Amanda Nelson Talks About Content Planning & Generation

Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Oh, my goodness. Okay. My life has been based mostly around hospitality, and I feel like my journey to where I’m at now has been a combination of unorthodox. It’s not average. I didn’t go to school specifically knowing that I wanted to run a marketing agency later on. I went to school for hotel and restaurant management and really loved the marketing aspect of it. It was hotel, restaurant management and marketing. So, in that, I left that I was managing restaurants and I made the mistake of doing the maths between what a server or bartender would make versus what I used to make doing that versus managing restaurants on a salary. And it was just such a big gap that I did not want to do that anymore. The work was too hard and the pay off was not good enough. But then I went into a sales position selling industrial supplies, which was a whole other direction. But again, building skills to where I’m at now and then got laid off from that after having my son and decided to start a small little social media consulting business. Really found some stride there and got some great clients and expanded it out and grew the agency to what it is now where we’ve got a team of 19 people working.
And I found that if I didn’t have a skill set, then I found the people with the skill set. So, we’ve got experts in all their respective fields and we help businesses grow.

We started out slowly in 2016, really took stride, 2017, 2018, and then now we’re finally coming into a really good spot now. We’ve been doubling our revenue for the last three and a bit years, so it’s really been going in the right direction.

Well, this is an interesting question because I talk to my clients and we talk about target clients and ideal clients and I want them to envision someone sitting in front of them and that’s who we’re going to market to. With me, it’s a little bit different because I don’t go for people in specific verticals. I go for people that are running businesses that are hitting a certain revenue mark. Anybody that’s anywhere between… They have to be generally over five million in revenue a year and up just to afford the full service that we offer. I found that we have a lot of healthcare and finances. A lot of those guys are clients, and I’m looking for clients that are… They’ve either worked with an agency, they haven’t seen results, they’ve had a few different people in a few different parts of their business, but nobody really that’s there to handle the whole thing. And that’s where we come in. And I’m essentially an extension of their business, handling all of their marketing. And my team will then work together collectively to get those results.

Yeah, well, that’s tricky. I have a few differences… There’s a couple of things that I can say about that. One is I like variety in the work that I do. And so that’s one thing I don’t want to do… Sure, I’ll say yes. If I get a whole bunch of dentists coming my way, I’m not going to say, I’m bored with dentists, I don’t want to work with dentists. But it’s a matter of, yeah, I like the variety. I like to be able to see how different things work because a lot of the actions are similar. It’s just a strategy that has a different shift. So seeing how a tweak in strategy will make a difference in law versus a brain surgeon and where are we doing the differences, and how is that working? I really like analyzing the differences as opposed to doing similar actions over and over again. Also, having a whole bunch of the same, it takes a lot to develop a strategy, and I really don’t want to be giving or I want it to be very defined… I do have two doctors. They’re in the same field, but it’s tough to make sure that the strategy is specific for each client as opposed to using the same one across the board.
I like that variety as well, so we can keep the strategy unique to each client.

I’m someone that even on my work day, I bounce from task to task because I like that variety and I get bored fairly quickly. I like to be able to stay agile and fluid.

Okay. When we come on with a client, we will do… Generally, the other thing is that the ideal client is someone that lets us do it all. So essentially, a lot of businesses have their brand already in place or they’re looking for a brand refresh or a complete overhaul. So, I like that as a starting point, doing a full brand development because in that process, a lot of the strategy is starting to form and it’s starting to spark, I guess. And then from there, putting together a marketing plan and then pulling in the team with our ad specialists and our email marketing specialists and our copywriters for content production and then being able to put it into action from there. Of course, SEO and online reputation management is always a huge factor as well. But did I answer your question?

Specific niches? What do you mean specific niches?

Okay. So, some of the services that we offer are marketing planning and strategy, email marketing, PPC advertising, Google AdWords, online reputation management, social media marketing website, WordPress design and development, e-commerce website design and development, lead generation, SEO optimization, and brand development. We create marketing collateral, we do content development, lots of marketing data analysis, graphic design as well as in our wheelhouse.

Well, generally, we work with our clients for a year, minimum. So, we start out and depending on what the strategy depicts is where we’re going to pull from our offerings. And I probably wouldn’t just do social media management for a client. I probably wouldn’t just do email marketing. And the reason why is because I did that years ago where we would just do one-off services and client’s expectations were not being met because they often don’t understand all of the other factors that go into making that social media post do something. I will start with building a website because I do find that that’s a platform that leads to other marketing work with that client because when we build a website for them, then it’s talking about, well, you get them on the website, what do you want them to do there? And how are you going to market them? It’s great to have a nice looking website, but you need to make that work and earn that money that you paid for it. We do guest blogs for things often, but I don’t like to just piece things out and chop things up for people.
I like to be able to make sure that the full picture is doing what it needs to do.

Okay. So, clients normally, the expectation is that they need to be able to afford anywhere between at least 3,000 to 4,000 a month is what they need to consider for an investment for one year. And then we just go from there. And then as things come up, we will have a base. Here’s what we’re going to do for you each month, and this is what this is, and then it just goes rolling. But then as things come up or sometimes they need additional stuff, and then we would just take it on and do it. Like, if they need a brochure this month because I’ve got something going on, sure, we’ll do that for you and then just charge at an hourly rate.

Yeah. The main thing, everything starts out with an initial growth marketing strategy consultation, which lasts anywhere. It’s at least a two hour thing where we’re digging into everything at that point. I have an extensive onboarding forum, which I get clients to fill out because we need to… The big thing is getting their goals for sure. Where do they want to go? It doesn’t matter where I want them to go. It’s where they want to go. And then also their measurements of success. What can I do to make sure that the money that you’re paying me is worth it for you? And then also setting the expectations that all of these results are not going to happen within a month. You’re going to have to see it over time, which is why I put it into… We work with you for a year, and generally after three months, we’ve got things rolling and you’re starting to see some traction. At the six month mark, you should see some momentum building, and by one year, you should see noticeable, tangible ROI on what has happened over the past year.

Right. Well, we do a lot of… All of our meetings are generally over Zoom or Google Meet. Because a lot of my clients are not local to me. I’m from Canada and a lot of them are in the States. I use a combination of a few different software programs. One for my proposals and contracts and everything is called Dubsado, which I really like. I’ve been with them since I started business. I think it was close to when they started, so it’s neat to have been able to grow with them. The project management system that I’ve just found this year and absolutely love is called Hive. It’s not a bigger one. We worked on monday.com, the teamwork, and a whole bunch of other clickups, and I just was not able to really adopt that. My team was not able to adopt it, so I’m really happy with Hive. We do a lot of our stuff in Google Drive. That’s where we put all of our files and stuff. We’ve got Slack as well, but Hive generally… I’m hoping to take Slack out of the picture and go just to Hive because that’s a good messaging system as well.
When it comes to project approvals, etc, we’re doing it via email and also Hive as well for that because we can have our clients in there and we message them directly through there.

Well, if I’m being completely honest, I don’t have a single employee. Everybody is a contractor, which is why I really like the model because I find contractors are more responsible for the work that they produce and they don’t take things for granted. Also, I like that people then will have a set, they’ll be on set clients, they get used to the clients and the expectations are there. And again, I go through with them, here are my goals, here are my measures for success, here are my expectations for the work that you need to produce. And then they all perform, which is fantastic. And if they don’t, they don’t last long.

I absolutely love the branding process. We’ve got a couple of amazing art directors, and I love… They each have their different ways of going about a brand, and it’s really interesting. I’ve worked with one in the past. He was super in-depth and he would sit with the client for an hour and he would put together gorgeous stylescapes, three different stylescapes for the client. Then from there it was an intense process. From there he would develop the brands and it would be top to bottom. It was awesome. I found that that worked out really well, but it was extremely costly, which is great. His work is fantastic, but it was extremely costly and it also was time consuming. We’ve got another art director right now that meets with the client and I’m sitting in on it just because I enjoy the process. Digging in again, finding out their goals, finding out what they like, where do they see their brand, what do they envision their business doing in the next 5 to 10 years. Then they go to work and put together a pitch deck for the logos. Generally, we do three logo options with three colour options with typography options.
The logos generally have an icon. There’s a sub logo and then a main logo. Then we just go from there. Then the clients generally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a client pick one, and then we’re done. Then it’s like there’s a conversation there where I like this from this one, and I like this from this one, and I like this. Can we put it all together? So then they go back to the drawing board. We’re in this process right now and it’s really fun with a brain surgeon in California, actually. Then they produce an amalgamated version of everything that they’re looking for. Then it’s finalized and then we go into a website build generally and marketing collateral with, in this case, brochures, business cards, email signatures and all that. But it is absolutely incredible to see a brand come together from the starting point because then I get to start envisioning. I know the art director has it going off, but now I need to because they’re not necessarily going to be doing all of the social media graphics and all of that. They’re setting the tone for my other designers, like a senior designer that would come in or a junior designer would come in after and support that stuff.
So, it’s fun to be able to see where the brand is going to go and what the vision is and to take that and bring it to the rest of the team and breathe life.

We do a lot of data analysis and data capture and we’re running a lot of reports. When it comes to that, we’re getting the mentions, we’re getting the follower increase, seeing how popular they are as a whole. In most cases, the benchmark is pretty low. They haven’t seen a whole lot of results. Almost instantly, once there’s something in place that is consistent and cohesive, there’s an increase there. But yeah, we’re measuring. They get, I think it’s like a 40 page report of analytics every month. That is pretty comprehensive across the board on all of our actions.

Well, what we do is I have clients and they have their specific… I want to make sure that I’m giving them the full package. Again, as much for them as it is for my team, because I’m also sending those out to my team so they know what their work is doing. And the clients generally are looking at things like, how many followers did I get? How many visits did I get? What’s my ad spend? Those are the things that they really care about. And so then we go through them. I do quarterly strategy meetings with the clients after we’ve got things set up, and then we set out the strategy for the next. We go over what happened the previous quarter and we set up the following quarter. In there, we’re going in detail of here’s what’s happening here, here’s where you were, here’s where we want you to be, and here’s what did well, here’s what didn’t do as well, and here’s what we’re going to do to get it doing what we needed to do.

For sure. Even when the results didn’t do what we wanted them to do, even when they’re not great results, I believe in complete transparency there as well because there’s always strategies of, Okay, why didn’t this work? And what are we going to do with that information that we’ve gathered to be better?

I think the best way to do it is to create campaigns, campaigns around one thought process and one goal. And what are the actions that you’re going to do that are going to support that one goal and then pulling things together from there. And it’s based around the client’s goals. What do they want? What’s the theme or the focus on the marketing that we’re doing for that quarter? And how can we make a campaign out of that to pull it all together?

Well, the big thing is to make sure that the people that are on your list actually want to be on your list and always give them an option to opt out. I’m okay with people unsubscribing, please unsubscribe. If you’re not going to open my email, if you’re not going to click on it, if this isn’t what you want, then unsubscribe. I really heavily encourage that. But providing good value with the emails, again, I feel like the theme in marketing is setting expectations. So letting them know, having a solid welcome series when they opt in, letting them know what to expect and how they’re going to hear from you and how you’re going to show up for them and why you’re of value to them. What else? There’s some strategies that you can get into when it comes to actually sending out the emails. One thing you can do is figure out who your most engaged followers are and send them first. Then within an hour or so, send out the rest of your list because then it’s going to help Google and Yahoo and the hotmail gods say, Oh, this person is great.
Look at all these people that are opening this email and get it into their inboxes. Lots of list cleanups, often making sure the list is really organized and segmented and tagged off properly. Creating a lot of campaigns based on actions within the emails. Like, if they click here, then they’re getting really granular with their actions is something that produces a lot of great results.

I am, just not from your own domain. You don’t want to use your own domain. I’ve worked with a few sales companies and did cold outreach myself. And we’re not using the art of B. Ca. We are using other domains, so it’s not going to affect my main domain with my main marketing. But yeah, I’m very much a fan of cold outreach. I’ve seen a lot of businesses come through with that and don’t see anything wrong with it because people will, again, delete if they don’t want it. I get cold outreach. I get emails from people pitching all the time, and often unless there’s something serious, I’m not interested at all. But I’ll often be open to really almost anything that people email me because I always am interested in what other people are doing when it comes to their marketing.

I have a client that’s on HubSpot. I absolutely love HubSpot. We use Active Campaign a lot for a lot of ours. That client that’s on HubSpot, they’re big. It’s a heavy sale. It’s a heavy competitive industry that they’re in and we need to get really crazy with that one. For the ones that are like mid level and yes, we can segment and do everything, I love active campaigns for that stuff.

Sure. I think that’s the main reason why, too, with our clients, we want to be doing all of their marketing is because when we have, we set up the goals and the themes for what’s going on in our growth strategy consultations that we have with our clients every quarter, talking again about what happened in the past, what we want to happen in the future, building off of what we’ve learned from the data in the past, and then setting a theme. We have an ultimate goal for the quarter, and then each individual month has a focus. We’re not spreading ourselves across and talking about all of the services or products that they offer in one month. We are focusing on just a little smaller part of it. Then everything, emails, social, ads, anything like that, is leading towards that with that in mind. Everything then is tying together that way to really hit them on a whole bunch of fronts all with the same consistent messaging.

Well, revenue, obviously, is the one that everybody wants to see increase. So, that’s a nice one to look at. With some clients, I’ve got one with a brick and mortar store. So, we’re looking at there, how many people mentioned the email campaign? We’ve got things in our email campaigns that encourage them to come in store because that’s their goal is to get them physically in the store mentioning this email campaign or something. So, that’s a measurement that we have there. Sales, obviously, or even looking at e-commerce, if it’s in the cart but they haven’t bought it, at least we’ve got them one step closer. Now that part of the puzzle is solved. Now how can we get maybe an abandoned cart sequence out and see what’s going on there? Other measurements, again, of course, increase in followers, brand mentions, costs per clicks. I like to look at that thing, impressions, how many people are seeing it, how many shares are happening, all of that stuff.

That stuff is really cool. That stuff is really cool. Being able to watch what someone’s doing on your website and finding out the sticking points. Yeah, that’s awesome. I love that stuff.

It’s called Hot Jet. I do use one and I can’t remember. It’s someone on my team that’s more… But I was on it. Hot something…

Say that again.

I don’t think that’s it. I can’t remember. I will get back to you on that. I know I’ve got something. I can find it fairly… Darn it. It’s like on the tip of my brain. It’ll come to me when we’re on something else.

Oh, hot Jar. Yes, hot Jar. Yes.

A few common mistakes are coming off too hot and heavy with your pitches. I think you want to really build that relationship, ideally. Unless you’re going out with a cold email, like you’re cold selling, you’re cold, you’re hitting them hard with cold, then you need to be unique. You need to make sure that your email is dramatically correct. It needs to be on point that way because if I see something and something is off with the spelling or anything, I am judging, judging, judging on that first impression, you need to set yourself apart. One person could do outreach and they used video and it was cool. And it was a video with my name and my business in the video. So, I knew that they took extra effort. And then I didn’t respond because I wanted to see, okay, what does your follow up look like? How does this look? And they sent me another email, which was just on point. And then a third email was another video of them. Again, it’s a custom for me, which I thought was incredible. I don’t know how you can do that at scale, but it was really incredible and impressive.

Maybe. Yeah. It was impressive. Then I finally emailed them back and said, Holy, you did awesome. This was great. We weren’t a fit for anything, but I definitely took the time to meet with them and see what they were all about because I was so impressed.

We have gone through a lot of publishers and schedulers and trial and error over the years. Currently, right now, I’m really loving eClincher. I like their platform. I like that they hit all of the social accounts that I need for my clients. They’ve got great reporting. They’ve got a really cool thing that is like recycling queues. I really like that where you can have posts that are evergreen and it just keeps going and going, which is great. That’s what we use for software, for socialising. Then obviously designers are using Adobe and InDesign and all of those Photoshop and all of that jazz.

Okay. With clients, often it’s being able to be really transparent with clients. I also always get their birthdays on our intake form. I’m sending them out a little something on birthdays. I send them out a little something on Christmas. I want to be thoughtful with my interactions with the clients and really purposeful to also check in with them by email on a weekly basis to see how they’re doing just to be touching, checking in, yeah, just to touch base. That’s what I’m getting at. Yeah, I want to make sure that the clients are happy because ultimately that’s the whole thing. They need to be happy. When there’s issues, it’s going above and beyond to make things right and admitting if we did make a mistake, then yeah, we own it and we make it better. I don’t want to make excuses for what happened or whatever. It’s owning it and making it right. I haven’t quite yet, but the thing that I’m working on is because every year we do a little rate increase and I want to go to the clients and say at the six month or eight month mark, hey, you want to lock in your rates for next year?
Sign up for another year now and you can. Otherwise, there will be an increase at the end. That will retain a good chunk of them as well. Also just getting great results for them and having a really good working relationship. Generally, I have good… And I work with the clients personally. I’m touching base with them on their quarterly meetings. So they’re getting that consistent person, the CEO of the company is taking the time to meet with them. I think that’s a big thing as well. With my contractors, with them, it is a matter of, again, setting those expectations. A lot of people, I get pitched a lot for people to work for me. I think that says, oh, we have really good core values. That’s it, too, is when someone starts working with the art of business, I go through with them or when I interview them. The big thing that I say is we are all about our core values. And those are being like, number one is to love what you do. If you don’t love what you’re doing here at the Art of Business, then it’s not. You need to either let me know and we’ll put you in a different spot where you will love it.
But if you start to not love your job here, you need to either quit or we need to figure something out because I don’t want someone that doesn’t love what they’re doing because if they love what they’re doing, they’re putting out great work, they’re passionate, and you can feel it. I want their best work. Another one is to speak up with our core values, I need good communication with everybody all over the globe. We need great communication. We need expectations in place. That is just off right from the beginning. I said that. Another one is working hard. I like to reiterate that with everybody because sometimes we are working at a pretty high pace and I need everybody to rise up because if someone isn’t, it’s going to affect the whole team and derail us, which is not good. What else? Oh, and the last one is to always be growing or always learning. So I also like to check in with them and we have a learning channel in Slack of like, what did you learn this week? What are you interested in? What books are you reading? What is exciting for you? I’m really interested in knowing about them and meeting with them and really caring about them.
I have it. Any personal things that are going on, I like to check up with them. Someone just got married a couple of weeks ago and just checking in and seeing how their life is. They’re not just here to work, it’s a relationship building as well.

Okay. Most successful case study study. This is an interesting one. Thinking about it across the board. Most successful. I guess it’s one of the ones that stand out for me, and it is a success. It’s not a full scope, but it’s one that I did in 2017 or ’18. It was with a business that… It was a competition that was running here in Alberta, Canada, and it was to build your business. It was about a bank here, Alberta Treasury Bank, putting on a contest that the winner was going to get $5,000 for winning this campaign. And they had goals. It was a crowdfunding campaign. And so we were hired to come in and help with this. And we developed the brand for this business. And then we ran the campaign for… It was a month of going hard. So we’re doing emails, we’re doing paid ads, we’re doing social. And it was just super exciting to see. We’re helping her with coaching on, You’re going to go live today. You’re going to talk about this. This is what you’re going to be really walking with her on that journey. She won the competition, which was fantastic.
She ended up not only getting the $5,000 prize, it was a startup business as well. $5,000 was quite a bit for her to start up. Then she ended up with over $10,000 in money coming her way from all of the crowdfunding efforts and all of the stuff. It was just a really fun campaign that was really high pressure for a month and lots of contact with the client and really cool results that our whole province saw.

Oh, yeah. I’m sure. Oh, horror stories. I guess a lesson that I’ve learned is partnerships often aren’t ideal situations. At least they aren’t in my case. And also really making sure that clients and my contractors are separate. There’s always a bit of a middle person there because we worked with this one brand, we developed an awesome brand for them and the marketing was going amazing. The website was in process. And then I had a bit of a falling out with a partner, or she wasn’t a partner, but she was someone that was like my number two. I leaned on her a lot, but she was going behind my back and sweetening up clients. This one that we had so much fun with, they ended up leaving me. It went sideways. They didn’t pay their last couple of invoices. We were out quite a bit of money. My number two left as well and took that client that was pretty major at that point as well when it came to… It was one of my main sources. It was one of the biggest clients that I had. She took it, they went off and it went sideways from there.
They’re not in business anymore, which is unfortunate. But yeah, that one went a little sideways.

Well, and I also found too, because I have had some clients reach out to contractors on the side, and thankfully, my contractors are loyal. A lot of them come to me and say, Hey, I was reached out by this client, so then I can nip it in the bud. But also on the other hand, if a client did take one contractor, they’re missing out on… Sure, take the contractor and pay a lesser dollar value, but you’re missing out on the whole package. I’ve got a team of 19 that’s working for you and you want one contractor. That’s your… It’s not my loss at this point. You’ve made a silly decision and you’ve broken a relationship and you’ve broken trust and you’re on my blacklist.

All right, do it.

The funniest incident? When we used to do team meetings over Zoom, we would sing every time someone had a birthday, everybody would sing them happy birthday. And listening to that afterwards, we are clearly not a choir. We are a marketing team, but our voices are not great. So, that was pretty funny, listening to the playback of all of us doing happy birthday.

I have just been asked by a client to come on as a CMO role, like an official CMO role. So, things are being considered for that and just navigating how that would work. So, that’s an interesting thing that I don’t know about outcomes or anything, but yeah.

Maths. Terrible.

Sharks. Or the water. Were you looking for something deeper?

Oh, geez, my inspiration. I get inspiration from so many people and so many now. Jeez, I can’t really pick just one. I’ll go with a safe one. My dad’s my inspiration. There’s so many, though, but my dad is a pretty big inspiration to me. He’s someone that has worked hard. He’s built up. He’s an entrepreneur as well or was. He’s just always really financially smart. He seems to have it all together. One day I hope to as well.

Oh, geez. My last Google search, green shirts. Which is funny because I’m doing a photoshoot. Well, this is one of the results of the Google searches. But yeah, we’re doing a photoshoot. I’m planning a photoshoot with a photographer for my brand.

Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it too.