BI 340: How to Use the Forecaster Method and Stop Wasting Your Marketing Dollars
November 24, 2020
On the show with me today is John Lincoln; founder of a full service digital agency by the name of Ignite Visibility; a four-time Inc 5000 company. With 16+ years of demanding experience, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses including amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide.
Lincoln has authored thousands of articles and videos, taken hundreds of websites to number one positions in Google for competitive keywords, built social communities to millions of members, strategized many record breaking advertising campaigns with millions in spend and worked on hundreds of advanced projects in CRO, influencer marketing, media buys, email, Amazon and affiliate marketing. Lincoln has authored two books, "The Forecaster Method (2019)" and "Digital Influencer (2016)," and is Producer and Director of "SEO: The Movie" and "Social Media Marketing: The Movie". Lincoln has received the Most Admired CEO Award and San Diego's Top Business Leaders Under 40 Award. He has spoken at Web Summit, SMX, Pubcon and more.
In my conversation with John, we talked about two main topics; how authoring books has helped me to become an influencer, and how to leverage analytics and attribution tracking to ensure that ad spend is not wasted on offers that don't perform up to expectations. In fact, I was so impressed with what John shared with me that I hired his firm right after we finished recording the episode.
So, regardless of whether your run a SaaS, an eCommerce business, or a digital agency, you are going to get a ton of value from this interview.
Thank you so much for listening! Please subscribe rate and review on your favorite podcast listening app. To get to the show notes for today's episode, go to https://brightideas.co/340...and if you have any questions for me, you can leave me a voicemail at brightideas.co/asktrent
Episode Highlights
[03:37] — John introduces Ignite Visibility
- Ignite Visibility is a mission-driven digital marketing agency that uses a multi-channel digital marketing strategy.
- They use the systems and strategies they learned from scaling their own marketing efforts for their clients.
[05:16] — Doing one big thing per year and writing a book
- Having a quarterly or annual big marketing campaign will help keep your brand at the top of people’s minds.
- So far, he has made two movies and two books for this one big marketing push.
- He uses his books as a learning experience and an opportunity to share his own experiences.
[10:48] — The know-hows of Google Analytics
- The mediums are the buckets of traffic, while a source is a specific piece of traffic.
- Google Analytics provides a space for PPC management to increase your conversion volume and build an entire business model around your ad spend.
[13:34] — How Ignite Visibility’s PPC management volume works
- They figure out where your customer spends time online as well as the ad activity of your competitors.
- They then project a cost per acquisition framework to get a customer from every network. After that, they would build the business model for you.
[15:29] — The importance of landing pages and remarketing
- The top-to-bottom funnel approach works well on custom landing pages. They nurture them further and further down.
- They also remarket specific strategies by ad network, introducing them in a positive, non-conversion way.
[17:55] — Why John never takes his foot off the brake for marketing
- It is what led them to become a four-time Inc. 5000 company.
- When you consistently reinvest 10% in your marketing budget without any changes, it would drive growth.
- What follows is making sure you’re set up operationally to follow that up.
[19:48] — Using great data to make good business decisions
- Ignite Visibility has an analytics team, a big data team, and people who do custom analysis.
- There are a lot of attributions and different ways to track conversions. Every business needs to figure out its attribution.
- Multi-channel funnels show you every assisted conversion with the attribution process.
- View-through conversions require a brand lift or conversion lift model.
[22:39] — The best practices in figuring out your attribution
- Use your multi-channel funnel report and look at your assisted and last click conversions.
- Tag every single one of your URLs using Google Tag Manager.
- Set up a custom dashboard for yourself.
[25:54] — Landing major clients
- John has worked with clients such as FOX Movies and Tony Robbins.
- He landed Tony Robbins as a client by sending him a tweet and getting an RFP a year later.
- A lot of the content in The Forecaster Method came from the multi-channel marketing framework they’ve done for Tony Robbins.
- With around 180,000 followers on Twitter, he gets a fair amount of visibility on his tweets.
[29:22] — Accumulating a social media following
- John worked on his personal brand doing digital marketing.
- Writing for major magazines and publications has also helped in accumulating a following.
- To follow this path, you have to build a following, good author profile, and portfolio after starting your blog.
Resources
Which of John Lincoln's bright ideas sparked something in you? And what new things about PPC management to increase traffic and conversion volume did you learn? Feel free to comment below and share your thoughts with us.
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