01 / Brent, Marshall & Stewart, luxury beds, London
£32,000
One article about his rivals. One customer. Forty five minutes in the showroom.
The comparison article his rivals would never write
Brent owns Marshall & Stewart, a premium bed brand in London. On one of our weekly meetings he told me a customer had walked into his showroom and said: “I was just about to buy a Hästens bed when I started doing a bit of research online. I came across your article comparing Hästens, Vispring and your own beds, and I thought, that is a great article. I will come in and have a look.” Forty five minutes later she put her card in the machine and spent £32,000 on a new bed.
Now tell me one other agency that will encourage you to write about your competition, and then help you do it in a way that is safe, honest, and sells like that.
This is what I mean by bravery. Not shouting. Telling somebody something true that a cautious competitor would delete.
02 / Katherine, curtains & blinds, London
£1.2m+
From around £600,000 a year when we started. Just Katherine and one assistant.
She speaks beautifully. Her blog would have been terrible.
Katherine is a phenomenal businesswoman, but that is not what her clients buy. They buy her phenomenal expertise in everything to do with curtains and blinds for their beautiful London homes. She has been invited to dress the windows of stately homes in the north of England, including one with more than sixty rooms. She speaks beautifully and communicates flawlessly, and if I had asked her to write a blog on day one, it would have been terrible, anodyne sales copy, because that is what she thought you were supposed to write.
She knows better now. Our working routine of interview, edit and publish has done the rest: from around £600,000 a year when we started to more than double that, with nobody in the business but Katherine and one assistant.
03 / Lyle, roofing, Indiana
14
“I want a new roof” emails in one month. About as many again by phone. Site live three months.
Three months in, and the enquiries are for whole roofs
Lyle is in very early days with us. His new website went live about three months ago. Last month, fourteen solid enquiries landed in his inbox saying, in effect, I want a new roof, and about the same number again came in over the phone. Not repairs. New and replacement roofs. I will not put a revenue figure on that, because I do not yet know what those enquiries turned into. But if you have ever replaced a roof, you will know those jobs are significant.
It is the weekly meetings doing the work, turning Lyle’s great expertise in roofing into the content that drives those calls. Lyle grew up in the Amish tradition and is by no means an SEO or computer nerd. That is the side of his business we are happy to provide.