Done-For-You Outbound Marketing

Become a household name to 6,000 prospects in 6 months

 

 

We Do Things Differently

Build An Audience First

While many inbound approaches do deeply consider the needs of those it seeks to attract, with inbound you are also forced to consider the “needs” of the following stakeholders because without their help you cannot distribute your content:

  • Google search ranking signals
  • Social media ranking algorithms
  • Ad marketplaces
  • Influencers or gatekeepers you might want to help you promote your content

If you turn your ideal client profile into a carefully-constructed LinkedIn Sales Navigator search, you can build an audience of thousands of prospective buyers and recommenders for your services. Typically this audience will look like this:

  • 40 or 50% will have a valid work email address where you can directly distribute educational content; fewer than 3% will unsubscribe
  • 50 to 60% will convert into a LinkedIn ads audience
  • 30% to 40% will accept a LinkedIn connection request and be open to a 1-time message professionaly introducing your firm

Building an audience first solves many content distribution problems.

Curate Instead of Create

It’s easier, cheaper, and faster to create a topical newsletter worth reading than it is to create traditional content marketing worth reading. It’s easier, far cheaper, and faster to build an audience by inserting something relevant and valuable in their inbox than it is to win the search rank contest or to successfully bid for desirable clicks. To be fair, if you naturally have truly interesting insights to share and the resources & know-how to distribute those insights effectively, you should do that. It’s an incredible trust-builder that helps you command the highest possible price for your expertise. But too many of you fall into the “unhappy valley” of limited resources and few ideas the market regards as insightful. A topical newsletter is something you should consider. Here’s why.

  • In an already-crowded information landscape, curation is an easier path to value-creation than creation because 1 more curator adds more value to the crowded landscape than 1 more creator does (unless that creator is exceptionally talented, hard-working, well-resourced, or lucky).
  • Curation is lower risk than creation because your taste as a curator is much more likely to match that of sophisticated buyers in your market than your taste as a creator is likely to.
  • It requires less skill for you to serve your market as a curator than it does as a creator because serving your market as a creator requires that you also become an effective distributor of the content you create.
Educate and Introduce Instead of Pitching

At large enough scale, directly pitching expensive, trust-intenstive services via cold outreach does work. Over a large enough group of prospects, a few will have budget, authority, need, and be ready to buy but lacking good options and will include you in their consideration set. But at what cost to your brand and professional status among the rest you pitch and annoy?

If you sell a service that your market regularly buys, and if you have distinctive, memorable positioning, then positioning your business as a source of educational value and professionally introducing yourself directly to your audience are a better approach than directly pitching prospects on your first interaction.

Price

  • $2,500/mo for outbound content generation and distribution
  • $4,000/mo for outbound content generation and distribution and professional network growth support

Philosophy

The OpportunityLabs done-for-you newsletter service is:

  • Affordable outbound brand marketing
  • Marketing that is complementary to traditional content marketing

The goals of the service are to:

  • Define an audience that includes as close as possible to 100% of the potential buyers of your service/product
  • Use outbound methods to distribute free education that increases your company/product’s positioning and name recognition among this audience

Here is where the OpportunityLabs newsletter service fits:

Competing for the clicks and eyeballs of buyers who are assembling a consideration set is costly and difficult because there is a relatively small quantity of those buyers at any given time (relative to the entire market of future buyers) and there are well-known ways to reach those buyers (SEO and ad platforms). Thus, the auction mechanism underlying SEO and ad platforms can drive the price of reaching “buying-now” prospects quite high, and small errors in marketing execution can dilute or waste that spend. This is not a reason to outright avoid these approaches, but it’s a reason to build a more resilient marketing strategy by layering in a long-term brand marketing approach to complement the more traditional content marketing + SEO/paid media approach.

The OpportunityLabs done-for-you newsletter service helps earn your company/product more positioning and name recognition among all potential buyers, whether they are actively researching/buying or not. This means that for many of your future buyers, you have more time to build trust and familiarity with them because they first encounter your company/product well before they begin a buying process or customer journey. And you can reach a great many of these prospects at a relatively low monthly cost.

We see traditional content marketing + SEO/paid media and the OpportunityLabs done-for-you newsletter service as complementary pieces of a marketing strategy. If you’re just starting to build a serious marketing effort for your business and only have the budget for one or the other, we think you should start with us for 2 reasons:

  • Like they say about the best time to plant a tree being 20 years ago, the best time to start a long-term brand marketing approach is also 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. You can always layer in a focused content marketing effort later when you have more insight into what buyer objections that content marketing needs to address.
  • It’s very difficult to execute a high quality content creation + SEO/paid media distribution initiative for less than $10k/month. You can lower the price by lowering the quality or effectiveness, or you can do what our newsletter service does for you: you can switch from content creation to curation, which, at $2,500/mo for our service, is a much lower cost way to create educational value for an audience.

Process

After you contact us using the form below but before you become a client

  1. We’ll send you a link to schedule a first exploratory call:
    1. During the exploratory call, we’ll be very curious about your business, what sort of positioning/focus you have or are willing to commit to, how you’ve intercepted opportunity in the past, what you’ve already tried to generate leads, and why you’re interested in getting help with lead generation.
    2. By the conclusion of the exploratory call, we’ll try to give you a “worth it/probably not worth it” diagnosis on whether it would make sense to work together, and if not what you might consider doing instead. And of course we’ll suggest how specifically you should engage with us if any of our methods make sense for your situation.
    3. Incidentally, we never try to “close you on the phone”. We always prefer our clients have made a thoughtful, considered decision about engaging with us before any money changes hands, and at least a few days time for you to think things over or discuss with other stakeholders before you make a decision usually results in a better decision.
    4. If we conclude the exploratory call with what seems like mutual interest in working together and we do not hear from you, we will follow up twice and then drop it.
  2. If we mutually agree to work together, we will set up a method of recurrring payment (ACH transfer, Wise.com transfer, or stripe.com charge; monthly up-front rather than in arrears), a series of onboarding meetings and recurring status calls, and a mutually-acceptable means of communication for the engagement.

After you become an 80/20 Agency Marketing client

  1. We’ll put in place outbound marketing infrastructure. You own the infrastructure, so if you ultimately want to run it yourself, you can without extra switching cost.
  2. We develop a strategy for your newsletter.
  3. We work with you to answer this question: would your existing site impede the lead generation strategy? If so, we interpose a 1-month copywriting/messaging sprint to focus on removing those impediments.
  4. We work with you to develop a list of news sources to monitor and curate.
  5. We work with you to develop list-building criteria for the newsletter.
  6. We produce for you a weekly newsletter and (after your review & edits) email it to a growing audience. We target reaching an audience of 6,000 prospects within 6 months.

After you decide to stop engaging with us

Nothing lasts forever, all good things become commodities, familiarity breeds contempt, sometimes things just don’t work for whatever reason, sometimes things work great but the context changes, etc, etc, etc. We do everything we can on our end to only enter into what are likely to be mutually-beneficial relationships, but no business relationship is “until death do us part”, and some of our service offerings are only meant to be short-term skill-transfer-focused coaching anyway. So not if but when we part ways:

  1. Whoever wants to end things gives the earliest possible heads-up so things can be wound down in an orderly fashion.
  2. If there’s time in the wind-down period, we’ll teach you everything you need to know to keep your topical newsletter running.
  3. Before we leave, we’ll hand over some documentation to help you keep things running smoothly on your own, should you choose to.

Inquire

 

(Or, if you hate forms: philip@opportunitylabs.io)

Stay In Touch

If you want to watch and learn from a distance rather than hiring us now, our email list is a good way to do that:

 

More Information

  • Where needed, we will do copywriting work to clarify positioning/pov/messaging on your existing website and set up some on-site conversion pathways.
  • If you want to publish insight content (that you write) instead of a topical newsletter, our content distribution process can accomodate that.
  • This is a new service. Prices will never be lower. We choose to not ask for a long-term commitment from you because this service is new, and we understand the perceived risk that poses.