Our second interview with Corebidz. Learn how this start up that gained 17 oil and gas clients in its first month, grew to 70 after a single blog post. Their first interview can be seen by clicking here.

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Mark:                          Hey, folks. Let’s learn something new about the oil and gas industry.

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All right. Today, we have Jeremy back from CoreBidz. The last blog post we did we’ll put a link to the early one. It was a tremendous traffic driver for us and it was – we thought we’d bring Jeremy back to ask him some questions to follow up to our first blog post.

So, Jeremy how are you doing today?

Jeremy:                       I’m doing good, Mark. Thanks for having us back.

Mark:                          You’re very welcome. So, let’s jump right into it. So let’s talk a little bit about marketing. So, when I first met you, what type of marketing are you doing?

Jeremy:                       Besides the t-shirts that we’re wearing right now, it was making phone calls, doing face to face, you know, calling people, but we didn’t really have internet presence or anything like that, so it was definitely going out and face to face calls.

Mark:                          Okay. And is that how you obtained your first seventeen clients?

Jeremy:                       That’s correct.

Mark:                          Okay. And yet, how much traffic do you generate back then?

Jeremy:                       At that point, because we didn’t have any other outlet as far as advertising or anything and the budget was slim, three or four pieces of traffic a day were going to the website and, you know, a couple of those were ours, I’m sure. But it was generally everybody that came to the website, it was a face to face or a phone call.

Mark:                          And then, let’s talk about social media. So back then what type of social media were you using and did you believe in it?

Jeremy:                       I’ve got to admit that I was not a believer in social media. We did not have a Facebook account, we did not a Twitter account and we did not have a LinkedIn page and I remember one of the things you did mention to us is you got to get on board with those.

Mark:                          Absolutely.

Jeremy:                       And since then we have and we’ve been very surprised with the results.

Mark:                          Okay. So think back when we posted the original interview, what type of results did you see after we posted that?

Jeremy:                       You know it was like a great birthday present because our interview is done June 17 and I remember the video posted on a Saturday and I woke up and there were five new sign ups just on a Saturday. And generally on a Saturday, we were getting maybe one piece, you know, one traffic view or one person view on the website. I woke up to twenty views on a Saturday. The next day it went up to fifty and it follow the trend that you said peak at a hundred twenty on a Monday.

At that point, we hadn’t had a hundred twenty people view the site for the first six weeks of our existence. So, very surprised what a targeted effort could do as far as driving people to the website.

Mark:                          Yeah. So, I’m glad like to see we actually drove some good traffic to your site. And then, so have you figured out who your target audience is by now?

Jeremy:                       We have and it kind of yes and no. So we do know on for our service provider types we actually know exactly what we’re looking for. However, what we found is on the operator side, there is different title depending on the size of the company, so whether when it’s a smaller company it is sometimes one guy wearing a bunch of different hats. It’s an engineer that also does procurement and does something else. When you get to that medium size company, you know, there’s a procurement department.

And so, it’s been a challenge to find exactly the title of the person that we need to find, so we’re having to go through different channels and maybe sometimes it takes two to three meetings to get to the right guy. But we’re definitely – we’re definitely figuring it out, but it is definitely dependent on the size of the company.

Mark:                          Yeah. And speaking of the target, it’s just [0:03:18][Indiscernible] business efforts because you could spend every day of the week talking to people that one can listen to you that work in oil and gas, but they’ll never buy from you so you got to quickly [weed] out of people that you don’t want to so you can talk to those true targets, people that you can actually help.

Jeremy:                       Exactly.

Mark:                          And then, since – what do you — the key takeaway as far as driving specific target?

Jeremy:                       I think that the – what we want is that you’ve got to create consistent content that’s relevant to the person you’re trying to reach. We were excited when our traffic went up and people visiting the site and we had suddenly roughly 10-12% which was unheard of. But as fast as it went up after a few weeks it went down. If you’re not producing new content that’s relative to your target audience, there’s no reason for them to come back, so you’ve got to come up with consistent relative content to bring them back to the site.

Mark:                          And so, hopefully folks you’ll find this relevant content and you’ll [go] to my site. And then, may I ask you, why do you think the interview is so successful?

Jeremy:                       I think it was an interesting story first of all and your customer base were not – the people that follow you, I think they found some value in it and they just, it was just an interesting story and I think that they wanted to know how we did it and I think looking back on it, we may have not done it the correct way. We were very happy with seventeen sign ups, but when we see that six weeks to get seventeen sign ups as opposed to we got seventeen sign ups just on that Saturday and Sunday alone without making any phone calls. There is definitely a value in using social media and doing targeted marketing to, you know, finding the relative content for the person who we’re looking for.

[0:05:09]

You told me over and over again, find that person – find out the person you need to find first and then target your message to that person.

Mark:                          Yeah, absolutely. And then, have you been able to recreate this type of traffic?

Jeremy:                       We are – we’re testing that right now. So, up until a few days ago we had not spent a dime on marketing, it was all, you know, what we’ve done on Twitter, what we’ve done on LinkedIn, what we’ve done through the Modal Point interview. And we just recently launched an ad that – on [Rigzone] and so this is our first paid media and it is driving some traffic, but it is definitely not in closing rate that we did with Modal Point.

So, what will be interesting to see is if these ads are going to be — this ad is going to be running simultaneously with the Modal Point interview whenever it comes out.

Mark:                          Yeah. That will be interesting.

Jeremy:                       So we’re going to track and see what kind of results we get.

Mark:                          So, what’s going on with CoreBidz now today?

Jeremy:                       Today, we’re sitting at roughly seventy customers that have signed up. We are in talk with some of the operators that are about to start some work and so we – it’s been a big learning curve finding out you’ve got to catch them when they’re about to start drilling, if you don’t they’re not going to switch service providers for the job.

So, we’ve been ecstatic with the amount of people that called out there sign up the service. We’re open for business we’re ready to see those jobs start coming in and all the categories we have because we have a wide breadth of service providers that are waiting to bid on jobs. So it’s very exciting, so we’re open to business. Hope you come to the site, if you can provide more services.

Mark:                          And so, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, how should they do that?

Jeremy:                       They can go to the website which is www.corebidz.com or they can call, our phone number is 832-655-2402.

Mark:                          Yeah. Folks, we’ll put those links and the phone number to the show. And then finally, any interesting story you’d like to share?

Jeremy:                       I had a great very interesting story and it went from being really exciting for me to finding out that it was somebody trying to get a hold of you. A gentleman called me one day he’s very interested in the service saw the video and I spent about twenty five minutes talking to this guy thinking he was going to sign up and the long and short of it, he really just wanted to get in contact with you and that was how he – he said, “How am I go to get hold of Mark?

And just kind of a long way around to get back to you which I thought was interesting and he didn’t sign up, but I think he did call you. So, hopefully you turn him into a client.

Mark:                          Yeah. That’s pretty funny. That’s just pretty bizarre. He just reached out to me directly through like the people being personal.

All right, Jeremy, look, we appreciate your time. We wish much, much future success.

And folks, I hope you find this useful. We will see you next time.

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