tell you that all of them work without exception; every single platform, if you do it right, works every single time. No exception. As a company, do not ask the question of what’s the trend or what channels you should use. That’s not the right question you should ask yourself. The right question is: where are my clients expecting to be sold to? Where can I get in touch with them?
