Born and raised in York, England, Bill J Clarke is the Founder of Mustard Fox Marketing – a lead generation agency delivering high-value clients to brands in the UK. As his father and grandfather were both entrepreneurs, it was only a matter of time before Bill followed in their footsteps and that time came when he had spent a year and a half at university in Leeds, bored by lectures while studying his Business & Marketing degree. He knew this wasn’t the best way he could be spending his time so took the risk and dropped out, despite his grades of consistently over 90%, and his family urging him to stay in university and get a safe, corporate job at the end of it. He worked at a marketing agency after dropping out for a few months, spending his days working a 9-5 job and then building what would soon become Mustard Fox Marketing, in the evenings.
Cut to a couple years later and his agency has helped clients from freelancers looking to get their first client, to 7-figure businesses looking to grow their revenue through online marketing channels. His services have ranged from web design, social media content creation, SEO, paid traffic services, email marketing and the list goes on. He now focuses on the one service his clients value the most – lead generation. He is also able to run his agency from wherever he has his laptop and a wifi connection, most recently spending 5 weeks in Turkey to get some winter sun and is currently looking to head to Bali.
It’s fair to say Bill knows his stuff when it comes to digital marketing and generating clients.
When he works with a new client, one of the first steps they work on together is defining their brand, and this isn’t just looking at their logo. This involves doing a deep dive into their values, their content, their offers, the owners/directors as people, their website and much more. It can be from the tiniest detail to how they word their emails, all the way up to what their business stands for.
Bill says this should be an entrepreneurs first step when looking to generate high value clients. He sees so many who jump straight to the next hot strategy, marketing hack or method that some internet guru has deemed ‘The only way to get clients’. It may be hard to ignore when they flash their Lamborghini and a wad of $100 bills, but take it from Bill who has been through the courses and understands their marketing psychology, please keep scrolling past their Facebook Ad. Focus on your own branding, define it, and then integrate that into everything you and your business does.
So you’ve defined your brand and have made it known across your website, your offers, your social media and you bought a t-shirt with your logo on it, what now? Is it time to jump straight into Facebook Ads because that one guy from YouTube said it was the only way your business will grow? No. If you thought yes, please go back to the previous paragraph and re-read. Bill focuses on generating high-value clients. So that’s what we need to do – define what a high-value client is to your business. What do they look like? What do they do? Where are they? Where do they congregate online? What problems do they have? What do they want from life? Are they ready to buy from you? Answer questions like these to get a crystal clear idea on what an ideal client looks like to you.
Now it’s time to jump into Facebook Ads, right?! No! It’s true that Facebook Ads are a great way to generate online clients but only if you have a budget you’re willing to potentially lose on them with no return, and you need to also be proficient yourself with the Facebook Ads platform, or employ someone who is. If you don’t fit that criteria, please don’t worry. Bill’s advice for finding the lead generation strategy is just to look at what your competitors are doing. Warning – this does not mean to copy them. But using the same strategies as them is effective as they wouldn’t be using them if they weren’t working, so all you need to do is mould it to your brand, offers and audience, then follow the scientific method.
What’s that? It’s a way of constantly improving your campaigns and staying profitable. Firstly, you test a campaign. Then, you collect the feedback on what worked, what needs improving and what needs getting rid of. Next, you optimise your campaign with your data. Does it stop there? No, you should be doing this loop constantly as lead generation campaigns need regular optimisation and management.
If you stick to this scientific method and stay consistent, it’s only a matter of time before you’re generating high-value clients like a high powered magnet if you stick to everything Bill has spoken about in this article.