Local Marketing Stars Client Testimonial – Berkman Financial

Geoffrey B.:                       We’re focused on the small business sector. We really lend where the banks don’t or can’t, or the end customer doesn’t have time to wait for the bank. Any time the customer needs money now for things like purchasing inventory, handling a payroll need, a project, and our value prop is really that we can deliver the money to you quickly, smoothly, and really credit is not a threshold for us.

Joseph Mann:                    At Local Marketing Stars, we were focused heavy on direct mail marketing. As the months went on, the space got more competitive, and we feel we weren’t seeing the exact conversion rates we were hoping for.

Geoffrey B.:                       We were searching for someone to help us with our digital marketing. We had looked high and low. We’d used a bunch of different firms, we tried it on our own, and we found very little success. The things we were running into on the digital side were we were getting very little return for our dollar.

Geoffrey B.:                       Oftentimes, we were chasing expensive Ad-words. Then we brought in a couple different firms to do it, and we felt like we’re still not getting the return that we wanted on the volume side, and they weren’t really looking for value. They were buying the same type of Ad-Words that we were buying, and in turn it wasn’t really helping us, and we were just paying a fee for no reason.  For example, I think when Oz came in, we really had no landing pages. These Google Ad-Words were just kind of clicking directly to our website, and we weren’t giving them the ability to accurately track how many we were getting, where they were coming from, etc., etc. That was a big pain point for us because we were spending I think at one point $15,000, $16,000 a month digitally and not getting any return from it.

Geoffrey B.:                       We interviewed about five or six different people to help us with our digital marketing, and we decided we were going to try digital again. The only person who came to a face-to-face meeting was Oz, and I told him in our first meeting that that was a big deal to me. It was impressive, and believe it or not, he’s still showing up here.

Geoffrey B.:                       One of the things I think was differentiating was he really wanted to hear what experiences we had. You weren’t just trying to shove your program down our throat, and you were very honest with your experience in the space, whether you had experience, and you also used parallels from other other spaces to explain to me how you thought we could best hit it, and you were also honest about the time period it was going to take for us to gain any level of traction or success so that we didn’t have false expectations. You didn’t come in here and tell us that 30 days from now everything’s going to be grand. Now, I think we’re six, seven months in or five months in, and we’re really hitting stride. We’re pleased, and we’ve upped the budget, and we’ve given you another project through our website. We’ve been very happy with [inaudible 00:02:59].

Joseph Mann:                    When we met Oz, we started focusing mainly on digital marketing, social medial marketing, and things like that, and we saw our conversion rate go up roughly around 25% to 30% month over month. In a short amount of time, we’ve seen roughly around 400 applications come through of leads that are considered warmer, so the information was already and they were well-qualified targeted prospects. Aside from us doing regular cold calling where we would just be reaching out to merchants and offering our services, we were actually getting a lot of inbound traffic coming to us where people that were highly interested in our services.

Isaiah R.:                              When we get warm leads, it’s like a gift because these people are actually looking for financing. They’re actually expecting your call, and those are the ones that [inaudible 00:03:40]. With what we’re doing with Oz sending us a lot more warm leads, people who qualify, people who are looking for funding, it just makes it a lot easier for the guys to call and myself to call.

Geoffrey B.:                       Say that the service is top notch. You’re going to get exactly what you want. There’s a lot of great feedback in conversation. We’re constantly changing what we want and what we’re looking for, and we’re trying to grow something together. And I feel like we’re growing together. When we had the initial project, we had an initial monthly fee that did digital marketing, now we’re doing the website. We’re hoping that as our business grows, we can grow to do more things, and one of the nicest things about you is you’ve become an extension of us. We could probably put you on the phone with a customer at this point, and that’s great. That’s exactly what we’re looking for.