DemandLever

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the founder of a small business consulting firm, and I've been operating it for close to 20 years. I work with small and mid-sized companies, helping them with everything from strategic planning to operational improvements and financial management. 

What challenge were you trying to address with DemandLever?

With the help of DemandLever, I’m trying to create more business awareness on social media and to achieve a thought leadership position.

What was the scope of their involvement?

DemandLever offers a comprehensive list of services. At first, the engagement seemed fairly simplistic, but after a little while, they've covered everything I need to cover. They create content for me, and sometimes I give them a bit of direction. I tell them what topic I’d like to create something around, and they expand on it. They also do graphic design and written descriptions. At present, they’re only posting on my Facebook business page since I have another provider on LinkedIn. However, now that we have some experience with each other, I’m planning to have DemandLever help me with LinkedIn, Facebook, and potentially other channels.

Apart from that, we also do four short videos each month, and each video has a message and an opening caption. They mostly talk about resolutions to problems and how we can help people deal with leadership issues or things of that nature. Overall, they’re about strategic planning. They’re short, but they help add visual expression to what would only be a short bullet-point narrative. They also get more views than static images. 

Finally, DemandLever does monthly email distribution for us. We call it a newsletter, but it’s more of a brief summary of the services we have. We remind people that we’re here to help them if they need us. For future tasks, we’re talking about creating landing pages and using the other services they provide. 

What is the team composition?

I work with three people from DemandLever, consisting of a sales and marketing business development officer, a video editor and social media publicist, and a newsletter editor and publicist. 

How did you come to work with DemandLever?

I saw DemandLever on a social media post on LinkedIn. I wasn’t actively looking for them; they were just something that caught my eye. At that time, I was thinking about letting people know what I did, and I’d give them the time of day to hear what they did. When we connected, I asked DemandLever to tell me what they were offering, and we looked at it. 

For the price at which they were offering their services, I was impressed by the quality of their work and timeliness. Overall, I decided that their service was worth giving a try because of its cost-effectiveness.

How much have you invested with them?

I’ve spent around $1,500–$2,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them in December 2020, and the engagement is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

I get a report each week that shows me the number of likes, connections, CTRs, and other statistics we get. What I’m doing is pretty low-volume, so I don’t expect a high yield. However, the yields I’m getting are significant by comparison. If I’m sending out 200–300 emails and getting 5%–10% CTR, I’m satisfied with that. I know that if I scale this up, the results will probably be even more powerful. 

Moreover, their services are inexpensive, and that’s one of the things that work well for them. Using them consistently and repetitively is quite an advantage for me as a client who doesn’t have a huge marketing budget but wants to get out there a little bit. On top of that, they have the ability to communicate and translate what I normally say in 50 words into something in 3–4 words.

How did DemandLever perform from a project management standpoint?

DemandLever has an approval process where they send samples of the narrative and creative materials for me to review or comment on. The process works pretty smoothly. I’ve developed a relationship with the DemandLever team through email. We can ask very easy questions and get quick answers. We’re learning how each other works, and by doing that, it’s much easier to do the things we’re trying to do. I can send them ideas and thoughts, and they’ll send me concepts and visuals around those ideas. This makes the process much quicker for both of us.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m very impressed with the fact that they offer a high level of quality in both their communications and responsiveness at the price point that they’re at. In other words, they’re doing an admirable job. 

More importantly, I’m impressed with their personality. It’s not like I’m working with a company; I’m working with actual people, and that’s what really makes them different from other providers. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

In the first few rounds of what we’ve done, I’ve given them feedback about consistency. When managing a brand, we should maintain a level of consistency. If we use this standard each time, it will save us time when we do the next round of engagements. I’m not 100% sure if DemandLever is cognizant of the previous brand requirements they may have done for someone else. 

That being said, they’re a small business, so they don’t really have brand requirements. The only reason I have such requirements is that I consult with large media companies, so brand specifications and guides are always on top of my list. I’ve developed that for myself.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Look at what you want to do most. Start small; pick something. If you want to give video projects a try, pick a video and give DemandLever a project. If you want to see if it actually works, be willing to invest. If it works and you’re happy with that particular service, pick another service until you reach the point where you have all the services you’re looking for.

That’s exactly how I started with them: we started off small to see what they can do, and they came back with quality work. Then, we made a couple of videos, and those worked, too. We moved on to the newsletter, and it worked as well. Overall, if you’re doing business with DemandLever, treat the engagement like a ladder; get on the first step and see how you want to climb. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the president of ActionMap Inc. We’re a small SaaS application company.

What challenge were you trying to address with DemandLever?

I wanted to maintain my brand presence on LinkedIn. It was consuming a lot of my time, but I wasn’t producing professional-grade content. I think it’s true that having regular exposure on LinkedIn is helpful, so I engaged DemandLever to do that.

What was the scope of their involvement?

First, I answered some questions and provided them with some links to my website and LinkedIn articles. That was about all the collateral I had. Since then, DemandLever has taken that and now extracts short, 300-character messages for calls to action. Then, they add those to business-themed stock photos and send them to me so I can edit or approve them.

DemandLever posts approximately once a day on LinkedIn and gently nudges me if I’m late at editing the contents. They keep the pipeline filled.

What is the team composition?

I’ve worked with two people. One of them is our social media manager; they handle the day-to-day posts. Then there’s Marjorie (Marketing Director), and now they’ve added a production manager as our main point of contact.

How did you come to work with DemandLever?

They contacted me on LinkedIn. I’d had a conversation with their sister company, so I recognized their logo — that and their very compelling price were probably what convinced me. We then started an onboarding process.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend $99 a month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with DemandLever in January 2021. We’re just starting our third month with them, so the relationship is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

They have a dashboard that provides metrics on how many people we've reached, how much exposure a post has had, and a bunch of other information.

Also, we’ve gotten a considerable amount of likes and some positive feedback. People have told me that the ads look good and that they like them. I was pleased with that, and it has certainly exceeded my expectations. At first, it wasn’t clear to me that I was going to get feedback on that, and it’s been good.

How did DemandLever perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re very responsive. They typically answer within an hour, and they make plenty of adjustments to adapt to my changes. My product is complicated, so extracting information from my pages and condensing it is difficult; I have to do a certain amount of edits to make the final draft. However, they’ve been remarkably attentive. Their marketing director is always making sure I’m happy.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m impressed with their responsiveness, to be honest. For them, this could be just job shop work, but they’re really quite good. I’ve developed a sort of understanding with the social media representative; I feel an obligation to treat her well and help her. I didn’t expect that I would get that sense of relationship with them.

The other thing I find impressive about them is their value proposition. Even though I have to edit the material, they extract the content, get it into shape, and put the graphics together for me. My material is difficult, so it's great that they can do that early draft. It’s a huge amount of work, and they’re offering it to me at a very low price.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t know what they could do better. I wish they could produce a final copy that I didn’t have to edit, but that’s completely unrealistic. At first, I thought the images were a little bland, but people like them, and they’re much more professional-looking than the ones I did.

I keep my eye on things to improve anything, but I can’t really think of anything that I’d ask them to do differently at this point. They’re covering the bases and doing a good job.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I think it gets back to the basics of marketing — know who your customers are and keep your messages as targeted as you can. You have to exercise your own marketing intelligence; they can’t tell you what your branding, content, value proposition, or target market should be.

DemandLever does a great job at getting your message out there, but you need to do the extra work to figure what messages you want and who you’re talking to. DemandLever is a channel to deliver those messages.