The SquarePeg x CMOontheGO
Case Study: Using AI CMO for our own agency’s sales pipeline and marketing strategy
About The SquarePeg
The SquarePeg is a digital marketing agency with a clientele across the United States, UAE, GCC, and Pakistan. Our team of experts has developed CMOontheGO, a cutting-edge, AI-powered solution for expediting the lead conversion process. The tool helps bridge the gap between a successful discovery call and closing the deal by providing a ready-to-use marketing proposal based on an instant analysis of the brand’s digital presence.
Our own marketing department has also become an interesting case study in its own right, a byproduct of the cross-pollination between building the tool and using it daily, and you will see more of that in the sections that follow.
The Challenge
For years, our CEO would watch business opportunities slip away in the proverbial “time window” of the proposal pitch process. A strong discovery call meant a prospect was interested in hiring us. But it still took two to three working days to prepare a full proposal during which time, another agency could swoop in and claim the client.
The team desperately needed a real-time, all-inclusive digital analytics tool that could conduct a prospect’s digital deep dive right during the discovery call, uncover opportunities and roadblocks during the conversation, and have a compelling, tailored offer ready by the end of the call.
The Solution
CMOontheGO unifies competitor analysis, website and SEO audit, GEO/LLM visibility review, and social media check in one place. The user enters the prospect’s website URL, brand offering, differentiation, industry, target audience, and the software instantly finds the most relevant competitors if the user doesn’t sort them manually. Then, within the next couple of seconds, it identifies the key differences between the brands based on positioning, SEO, social media, and paid ads, and quantifies the revenue lost to unresolved technical issues. The user also gets a comprehensive report and recommendations in real time that they can use right away to present to their prospects live in a discovery call.
Below are two of the many use cases where The SquarePeg put CMOontheGO to work.
Locking a New Client During the Discovery Call
A UK-based prospect walked into the discovery call dissatisfied and unhappy with her previous agency that, in her words, didn’t provide any analytical data throughout the duration of their engagement with her brand which she could use to track their performance.
Instead of asking the lady to reschedule for some other time when a proposal would be ready, the team pulled up CMOontheGO’s competitor analysis module and typed in her website URL, brand offering, USP, industry, target audience, and target location. Right then and there, the tool suggested 3 relevant competitors of hers automatically and put together a real-time performance overview: revenue lost to unresolved website/seo issues for each, a direct comparison of the USPs, offerings, and a website audit benchmark.
From there, we drilled into the SEO audit to see how her on-page, technical, GEO/LLM SEO performed vs. the same metrics of her competitors. Her business was invisible to AI search, while her strongest competitors were all over. On top of that, we used a live social media module to compare the performance of channels vis-à-vis her competitors, uncovering which ones operated paid social media ads and what those ads looked like.The call concluded with a comprehensive content and keyword gap analysis, SEO recommendations, guidance on paid media, and the social media strategy scope and by then the prospect had already signed on the dotted line.
To put the ROI in perspective, this $16 audit is predicted to bring in over 40x ROI in the first month alone, but it grows exponentially in value when you add her customer lifetime value as an agency referral.
Retaining an Existing Client Who Was on the Verge of Calling It Quits
A UAE-based client for whom we had been handling social media marketing and paid ads for the past two years came to us concerned about a sudden drop in sales this year’s holiday season as compared to previous periods.
As an agency, our first course of action wasn’t trying to explain how brilliant her ads and social media were. Instead, we took a look at her account via CMOontheGO’s website module and SEO tool to identify what was actually happening. We took this route because a website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization or local geographic targeting) both impact ads performance. Plus, due to the popularity of ChatGPT and other large language models, a number of buyer intents previously exclusively recognized by Google are now identified by LLMs.
We found that her website had slowly become invisible in AI search. Besides that, it had quite a few on-page technical SEO issues that pushed it out of the search engine’s sight. All this led to the organic traffic far from satisfactory, being much lower than the industry standard. In the latter half of the call, we exported the report and walked her through it, explaining every detail step by step. The client did not blame us for the issue; instead, she decided to scale the project, add SEO and GEO to the list of our services, and increase the retainer by 50%. A potential churn turned into a much stronger account, all because of our AI CMO for marketing agencies!
Other Than Clients, You Can Use CMOontheGO to Build Your Own Marketing Strategy
CMOontheGO is not exclusive to prospective clients. We also use it to develop our own strategies.
Prior to LEAP East, which happened in Hong Kong earlier this year, the team decided to test-run the same competitor analysis and recommendation module on The SquarePeg.
We entered our website, brand positioning, SaaS product and target audience. The platform automatically pulled up competitors based on this input, audited their website, SEO , and social media content, and identified competitors that had running ads.
Then, we asked the AI CMO advisor to suggest a hype campaign within the software to recommend a pre-and post-clinic hype strategy based on the findings. Within seconds, the advisor had laid out a channel-wise strategy with details on what to post before the event and the metrics to keep track of, like click-through rates and engagement benchmarks, plus a follow-up action plan that included a recap post, thank-you notes, and lead nurturing outreach after the conference.
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Do you want the same edge for your digital marketing agency? It doesn’t matter whether you’re pitching your services to a prospect, trying to retain an account, or planning your own strategy for trade show marketing. CMOontheGOanalyzes a brand’s digital presence in real time, competitors included, so you walk into every conversation with the answers already in hand.
