✅ Performance Marketing

In 2017 I started as a helping hand in the event-agency of a friend of mine. I soon realized that this kind of work/job is something I enjoy doing and wished to get more involved regarding responsibilites. My friend and me sat together and made plans to expand the business from Stuttgart towards Munich - the second biggest industrial city in germany. Because we were serving B2B clients, it was crucial to expand into an environment with many established businesses. Not long after the decision, we started cold calling potential business partners for cooperation. With an overly satisfying successrate, networking began. After the first meetings with represantatives of congress hotels and venues, contracts were signed and everything was set to start business. Waiting for our first client for a quarter of the year, we realized that something was not right. Was it the way our business partners offered our services? Was our offer less attractive in Munich? Is there a technical problem for clients to reach us? We figured out that the industry we solely reached out to cut back budgets radically: the german automotive industry. Because we were offering supporting programmes to conference groups which are rather less important in times of financial bottlenecks, there was simply no need on the market for our products. Unfortunately, this enlightenment happened very late after we invested high amounts of time and money networking in munich. In Stuttgart, our business usually grew naturally by word-of-mouth because of our unique products. That declined also badly and up until we got behind what was going on, we tried everything to get back to business. Was it still possible to reach a turnaround without external help? I sat down for myself and started thinking about ways to improve the situation. After a few days I stumbled across online marketing. I thought to get some freelancer onboard. But that would just mean more expenses. I didn't want to give away the responsibility for renewed success to someone else. What was the alternative? To do it myself! I didn't really have a clue about online marketing back then, but I knew of a friend of mine who I'd met on my semester abroad in Peru, who was into it. I contacted him asking how to start and only a few moments later, he listed up all the things I should do to be able to understand everything from a-z. I bought and pushed through online course after online course, day after day until I had the feeling of basic understanding about everything. From that point on, I started running a few marketing campaigns on Google and Facebook for our event agency with the purpose of reaching out towards new, yet foreign industries. I decided to target consulting, banking and insurance companies which I thought of being solvent enough to pay for our events. BINGO! Just a few days after setting up the first campaign, we received our first request from a consulting company. That was the day when I decided to look more into digital marketing. It felt like I had the right way of thinking to generate leads and ultimately revenue and profit. I started to offer my skills to relatives and friends who own companies in order to get some references and more practice. Soon, more and more business owners heard of me and contacted me. Unfortunately, those businesses were mainly small and not able to pay enough so I could live off that only. I decided to go international and now here I am.