Jeremy Frohlich
LRDG is Language Research Development Group, the market leader in educational technology to the Canadian government.

Ilia Tretiakov
All right, and tell me about yourself. What’s your role there?

Jeremy Frohlich
I am currently the COO. The Chief Operating Officer of LRDG. I’ve been here for about ten years, on and off, currently in the role for three months now. Before this current role, I was the director of Business Development. My tasks included automating and really restructuring the entire sales department first and creating a marketing department from scratch, or recreating a marketing department rather. So we had a few in house resources. Getting the sales and marketing teams to work together through a structured plan, and of course, using an expert agency to do so. We had remote employees. Getting them to work together wasn’t easy, but ultimately they weren’t working towards a plan. We had hired resources kind of from the ground up, creating a marketing strategy. You almost never get it right on the first try. And so, So Good Digital. Had done this before, helped us. The word I always use is retranslate back to us, what we wanted to do. You may remember this yourself. We knew in details what we wanted to do. We needed to formalize it, to create a plan around it, to get some resources in. We couldn’t have a ten person marketing team doing every you know what I mean, every specific task.

Jeremy Frohlich
And so working with somebody like you, who brought in the right resources as needed for specific tasks, we weren’t attached to certain, necessarily people or resources longer term, but to help us execute on our vision. You were able to PR. Public relations is one example. We don’t need a dedicated full time resource for that. You were able to bring one in short term and then go back to the plan to execute the rest of it. That was a big thing.

Ilia Tretiakov
Awesome. And you mentioned before that you had numerous employees working on marketing, but no clear strategy or focus on results. What did you mean by that?

Jeremy Frohlich
We were just going through the motions. I don’t want to say anything bad about anyone, but at the end of the day, it was a series of tasks. We wasn’t even redoing our website at the time. That’s what came of it. But we needed to improve our SEO. We needed to start running some ads. We just were going through the motions and doing things to do them without a clear understanding as to why and how one thing is connected to another. And in order to achieve something, you need to achieve it in phases. And so we got ahead of ourselves and wanted something done overnight. And then we’re ready to pivot when it didn’t happen, when in reality you work longer term, something in an organized fashion, and it would work out better. So that’s how I separated working through a vision and a plan rather than a series of tasks. After probably the third go at it, the third attempt. So we literally had our third kind of iteration of an in house marketing department. We were getting better and understanding it better, but still weren’t anywhere closer. We still had a one year kind of thinking of getting us somewhere.

Jeremy Frohlich
And at one point I just said, enough is enough. We’re never going to get anywhere doing it in this way. And then outside of marketing, again, we had a digital transformation. We had to figure out overnight how to manage our employees and resources remotely. And so you had the cultural side, not the emotional, but the employee management side of things outside of the day to day marketing. So after again the third attempt at restructuring our marketing department in house, we said, that’s it. Let’s bring in an agency who’s done this before, who’s doing this for companies as we speak in our market, who has the expertise, who can work through all of the less essential details and just hit the ground running rather than hiring a resource onboarding them, scaling them up. You were able to really get your team involved and literally hit the ground running overnight. What started this all out is the fact that we wanted to diversify our company a little bit into a new market. It wasn’t, sorry, it was a new market segment, really a different population of our existing market, where marketing became that much more important. We have 20 years of business experience, never needed marketing as much as now specifically going into the B to C market of the Canadian government.

Jeremy Frohlich
We needed to up our digital footprint. And so SEO and SEM were the two biggest areas. Again, like before, we started so good in a very specific capacity to help us in one area, all the while knowing that we needed support well beyond that. And as soon as you were ready, as soon as we validated that it worked and you were doing the right things, we were able to add to the budget and add to the scope.

Ilia Tretiakov
And we have grown the scope quite a bit, right? Because we have those ads, we have SEO, we’re doing social, we’re doing public relations, and we’re really like bringing everything together into one marketing package. Right?

Jeremy Frohlich
That’s exactly what it’s become. We talked about this a year ago, that you would become the extension of our marketing department, and you now are in direct touch with other departments for their own needs. But again, it’s all part of a central vision for it. That’s how we work with you. One big factor was your expertise in doing this before you demonstrated really nice case studies and more than case studies on paper. You explained to me the word I use is in English, in layman’s terms, in non marketing talk, what I want ultimately. And so you translated it back to us and demonstrated your ability to get it done. And again, things weren’t clear. And down packs for us, but there was value in what we provide, there was concrete things that we wanted to do and you helped us put that all together into a nice action plan. You made it easy and you continuously do that week over week. We have nice report meetings and discussions to improve things for the future and it always leads to something. Results and the reports and the metrics that you’re hitting. But ultimately, we have successfully opened up a new market.

Jeremy Frohlich
We have a good amount of leads coming in, high conversion rate. We have two dedicated employees who are now responsible for those leads and they’re succeeding. So one direct benefit is the ability to grow our sales team. It’s still only a subset of our existing marketing revenue, of our existing company revenue, but we’re expecting that market to grow. So inside the first six months there, it’s been worthwhile.

Ilia Tretiakov
So we were able to record, at one point, 342% return on investment on those paid ads. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Jeremy Frohlich
My only expansion on that is why didn’t we spend more on it to begin with and get a higher return?

Ilia Tretiakov
In your very niche targeted market, last year we hit over 70,000 individuals reached on Facebook and just under 500 followers on LinkedIn. Again, all very much in your targeted niche. What can you tell me about that?

Jeremy Frohlich
We’ve been busy. We’ve been busy. A lot of it is from So Good Digital directly. So that’s interesting. What’s clear is we are getting into that stage of being a medium to large business. Funny enough, we get a lot of people reaching out to us for investment opportunities. We are noticing our digital footprint is larger in every area. We’re noticing a deeper analysis. Again, we were doing things to do them without always understanding why or the implications of it. You’d ask questions like why do you want to do that? And what’s your ultimate objective with this? And so it’s allowing me to look at things more, both more strategically but more granularly at the same time. So you provide that sense of advice and consultation. You don’t just execute on tasks that we give you, you actually lay out the foundation for it to then deliver on the results. So I found that always interesting. Genuinely happy to say it’s been like a family. Your team cares. Your team believes in our mission and vision and wants us to succeed and knows that they can help us. And anytime I share any advice, not advice, any constructive feedback on the way an ad is being written or a copy is being generated, your team jumps on it and is so open and accepting of it and is ready to you know what I mean, to perfect it.

Jeremy Frohlich
That is genuine feedback that I’ve loved to see and work with your team on. It’s quite possibly the single biggest area that we need to expand on. We have only gotten so far in our 20 years of business without marketing. Now that we want to have new market segments and new revenue streams, forget just locally the opportunity that we have here in Canada, in the Canadian government, in the corporate sector. But our end game to get out of Canada, to go internationally. You’re never going to get anywhere without showing the world what you do and what you can do. And So Good Digital is helping us do that