Ep. 051 – Dan Knowlton “We focus on creating as much value, adding content that helps and attracts customers to us, so they come to us and say – we see what you do and we want to work with you”
Dan Knowlton Show Notes Dan Knowlton has been ranked as a Top #100 Digital Marketing Influencer and is an international speaker who went from knowing nothing about Digital & Social Media Marketing to growing an award winning, 6 figure Digital Marketing Agency with his brother Lloyd in under 2.5 years. Dan is also a contributor for a variety of key marketing publications including Social Media Examiner, Content Marketing Institute, and Jeff Bullas’ Blog. Most passionate about I’m passionate about a lot of things, but I think the main one is education, to educate and help people to use the social media strategies we’ve used to grow our business. We are doing it through variety of channels; we create educational content, we use speaking events, and we take part in podcasts like this. So what we enjoy and are passionate about is education. The big picture for us is to continue growing a big successful business. And with time, we are developing more and more educating opportunities, training, event speaking, and creating more educational content. Dan’s Career I did a marketing degree in university, but actually I didn’t take any modules and didn’t learn anything about social media and digital marketing. I worked in a company after my graduation and learned a lot about how to run a business, about customer services, sales, and marketing, but I quit because it was too much pressure. I traveled to Thailand and that was a good opportunity to think about what I would like to do, and I became obsessed about how to grow an audience through social media by creating content, writing articles, polls, and blogs and so on, and I started build my own community online. I built a fairly big community on Twitter. And then I thought I could help others do it as well and I started KPS Digital Marketing and my brother came on board and it really started from there. Dan’s Customers Starting out, I really didn’t know who were going to be my customers. It’s has taken experience, and it’s taken years to work in different industries, with different companies, and different mind sets to understand who are the right customers for us. And today, we are working with a variety of companies in different sizes and from different industries. When we started out, we had this mindset that everyone that wanted to work with us; we wanted to work with, because this was the beginning. But we soon got to understand that our best customers are those who really understand the value in what we provide. Those who don’t need convincing and chasing after. The people who you chase tend to be the customers that are never satisfied and take the hardest work. So for us, the customers we focus on are those who understand the value in what we do, and also those customers that truly understand that this social media, and marketing isn’t just a magic pill you take, you are doing one thing and BOOM!! Everything is happening. They are those who understand that they need to work hard and they need a team on board etc. And finally, our best customers are customers that share similar values with us, and we have three main values, first of all, to have fun, to grow, and make money for both the customers and us, and to live through our values. Dan’s best advice about approaching the customers We really were growing our customers through inbound marketing. We don’t do any kind of outbound, going after customers, saying: Hi, come and work with us. We focus on creating as much value, adding content that helps and attracts customers to us, building relationships with these customers over time, so they come to us and say “we see what you do and we want to work with you. So my number one tip would be to really understand who your customer is, first of all, and then do all the great digital, social, and content marketing that will help attract those people to you, rather than going out there and trying to find them. What...