Growth & Search Proof of Concept Plan & Objectives


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HOW DO WE MAKE MONEY
  1. We receive a placement fee for succesfully sourcing in-house marketing talent for clients and agencies. A contingency based fixed fee of 7% of total remuneration package will be charged for sourcing successful candidates . 
  2. Agency search is provided freely to clients for projects / assignments that are generally not overly complex and where the anticpated cost is generally projected to be under $10K. In these instances MM7 charges a flat 15% referral fee to the agency that wins the business plus an ongoing 7.5% fee for future work undertaken by the referred client.
  3. For  more complex project/ search assignments or requests for assistance in co-ordinating formal RFP’s and detailed briefs etc a fee may be charged.

    The level of fixed fee will be dependent upon the scope of work and expertise and support requested from MM7.
    This will be negotiated and agreed upfront with client on an individual case by case basis.  Average fee is projected to be around $1.5K based on 4hrs search assignment. In addition a success fee is payable to MM7 from the specialist / agency appointed of 15% and 7.5% ongoing for any future work.

  4. We make a commission from product referrals and affiliate programs.

  5. Our MM7 strategic partners pay an annual membership fee.
  6. Our sales commissions are standard for all of our network supplier partners. Projects = 15%. Monthly subscription services, 15% for the first three months then 5% ongoing. 

    Our income is generated in four ways:

    1. Our MM7 strategic supplier partners pay a base membership fee.
    2. We charge a agency search & shortlisting fee for more complex searches and supplementary support requests such as RFP co-ordination. This will apply to projects/assignments where the budgeted cost anticipated will be >$10K.
    3. We make a commission for the sale of services from our network of marketing providers.
    4. We make a commission from category sponsors, referrals and affiliate programs.

    Agreement. If we agree, you are a great fit for our network, and the audit confirms this, we will send you a strategic partnership agreement. You are not locked into anything and can exit at any time. Our sales commissions are standard for all of our partners. Projects = 15% then 7.5% ongoing . Monthly subscription services, 15% for the first three months then 5% ongoing. For complex projects, where you must be part of the sales process, we can set a fixed rate, minimum $300+gst. 

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LEAD GENERATION

Many popular lead generation models can be woefully inefficient for a range of business types, especially small businesses. In fact, it’s easy to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars and countless hours on lead generation without earning any business. Let’s take a look at real lead generation costs and some strategies for making the most of your lead generation budget.

The changing lead generation landscape

Once upon a time, print ads were the centre of most brands’ lead generation mix. But with the rise of digital, print consumption dwindled and the effectiveness of print ads went with it.

Billboards and other physical forms of display advertising were likewise effective. However, since COVID-19 lockdowns have reduced our exposure to such physical ads and increased the amount of online shopping consumers do, their effectiveness into the future is now in doubt.

Here are some of the most popular lead generation channels and their typical costs for small businesses:

  • Website (this is your digital business card and can be a home for many or all of your lead generation assets) — $3000-$15,000 (the average is around $5000) plus ongoing fees for hosting and maintenance etc.
  • Search-engine optimisation (also called SEO, this is a tool for attracting your ideal clients/customers and increasing business profits) — $500-$2000+ per month.
  • Lead generation companies (such companies will sell you a list of contacts who you can attempt to convert into leads) — $100-$1000 per month or $5 per lead (for cold leads who are in your target market but haven’t shown any interest in what you’re offering).
  • Appointment setters (these service providers are similar to lead generation companies except that they’ll secure appointments for you with people who are interested in your offerings) — $50-$400 per appointment with a qualified lead.
  • Social media marketing (this is a tool you can use to engage with your ideal audience where they are already gathering information and researching solutions to their problems; you can also use it to reach out directly to individuals with personalised messages) — Nearly $5000 per month made up of:
  • Google Ads (this is a tool you can use to quickly reach large volumes of your ideal audience, especially when they’re actively looking to buy something) — $5000-$15,000 per month.
  • Email marketing (this is a tool you can use to provide a personalised experience to your audience without them having to go anywhere) — $380-$1300 per month.
  • Webinars (you can use webinars to engage with your audience in a way that enables you to tailor your message to the needs of the unique group of people who attend, and it’s more scalable than contacting people individually) — up to 20% of the marketing budget.

The lead generation landscape is constantly changing, and it’s up to brands to monitor what works for their target audience, so they can keep pace with those changes and remain relevant and viable businesses. Unfortunately, many businesses fall prey to lead generation models that others have found effective but which don’t work for their specific brand and audience.

Examples of potentially inefficient lead generation models

The quintessential example of a lead generation model that can be extremely effective, but often isn’t, is the blog. The top-earning blog worldwide, HuffPost, earns $630 million per year, so blogging can certainly be profitable. However, the vast majority of blogs are incredibly inefficient lead generation tools and ineffective revenue generating tools.

For example, in 2015, a joint study by Buzzsumo and Moz found half of all digital content had been shared no more than eight times. And while it’s possible to attract plenty of leads through search without having your content shared much, content that’s not being shared is unlikely to be beneficial enough to the target audience for it to be generating substantial leads.

So many businesses invest huge amounts of time and money into their blogs, expecting them to bring in heaps of leads, but unless blogs are done well, they often don’t bring any business at all. Of course, lead generation isn’t the only reason to have a blog. Blogs are a great way of increasing customer satisfaction, for instance. But this highlights how it’s easy to pour resources into a lead generation model that’s known to have great potential only for it to not work for your business.

Another example of this is pay-per-click ads. 

The average Australian small business spends $7-$30 per click through Google Ads. The average click-through-rate for Google search ads is 3.17% and the average conversion rate is 3.75%. That means the average cost of a conversion is $187-$800.

Now, if you’re going to generate thousands of dollars of service sales from each conversion, that’s fine. But if each conversion is something like the purchase of a $100 textbook, then that’s pretty expensive.

It’s all about context.

Some lead generation methods seem cheap. After all, if a click on your ad costs $7, and that ad viewer then goes on to make a purchase, $7 could be a pretty low price to pay for a lead who then went on to buy something from you. Similarly, if you can pay $600 for a blog post that attracts thousands of your ideal customers every month for years to come, that looks like a pretty good deal. And if you can pay $5 for every lead from your target market that a lead generation service hands you, you might think you’re onto a winning strategy.

But it’s the hidden costs of many lead generation methods that you’ve got to watch out for. For example, if your ads have really low conversion rates, the costs pretty quickly add up. If your attractive blog post doesn’t link to any of your sales content and so doesn’t generate any sales, it’s pretty much just a waste of money. And if your lead generation service sells you unqualified leads who’ve never heard of your brand or what you offer, and it turns out most of them don’t even need your product or service, you’ve not only wasted money, you’ve also wasted all the time you spent reaching out to your leads and trying to convince them to buy from you.

Part of the problem is that many businesses don’t know how much they’re spending on lead generation or how much sales are costing them. For example, 18% of small businesses, 24% of medium organisations, and 46% of large corporations, don’t know how much they’re spending on social media marketing. In fact, many people think social media marketing is basically free.

Now, that’s not to say that these methods never offer good value for money. But it does mean you’ve got to look at those hidden costs if you want to make a decent profit. And it does mean you need to find quality lead generation options that meet your unique needs.

Often, the key is to understand how much it costs to attract your audience (not just leads, since many lead generation methods will require you to pay regardless of whether you generate a lead or not) and how much you’re paying on sales conversion (since not every lead to a sale).

Strategies for lowering your lead generation costs

Once you understand what your lead generation costs are, you can start working on either decreasing them or increasing the value you get from them. Often, deriving more value means trying new methods.

One of the best ways to decrease your lead generation costs while also exploring new lead generation methods is to use the 70-30 rule. This rule-of-thumb suggests allocating 70% of your lead generation budget to models that you know are effective for your business. You can then allocate the remaining 30% to models that you want to explore to see if they could be effective for you.

The benefits of this strategy are twofold. 

Firstly, you’re allocating most of your funds to lead generation methods that you know will deliver a decent return on your investment. So, you know the majority of your budget is going to be wisely invested and will almost certainly deliver you a decent amount of business over any given period. This gives you a stable lead generation stream to keep you making decent revenue.

Secondly, you’re allocating a low-risk portion of your funds to new lead generation methods. So, you’re continuously looking for ways to evolve and improve your lead generation processes, so you can grow your business. This gives you the chance to discover lead generation methods that provide a great return on your investment than your current go-to methods and is essential since models that once worked aren’t likely to work indefinitely.

Another strategy is to use low-cost yet high-exposure passive forms of lead generation. 

As an example, you probably already have a website. If it’s been optimised properly for search engines, you’ll be getting a steady flow of visitors from your target market who are directly searching for the services you offer. This is a moderate-cost and moderate-exposure form of passive lead generation.

PR – Mass broadbased promotion:

Very philosophical indeed, but before I reveal the answer, let’s just work out what the difference between PR and marketing is.

Short Answer

The primary difference between the two is that marketing covers promotional activities, advertising and direct marketing to increase sales, and yes it generally comes with a price tag.

Enter public relations activities. The sole purpose of PR is reputation management through generating positive media coverage and stakeholder communication. When I mean stakeholder, it’s not a bunch of angry vampire hunters but any persons who have a stake in your organisation (obvs, this includes your employees, suppliers, customers, social audience, etc.).

Long Answer

While both PR and marketing are to improve your brand positioning, their strategies and tactics, focus and measurements of success are very different.

Let me break it down. 

Primary focus

Marketing: to amp up sales activities through advertising and promotional stuff because there is a bottom line and that is to bring home the bacon.

PR: to manage your intra and inter-communication channels for consistency. It’s all about building and maintaining positive brand awareness and relationships with those folks with the stakes.

Target audience

Marketing: Current and potential customers.

PR: Well, kinda everybody. ALL your stakeholders, the media and the general public. Point is, people love great stories, so if you have one, you need to get it out for all to know. Downside? People also like scandals, so reputation management is a 24-hour business with lots of social listening and proactive exercises.

Tactics

Marketing: Plain and simple, mostly items you need to pay for either directly or indirectly in terms of tools or resources, like comprehensive CRM systems for your EDM campaigns, Association Memberships for your networking activities, trade shows or expos where you can exhibit your awesomeness, ads on TV, billboards, in print or online (cue the algorithm conundrums of social ads). The list goes on.

PR: writing media releases and alerts, securing speaking opportunities at industry conferences, writing speeches, generating award nominations, managing your relations with media (love thy journalist they’re your BFF), overall controlling the consistency of your brand personality. All of this to get the public talking about you in a nice way. Stuff money can’t buy, really.

Measuring success

Marketing: Success is generally measured by increases in sales revenue or in specific actions you want your customers to take, like the number of downloads of your lead magnet, the number of subscriptions to your YouTube channel, and so on.

PR: It’s all about gaining positive media exposure and influencing a positive change in perception. Generally focused on more long term results and is measured in a qualitative manner.

Overall superpowers

Marketing: The power to sell. You need to be good at this and you also need a budget because this is your shortest route to increased sales. On that note, beware, marketing is a walk in the park – on LEGO. 

PR: The power to change attitude and behaviour. This is the heavy stuff. Your key messages are way more effective when they are not coming from you but from the people around you. Positively influencing your brand image through your PR is priceless.

So, to get back to our very Shakespearean dilemma of PR or not to PR? It’s a definite YES from me. We live in a socially-connected world where consumers want ethical brands with transparency and a commitment to their communities. If you are that brand and your people know it, you’re definitely onto a winner. If you need to lift the curtain on your greatness, but not sure how, just give us a shout.


Lead generation is essential to a successful marketing strategy. You constantly need to monitor what works and what needs changing if you want to stay ahead of the game. Don’t fall asleep just yet, it’s not that complicated.

Use the Correct Data

Your customers should be your top priority, always. It’s paramount that you have their correct data. The more data you have, the more you have to work with, and can personalise your strategy to suit your target demographic. It’s crucial that you know how to communicate with your customers with the right tone, so that they pay attention to your brand and what services you offer. Essentially, data is your friend but you regularly need to maintain it. Here’s an exercise for you, go and check your database in your CRM system and your social audience on your platforms, and have a look at how many of those people interact with your content. If there’s crickets then it’s time for a resuscitation. 

Tracking Leads

Knowing how to track leads is another essential component in delivering a successful lead generation strategy. You can do this by using social media, email or your website. Using Google Analytics can be a great place to start which can help you figure out which pages of your website are receiving the most traffic. You can also use CRM (customer relationship management) software to keep track of the relationships that you are building with customers. This is the time-consuming stuff, you will need snacks and lots of patience.

Quality Over Quantity

It’s better to focus on the quality of the content you deliver rather than the number of channels and pieces of content, which will ensure you do not waste any time on unqualified leads. Ensure you conduct thorough research, so you can warm up and target leads who have a higher chance of becoming your customers. When speaking the same language and offering the exact solution to their problems even those coldest, antarctic leads will warm up towards you and your brand.

Monitor Your Competition

For your lead generation strategy to be a success, make sure to also check out competitors in your industry. You can get an idea of the products, services and type of content they post on their website, helping you to work out what to do next to stay ahead of the game. You don’t have to fully reinvent the wheel, just make sure that you adapt and personalise the winning formula exactly to your brand and audience. Use the information you gather wisely, and make sure that your strategy is eye-catching and engaging to convert your audiences sitting on the sidelines.

Use Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a fantastic and cost-effective method to generate new leads for your business. Make sure to use an opt-in strategy that allows subscribers to make the choice on whether they are happy to receive your emails. Always ensure you insert an unsubscribe link too. With only 10% of those in the marketing industry believing that their lead generation campaigns are effective, knowing the right tips is essential for delivering a strategy that is powerful and engaging to viewers. Avoid the daily spam but try to be regular on a weekly basis. Monthly newsletters delivered in a Word template might as well come with a serve of prune juice.

Enlist Expert Help

 

 

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OUR MISSION, VISION & VALUES
OUR MISSION ( why we are in business – our mission drives our growth strategy)

Our overall mission is to self-enable small businesses with a more efficient,  effective and readily adoptable approach to generating and realising meaningful and sustained growth improvements , market relevancy and profitability.



Central to supporting this mission Growth & Search’s is committed to the ongoing development and open sharing of it’s  ‘Standard Growth Model For Small Business’.

The ‘Standard Model For Small Business Growth’ is a theoretical model that seeks to describe and capture the elemental building blocks that when evident and practised well within a small business environment will support and materialise sustained business growth, relevancy and profitability.

To ensure its ongoing validity and relevancy we are continually refining and adding to the model through ongoing research in collaboration with our member community of specialist growth providers and sponsors who have come together as partners – working side by side under one banner: Australian small & medium business!

We enable small businesses to realise growth improvement through ;

The facilitation of a central web based application that provides small business members with a  proprietary strategy lead market growth plan and system, a related best practice knowledge bank and a range of  services to support businesses in directly mastering the practice deficiencies ( growth inhibitors ) that typically plague small business and yet are critical and foundational to enabling and driving growth.

We provide a clear pathway to greater growth, filter down the overload of growth information available to what matters , arrange it into a structured and readily adoptable fashion so to help you to work out, prioritise and focus on what matters and objectively support businesses when needed in finding the right fit solution and expertise they need to deliver great outcomes.

OUR VISION

Is to become the trusted default growth knowledge and services platform destination for small and medium businesses across Australia & NZ.


OUR VALUES

We place the customer front and center in our design and service.

We center our decisions and recommendations on value not price.

We will always maintain a humanistic approach to service delivery.

We continually strive for greater simplicity and transparency.

We promote whenever possible, independent small to medium local based specialist growth providers.

We support open internet and WEB 3 and seek to decentralise control and ownership of the platform to our membership in 2024.

MARKETING GOALS – BROAD DIRECTION – TELL YOU WHERE YOU ARE GOING.
NEEDS TO FULFILL THE MISSION .

1) To build awareness, website traffic and registrations initially from the South Australian SME market.

2) Complete validation of product market needs fit , asap.

3) Acquire early adopter revenue generating clients and deliver proof of concept by April, 2021. 

 

MARKETING OBJECTIVES – (SMART)  SPECIFIC, MEASUREABLE, ATTAINABLE, REALSITIC AND TIMED. NEEDS TO BE ALIGNED TO BUSINESS GOALS. 

1) To complete 23 talent sourcing placements ( average 2 a month ) and 53 agency search requests by 1st November 2022 ( average 5 a month ) total of 7 payable clients : contact 60 businesses a week @ strike rate 3% = 7 successful conversions per month.

 

2) To onboard 50 specialist agency primary partner listings in South Australia by 1st November 2022 ( 5 a month) 

3) To attract and enrol 7 SA local category sponsors by April 2022.

4) To identify and adopt an affiliate partners program by April 2022.

5) To identify and onboard 2 additional partners – co-founders by May 2022.

6) To identify key PR partners and jointly develop a promotional story strategy by Feb 2022.

7) Join Business SA to network and connect with prospective clients and future partners, sponsors by 
March 2022.

 

STRATEGIES – HOW WE WILL ACCOMPLISH OBJECTIVES AND GOALS, HOW MM7 AND WHERE IT WILL PLAY TO WIN.

1) Promote our central belief as to why MM7 was developed – our purpose to extend our reach-utilise and the Magnificant Seven analogy storytelling via PR. Values. Share and organise fundamantal knowledge in plain english / promote local solutions to support local trade / find a way to do things better / think differently about marketing. Build the story.

2) Build an early adopter and supplier community in SA ( 10 MM7 product service evangelists ) provide value upfront in exchange for feedback and assistance in beta testing and discovering what they truly want and determine if they would be willing to change.

3) Make it easy to do business with us – promote a human face and other options for different audiences . Provide risk free – replacement guarantees. Simple design and easy navigation. Let people know you can make an impact quickly. One application that provides end to end support , provided freely – easy registration, communicate in language of audience. Design and utility.

4) Establish broad differentiation from competitors ie integration in one app of three inter-related services , candidate first sourcing / selective partners / specialisation / we do the search / not advertising driven, content orientation / promote value over price etc 

5) Establish clear market positioning and UVP against competitors.


6) To promote awareness of MM7 through publishing/posting quality content on linkedin and instagram.

 

TACTICS AND ACTION PLAN  – HOW WE WILL REALISE ACHIEVE STRATEGIES.

Target communications via linkedin on SA businesses that are advertising for marketing talent.

Promotion of a newly established specialist recruitment solution to SA base agency owners as well as a select number of generalist recruiters that may be open to utilising MM7’s search expertise on a split fee arrangement.

In addition leads and enquiry will be derived from appproaches to CEO’s / Marketing Mangers and Hiring Managers across the SA SME sector.

Articles will be also posted on Linkedin / Instagram to promote awareness and enquiry.

 

2) Individual targeted communications via linkedin to SME Business owners , marketers, sales and marketing managers in SA promoting the introduction of the MM7 application. Every person approached will be provided free access to the application on the understanding they provide some feedback on how to further improve the value proposition.

Articles will be also posted on Linkedin / Instagram to promote awareness and enquiry.

3) A target list of agencies in high demand service sectors will be ongoingly invited to list as one of seven primary partners for each discipline and visited in person by myself to onboard and validate their specialisation. 

4) Find a local sponsorship specialist to work with.
Approach strategic partnership executives directly with professional pitches.
Find key lead to start with ie State Govt
Dept for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.4

5) Start with 2 affilliate non competing products and services initially ie web hosting/ resume checking. Ask for recommendations from my network.