Lead Generation for Video Production Company: 7 Wonders Cinema Case Study

About 7 Wonders Cinema

7 Wonders Cinema is a digital video agency that offers full-service video production and has Mercedes-Benz, The Atlantic, Campbell's Soup, Mastercard, US Bank, and other famous brands among its clients. With offices in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, 7 Wonders Cinema is skilled in creating B2B and B2C video content, corporate videos and training materials, commercials and short documentaries.

Client’s challenges

As a coast-to-coast video production, 7 Wonders Cinema was pretty content with its share of warm leads and referrals.Their business was up and running, but they wanted more. 7 Wonders started looking forlead generation services for their media production agency to boost sales opportunities and create new marketing and sales channels. Here’s a list of challenges the Belkins team revealed when getting familiar with this case.

Lack of warm leads. 7 Wonders Cinema's global expansion required robust sales pipelines. The client found out that they were running out of warm referrals and connections that used to be enough for their two offices in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Now when they opened new branches outside the U.S., there’s been a dramatic need to increase their marketing and sales channels to find opportunities to get in more doors.
Insufficient digital presence. Social media platforms can be a constant lead prospecting source when handled correctly. 7 Wonders Cinema’s digital presence did not match up to its ambitions to scale up. In particular, the company’s LinkedIn account was underperforming while the platform is a ready-made lead database.
Narrow ICP. The customer profile has worked for the U.S. market. Expanding globally required some changes to the company’s ICP to explore businesses where video content marketing would work for.
Underperforming email outbound. 7 Wonders Cinema had no trouble with their cold email strategy with their previous vendors. However, once they became aware of their desire to enter new markets, they realized they didn’t have the capabilities to do that. 7 Wonders Cinema lacked the infrastructure to scale its cold email outreach.

What we did

1) Laying the groundwork

Scaling sales takes time. The very first month was really slow, with the Belkins team generating only one meeting. As we began developing both inbound and outbound at the same time, we needed time to spin up 7 Wonders’ content-making machine.

First, we had a dig at social. The Belkins team focused on developing the client’s LinkedIn account. Taking it gradually, we began doing content promotion and sending out connection requests to relevant decision-makers. At the same time, we started cold email outreach too.

To make this discovery stage effective, we redefined the company’s ICP. We began looking at companies that already used video content in the past, so they could turn to this marketing method again.

These efforts brought us 750 leads and 3–5 scheduled meetings (with at least 1–2 meetings being from LinkedIn leads).

Frame 8 (5)

2) Scaling up sales outbound

Working on the ICP and personas, we better understood what 7 Wonders customers are looking for. After identifying urgent needs for outbound leads, we continued scaling up content marketing and email outreach.

Having started 7 Wonders Cinema’s outbound sales with one rep, the Belkins team added one more SDR to the project, thus making it possible to bring 3,000 leads per month.

3) Email outbound

Cold email outreach was one of the working marketing strategies Belkins routinely used for lead generation. To scale 7 Wonders Cinema’s sales outreach, we warmed up 14 email boxes and used email deliverability software. Having high-performing email outreach requires certain steps. However, once you get a knack for email deliverability and spam issues, what’s left is just to write an engaging email copy and do your share of personalization.

Frame 8 (6)

4) Sales tech stack

When Belkins takes on a new client, they make sure that the client’s sales tech stack has all the tools needed to scale up. That’s why aligning our views on sales software is our first step when we start cooperating with a new partner. With 7 Wonders Cinema, we took over their CRM operations to manage post-call follow-ups and inbound traffic through the submission forms on the website. It helped us bring in more meetings.

Also, we offered 7 Wonders a HubSpot package to handle all inbound leads. As an inbound marketing and sales platform, HubSpot is highly useful as one place to manage all the activities of marketing and sales teams.

Finally, we introduced Folderly, an email performance solution developed by Belkins allowing the team to take control over almost any email deliverability issue like spam, inbox warming-up, email audits, DNS settings, sender score, etc.

1) Business expansion. With an average of 25 meetings per month by the middle of the project, Belkins scheduled 33 appts for the client in October 2022. The company’s economic growth was translated into hiring 3 more sales reps to handle meetings. Overall, during the first 6 months of Belkins project, the sales team closed several deals worth more than $100Kwithin a span of just a few months.

2) Predictable sales pipeline. Belkins support consistently provided 7 Wonders Cinema with a lot of meetings that made the client’s sales process predictable. Now, they have the opportunity to get initial conversations with so many clients in different industries that they hadn’t had an opportunity to get it before.

7 Wonders had many prospects in development, and Belkins’ strategy allowed them to book meetings and convert them into lifetime customers. These are tremendous sales opportunities because oftentimes, these are the clients you have no other way to get in the doorway.

3) Successful scaling up. Belkins started working with an exhausted pipeline and was barely able to book just one appointment. Having 25 meetings per month on the ongoing was a great achievement. 7 Wonders was really amazed to see a4X increase and tremendous results in comparison with their previous vendors.

Overall, during 36 months of our collaboration, we delivered almost 700 appointments.

Key takeaways

Always revise the client’s ICP. That’s Step One because it affects all the other steps and actions. If a client changes its markets or expands, it means it’s time to rethink who they target it to. In the case of 7 Wonders, we loosened their ICP to include more companies, and then we tuned personas along the way.
Iterate your message along the way. Although our marketing strategy remained unchanged throughout the project, tactics, and methods needed tweaking and improving all the way through. By listening to prospects, you can always find out what isn’t working or is working not the way you need it.
Be presentable. Having a good-looking brand (website, brochures, style) would definitely increase your conversions. For a visual brand, it goes without saying that the client did a great job on that front.

4X growth and almost 700 meetings for a video production agency 7 Wonders Cinema