Our sales and marketing year in review: What got us the most leads?

In 2021, 100% of our leads at Spaced Digital came from referrals or repeat business.

But in 2022, we've had a healthy uptick in inbound leads.

What changed?

We actually started doing some sales and marketing! ??

Sounds crazy but, in 2021, we did zero marketing as a company. Something I regret not starting sooner. However, this year, we've taken our marketing seriously.

This newsletter takes a look at our first year of marketing ourselves, the results we've seen, and general insights.

The aim being to help B2B companies to feed this into their own marketing efforts for 2023.

So, let's go...

The results...

Summarising our year, excluding referrals and repeat business, here's how it went:

166 = Marketing qualified leads

33 = Sales meetings booked

12 = Proposal meetings

7 = Lost clients

3 = Signed clients (and 2 still pending)

Considering we only started to take our marketing seriously in March 2022, I'm super happy with the results.

We literally generated 0 leads and booked 0 sales meetings from our marketing before this.

Out of the clients we lost, 4 of them were because of the price. Which we are now looking into adding "starting from" pricing to our website to catch this earlier.

So, how did we achieve this?

In short, the new clients we signed came through our website's local Cambridge pages and also through LinkedIn - more on both below.

As well as this, we have been busy launching a newsletter and podcast, producing blog content, and running webinars.

We'll dive into each in a moment, but first, the biggest change we've made that has helped all of this....

Our strategy and positioning

In March 2022, we signed up for an agency accelerator programme. One of the key things they had us do was to work on our positioning.

Before this, we worked with any company you could imagine: eCommerce, B2B, local, white-label, and so on. You had a website problem, we would help you.

Here was our old homepage banner:

I have long known that we needed to focus our attention on one target customer. And we realised that we had the best case studies with B2B companies and enjoyed working with these brands.

So, this was our first big step... repositioning ourselves as an agency that only works with brands in the B2B space.

Our strategy was geared around helping people in charge of marketing at B2B companies to optimise their website and generate more leads.

This gave us focus. That everything we do as a company is to help make this marketing person's life easier. To solve the pain points they have with their website.

Diving into each channel...

In this section, we're going to run through the results we've seen with different channels and what we learnt.

Website traffic

Overall, website traffic was up 32% YoY (4,647 to 6,084 new users).

Resulting in 10 MQLs and 11 sales meetings booked, these were high-quality contact form submissions - 9 of these happening in the last 6 months.

With Social traffic up 60% YoY - LinkedIn being the main driver, up 85% YoY. Caused by our webinar traffic but also sharing posts that link through to the free tools and resources we had created for our website.

Next, Organic traffic was up 32% YoY. Mainly driven by our Cambridge pages up 1,000+% (from 20 sessions to 355 in 2022). And then our B2B pages from 0 to 168 sessions (all in the last 6 months).

The main driver of website traffic has been our bottom-funnel service pages. As shown here...

We created pages based on keyword research for all of our services e.g. "Cambridge SEO agency" and "B2B web design agency". Both of which we now rank in the top 3 positions.

We produced these at various stage of the year and have just left them to increase in ranking position over time. We have also been building links in the background, not many, around 2 a month to our site. HARO has been a big help with this.

Not only this, we have various CTAs down the page, for example, on the web design page we have a link to download our website brief template.

As well as trying to rank for more keywords, one area of focus for us in 2023 is to optimise the site to increase conversion rate.

Blog

We've been producing top and middle-funnel blog content for our site (e.g. B2B SEO guide, link building guides, web design tips etc.)

These are starting to rank well on Google and we began by picking off the lower-difficulty B2B keywords.

This will be a big area of investment for us in 2023. With the aim of producing one piece of new content every two weeks, targeting a customer pain point.

This will then help feed into my LinkedIn content, as outlined below...

LinkedIn (my personal account)

This has been the single biggest driver of leads for us. Without building up my own audience on LinkedIn, the other tactics (blog, webinar, newsletter etc.) wouldn't have performed as well.

For around 6 months, I have been posting on average 5 times a week. Going from around 400 followers up to 4,000 followers.

I post a mixture of content and I have added some examples below:

Value:

Wide:

Personal:

Conversion:

Spaced update:

Mixing up the content has helped to keep things fresh and I've enjoyed the process.

The best performing post in terms of booking sales meetings, was this post. Offering our website quality audit to B2B companies:

One area of focus for us as a company is 2023 is to empower our team to post their own content and build up their own following on LinkedIn. I feel this is both mutually beneficial for the employee and employer.

Webinar

We ran two webinars in Q4, both focused on helping B2B companies generate more leads. A very broad topic, which I feel we should change in the future.

In 2023, we will focus our webinars around one specific aspect of the pain point our ICP has (e.g. how to produce content that ranks). Rather than trying to solve the whole issue (e.g. how to generate more leads).

The first webinar generated zero sales meetings for us, but the second booked us five sales meetings.

We have quite a slick workflow for our webinars now:

When you sign up, the user is directed to a page to book a website quality audit, if they want to move faster. As well as receiving automated emails about the event, to ensure they turn up.

We will be running one webinar every month in 2023 and this is a big focus area for us.

Newsletter

Around May 2022, we launched a LinkedIn newsletter, what you're reading now! We have gone from 0 to 500+ subscribers in this time.

But why do a newsletter on LinkedIn?

Because it notifies every follower you have when you create it, and then it alerts your newsletter subscribers every time you publish a post. I felt, to begin with, this is a great way to build up a following.

Here's what we've been posting:

One thing that I have been toying with is moving the newsletter away from LinkedIn to your traditional email newsletter. Which may happen later in 2023 so then my audience isn't in LinkedIn's hands if they chose to scrap the newsletter pilot.

That being said, we have generated zero leads directly from our newsletter. However, in the analytics it lets you see what "Companies" have viewed it, so we get great insights on who is actually looking at this.

And whilst it's too early to decide if we should keep investing in it, I am enjoying the process of creating the newsletter. So, it stays.

I feel it provides another creative outlet for our content and has got good (although declining) engagement.

Because we only focus on B2B companies, the newsletter can be hyper-specific to that audience and their pain points. Hence the name Bitesize B2B Marketing , which also has spawned our podcast series as well.

Podcast (live show)

Launching in Q4, we started a podcast with the same name as our newsletter.

We air the episode on LinkedIn Live every week at the same time, and then upload this to PodBean which goes out to other platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc.)

Like the newsletter, we have generated zero leads directly from this. But it's way to early to decide if this something we should keep investing in.

We'll continue investing in this for the whole of 2023 because the initial feedback we've had has been positive.

Here's a snippet from that show:

In summary

There we go, our year of marketing in review:

166 = Marketing qualified leads

33 = Sales meetings booked

12 = Proposal meetings

7 = Lost clients

3 = Signed clients (and 2 still pending)

Like I said, I'm super happy with the results we have seen in such a short period of time.

We are trying out a lot at the moment, which isn't sustainable (or wise) in the long run, but we're seeing what works for us and what doesn't. Then we can double down on what does.

This year, LinkedIn has been massive for us and I expect this to be the same next year. And we'll continue to invest in content for our website which we can then repurpose for other channels.

I'm confident about 2023 and look forward to building on what we have.

If you have any questions on this, please leave a comment or send me a DM.