Andy Alagappan Inbound Marketing with ROI Helping Businesses Get Found

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Andy Alagappan, Best Selling Author

Great stage magicians are good at entertaining crowds with invisibility illusions, but Andy Alagappan knows that when it comes to businesses, being invisible online can be disastrous. He’s built a business around making sure businesses get found online by customers who are searching for what they do. Showing up in search engine results sounds like a simple process, but there are hundreds of criteria that search engine algorithms use to determine which websites to list on the results page. Learning how to structure a website and its content to meet these criteria as well as keeping abreast of the almost constant algorithm updates has become a science. It’s a task well outside the skill set of most business owners who are usually busy enough running their business. Andy Alagappan founded EPromotionz to handle this enormous task for business owners, so they can harness the business-building power of the internet without taking precious time away from their business to do it

That means to do that, so he devoted himself to mastering both. Epromotionz has since added Content Creation and Social Media Marketing services in order to provide a full spectrum of inbound marketing services. As the company expanded its services, it also expanded its reach and now serves an international market. Alagappan attributes a good deal of the success EPromotionz has enjoyed the fact that he understands the business from both sides. Before launching EPromotionz, he owned a digital printing business in downtown Houston specializing in trade show graphics. It required huge capital investment to stay on top of his market and it was very difficult to measure results. He wanted his clients’ experience to be different, so EPromotionz uses extensive analytics to inform decisions and measure results so clients always know their return on investment. His mantra is “Consistent Improvement”. 

When he isn’t busy driving growth for his clients, Alagappan enjoys nature photography and exploring our National Parks. He loves traveling to different countries and learning about new cultures. 

Conversation with Andy Alagappan 

Tell us about what it is that you do and what types of clients you help? 

Tracy, we’ve been doing online marketing, web development for nine years now. Basically, in the last five years, we shifted focus to more B2B clients, and we are also getting some enquires daily for B2C clients. Online marketing visibility is not an option anymore. Prospects are starting to realize that. The Yellow Pages are pretty much dead. Newspaper ads, they can run some magazine ads to maybe get new business. The first question I ask potential clients is when they call me, how do you get new business? And then I Listen to what they say. That’s the main reason they call us. They want more new business. We try to analyze where they are right now. What’s working, and what’s not working?

Obviously, something is not working. That’s why they want to have a conversation with us. Online visibility is the future. The advent of smartphones, the searches from smartphone devices has increased more than desktop computers, and laptop searches. This is according to Google. People are searching for the services whenever they want it, 11 o’clock at night or 5 in the morning, looking for solutions to help them in their business. This is the reality. This is what we educate our clients on, we don’t do any hard selling Tracy. We just educate them. Here is what your competition is doing. Here is where you are today compared to these guys your competition. Look at their online presence, then we educate them on what it is they need to do. 

Obviously, something is not working. That’s why they want to have a conversation with us. Online visibility is the future. The advent of smartphones, the searches from smartphone devices has increased more than desktop computers, and laptop searches. This is according to Google. People are searching for the services whenever they want it, 11 o’clock at night or 5 in the morning, looking for solutions to help them in their business. This is the reality. This is what we educate our clients on, we don’t do any hard selling Tracy. We just educate them. Here is what your competition is doing. Here is where you are today compared to these guys your competition. Look at their online presence, then we educate them on what it is they need to do. 

Educate and advocate for sure, Is there a certain company that you help or certain revenue that they bring in or are you helping any kind of businesses? 

Yes. That a very good question. Five or six years ago, Tracy, we used to help a lot of startup companies. It requires a lot of time educating them on why they need to have a good web presence. Now our business has grown quite a bit. I tend not to work with brand new startups who don’t even have a website. Yes, we can help them. It is a monumental task for them to realize the market they are in and what their competition is doing, and they don’t even have a website. Ideally most of the clients who call us through our inbound marketing efforts, which is, by the way, this is how we get 90% of our business through inbound marketing. 10% comes in from word of mouth referrals. When they call us, they have some idea they need to do this so they already have a website 99% of the time. We just look at their site, tweak it, clean it up, redesign it, or dump it and start from scratch depending on how their site looks

They could be anywhere from half a million in sales to 30 million in sales. They could be a local B2C home remodeling custom design company. Or could be a cosmetic surgeon, dentist, all the way up to manufacturing national market type clients, and software services. Those clients have a national market. What we’ve found is ideally national clients understand and get the importance of all this. Local clients are starting to get more and more aware. I think we like to work with, to answer your question, companies who’ve already established, who want to grow their business. 

When a business owner comes to you and they are not quite sure about this SEO or this internet thing, what is the most common obstacle preventing them from taking that first step?

It is fear. They don’t know what all is involved. They know they need to do it but they don’t have the knowledge base or the staff or skills in-house, so fear is the main thing. Really they get into analysis paralysis is a good way to explain it. After the fear factor, once they talk to us we educate them and show them this is what we think they need to implement. We leave it at that. We don’t bombard them with 100 emails. We just have a conversation as a trusted advisor, explain to them, then their fear level drops. After that, it is all budget. How aggressive they want to implement. This is why national companies are better for us because their market is the entire US. They know they need to implement and they’ll get good ROIs. Local clients are starting to wake up to that because they can’t go everywhere. They can’t be everywhere telling people one-on-one about their business. They just can’t do it. 

Another misconception might be when people think of this SEO and they are looking for an ROI, how do you connect that or bring that together as far as ROI?

That’s an excellent question. As I said earlier, we are very analytics-driven. We ask them a lot of questions about their typical buyer persona. What that really means is who is it they are trying to reach and work backward from there and what kind of pricing is out there to reach that market. What is the market paying for this service which they are trying to provide, and we break everything down to real numbers. What is the average new client worth to them in a service? Just give me an average. They might do 10 different services. Pick your best. Every business has 80-20 right? 80% of them is what is the lifetime value of the client? Let’s say one year. Then they start thinking about it. Lot of them haven’t thought about all this, so it is a very good dialogue we have. In your case, maybe 1000. We come to a number okay? The initial revenue, lifetime value, what we do generates new business. If they get 10 new enquires for that service for that sale, which is initially worth 3000, we can do that. 

We can get them those 10 enquires. We can’t close it for them. We help them once they get the enquires on how to differentiate themselves and close the sale. Every month we track it. “Last month you got seven enquires and here are the seven enquires which came through your website. How many did you close? That’s how we justify it. Very easy. The way we do it in our process, it is very clear to them the cost benefit. The cost of not doing this and the benefit of doing this.

The reader is interested in kicking off an SEO campaign. What would be some obstacles that might be preventing them from doing this?

Basically budget Tracy. It comes down to that. We analyze the competition. We pick two competitors. I ask them to tell me who are your competitors? We get their agreement on it. Then we do some reverse engineering. This is what these guys are doing. Do you want to compete with them?

This is what they are spending. This is how they are presenting themselves online. This is how you are presenting today. Your website needs to be cleaned up. It needs to have the right content for the audience you are trying to reach. It needs to have call to action. You need to have resources. You need to offer them some white papers. You need to maybe have some video case studies. Look at all these things these guys are doing. 

To implement certain things in Phase I here is the budget, and I tell them I am not forcing you to do any of this. This is what you need to do to compete with these guys. Let’s move forward. If they don’t do it, they know the consequences. It is mostly budget, education, awareness building, helping them see it. They might have known about it in the background but nobody has shown them clearly this is the situation. Once they understand it, they find the money. 

If someone is considering optimizing their website and stepping into the Inbound Marketing World. What would be your best piece of advice? 

That’s a good question, Tracy. The first thing they need to do who are they competing with? Who is their competition? You like it or not, they have competition. They need to go to Google 90%, 80-90% of all searches start with Google.

Rest go to Yahoo and Bing. You’ve got to go to Google and type in what is it they are trying to reach. Who are they trying to reach? What is it they are trying to market to whom? See if they are being found. Yesterday I got a call, from a computer repair …

They do computer repair. They go to businesses and fix firewalls and remove virus and stuff like that

They want to expand it and he didn’t know who his top three competitors were? Once we looked at all those three, and they do a very specialized computer service, not like Geek Squad. Their clients are usually at least have 20 computers in their office. That’s their bare minimum. Otherwise, they don’t go after anybody less than that. Once we looked at these three competitors, then he understood what is it he needs to implement. That’s step number one. They have to see who they are competing against. Who they want to be found alongside? 

Once they do that, we can start helping them. Let’s do this phase I. Let’s do this Phase II. Let’s implement this over the next six months.

While the positive impact of inbound marketing can be felt in many key areas of business, tell me three areas of how an inbound marketing strategy can boost sales. Here are 3 ways. 

1. Better Quality Leads 

Because inbound marketing essentially focuses on those people who are already looking for products and services that you sell, you have a much wider window to capture their attention by strategically placing useful and relevant content at various stages of the purchase cycle. This way you can stop chasing just any customer and wasting your time, money, and efforts on those who may not be interested in buying anything from you. 

Not only that, it solves yet another classic business problem you might be facing—misalignment between your sales and marketing folks in terms of lead nurturing. According to recent lead nurturing statistics, 79 percent of marketing leads go without a response from sales. Often marketing teams pass down unqualified or poor leads to the salespeople, forcing them to find their own leads. And, this is one of the biggest reasons why your sales team might not take marketing-sourced leads seriously. 

When such frictions between two teams are reduced and sales cease to be the sole responsibility of your sales team to become a unified effort, it produces better outcomes. 

They could be anywhere from half a million in sales to 30 million in sales. They could be a local B2C home remodeling custom design company. Or could be a cosmetic surgeon, dentist, all the way up to manufacturing national market type clients, and software services. Those clients have a national market. What we’ve found is ideally national clients understand and get the importance of all this. Local clients are starting to get more and more aware. I think we like to work with, to answer your question, companies who’ve already established, who want to grow their business.

When a business owner comes to you and they are not quite sure about this SEO or this internet thing, what is the most common obstacle preventing them from taking that first step?

It is fear. They don’t know what all is involved. They know they need to do it but they don’t have the knowledge base or the staff or skills in-house, so fear is the main thing. Really they get into analysis paralysis is a good way to explain it. After the fear factor, once they talk to us we educate them and show them this is what we think they need to implement. We leave it at that. We don’t bombard them with 100 emails. We just have a conversation as a trusted advisor, explain to them, then their fear level drops. After that, it is all budget. How aggressive they want to implement. This is why national companies are better for us because their market is the entire US. They know they need to implement and they’ll get good ROIs. Local clients are starting to wake up to that because they can’t go everywhere. They can’t be everywhere telling people one-on-one about their business. They just can’t do it. 

Another misconception might be when people think of this SEO and they are looking for an ROI, how do you connect that or bring that together as far as ROI? 

That’s an excellent question. As I said earlier, we are very analytics driven. We ask them a lot of questions about their typical buyer persona. What that really means is who is it they are trying to reach and work backwards from there and what kind of pricing is out there to reach that market. What is the market paying for this service which they are trying to provide, and we break everything down to real numbers. What is the average new client worth to them in a service? Just give me an average. They might do 10 different services. Pick your best. Every business has 80-20 right? 80% of them is what is the lifetime value of the client? Let’s say one year. Then they start thinking about it. Lot of them haven’t thought about all this, so it is a very good dialogue we have. In your case, maybe 1000. We come to a number okay? The initial revenue, lifetime value, what we do generates new business. If they get 10 new enquiries for that service for that sale, which is initially worth 3000, we can do that. 

We can get them those 10 enquiries. We can’t close it for them. We help them once they get the enquires on how to differentiate themselves and close the sale. Every month we track it. “Last month you got seven enquires and here are the seven enquires which came through your website. How many did you close? That’s how we justify it. Very easy. The way we do it in our process, it is very clear to them the cost benefit. The cost of not doing this and the benefits of doing this. 

The reader is interested in kicking off an SEO campaign. What would be some obstacles that might be preventing them from doing this?

Basically budget Tracy. It comes down to that. We analyze the competition. We pick two competitors. I ask them to tell me who are your competitors? We get their agreement on it. Then we do some reverse engineering. 

This is what these guys are doing. Do you want to compete with them? This is what they are spending. This is how they are presenting themselves online. This is how you are presenting today. Your website needs to be cleaned up. It needs to have the right content for the audience you are trying to reach. It needs to have call to action. You need to have resources. You need to offer them some white papers. You need to maybe have some video case studies. Look at all these things these guys are doing. 

To implement certain things in Phase I here is the budget, and I tell them I am not forcing you to do any of this. This is what you need to do to compete with these guys. Let’s move forward. If they don’t do it, they know the consequences. It is mostly budget, education, awareness building, helping them see it. They might have known about it in the background but nobody has shown them clearly this is the situation. Once they understand it, they find the money. 

If someone is considering optimizing their website and stepping into the Inbound Marketing World. What would be your best piece of advice? 

That’s a good question, Tracy. The first thing they need to do who are they competing with? Who is their competition? Like it or not, they have competition. They need to go to Google 90%, 80-90% all searches start with Google. 

Rest go to Yahoo and Bing. You’ve got to go to Google and type in what is it they are trying to reach. Who are they trying to reach? What is it they are trying to market to whom? See if they are being found. Yesterday I got a call from a computer repair ..

They do computer repair. They go to businesses and fix firewalls and remove virus and stuff like that. They want to expand it and he didn’t know who his top three competitors were? Once we looked at all those three, and they do a very specialized computer service, not like Geek Squad. Their clients are usually at least have 20 computers in their office. That’s their bare minimum. Otherwise, they don’t go after anybody less than that. Once we looked at these three competitors, then he understood what is it he needs to implement. That’s step number one. They have to see who they are competing against. Who they want to be found alongside? Once they do that, we can start helping them. Let’s do this phase I. Let’s do this Phase II. Let’s implement this over the next six months. 

When a business owner comes to you and they are not quite sure about this SEO or this internet thing, what is the most common obstacle preventing them from taking that first step?

It is fear. They don’t know what all is involved. They know they need to do it but they don’t have the knowledge base or the staff or skills in-house, so fear is the main thing. Really they get into analysis paralysis is a good way to explain it. After the fear factor, once they talk to us we educate them and show them this is what we think they need to implement. We leave it at that. We don’t bombard them with 100 emails. We just have a conversation as a trusted advisor, explain to them, then their fear level drops. After that, it is all budget. How aggressive they want to implement. This is why national companies are better for us because their market is the entire US. They know they need to implement and they’ll get good ROIs. Local clients are starting to wake up to that because they can’t go everywhere. They can’t be everywhere telling people one-on-one about their business. They just can’t do it. 

Another misconception might be when people think of this SEO and they are looking for an ROI, how do you connect that or bring that together as far as ROI? 

That’s an excellent question. As I said earlier, we are very analytics driven. We ask them a lot of questions about their typical buyer persona. What that really means is who is it they are trying to reach and work backwards from there and what kind of pricing is out there to reach that market. What is the market paying for this service which they are trying to provide, and we break everything down to real numbers. What is the average new client worth to them in a service? Just give me an average. They might do 10 different services. Pick your best. Every business has 80-20 right? 80% of them is what is the lifetime value of the client? Let’s say one year. Then they start thinking about it. Lot of them haven’t thought about all this, so it is a very good dialogue we have. In your case, maybe 1000. We come to a number okay? The initial revenue, lifetime value, what we do generates new business. If they get 10 new enquiries for that service for that sale, which is initially worth 3000, we can do that. 

We can get them those 10 enquiries. We can’t close it for them. We help them once they get the enquires how to differentiate themselves and close the sale. Every month we track it. “Last month you got seven enquires and here are the seven enquires which came through your website. How many did you close? That’s how we justify it. Very easy. The way we do it in our process, it is very clear to them the cost benefit. The cost of not doing this and the benefits of doing this.

The reader is interested in kicking off an SEO campaign. What would be some obstacles that might be preventing them from doing this?

Basically budget Tracy. It comes down to that. We analyze the competition. We pick two competitors. I ask them tell me who are your competitors? We get their agreement on it. Then we do some reverse engineering. This is what these guys are doing. You want to compete with them?

This is what they are spending. This is how they are presenting themselves online. This is how you are presenting today. Your website needs to be cleaned up. It needs to have the right content for the audience you are trying to reach. It needs to have a call to action. You need to have resources. You need to offer them some white papers. You need to maybe have some video case studies. Look at all these things these guys are doing.

To implement certain things in Phase I here is the budget, and I tell them I am not forcing you to do any of this. This is what you need to do to compete with these guys. Let’s move forward. If they don’t do it, they know the consequences. It is mostly budget, education, awareness building, helping them see it. They might have known about it in the background but nobody has shown them clearly this is the situation. Once they understand it, they find the money. 

While the positive impact of inbound marketing can be felt in many key areas of a business, tell me three areas how an inbound marketing strategy can boost sales. Here are 3 ways. 

1. Better Quality Leads 

Because inbound marketing essentially focuses on those people who are already looking for products and services that you sell, you have a much wider window to capture their attention by strategically placing useful and relevant content at various stages of the purchase cycle. 

This way you can stop chasing just any customer and wasting your time, money, and efforts on those who may not be interested in buying anything from you. Not only that, it solves yet another classic business problem you might be facing—misalignment between your sales and marketing folks in terms of lead nurturing. According to recent lead nurturing statistics, 79 percent of marketing leads go without a response from sales. Often marketing teams pass down unqualified or poor leads to the salespeople, forcing them to find their own leads. And, this is one of the biggest reasons why your sales team might not take marketing-sourced leads seriously. 

When such frictions between two teams are reduced and sales cease to be the sole responsibility of your sales team to become a unified effort, it produces better outcomes. 

2. Shorter Sales Cycle

Modern customers are growing incredibly less patient —they want to make faster decisions and have no time for long drawn out sales processes. By adopting an inbound marketing strategy, you can significantly shorten the sales cycle, giving your customers the experiences they prefer. How? 

-In-depth content like white papers and e-books identify, address, and solve customer’s problems, allowing your prospects to answer their own concerns. 

-Regularly publishing effective content can establish your brand as a thought-leader in your industry, making it easier for you to build trust and relationship with your potential customers. 

-Interested and sales-ready leads are more likely to be converted into paying customers. 

3. Increased Chances of Repeat Sales 

Thought-leadership combined with great customer service positions your brand as a reputed and credible resource in the market, which will get serious buyers coming back to you over and over again. An inbound approach not only helps to cinch the first deal but also creates avenues or further business, including cross-selling and upselling opportunities, hence maximizing the potential for revenue, profit, and future growth. 

To sum it up, inbound marketing can transform the way sales is done and, as a result, add significantly to your company’s bottom line. While inbound marketing is, most certainly, not an overnight job, when done right and with solid strategies in place, it can present endless opportunities to make more customers and retain the older ones. 

If somebody is ready to get started, what’s the best way for them to reach out and contact you?

They can go to one of my websites. We may have, and as I said we practice everything we preach. All of our websites have a call to action form. They can fill it out and we will do a free analysis of their website and their two competitors, then we sit down and educate them over the phone or faceto-face and show them, “Hey this is what’s happening. This is what you are up against. If you are serious about your business. You want to do this long-term. This is what you need to do in the next year. This is phase I. This is Phase II and here’s the budget. If they are these types of business, industrial, national, B2B type client, they can go to epromotionz.net. Epromotionz with a Z, .net, because that is aimed at B2B industrial type clients. If they are B2C client, they can go to www.B2BinboundMarketing.net .

What’s the best way for an international client to get a hold you? Do you have an email or what’s the best way to do it? 

Usually, it is andy@epromotionz.net. They could reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn and all of the other social media platforms.

WEBSITE: (Click on Links) 

https://www.epromotionz.net 

https://www.B2BinboundMarketing.net   https://www.whattheheckisinboundmarketing.com 

EMAIL: andy@epromotionz.net 

PINTEREST: https://www.pinterest.com/andyalagappan  

YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/user/epromotionz1  

LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seoppcguru  

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/AndyAlagappancom/ 

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/seoppcguru

PHONE: 832-677-4620

Visit > https://www.WhatTheHeckisInboundMarketing.com  to learn more