Cornering an Untapped Market
I took over management of a marketing team at the same time ChatGPT began to grow in popularity. As the lead marketer at a speakers’ bureau (a talent agency for keynote speakers), I saw an opportunity to get big wins from a corner of our speaker roster we’d never paid much attention to. The result? A 850% increase in organic traffic, an ROI of 480% on paid search, and a 450% increase in inbound leads. Find out more below, and get in touch for more!
The strategy
To boost our sales-qualified leads for my agency’s keynote speakers on AI, I put together a strategy across four channels: organic search (SEO), paid search (Google Ads), email marketing, and sales assets that doubled as content marketing.
Organic search
I identified top keywords with transactional intent, interviewed our SMEs, and wrote a network of content to push the keywords to the top of the SERPs. We weren’t ranking for any of our keywords at first—but with a little trial and error, I got our top keyword to rank at #2 on Google, and 20+ of our secondary keywords to rank on the first page. Over the next 6 months, we saw an 850% increase in organic traffic.
Paid search
At the time, we weren’t running paid ads on any platform. I taught myself how to use Google Ads and put together a campaign for our AI keynote speakers. I created, optimized, monitored, calculated, and optimized again—and our couple-of-thousand-dollar budget turned into tens of thousands in revenue: an ROI of 480%.
Email marketing
I wrote and distributed an email campaign on the topic of AI speakers, which reached over 16,000 clients with an open rate of 40%. Leads from this campaign led to thousands of dollars in revenue. I worked with the sales team to translate this into sales collateral, which they used to nurture new business from existing clients.
Sales collateral
I led my producer and copywriter to create a series of sales collateral. The biggest piece was a highlight reel of our top keynote speakers, which 100% of our sales team used—the CEO wrote, “This is amazing!” and another agent said, “You make my job so easy!” We also optimized it for YouTube SEO, pushing it to #1 on the YouTube search results for relevant keywords and gaining 19,000 views to date.
The result
One year into this campaign, the results became clear: we saw a 450% increase in inbound leads for AI speakers.
AI speakers became a new revenue stream for the agency, and our content continues to perform well and bring in sales-qualified leads across organic search, paid search, email marketing, and business development.
