Episode 18
· 24:10
Pierre Mol (00:00)
Welcome to another episode of the $5 million milestone podcast where Tim and I dive deep into what it really takes to grow and scale a successful professional services business. I'm your host, Pierre Mol. Today, we're joined by Sofiane Morouche a fractional CMO with Growth Connect, who will be sharing with us an incredible case study on how he's helped a local law firm in the Bay Area achieve a staggering 10X increase in website traffic and leads by putting in place a strategic marketing approach. We're talking about real measurable results.
that transformed a professional services firm's entire business trajectory. If you're a professional services owner or marketer looking to break through your current growth ceiling and hit that $5 million milestone, this conversation is packed with actionable insights you can implement immediately. With no further ado, hi, Sofiane, and welcome to the program. And how are you today?
Sofiane Morouche (00:46)
Hi Pierre, hi Tim. Thanks for having me today. I'm great. Thanks.
Pierre Mol (00:50)
All right, awesome. So let's just dive right into it and help our audience get to know you a bit better first and sort of walk us through your journey from starting your own marketing agency with your brother in France and Dubai to then working as a fractional CMO in Bangkok and working with both US and Australian companies, today.
Sofiane Morouche (01:07)
Yeah, correct. as you said, Pierre, I'm originally from France. You probably get it from my accent. I started my career in traditional marketing and I kind of fell into digital marketing accidentally. And after five years into my career in Dubai, I decided I wanted to launch my own business. So I was already very ambitious at a young age. So my brother happened to be a digital ⁓ and cybersecurity expert.
but more on the technical side of things. And on the opposite, I was really starting to master the sales and marketing side of the business. So we then decided to join forces, the tech guy and the marketing guy. And then we opened our first digital marketing agency between France and Dubai. We run the business for several years and then I moved to Thailand. My brother continued running the agency. And for my side, I joined Pronto and Growth Connect.
As a fractional CMO. So now I have more than 17 years of marketing and managerial experience behind me and hopefully many more ahead of me.
Pierre Mol (02:05)
And when you started your career, were you working with big brands, small companies, give us a sense of what kind of experience you had prior to kind of working with? Yeah.
Sofiane Morouche (02:15)
So we were a kind of boutique agency, so we were not working with really huge accounts, at least when we started, it changed later on, but when we started, we really working with SMEs. And what we did is that we started helping people who were around us, around our office, in our hometown, the local fashion creators.
the small businesses or businesses that were a bit more advanced or had been around for more years, but who didn't yet take the digital transformation turn. So that's the type of people who started helping first and working with first.
Pierre Mol (02:55)
Right, very interesting. So you were helping people kind of get their first website or kind of go from their first website to then kind of the level up and their digital transformation.
Sofiane Morouche (02:59)
Yes. That's absolutely that. Yeah, you got it right.
Tim Kelsey (03:05)
Sounds kind of like the early years of Pronto, like our very first customers back in 2008. It was their first really professional website that they were getting with us and like, you know, their first big step into the world of websites and digital marketing. So interesting that we had kind of similar paths and led to us coming together eventually and working together. So very cool.
Sofiane Morouche (03:26)
Yeah, absolutely.
Tim Kelsey (03:27)
I'd like to jump into your work with LaPorte Law Firm and I think you've achieved some incredible results with them, but maybe we can go back to the beginning of your engagement with them. I know a big part of the Growth Connect process is really setting the foundation of a marketing strategy, getting in depth with that business owner and figuring out what is potentially going to work for them. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you typically kick things off with one of your Growth Connect clients and how you start getting involved as a fractional CMO when you're starting a relationship with a new client.
Sofiane Morouche (04:03)
Okay, all right. So first things first, I wanna talk about the most common mistake that business owners or CEO who don't have a fully fledged marketing department or who don't have marketing leadership make. Whenever they identify they have a problem, what they tend to do is that they jump into implementing a bunch of marketing tactics across different channels randomly. So they know they have a problem, they jump straight into solutions.
So one of the problem they could identify, for example, usually when I have a first discovery code with them is that we don't have enough traffic, we don't have enough leads, or our leads are not qualified enough, or it can even be all of three together. And so usually the mistake they all do, they all tend to do is that they jump into solutions before analyzing the root cause of the problem that they have. And the solutions that they implement is like,
Let's run an ad campaign. Let's put up a Facebook or LinkedIn company page. Let's run a webinar on this topic. Let's start a call email campaign. Let's buy links, et cetera, et cetera. So most of the time what they are missing is that they need to get the fundamentals right before they roll out an action plan. And if I say it, in other words, that's there is strategy before tactics. So that's the first thing I work on with my clients. Let's get the strategy right. And then we can.
jump into implementing X, Y, or, Z tactics through this or that channel. So if they run the campaigns, but they don't look or they don't start with strategy first, there are a lot of things that could go wrong, that could be wrong. The first thing is that they didn't get the target persona rights. That's why the campaigns are not getting any results. The customer narrative was not on point.
or they are not catching the leads or the customers at every touch point of the customer journey, or there could be issues with the copy on the website, the bounce rate is too high for whatever reason, et cetera, et cetera. So if you are not addressing those points first, you can implement as many tactics, marketing tactics or campaigns you want. It's not going to move the needle. And so that's exactly the first thing I do with my clients and what I did with Laporte Law Firm is try to understand what is wrong.
Tim Kelsey (06:08)
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting approach and we've worked with so many businesses who have come to us for help with marketing. prior to our launch of Growth Connect or separating Growth Connect as a sort of separate business entity from Pronto, we didn't really have a strategy angle to send our clients to. And they would come to us and just say, okay, I want to run ads. I want to do some link building. Let's try this. you could tell they're
kind of just stabbing in the dark or just they read a blog article somewhere saying that they need to do this thing so now they're going to go do it. And it's so important to take that step back and really think about like what are we trying to accomplish and having a methodical approach to actually accomplishing that rather than just saying let's try all the digital marketing things and hope one of them works eventually.
Sofiane Morouche (06:58)
Yeah, correct. And Tim, to answer the second part of your question, so what did I do first? What we did is that, and it's kind of my proven methodology, what I do with all my clients is that we start with what we call the marketing blueprint, or we also call it the 90-day transformation program. So as the name says, it lasts 90 days in total. For the first one and a half months, we dive deep into the fundamentals of the business, and we analyze everything that can be analyzed. That means...
your current SEO, your website traffic analytics, your website layout, the CTA, are there any UX roadblocks? We do a content gap analysis. We look at your competitors. Who are your competitors online? And what do they rank on that you are not currently? Who's your ideal target persona? What's the customer journey, et cetera, et cetera. So we look, we put everything on the table. We lay out everything flat.
We look at all the components individually and then we come up with a plan. I might have forgotten some things, but the first one and a half months are extremely intensive in terms of what we look at.
Pierre Mol (07:57)
Yeah, and Sofiane if I'm correct, I think you also look at things like unique value proposition and kind of core messaging. So like how how do you position yourself in the market versus those competitors? And this is different from looking at how you're ranking online, because you have to analyze both sort of the SEO side of things of, you know, how is my website doing versus my competitors website? But then it's also looking at how am I actually positioned? Are we actually going after the same kind of clients? I mean,
two law firms may be completely different. One may be only focused on the Bay Area, for example, whereas another one may be national. And then their strategy will differ completely based on that kind of situation and context.
Sofiane Morouche (08:39)
Yeah, you're right to mention it, Pierre, because it's not only a digital marketing analysis where we look at the traffic, where we look at the SEO, we also look at the business fundamentals. it happened to me with some clients that when we ask ourselves those questions with the CEO or with the top management team, we came to the conclusion that there is no point continuing selling this service because no one is interested in the service or because
there are too many people selling this service on the market and the margins are ridiculous and it's extremely expensive to acquire a client for this service. Or we came to the conclusion that we are not targeting this buyer persona which is extremely important for our business. Or we are spending too much time on trying to target this buyer persona which is bringing no value at all to our business.
We are not only making changes to the website, sometimes we're also making essential strategic changes to the business strategy itself.
Tim Kelsey (09:35)
That's really interesting. mean, I think some of the like good marketing isn't only about just running a well optimized campaign or having the right keywords to target. Like the product market fit is such an important part of having a successful business and a successful sales and marketing team. And I think it really does take someone working with someone like you, Sofiane, and to get in there.
Tim Kelsey (10:00)
and take the time to understand and ask the hard questions. I think that's where like Pronto is sort of an execution house of marketing. Always struggled with that strategy prior to us having Growth Connect is because we didn't have the people or the bandwidth or the time to really dig into those deep business problems and understand things that it can't only be, let's just talk about this ad campaign. It needs to be this much broader.
Let's talk about your business as a whole and figure out what's going to work here.
Sofiane Morouche (10:33)
Yeah, absolutely.
Pierre Mol (10:33)
I was just going to add to that because one example at Pronto where we make strategic decisions is should you run a campaign for a specific buyer persona through SEO or through Google Ads? And sometimes you'll figure out, OK, well, there's no point in selling a Google Ads campaign because you can see that there's just not going to be enough search traffic or there's a really, really high
cost and that may not be profitable. And so we kind of get at that level. But if we identify that certain channels are unviable or that certain buyer personas may not fit a certain channel, we can give that kind of recommendation. But then I think where you go a step further is that, okay, let's find solutions around that. Is it that this buyer persona is just not viable as a whole? Or is it that we need a different channel that, you know, Pronto doesn't handle and then you kind of go
to market for this buyer persona through a different channel and look at it that way, just to kind of differentiate what we do as an agency versus what you do as sort of more of a strategic advisor and coach.
Sofiane Morouche (11:34)
Yeah, absolutely. I I think you nailed it. And the key word here, the key term is a strategic advisor. I come on board as a strategic advisor. So I sit at the table with all the other C-suites and I talk with them directly at a strategic level.
Pierre Mol (11:49)
All right. And so once the blueprint is in place, ⁓ what were the specific marketing initiatives that you kind of then identified and prioritized for a report to kind of really get to those incredible increase in traffic and leads? Can you walk us through a little bit more those tactical steps after the blueprint, what you did next?
Sofiane Morouche (12:04)
Yeah, sure. So when it comes to Laporte law firm, there are two things that's really made a difference and move the needle, as you said, but it's actually the same. It's the case for all the client I've been working for. The first key step was a total revamping of the website. So that's often a difficult decision to take because somehow people get sentimentally attached to websites, especially old websites.
But it's extremely rare when you can launch a new strategy or strategy at all with all materials. So if the website was performing, I would not have been called to the rescue. So that means that there's fundamentally something wrong with the website. It can sometimes happen that we just make some adjustment if the website is pretty recent and modern, like we make adjustment to some strategic pages or we add new ones, but...
So far, with all my clients, we agreed that it was better to opt for a full revamp. And that's where we worked with Pronto to totally revamp the website. I would say that's the first big step is to get the website right. The other thing that really moved the needle and helped us to 10x the traffic and the leads is
is the marketing content strategy. So one big change that we made is that we decided to internalize content production. And in the case of Laporte law firm, who better than attorneys can write about legal matters, right? So we put together a kind of killer team. So on one side, it was me, the marketing strategist, doing all the prep work on what keyword we want to target, where's the high search volume, where's the low keyword difficulty.
drafting blog briefs, outlines, and looking at who we want to beat on Google. And then on the other side, was the attorneys who were taking my briefings and my outlines and then writing about what they know best, which is social security disability law. Once we made that shift, once we had a brand new website that was really aligned with the strategy we designed in the marketing blueprint, and once we had killer content,
we started to see a huge uptake in traffic. Up to the point where 23 out of the 25 most visited pages were blog posts written by the attorneys. So to give you more precise numbers, we started by doubling the traffic within few months. Then we tripled the traffic within a year. We multiplied the traffic by five within two years.
And within three years, we managed to multiply the traffic by 10.
Tim Kelsey (14:31)
They're really crazy results. It's super interesting to hear that. I love that a big part of your strategy involved the LaPorte law firm team putting in the effort on their side. think there's, especially when it comes to, content related to legal issues or any sort of content that requires this deep expertise, the people who are doing that work are going to be so much more detailed
And so much more accurate in what they write than any sort of outsourced content copywriter sort of thing. Did you run into any challenges getting the team on board with that? mean, even with our own content, sometimes we've had initiatives internally at Pronto where we say, okay, we want more team members to write content, write blog articles for us. It's really hard to get people motivated to do that. What sort of challenges did you run into in that area?
Sofiane Morouche (15:22)
Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, strangely enough, there was less roadblocks than what I thought, but there were still roadblocks. I think the biggest challenge I had when working, starting working with Laporte law firm is that they didn't have any internal marketing resources whatsoever. And they never did in the past because of the nature of the business. It's a family law firm. I knew it would be difficult to create an internal marketing department. So I had to be creative.
So we use a combination of internal resources and external resources such as Pronto Marketing. But the key element was for the attorneys themselves to create the content. And to be able to reach this stage, I had to free the time from any other potential time consuming tasks on the marketing or sales side, especially the leads management side. So what we did is that we implemented a couple of tools and tactics.
in order to free time for them so that they have time to write blogs. So some of the things we implemented was, for example, ⁓ implemented chat bot so that the chat bot can answer most of the common questions that potential leads or potential clients have. Because when it comes to professional services, about 80 % of your potential clients have the same questions and the same challenges. So they have the same questions. So anytime you spend time answering the same question several times,
you are not making a good use of your resources. So we developed a chat bot. We implemented it. It freed a lot of time for the team. So they didn't have to keep answering the same questions. What we did also is that we created ⁓ self-assessment tools on the website so that they would not have to. The first step was to do a self-assessment on the website.
And then only if their situation was eligible for Laporte services, then they would contact the firm. And then lastly, we produced complete guides like how to or all you need to know about XYZ so that whenever the potential clients are at only at a warning stage of the decision process, they can just go on the website, download the guides, an ebook, and then they can get the content by themselves.
once they are at a decision stage or consideration stage, then they can get in touch with the attorney. So I don't know if you see the whole picture, but we try to really put as less pressure as possible on the attorneys so they don't have to spend the time answering emails and answering potential leads. And all the time we freed was used to create blogs. And actually,
They were a bit reluctant at the beginning because they are not editors, are not writers, they are not copywriters. But once they saw that the piece they produced became sometimes the most visited page on the website, that encouraged them to continue writing content. That's how it worked. It was like a snowball effect.
Tim Kelsey (18:02)
Cool, yeah, I really like that. mean, it is super rewarding to see something that you produced turned into a valuable piece of content for the company. That's a cool reward that I hadn't really thought of and a great way that like you're reporting about the gains that they're making to the company sort of reinforces all that work that they're doing and encourages them to keep up with it.
Pierre Mol (18:03)
And Sofiane, just to clarify, you weren't just dumping the blogs to the attorneys. And I think you mentioned it kind of briefly is you're actually still taking the time to really write outlines. So when the attorneys have to write those blog posts, it's not like they're starting from a blank page. So you're still heavily involved in that process as well, right?
Sofiane Morouche (18:43)
Yeah, I give them the skeleton and they just add the meat to the bones and that makes a killer block at the end.
Pierre Mol (18:49)
Yeah, very nice. And again, I think this one thing that's particularly important is that this is exactly in line with Google's E-E-A-T recommendations, where there's an emphasis on the expertise. And so this is exactly aligning with that guideline and obviously, to use some buzzwords here, everyone is trying to optimize for AI as well. And this is the same recommendation, except it's maybe even more important, so to speak.
And in terms of AI search, AI is really looking for like expertise from specific ⁓ experts. And I think you're right, right in there.
Tim Kelsey (19:26)
One thing I'm sort of interested in, and we've dug into La Porte law quite a bit, but for any sort of business owner out there, whether they're a law firm or any sort of professional services, B2B sort of thing, who's struggling with marketing today, kind of doesn't know where to turn, other than, you know, signing up with you and having you come on as their fractional CMO. What are the couple of things that you think they should start working towards to be prepared to, you know, build a marketing blueprint or start building the foundation of their digital marketing presence.
Sofiane Morouche (20:02)
I would say start by asking yourself the right questions. Why things you've been doing for the past so many years do not work. Do not jump into conclusion or do not try to implement this and that without understanding the root cause of the problem. Another big advice I would give, I know it's not possible or applicable to every business, but I think at least the strategic
component of marketing should live within your company. It's okay if you don't have enough budget to build a fully fledged marketing team with, I would say, three to five people and a marketing director or CMO, VP marketing, but at least try to have the strategic part living within the company. Then you can outsource execution, but strategy is extremely important and you cannot rely on external providers to come up.
Or to decide on your strategy. No one better than you knows about your strategy. You can get help from someone like me who's an expert in marketing strategy to lay the foundations right, but then try to at least have one person within the company who takes care of marketing strategy. Yeah, that's what I would say where to start.
Tim Kelsey (21:08)
Yeah, I totally agree. mean, no one is going to care about the success of your company as much as you do. And you really need someone who takes ownership of that internally, whether it's the owner or some leader of the marketing team. And if that person needs help, then working with you is the perfect place to go is to sort of coach them and guide them. I'm close friends with Kevin Laporte who handles the marketing at Laporte Law.
Tim Kelsey (21:36)
And he has told me that, it's been super helpful working with you and having you not only there to guide them, but also to hold them accountable when, things are, you know, getting busy, has other things he needs to be doing, but he knows he has his weekly or bi-weekly check-in with you that's coming up. He doesn't want to disappoint you. It's kind of like having a personal trainer. You know, if you skip the gym session, the next time you know, your coach is a little disappointed in you.
⁓ He sort of felt the same way where it's like I don't want to disappoint Sofiane and by not having these blog articles done which is exactly what a lot of business owners need because We're all busy running businesses and handling our day-to-day work. It's really easy to push some of the marketing stuff, which Maybe doesn't have immediate 10 tangible results It's like okay. That's not this blog article can wait compared to this thing. That's on my desk today
But if you continually push it off, you never get anywhere and you need that person holding you accountable and making sure this happens on this date. We're always moving forward and making progress. And like you were saying over the march of several months to a couple of years, you can have incredible results like LaPorte law has with 10 X traffic and leads. ⁓ so pretty incredible how that all adds up of just working through it sort of day by day and making sure you're staying on track.
Pierre Mol (22:58)
All right, well, thanks so much for sharing all of this with us, Sofiane Ann. If our listeners want to connect with you, what's the best way for them to reach you?
Sofiane Morouche (23:06)
Well, I'm just a video call away, so I think best is to send me an email at sophian at gross connect at IO. You'll probably get the link in the description of the video. We'll have a discovery call together and I will ask you one simple question. What are your three main challenges today? I will listen to what you have to say and then we'll decide if we are right for each other. If not, I will probably direct you towards other options or alternatives.
Pierre Mol (23:31)
Well, we'll make sure to include your email address ⁓ in the description of the video on YouTube. And you know, Sofiane consistently shares valuable insights about go-to-market strategy and marketing. So I also encourage you to follow Sofiane on LinkedIn and we'll include that too. So as always, if this episode helped you think differently about growing your website traffic and marketing strategy, please subscribe to the $5 million milestone podcast, leave us a review and share this with another business owner, who's navigating the complexities of digital marketing. until next time, keep focusing on making strategic marketing choices, growing your traffic and leads, and keep chasing that $5 million milestone.
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