Leveraging his 20 years of international digital marketing experience, PlusROI founder Robert Cooper has launched What Works Marketing, an agency focused on helping small service firms beat larger competitors in their local markets.

Recognizing that smaller companies don’t have the resources to hire an agency for all their marketing, What Works also includes a digital marketing Academy to help companies do their own marketing. The What Works Academy ignores the thousands of things service companies could do and focuses on the few things they should do to land more clients online.

Says Cooper, “It’s quite straightforward for service businesses. Referrals are typically the top source of new clients. After that, it boils down to showing up in Search and converting your visitors. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lawyer, chiropractor, accountant or auto mechanic: when someone nearby is looking for your service, you need to show up in search and then persuade them to become clients on your website. To address this, our paid services focus on Search (SEO & Paid), websites and visitor conversion.”

While What Works focuses on a narrow range of paid services, they provide tremendous insights on service business marketing through the Academy. Starting with Cooper’s approach of helping companies identify their marketing “themes,” the Academy helps business owners make sense of marketing and put their own common-sense strategy together.

Cooper says, “Our plan for the Academy is for it to be the absolute best marketing resource for service businesses on the internet and we’re making great strides already. For instance, the approach to SEO we share is ridiculously practical and will help companies prioritize their efforts and can save them hundreds of hours of wasted effort.”

What Works is a uniquely Victorian company: it’s based on PlusROI Online Marketing’s JumpStart Web division, which was created and validated in VIATEC’s Accelerate Tectoria Program. What Works is being managed by Carmen Herdzik, VP Operations, who previously lead Client Services and Operations for JumpStart Web.

Says Cooper, “It’s been ridiculously satisfying building What Works. First off, we get to help small business owners in ways that positively affect their business and their livelihood. Second, it’s been an opportunity to wrap the experience from my entire professional career into a company that’s ready to compete and win on a national level. It’s been so much fun so far and we’re just getting started.”

See more at WhatWorks.Marketing