Open Source Marketing: How We Grew Our Agency Through Inbound A lot of conference talks are about theories, things too new for anyone to have a real opinion on, and one-off campaigns that are white labeled with brand names obscured. What happens when we stop blurring the screenshots, give names to all the people involved and talk about what it really takes to make it all happen? In this talk Mike King gets down, dirty and in-depth and specific about how iAcquire invested in content strategy, content marketing, SEO and Social Media to improve lead generation by 60% YoY. Attend this session if you want a completely transparent look at how to grow a digital business.

1. OPEN SOURCE
MARKETING: HOW
WE DO MARKETING
AT IACQUIRE
The reason why you know who we are is due to the efforts of the
people in this presentation
@iPullRank

2. DOWNLOAD THIS DECK
http://iacq.co/how-we-market
@iPullRank

3. How marketing was born at iacquire
YEAR ONE: BRAND AWARENESS
@iPullRank

4. WHEN I
ARRIVED AT
IACQUIRE
APRIL 2012…
Nobody knew what it was, when I
showed people the website they
thought it was a software
company. They purposely obscured
their messaging.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

5. Brand reputation was meh
Iacquire.com
Those that did know iAcquire know it for the bad reputation largely inherited from the acquisition of Conductor’s Paid
Link practice and one of the co-founders having been involved with Text Link Ads.
@iACQUIRE

6. This isn’t an excuse, it’s just me
explaining that I didn’t understand the
magnitude of the paid link building until I
did the quantifying outreach study which
was literally days before my official start
date.

7. In hindsight… me to act as a figurehead showing
I realize that iAcquire hired
their “commitment” to thought leadership and being a white hat
SEO company.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

8. OF COURSE
MY FRIENDS
SHOWED
SUPPORT…
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

9. Site traffic 3/30/11 – 3/29/12
Sorry for the Clicky screenshots. iAcquire was still very tinfoil hat about Google Analytics at this point,
but this was their site traffic for the entire year before I joined.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

10. Site traffic 3/30/12 – 5/10/12
In the 6 weeks since I’d started I’d gotten iAcquire double the traffic they had the entire previous year.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

11. How did I do that?
Iacquire.com
I posted the Noob Guide to Link Building as a compainion piece to Oli Gardner from @Unbounce’s Noob Guide to
Online Marketing and linked back to downloadable PDFs on iAcquire.com.
@iACQUIRE

12. SURPRISE, SURPRISE!
WE DO INBOUND MARKETING.
To be clear I don’t develop marketing plans, I develop a quarterly content strategy and we execute
against that with regard to iacquire’s business goals..
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

13. The numbers behind the strategy
Iacquire.com
To date that post on Moz drove 1,211 newsletter signups and 451 tweets which helped increase brand awareness
and build a brand asset in the mailing list.
@iACQUIRE

14. Paywithatweet.com a message. Make
This is one of my favorite tools for spreading
users tweet about your content to get it. Make sure the content is
worth tweeting for though.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

15. TWEETS
ADS
BLOGS
VIDEO
UGC
COMICS
PLUGINS
PRODUCTS
COMMENTS
INFOGRAPHICS
UI ELEMENTS
Diversify content types
PHOTOS
SERVICES
PHYSICAL SPACE
ANIMATIONS
PRINT MATERIAL
SLIDE DECKS
PRESS
DATA
APIS
iacquire.com
TOOLS
EVENTS
PLATFORMS
PDFS
@iPullRank

16. GARY & cOGSWELL
Iacquire.com
I dreamed up a two robot characters based loosely on iAcquire’s co-founders called Gary & Cogswell and built a
comic strip series with illustration done by Kyle Bastian.
@iACQUIRE

17. IN KANSAS
Reinclusion Afterlife Presentation:
http://bit.ly/reinclusion-afterlife

18. This was great for me. I
actually got the chance to do
to affect change right away.
The reality of it is iAcquire had an offering that I didn’t actually believe in. They
sold me on joining by offering me the power to build an SEO capability the way I
believed it should be. I don’t believe that’s what they actually expected to let me to
do that, but the brand crisis left me in a position to do so which effectively made it
possible to build offerings that I did actually believe in and make the marketing
that much more effective.
@iPullRank

19. Hired megan & Norris
Iacquire.com
I hired Megan Brown (@thatgirlmegan) as our Social Media Strategist to help manage our growing community and
Norris Rowley as our Manager of Market Research & Analytics to help make our offering unique.
@iACQUIRE

20. I spoke a lot
Iacquire.com
Between this year and last I have spoken at dozens of conferences on behalf of iAcquire to let people know that we
exist and are on the cutting edge of Search.
@iACQUIRE

21. I brought on Josh Giardino
Iacquire.com
I hired Joshua Giardino (@techarity) so he could do Research and Development so we could stay on the cutting edge
with ideas for marketing and build tools. We built Authora & Broken Link Index from the Common Crawl
@iACQUIRE

22. Closed awas a knowledge gap around howa keep your post
$240k deal with to guest
I realized there
social shares after a 301. I wrote a post on SEW, someone saw it
and it ultimately generated $240K of new business for us.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

23. Hired tom
Iacquire.com
Selling on-page SEO projects made for products I could really believe in and enough revenue to hire someone to run
it. So Tom (@tomharari) joined the team as our SEO Manager.
@iACQUIRE

24. Tom guest posted too
Iacquire.com
Almost right away Tom found his stride and started contributing not only to our own blog, but on Moz as a thought
leader.
@iACQUIRE

25. Videostarted doing video content to showcase the iAcquire
content
We also
culture, spread brand awareness, educate and entertain. Our video
content doesn’t perform that well.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

26. 12 days of linkmas
Iacquire.com
I had thought leaders put together link building tips in the form of Christmas cards in the 12 Days of Linkmas
campaign. 51 Links from 16 LRDs for free. 5199 Pageviews. 107% traffic growth from Twitter. Coverage on SEW.
@iACQUIRE

27. 12 days of linkmas Social activity
Iacquire.com
Almost right away Tom found his stride and started contributing not only to our own blog, but on Moz as a thought
leader.
@iACQUIRE

28. There was no end to end
measurement plan at this
point
Sure we measured traffic and conversions per channel, but never rankings. We
didn’t really have any way to tie site traffic to how much business we were driving.
At this point it was far more about how do we get more eyeballs on iAcquire. And
yes, we did that.
@iPullRank

29. Primetime lead generation
YEAR TWO: DIRECT RESPONSE
@iPullRank

30. Goals (finally),
Generate 15 leads per quarter
Build brand awareness
Launch new website
Develop Editorial Calendar
Promote Content via Social Media
Reach more Directors, VPs, and C-Suite Execs
Launch Co-marketing efforts
Develop email marketing / lead nurturing
campaigns
Create 3 case studies per quarter
Limitations,
No defined budget
Lack of communication on resource requests
Not enough staff
Non self-sufficient team
@iPullRank

31. @iPullRank

32. We started the year strong with 5
http://www.iacquire.com/blog/how-the-mad-men-of-iacquireperformed-in-2012-and-what-to-expect-in-2013/
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

33. Redeveloped our target personas
Iacquire.com
Norris rebuilt our personas using data from Simmons Connect and we’ve since used those to develop Content
Strategies that have been incredibly effective in lead generation.
@iACQUIRE

34. OUR CORE STRATEGY
Our core strategy is to produce
entertaining and/or educational
content with the goal of
positioning iAcquire as the global
leader in inbound marketing.
@iPullRank

35. The iAcquire brand
voice is that of a
savvy yet
trustworthy friend.,
It is authentic, authoritative and
friendly. The voice exudes confidence but does
not foster alienation. iAcquire speaks the same
language as its audience and while we are
experts we are not wizards. No buzzwords…
Tone
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Authentic but not Brash
Fun but not Silly
Direct but not Uninitiated
Authoritative but not Persnickety
Questioning but not Rebellious
Informal but not Unprofessional
Cool but not Unapproachable
Effective but not Complicated
@iPullRank

36. Developed a slogan and philosophy
Iacquire.com
Unfortunately the CRAFT philosophy never caught on internally. Even in video interviews on the site with the
executive team some of them couldn’t tell you what it stood for.
@iACQUIRE

37. Developed a search-driven information architecture
Iacquire.com
Despite the fact that we are doing marketing across multiple channels we developed a site architecture based on the
things that people are searching for to make sure it performs well Organically.
@iACQUIRE

38. Updated the branding
Iacquire.com
Our Creative Director Robb Dorr and I worked to refresh the brand and make it look at cooler.
@iACQUIRE

39. Developed the wireframes
Iacquire.com
Robb and I developed wireframes to help us all stay on the same page with the content that we’d need to create for
this new site.
@iACQUIRE

40. Hired devin
Iacquire.com
I hired Devin Asaro (@copydev) as our lead Content Strategist to own the Content Strategy for the website in addition
to developing the copy.
@iACQUIRE

41. Homepage before and after
Iacquire.com
…
@iACQUIRE

42. Hired jenn
Iacquire.com
I hired Jenn Sager (@jennsager) to give us Creative firepower in NYC. She helped speed up the site launch working
on icons, case studies and other site content. She stayed until 10pm on her first day. She builds marketing materials.
@iACQUIRE

43. Offering clarity
Iacquire.com
One of the main goals of the new site was to showcase our expanded offerings with a lot of clarity to completely offset
the obscured messaging of the previous iteration of the site,
@iACQUIRE

44. The industry took notice.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

45. More importantly the metrics took notice
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

46. Organic search traffic increased
We saw an immediate uplift in traffic from the Organic Search
channel.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

47. Mom organic search traffic
Our Organic Search Traffic has continued to substantially increase
MoM since the launch of the new website.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

48. Our best referral lead source
Having a mention on Moz’s recommended list has been our single
most consistent lead source. It cost us $0.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

49. Moz referrals by the numbers
Iacquire.com
To date being on the Moz Recommended list has sent us 72 leads, most of which have been qualified.
@iACQUIRE

50. Established a content calendar
We’d had a content calendar in the past, but until now we hadn’t
been able to sufficiently stick to it. With more staff we’ve gotten
better at it.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

51. Hired Konner
Iacquire.com
Konner (@konnersmith) is our resident Video Producer. He came in and helped us streamline our video work and
improve its quality. Up until then I was shooting and editing all the video.
@iACQUIRE

52. WE blew out our promotions of the video content,
video content
We haven’t put enough efforts in
so the views are low, but they look great! However people often
comment to us in person on the content they’ve seen.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

53. Hired j-li
Iacquire.com
Jiafeng Li (@jli_jiafengli) came on to our Strategy team and made us a much stronger team from a quantitative
analysis standpoint. We leverage her Excel skills to make sure all of our data is strong.
@iACQUIRE

54. Iacquire got a lot easier to market
MARKET RESEARCH
DIGITAL STRATEGY
COMPETITIVE Analysis
Content Strategy
IN-HOUSE EXPERTISE
CAPABILITIES
REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
SEO
CONTENT MARKETING
Social Media
measurement
& optimization
DATA & TECHNOLOGY
IRANK
Iacquire.com
Data Partnerships
Now that I had a strong team of badass digital marketers and new cutting edge offerings it became much easier to
market something we could believe in.
@iACQUIRE

55. Experian webinar
Iacquire.com
We did a co-branded webinar with SurveyMonkey
@iACQUIRE

56. Surveymonkey co-marketing
Iacquire.com
We did content with SurveyMonkey
@iACQUIRE

57. Meetups first meetup in partnership with Zemanta and Distilled
for brand awareness
We launched our
and it was a smashing success with 50 in attendance. We’ve continued
to grow them and have over 100 people attend each time.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

58. The single best traffic driving piece of content on the site
Iacquire.com
My post on 18 Meta Tags Every Webpage Should Have in 2013 has driven over 70k visits and 61k unique pageiews
in 8 months making it our best traffic driver. That traffic is 100% organic.
@iACQUIRE

59. MAKE DEFINITIVE TACTICAL
GUIDES AND GET REWARDED
WITH TRAFFIC.
But not conversions if your content is too high funnel.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

60. Hired amanda
Iacquire.com
Amanda (@agalluch) was one of our all-star interns the previous year who had continued to contribute to our blog so I
brought her on as an Associate Content Strategist. She owns our blog, email marketing and landing page creation.
@iACQUIRE

61. Unbounce shredded our landing page
Iacquire.com
The guys at Unbounce tore apart our landing page and at the 0.20% conversion rate they are absolutely right.
@iACQUIRE

62. SO WE STEP
OUR GAME UP
IMMEDIATELY
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

63. Hired sasha
Iacquire.com
We hired Sasha (@galkinator) who primarily works on the Strategy side as a Copywriter, but also frees up Devin to
do more Marketing work.
@iACQUIRE

64. How we affected the business
AN EXAMPLE OF HOW THE TEAM
WORKS
Date
@iPullRank

65. I challengedthe thought withnew data that Google
lead the SEO industry to leverage the this
I
has given us rather than complain about the data they have taken
away.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

66. THE CONVO
AROUND IT
GAVE US AN
IDEA
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

67. Then devin made this
Devin talked about how (not provided) moves us away from
keyword stuffing back into marketing and telling good stories.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

68. WHICH MADE
US REALIZE
THIS…
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

69. AND THE
AUDIENCE
REJOICED
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

70. AMANDA AND
DEVIN MADE
THIS
With help from our creative
director @usethedorr. Signup:
http://landing.iacquire.com/sol
ving-not-provided/
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

71. We ran twitter ads targeting seos
Iacquire.com
Our Twitter ads have resulted in 524 clicks to the landing page at a spend of $283.
@iACQUIRE

72. We a/b test to get the most out
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

73. SO FAR WE
HAVE 90
SIGNUPS
Not bad for a few hours work.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

74. How we affected the business
METRICS AND MEASUREMENT
Date
@iPullRank

75. We don’t build links, they just come
We have over 11k links from 1.3K domains without ever sending a single outreach email. Marketing > Link Building.
iacquire.com
@iPullRank

76. traffic
Iacquire.com
Traffic in general is up 172.74% YoY and Organic Search traffic specifically is up 1323.50%. Our content strategy and
site relaunch paid off.
@iACQUIRE

77. conversions
Iacquire.com
Conversions are up 65.16% across the board and while the conversions we tracked last year are down substantially
the new ones that we truly care about (Site Contact Form Submit) are up.
@iACQUIRE

78. Helloooooo conversions
That’s 283 leads
in 3 quarters
vs. the 45 we’re
supposed to get
Iacquire.com
Safe to say we crushed that.
@iACQUIRE

79. iacquire.com
@iPullRank

80. Cost Per Acquisition
Iacquire.com
Based on the numbers at my disposal which may not be a complete picture of the cost of the sales and marketing
teams our CPA is $3,756.
@iACQUIRE

81. CPA:LTV Ratio
1:14
Iacquire.com
Our SalesForce setup is not entirely accurate, but based on the numbers that have been recorded our average
lifetime value per customer is $53,502 which makes our CPA:LTV ratio 1:14. (1:3-5 is considered good).
@iACQUIRE

82. Things we never quite executed on
FAILURES
@iPullRank

83. Outbrain doesn’t help us meet business goals
Iacquire.com
Only the most off-topic articles generate traffic for us through Outbrain and that traffic is largely unqualified.
@iACQUIRE

84. USER
GENERATED
COMICS
We never launched this project. The
interactive developer who was working on it
completely disappeared and the project died.
@iPullRank

85. REPUTATION
TRACKER
We never launched Reputation
Tracker. The co-founders of iAcquire
announced they didn’t want me
making tools when I was in the middle
of it.
@iPullRank

86. AUTHORA
Josh and I were ahead of our time
with trying to open source the Author
Graph. iAcquire didn’t believe in it at
the time and stopped putting
resources into it. Now they are
revisiting the idea as the basis of
ClearVoice’s author ranking system
VoiceGraph and VoiceRank
@iPullRank

87. BROKEN LINK
INDEX
The Outreach team wasn’t able to
properly implement the broken link
building as a viable method of building
links so iAcquire decided to stop
funding this project as well.
@iPullRank

88. NEVER LAUNCHED
IACQUIRETESTS.COM
We announced that we would we start making our seo tests
public. The project never happened.
@iPullRank

89. What you should implement right now
KEY TAKEAWAYS
@iPullRank

90. Understand your audience
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

91. Identify knowledge gaps that set you apart
Iacquire.com
We tend to b blog about things it no one else seems to be thinking about. It’s very effective in establishing us as
thought leaders.
@iACQUIRE

92. Focus on content strategy
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

93. Have channel owners
Social Media Owner
Iacquire.com
Blog, Email Owner
Our efforts became substantially more effective once we had someone to own each channel.
@iACQUIRE

94. Over communicate
Iacquire.com
Meetings, emails, phone calls, Google+ Hangouts. I don’t care how you do it, just communicate what you’re doing.
@iACQUIRE

95. Track everything
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

96. What you should implement right now
TOOLS WE USE
@iPullRank

97. hootsuite
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

98. mailchimp
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

99. Experian simmons
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

100. moz
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

101. sysomos
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

102. 15five
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

103. trello
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

104. Google analytics
Iacquire.com
Google Analytics is of course how we measure all the things. http://www.google.com/analytics
@iACQUIRE

105. feedburner
Iacquire.com
This is an actual email I got from someone who was actually considering our services. This is something I hear a lot
from my friends in the industry.
@iACQUIRE

106. Sharedby.co
Iacquire.com
We add our branding to the URLs and the top of every page that we share to easily drive people back to us.
http://www.sharedby.co
@iACQUIRE

107. Bit.ly
Iacquire.com
We have our own URL shortener via Bit.ly for iacq.co. http://www.bitly.com
@iACQUIRE

108. Ga url builder
Iacquire.com
For measurement purposes we need to tag our URLs with the right parameters. This tool makes it easy
http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-url-builder/
@iACQUIRE

109. unbounce
Iacquire.com
Unbounce is a WYSIWYG tool for building landing pages and running A/B tests. We don’t run enough A/B tests.
http://www.unbounce.com
@iACQUIRE

110. eventbrite
Iacquire.com
We use Eventbrite for tickets to our meetups. It provides metrics and Google Analytics integration
http://www.eventbrite.com
@iACQUIRE

111. wistia
Iacquire.com
We use Wistia as our video hosting platform so we can get visits directly to our site from Organic Search.
http://www.wistia.com
@iACQUIRE

112. speechpad
Iacquire.com
We use Speechpad to transcribe our videos so we can place the copy on the page and better improve its visibility in
Organic Search. http://www.speechpad.com
@iACQUIRE

113. @iPullRank

114. wwww.iacquire.com
Thank you
Michael King
Director of Inbound Marketing
@iPullRank