July 2017 - John Cerpnjak

It’s been said that every entrepreneur is a digital entrepreneur.

And in a sense all entrepreneurs are using digital technologies to build, launch, and grow their businesses.

But it would be wrong to think all entrepreneurs are doing everything digitally.

Although, amazingly, it is now possible to do that.

And it can create compelling career and lifestyle options for you in the process.

But what exactly is a digital entrepreneur and how do you become one?

Well in a word: interdisciplinary skills.

I know, that’s two words.

But anyone with multimedia skills, which are interdisciplinary in nature, can become a digital entrepreneur.

Digital entrepreneurs are business owners who focused exclusively on digital commerce.

And digital commerce is selling products and services that are marketed, delivered, and supported completely online.

Examples of digital commerce products include ebooks, online education, membership sites, downloadable software or files, web hosting and web site management, and software as a service (“SaaS”).

Anyone with multimedia skills like web/app design, photography, videography and writing can build a business for themselves.

What does every multimedia expert and digital entrepreneur need to succeed?

It stands to reason a good website is a prerequisite for success.

There are five elements of the modern marketing website that all multimedia specialists need to be thinking about and implementing in a smart way.

Really, all entrepreneurs need a website that incorporates these five elements.

Email (registration, not just opt-in)
Adaptive content and responsive design
The access experience
Online courses as lead magnets
Testing … of everything

Technical skills in multimedia is what you’ll need to implement those 5 elements for yourself. And an interdisciplinary approach will help you execute the work.

A podcast I listen to from the people over at CopyBlogger discus these five elements in the second episode. Here’s a quick link incase you want to listen: The 5 Elements of the Modern Marketing Website

How many people does it take to build an effective website?

You know, I frequently find myself having this conversation with potential clients often.

It honestly doesn’t take that much to develop an effective online marketing solution.

I’m living proof you can do it as one person.

In the multimedia field there are three primary areas of expertise involved with creating an effective website:

art/design
technical
marketing

Sadly many schools offering web design programs don’t offer a comprehensive curriculum which adequately addresses all these areas. Most schools focus primarily on the design aspect (layouts, colors, etc.) By necessity they do delve into the technical side, but tend not to spend significant time teaching students about search engine optimization and the more technical aspects of developing a website. And many schools tend to spend even less time teaching basic marketing principals.

This was a major struggle for me when I first graduated from McMaster University and Humber College and entered my career. I felt like my technical skills were well-rounded but I knew I didn’t know how to apply them in a way that someone would offer me a job for money.

It wasn’t until I met these 2 brothers who co-owned their own business and who were super smart marketers, that I started to understand how to take my understand of web design (and a bunch of other multimedia practices) and really create a web site so that it functioned as a primary marketing vehicle for business.

That’s really why I started writing and journaling the experiences I’ve had working for myself.

If I can play any part in sharing even a small nugget of knowledge or information that could help another young person find their way into a multimedia and digital entrepreneurial career path… I’ve won!

So listen, I’ve got a lot of ideas about what I’d like to write about but I’d still like to hear what you think. You can either write to me on my contact page or leave a comment at the end of this post. I’ll share case studies of my work, the strategies I use to find clients and process & techniques I use to make my various multimedia and digital marketing work.

And if you’re feeling really awesome you can join my email newsletter. (Maybe I’ll even show you how I make graphical HTML email templates).

I have a client I’ve been working with periodically over the last few years helping him with his real estate lead generation. Recently since January, we’ve been doing a big marketing push. We’ve been launching new websites, testing new offers and growing a bigger audience with new content.

A full ten-point restoration!

In the last 6 months we’ve put together a pretty good real estate lead generation system by leveraging marketing automation strategies and the client’s CRM to build out and improve upon his email list.

I called on my friends Thomas and David at Reverb Consulting to help me guarantee stellar results.

But instead of rambling on about all that I wanted to share with you what we’ve doing with Google Adwords specifically.

Here’s What You Need to Know

My client is a well respected real estate investment advisor who operates in the Greater Hamilton and Niagara areas of the GTA. He has spoken at numerous events, he’s writing a book, runs a podcast and owns a charity.

The Quest for Qualified Leads

Due to the overheated real estate market within the Toronto area, the client was looking for a specific prospect. Someone who fit the profile of an above-average income earner who has previous exposure to real estate investing. They must show an intention to purchase an investment property outside of the Toronto area. They would be of a novice level and would be affiliated with other local real estate networks and groups.

The client is a real estate agent who sells investment properties in specific cities towards the outside of the Golden Hourseshoe Area. The client needed a means to not only create a system for producing steady leads, but also needed to qualify leads who had above average real estate investment knowledge and who were actively seeking investments in specific geographic locations.

Our Real Estate Lead Generation Solution

Custom long copy landing pages

A 3-step paid traffic lead funnel was created to target people using specific keywords that included the geographic locations the client was selling investment properties. Paid traffic was sent to a landing page that offered a lead magnet that addressed the specific investment concerns that potential leads were looking to solve.

To qualify leads further, a follow-up offer was made on the Thank You page, which allowed users to register for an in-person real estate investment training class.

Various email sequences were created to track who registered for the event, who attended and who was a no-show. Based on the data collection and tracking, leads could be segmented into groups based on their quality and likelihood to purchase an investment property.

The Results

The following is a breakdown of the results that were achieved in the first 3 months of advertising. We still continue to run and optimize this campaign today. We’ve even done some A/B split testing, but I’ll save that for another case study.

Total Site Sessions

Over the course of the first 3 months of advertising we saw a wicked increase in total site sessions. This is a great example of not only just the number of leads that can in, but also indicates all the people who were interested in the business who would have never heard about it before. Since this is real estate investment, it might be more than 1.5 years before someone comes forward to make the purchase. We are now apart of those consumers decision set.

Total Site Sessions: up 673.26% (2,227 vs 288)

Pages Per Session

Some people have the opinion that paid traffic is usually worse traffic than organic traffic. It almost always performs worse as it brings in both qualified and unqualified traffic. However, we didn’t experience this, in fact we increased the number of pages views. This means that the people who are visiting the site are actually taking some time to move through and look at the site after conversions.

Pages Per Session is up 3.39%

Bounce Rate

Ads are usually accompanied by a high bounce rate, yet the bounce rate went down. This will be tied to many things, but the fact that we are running ads and the bounce rate stayed quite low, is a good sign. Just means that the traffic we are sending is qualified.

Bounce Rate is down 59.55%

Over 147 Goal Completions

The client’s website already received decent organic traffic and was getting some conversions. But by coming in and getting focused on the quality of traffic, we were able to show a clear performance boost in campaign goals, like signing up for the real estate training class. This is a comparison of our KPIs between organic traffic and paid traffic over the same time period we were running ads.

Paid – 102

Direct – 24

Organic – 5

Referral – 16

What this means is that without running paid ads the client would have only seen 21 goal completions vs 126.

The following table shows our results in the first month of advertising in contrast to and how they improved over time by the 3rd month.

Here are the Results by the Numbers
1st Month	3rd Month	Campaign Total
Total Clicks: 124	Total Clicks: 209	Total Clicks: 783
Total Cost: $331.02	Total Cost: $306.02	Total Cost: $1340.16
CPC: $2.67	CPC: $1.47	CPC: $1.71
Bounce Rate From Ads: 75%	Bounce Rate From Ads: 40%	Bounce Rate From Ads: 25%

The client is still running this real estate lead generation funnel. However, of recently we’ve been able to optimize by split testing different headlines and copywriting. When I’ve collected more data I’ll be sure to share it here with you.

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The Importance of an Interdisciplinary Approach to Multimedia and Business