In 2010, we had a wakeup call. Direct mail as we knew it was over. 

Our President, Wes Powell, had just returned from the MFSA Conference (now Epicomm and soon to be Idealliance). At the conference the Winterberry Group presented and was showing us the forecast for direct mail services.

They were going off a cliff.

The message was clear. Direct mail and print shops needed to change.

Need for Change

What was this change supposed to look like? We didn’t know, but we figured we needed to re-brand. We changed our name from The Mail Room, Inc. to TMR Direct.

If you’re like us, you thought the answer might lie in personalized URLs or pURLs, which were becoming a buzzword. The key was in taking direct mail and tying in an online capture form. This never caught on for our clients or prospects and took us nowhere.

MFSA was preaching to us that we needed to become a “marketing services provider”. This made sense to us. We needed to be more involved with strategy, and we needed to expand our service offering.

But the path wasn’t clear.

We dove into social media and started helping clients set up Facebook pages, and we were creating Tweets for them. This felt close, but it just wasn’t right. There wasn’t a clear way to demonstrate value or ROI. 

We were frustrated.

The Transformation

Later that year, in August of 2010, we bumped into a company called HubSpot. HubSpot provides marketing automation software and educates people on a methodology called inbound marketing. Today, there are many platforms that offer marketing automation software.

We did a demo and were hooked instantly. It made perfect sense. Here’s the basic premise and methodology:

Premise: The way people shop and buy products and services is different today. Today, people go online to do research and find providers. 

So how do you capitalize on this shift?

The Methodology: Get Found. You first have to get found by these people doing Google searches and exploring social media websites. How do you do this?

1. Blogging
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Social Media

Convert. Next, once you have the right people coming to your website, you need to convert them into leads. Not all are ready to buy, so you need to exchange valuable pieces of content or information for their contact info. You do that by creating:

1. E-books/checklists/guides/whitepapers
2. Calls to Action
3. Landing Pages (conversion pages)

Close. Now that you have a steady stream of leads, you need a way of moving them further down the funnel in order to close them into customers. Here’s what you need:

1. Bottom of the Funnel Conversion offer (demo, consultation, etc.)
2. Thank You Page
3. Email Nurturing Program
4. Phone Follow Up

Using this methodology, we started to experiment.

We started practicing inbound marketing for ourselves, and we brought on a test client. After 5 months, we started to see some traction. We could see website traffic improving and leads increasing. We knew we were on the right track.

It took a couple more years of experimenting, bringing on clients, and losing some clients, but we had figured out how to do inbound marketing for ourselves to help us grow as well as deliver this as a new service offering.

Growth

As with all things, we realized we needed to specialize. We weren’t going to be able to offer inbound marketing services to just anyone. We needed to be different. In 2014, we launched a new brand, Builder Funnel, which spoke to one industry vertical that we had come to know very well. This brand allowed us to attract clients at a much faster pace, and 2015 was one of our top 3 years for growth in our 40+ year history as a company.

Summary

Transformation is hard. Often, there isn’t a clear path or one right path for us all. It takes experimentation, perseverance, and risk. However, if you stick with it, I know you’ll find the direction that makes sense for your company, and you’ll come out the other side stronger than ever before.