Frank Olivo, CEO at Sagapixel | The SMB Marketing Agency Show

The SMB Marketing Agency Show is back with a brand new episode featuring Sagapixel's Frank Olivo. We've covered a few of the episode's many highlights below. Follow along as you listen on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

About Sagapixel and Frank Olivo

Frank Olivo is the founder and director of award-winning digital marketing agency Sagapixel SEO. In just 5 years, Frank has grown the business to 3 locations in Philadelphia and New Jersey. The agency boasts several accolades, including Best Web Designers in Philadelphia, Best in Search, and more.

Sagapixel serves businesses that aren't in a position to hire an in-house digital marketing team. Through best-in-class web design, SEO, and PPC advertising, Sagapixel delivers a robust digital marketing strategy to businesses across an array of industries, from legal to HVAC.

Frank's vision for the agency is to help business owners and entrepreneurs achieve their dreams of starting successful businesses that enjoy a steady stream of leads. An ambitious yet attainable goal, given Frank's track record.

Key takeaways from the episode

Frank shares his hard-won, expert advice for both small businesses and marketing agencies looking to grow.

Pivot away from strategies that don't serve your business.

Frank describes his “experiment” with outbound sales in 2018. At the time, Frank was handling follow-ups on sales calls. He was closing between one-third and one-half of leads. This success seemed like a clear signal to scale up and hire a sales team.

Things didn't exactly go as planned. “It was an utter disaster,” Frank recalls. “I ended up losing a lot of money.”

Fortunately, Frank learned from that mistake and reassessed the agency's infrastructure.

Today, Sagapixel generates business and loyal clients through their inbound marketing strategies and online presence in highly specialized fields.

Create solid processes.

The first obstacle Frank overcame after scrapping outbound sales was generating leads while managing the agency and taking calls:

“At that point, I didn't have the bandwidth to go out of office and go meet with clients every day of the week.”

Despite that, the business was growing, thanks to Sagapixel's local search ranking in the Greater Philadelphia region.

This brief lull allowed Frank to focus on profitability, maximizing utilization in the agency, “just ironing out all the kinds that we had in our processes.”

Not long after they revamped the agency's infrastructure, Sagapixel saw a spike in inbound leads: 

“They were a lot easier and a lot less work to close than outbound leads. I mean, the outbound leads needed to be convinced very often that they need a website, they need SEO.”

Their inbound leads, on the other hand, had already identified that need. The next step, says Frank, was “demonstrating that you can do a better job than your competitors can.”

Document everything you do, as you do it.

This is Frank's advice to digital marketing agencies of all sizes in every growth stage.

“I don't think that this is something that you can do too soon. Even if you are a consultant that aspires to hire some employees and and have a team someday, you should start now, documenting how you do everything."

This will save you headaches and money — not to mention it will expand your talent pool. However you choose to go about it, review what you've produced regularly to identify strengths and shortcomings.

Loom videos are Frank's preferred method for documenting processes, as well as training and delegating tasks to his team. “I've actually started off by breaking out every single task that someone needs to do for every one of the roles that we have here."

Demonstrate your expertise on multiple platforms.

To grow your business and deliver value to prospects and customers, give away your expert advice for free. Experiment with multiple platforms and evaluate the results regularly.

Podcasts, YouTube videos, conferences — these are just a few platforms Frank is using to get the Sagapixel name out there. The Sagapixel YouTube channel is especially helpful for business owners looking for pointers on SEO, Wordpress, and more.

Wrapping up

The next step for Sagapixel is to recruit and train new hires while boosting brand awareness. We're excited to follow Sagapixel's progress. A big thanks to Frank Olivo for taking the time out of his busy schedule to join our very own Philip Kuehnen on the podcast.

Tune in to the next episode of The SMB Marketing Agency Show, featuring SEO Locale's Marc Brookland. Don't forget to look out for our next post, where we'll cover the episode highlights.