How My Agency Helped Customers Generate Over $5.8M in Online Sales
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hey! I’m Brice Gump, the founder, and CEO of Major Impact Media, a hybrid agency/education company.
Our agency focuses on creating marketing that attracts new clients for experts, coaches, consultants & online service providers.
I’m originally from Texas, but these days you can usually find me working and managing my team abroad in places like sunny Barcelona, Spain.
We’ve worked with dozens of companies over the years – from business coaches to international personal development gurus – to implement traffic systems that have acquired thousands of customers and generated over $5,800,000 in online sales for their businesses.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
It all started back in 2008, I had a friend who hired me to help him sell cell phones through his store on eBay and Craigslist.
Over the next couple of years, I saw that business explode. What started as a living room operation became an international multi-million dollar operation.
That opened my eyes to the power of working on the internet, and I was hooked.
After I finished college, I decided that digital marketing was going to give me a better, more exciting career path than anything I could do with the political science degree I graduated with.
I started taking some online courses on SEO that someone recommended as different projects came up.
I’d go to my local coffee shop and take the courses for a few hours in the morning before going to work.
I also would go to the library and check out books on marketing and sales that I could read at home.
That led to freelancing on different projects I could find around SEO, content marketing, website development, and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on.
Around that time, I packed my bags and moved back to Austin, Texas, where I started attending meetups with people working online and in digital marketing.
Through going to meetups in Austin, I got connected with a great opportunity to organize events with a company called “Internet Marketing Party.”
While helping them put on these events, I got introduced to so many cool people.
You will learn potentially way more in two years working with A-level players on big projects than you will lack yourself in a bedroom for the next five years digging at it alone.
It helped me get started in this industry, meet great people, get inspired, and get introduced to my first clients when I launched my agency.
Take us through the process of designing your services.
Major Impact Media was born in 2015 from behind the screen of my trusty Mac.
The nice thing about a service business is you can start one quickly and start generating cash on day 1.
I started by offering Google Ads for a monthly retainer. I charged my first client $800 per month, and I would manage their ad accounts.
I spoke with a few business owners about what they liked and didn’t like about other agencies and tried to design my services in a way that would be a higher quality service than what other agencies did.
But learning to run an agency wasn’t easy, and I had to teach myself a lot through trial and error.
It took me a few years to find the right market of people I loved waking up and working with every day.
That meant having to trudge through a lot of work that wasn’t delivering the kind of results I dreamed about or creating the day-to-day life I wanted to create.
Through all of that, I always had this feeling that I could make it work and make it into something great.
There’s no reason to ever have to work with companies, industries, or products that don’t make you excited. Go find people to help that are enthusiastic and share the thing you’re passionate about.
I’m thankful that I stuck with it and never gave up because eventually, I found my groove.
I found a great group of people I love working with, and when you wake up every day doing stuff you enjoy with people you enjoy doing it with, there’s not much else you can ask for.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Major Impact Media was launched completely self-funded.
My first clients came from networking in my local area and slowly grew as my network got larger and I received more positive testimonials from clients.
I would go onto MeetUp and try to find good meetups related to small businesses and marketing. Most of them were a waste of time, but after going to 10 different meetups, I found two great networking groups and made some good connections. My first clients came from there.
I had my first clients way before I built a website. When I created a website, I had already been freelancing for a bit and then started my agency.
I used some basic drag and drop page builder to make a one-page website on WordPress, so I had something up.
It was nice to use it as a kind of business card that said "I'm here," but in reality, all my clients were coming from meeting them locally or referrals from previous projects.
There were a lot of things about running the agency that I had to learn the hard way.
Starting as a freelancer, I pretty much did what anybody would ask me to do, and I would take on any clients that would want to hire me.
What I figured out over time, though, is that who you choose as a client makes a huge impact on the success that the overall project would have.
That changed everything for me because so many agencies will work with anyone, but when I figured out a very specific skill that I could offer and a very specific type of person I could work with, I found the most success.
That helped me to be able to pick people that I knew would be successful with the services that I offered.
So when you are getting started as a service provider — Choosing the right clients and knowing the kinds of clients that will be the most successful with the services you provide is a huge lever to create a bigger impact for you and your clients.
At least it was early in my career because that’s when I figured out how to pick people that were going to be successful before we even got started and improve the results that we were able to get for all of the clients that we work with.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
One thing that’s been big for us recently is doubling down on our organic content strategy.
This has meant that we are posting valuable content consistently on multiple social platforms which has already paid off in new customers who appreciate our content and resonate with it.
We weren’t able to dedicate enough time and energy to it before but now we have a steady content system that is working well for us to increase our presence and authority online.
I think no matter what you’re doing if you don’t have an online presence where you’re giving value and showing people what you’re doing/how you can help them they will find someone else to work with or buy from that IS doing that.
Another thing we do to help attract and retain customers is having a “results vault” to pull from which holds all the results and positive feedback we’ve received from our clients to use for future sales pages, emails, our website, ads, and proposals, you name it.
At the end of the day, what helps us to retain our client base is doing quality work, following through with our processes, and making sure our clients are in the loop with everything we’re doing for them.
We kick off every new client by outlining exactly what we will do in the first 30-60-90 days of the campaign to make it successful. Then we use that as a guide to check in with our clients and frequently keep them in the loop with their progress and results.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We traditionally have kept our focus as a digital media buying company and only offered Facebook ads and Google ads as a service, but after iOS 14, we’ve seen a lot of changes coming on with the ad platforms and I believe this is just the beginning.
iOS 14 was only the start of a wave of issues of privacy changes that are going to continue to impact the way companies can acquire customers through advertising.
So to best help, our clients handle all these changes, we’re starting to offer new services to help them improve their return on their marketing investment.
We’re expanding our services to offer YouTube ads, TikTok ads, and email marketing.
We still want to stay super focused on our customer base and give them good solutions to keep running ROI focused marketing.
With our new services, we’re offering them a way to get their marketing budget off Facebook, expand onto new platforms and generate more sales with the audience they already have.
Before, we were only hands-on with the ad platform, but now we’re getting involved in landing pages, video sales letters, email strategy, and handling everything that happens after the ad click.
In the end, that’s going to have a really big impact on our clients.
The types of strategies that we’re seeing with funnels and customer experiences are changing after iOS 14, and I’m excited about the services that we’re developing to help our customers handle that.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
One of the smallest little hacks that I’ve started doing for the last two years that’s been super valuable is sitting down every morning and writing down the major things I’m trying to accomplish right now.
Doing that every day and redialing in my focus has helped me and my agency focus on what is important and getting that done.
If you run an online business there will always be an endless list of things to do, and often it feels like stuff piles on faster than it gets off.
Figuring out how to prioritize what you’re trying to do in your business is one of the biggest skills I think anyone can learn and something my team and I are always working to improve.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
- Project Management: Clickup
- Internal Procedures & processes: Confluence, Google Docs
- Bookings: Calendly
- Team Communication: Slack, Loom, Zoom
- Email Marketing: ActiveCampaign
- Graphics: No Limit Creatives, Canva
- Reporting: Hyros, Google Analytics
- Passwords: 1password
- SEO: Ahrefs
- Landing Pages: Convertri
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
There are so many great books to dive into like some of the classics that you hear about in advertising from David Ogilvy or Claude Hopkins.
Apart from those though, one book that I like to recommend is called the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. It’s a great way to learn and think about sales differently by putting the attention on sales strategies more than sales scripts which I think is valuable.
Another book that has had a big impact on my thinking lately is $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi.
Finally, a really good book on personal development is Atomic Habits. It’s super-valuable to help you learn how to train yourself, lock in good habits and build a great environment that will feed your success.
For podcasts, I like to look for interviews with people who are in the field of founding companies. It doesn’t matter what podcasts they’re on, a lot of these great founders and these great marketers will go do interviews on other podcasts.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
When you’re just starting, it can be super advantageous to spend as much time as you can working with people who are doing what you want to do at the highest level.
You will learn potentially way more in two years working with A-level players on big projects than you will lock yourself in a bedroom for the next five years digging at it alone.
So if your career is just starting, spend time looking for the people that are out there doing what you want to do successfully, work for them for cheap, make the moves you need to make, and do whatever you can to gain experience.
It will set you up with so many tools in your toolbox to use in your endeavors and you’ll get connected which is one of the most important things to do as an aspiring entrepreneur.
Additionally, something I’ve learned is that there’s an unlimited number of people with businesses that need help out there.
There’s no reason to ever have to work with companies, industries, or products that don’t make you excited.
Go find people to help that are enthusiastic and share the thing you’re passionate about.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Yes! We’re growing and hiring smart, curious people to help us make the biggest impact possible for our clients.
We’re currently looking for a Facebook Ads Media Buyer and Direct Response Copywriter.
You can find more information and applications here.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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