Mari’s story
Before starting her business, she held many different jobs in a variety of industries. In her early years, she worked as a legal secretary and then transitioned to a career in sales. One of Mari’s favorite jobs was selling software to lawyers, which involved traveling around Scotland and demonstrating the product to prospective buyers.
She caught the entrepreneurial bug early, which led to her starting her own cake decorating business. While strictly a side hustle, her cakes caught on quickly and she was soon supplying desserts for weddings, birthdays, and many other events.
Becoming a full-time entrepreneur
In 1999, Mari moved from Scotland to San Diego, California, and it was at this point she decided it was time to work for herself.
“I always loved being in charge of my own destiny and being my own boss”
She had held a number of sales and marketing roles during her career, so she knew she had a lot to offer in those areas. She was also acutely aware of how the internet was changing the way brands reached their audience and was eager to show businesses how to take advantage of this new technology.
So, Mari started her own business where she taught digital marketing to other entrepreneurs. She quickly became a valuable resource for businesses looking to grow their skills in online outreach and email marketing.
Her business was thriving, but it wasn’t long before the internet started to evolve—and it would change Mari’s business in a big way.
Going all in on Facebook
Facebook launched in 2004 and quickly took over college campuses. While initially designed to connect people and build relationships, it began to morph into something much more than that.
As someone who always stayed up to date with the latest technology, Mari was one of the first adopters of the new platform. She saw the marketing potential of Facebook and was excited to share it with her business clients.
In fact, Mari believed in the platform so much that in 2007 she made it the sole focus of her business. And it didn’t take long before she realized she made the right decision.
In mid-2007 she entered a contest that aimed to see which entrepreneur could generate the most registrations for their online course. Her course “Facebook for Professionals” proved to be the winner, showing her just how much demand was out there for this kind of information.
“Over my entire career, I’ve blended my love of people and my love of technology. So social media was a great fit. I thought ‘relationships and the internet, that’s perfect for me.’”
Since Mari shifted her focus to Facebook her business has grown immensely. In addition to consulting and offering online courses, she’s also become an in-demand speaker, published The New Relationship Marketing, and coauthored Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day.
Mari became so well known in the social media marketing space that in 2015 Facebook asked her to partner with the company as their Small Business and Facebook Marketing expert. This led to her teaching at the Boost Your Business series of live training events across the US.
After 16 years of teaching social media marketing, she’s consulted with countless social media departments, helped thousands of businesses exceed their marketing goals, and changed the way we use social media for marketing. It's no surprise that many have dubbed her the “Queen of Facebook.”
Challenges
As the owner of such a robust business, Mari is constantly launching new campaigns. One thing she often struggled with was inspiration. Staring at a blank page can be difficult, even for a marketing professional like Mari.
Another challenge was actually building out her campaigns. While Mari is an accomplished digital marketer she’s not a coder or web designer. So, she needed a solution that would allow her to build and customize pages quickly and easily, without requiring a lot of technical skills.
Finally, Mari uses a lot of different tools to run her business, so any landing page builder she chose needed to integrate seamlessly with other types of software.
How Leadpages helped
Professionally-designed templates
Leadpages makes launching new campaigns easy. Now Mari can browse the template library and find a look she likes. This way, she’s never starting with a blank page and always has an idea to build off of. And if she has a page that performs particularly well she can simply clone it and use it again for future campaigns.
Drag & Drop Builder
Once Mari chooses a template, customizing it is easy. She can use the Drag & Drop Builder to change colors, edit text, upload images, and add new sections—all without writing a single line of code.
“The platform is absolutely amazing. It’s super intuitive, I love the drag-and-drop builder, and there’s a massive library of templates.”
Native integrations
Leadpages integrates with a wide range of email marketing tools, CRMs, advertising platforms, and more. This means Mari can use all her favorite marketing software alongside Leadpages without any issues.
Results
17,000 webinar registrants
Shortly after she began using Leadpages, Mari used the builder to create a landing page for one of her flagship Facebook marketing webinars. Within a short period of time, over 17,000 people signed up and the webinar ended up generating multiple six figures of revenue in a matter of hours.
Over 800,000 leads since joining Leadpages
When it comes to total leads generated, it’s hard to compete with Mari. The exceptional value she provides her audience, and her highly optimized landing pages, have helped her collect hundreds of thousands of leads.
How she uses Leadpages
Landing pages
Mari uses Leadpages for all her landing pages, including opt-in pages, thank you pages, and sales pages. The conversion-optimized templates, drag-and-drop lead generation forms, and easy-to-implement online sales mean the landing pages can be created to suit all her business goals.
Pop-ups and alert bars
Once someone arrives at Mari’s website, she uses pop-ups and alert bars to highlight her special offers. This helps her drive more traffic to her landing pages and ensures no one leaves her site empty-handed.
WordPress plugin
The WordPress plugin allows her to easily add new landing pages, pop-ups, and alert bars to her WordPress site and to create branded URLs.
What’s next for Mari?
As someone who’s always looking to the future, Mari predicts that big changes are coming for social media marketing. She sees brands moving away from vanity metrics (likes, shares, views, etc.) and taking back control of their businesses from manipulative algorithms. She also believes AI will have a massive impact on digital marketing. Moving forward, Mari will be focused on educating her clients and students on these developments.
She’s also recently launched a new community proudly built on Mighty Networks called Mari Smith’s Superstars, which focuses on synthesizing Mari’s passion project for the past few years—studying The Human Design System—with effective leadership and social media marketing. Her new initiative offers a variety of free and paid training programs, masterminds, and private coaching.
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