The whole Grow Atom team is proud.
We’ve landed the best client we’ve ever had.
They’re ambitious.
They’re results-oriented.
They’re us.
That’s right—we’ve hired ourselves.
Introducing the Core Reactor
This is a bit of a crazy experiment.
Sure, there are plenty of marketing agencies that market themselves. That’s nothing special.
But what makes this project different is that we won’t just be producing content behind a smokescreen. We’re going to be radically transparent.
(Hat tip to Ray Dalio for that term.)
That mean you won’t just see the results of what we’re producing. We’ll share the strategy and thought process behind everything before we do it.
We also have a set budget, timeframes, goals, and a real sales process.
For all intents and purposes, we’re considering ourselves a “real client.”
This client signs on to work with us on January 1st, 2021.
We’ll do our first analysis in the meantime and share what we’ve found the first Tuesday of January—and the first Tuesday of each month, at least as long as we don’t fire our agency.
Then it’s execution time. You’ll get to see exactly how we did.
The details of the project
As a “real” client, we have requirements and standards.
Our primary goal is simple—we want to make a positive ROI with our content marketing and SEO.
But spending $100 to get $101 in work doesn’t make sense, so it needs to be at least 30%, with a dream goal of 100%.
In other words, for every $100 we spend on content marketing, we want to acquire $130 in client work, working towards $200.
We’re a dream client in a way because we know content marketing takes time, and we have the patience to make it work.
We don’t expect to earn anything on content marketing for the first three months. It will be a complete money sink, aiming toward long-term results.
At the three-month mark we hope to start increasing our client work.
By the first year, we hope to have a total of 30% ROI over our initial spend. If we reach that mark and continue past December 31st, 2021, our goal would be to increase that number to 200%.
Of course, we’ll track other metrics along the way—traffic, email subscribers, bounce rate, and the like. As we get started we’ll figure out what’s the One Metric That Matters.
(With such a long timeframe, it’s definitely not ROI.)
Like a real client, we also have a budget—$10,000 per month. We’re hardly Rockefellers, but we’re also not exactly scrimping, either.
The money is a tricky question because technically most of our work is “free.” If someone is already working 40 hours a week and we assign them an internal project, that doesn’t cost extra.
So to determine the cost, we made the decision to base our work on actual invoice amounts.
We’ll publish those each month—with the actual prices we’d charge for said projects—so you can get a feel for what we charge.
If we raise our prices along the way, we’ll have to decide whether to keep going or pull the plug.
Risks and problems
I’m going to be upfront here. Zero agencies I know have done this, and I think the problem is obvious—it’s hugely risky.
The most obvious risks I see are:
Risk #1: We don’t meet our goals
That would be pretty embarrassing. By setting a hard goal of 30% ROI, it’ll be obvious if we make it or if we don’t. If we finish out 2021 earning, say, 90% of what we invested… yikes. That’ll reflect pretty badly on our company.
And the risk is particularly real because—unlike the eCommerce and SaaS industries we work in—I don’t know much about the success of agency content marketing. It might be an ineffective (doesn’t work) or inefficient (takes too much time and/or money) way to find new clients.
That’s scary.
I’m taking solace in the fact that we’ll be constantly adjusting and revising, so even if we fail we’ll learn a lot and our readers (hi!) will have a better idea of what we were thinking all along.
Risk #2: Someone hijacks our strategy
The risk of radical transparency is that someone else can use that to grow their business.
So to provide the most transparency while also protecting our strategies, we’ll do a little anonymizing along the way.
For example, we might share the SEO details of a keyword we’re targeting, but not share what that keyword is until we’ve done the work behind it.
We’ll keep this to a minimum, but I think it’s necessary to keep everything sane.
Risk #3: This blows up too much
Alright, I realize this is a little bit of pie-in-the-sky thinking. But if this segment of “our journey” ends up being the most popular part of the site, I’m concerned it might overshadow the rest of our strategies.
So as part of that, I’ll be including this segment in our monthly invoices. It’s not free, in other words.
Risk #4: We’ll give away too many company secrets
This is a little tricky.
On the one hand, I don’t want to share all our client information and revenue figures.
But on the other hand, we’re a ROI-focused agency. We NEED to show some of those numbers to prove our strategy works.
The basic gist is this. Currently, we’ve earned $0 from our own content marketing efforts. Yet we’re still an agency with revenue, profit, growth, and the like.
So the numbers we display as ROI are NOT our total revenue figures, they’re only clients that we earned through our content marketing channels.
For us, that means clients who discovered us through content marketing.
So these examples would count:
- A client Googles a term, finds our blog, signs up, and eventually hires us
- A client’s friend recommends our blog, they find the blog, request a quote, and hire us
- A client finds a link to our blog post on another site and hires us
But these examples wouldn’t count:
- A client referred a friend, who liked our blog and signed up
- We pitch a company, and they sign up and hire us
- A friend of Stephen’s starts reading the blog and eventually hires us
We need to be as strict as possible.
So now, we’ve done the basic analysis.
The next step? Doing the first January analysis and sharing it the first Tuesday in January.
See you all there.
