In this edition of Marketer of the Week, Ignite Visibility spotlights Adrian Tobey, the founder of Groundhogg.
Ignite Visibility applauds Tobey and the Groundhogg team for producing an outstanding CRM tool that works well with WordPress.
Adrian Tobey
Adrian Tobey is the son of entrepreneurs. His parents deployed an Internet marketing training business way back in 2001. He tagged along to those training sessions and learned quite a bit about marketing during his formative years.
By the age of 16, he worked as an assistant trainer in some of the marketing sessions.
And when he wasn’t training people on how to succeed, he built WordPress sites and integrated CRMs.
At 18, he became an InfusionSoft Certified Partner and Certified Trainer. He used that skill set to produce hundreds of sales funnels for his parents’ clients.
It was during that time that he also built and monetized his first WordPress plugin: Formlift.net. It still sells “form styling” to more than 1,000 InfusionSoft (now Keap) customers.
At the age of 21, he dropped out of college to launch his own venture: Groundhogg.
Groundhogg
Groundhogg might seem like an unusual name for a company. But there’s a good reason for it.
Tobey named the company after the still-famous Bill Murray comedy “Groundhog Day.” In that movie, Murray’s character experiences Groundhog Day (Feb. 2) over and over again in successive days.
In other words: every day was Groundhog Day in that movie.
What does that have to do with Tobey’s company? He realized a long time ago that many business owners were reliving the same day every day.
They were doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result.
Tobey wants to disrupt that recipe for failure. And he’s got a tool to prove it.
The Plugin
The Groundhogg plugin is a CRM tool designed for WordPress website owners.
If you’re unfamiliar with WordPress, it’s probably because you don’t run a website. WordPress is currently the #1 ranked content management system (CMS) on the planet.
By a country mile.
But one of the coolest things about WordPress isn’t the features that you get right out of the box. It’s that WordPress is designed to work with plugins.
In other words, you can add features to your WordPress website by doing nothing more than downloading a plugin and installing it. You don’t need to know how to code.
There’s a veritable Alexandrian Library of plugins that do everything from improving security on your site to helping you get set up with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
The Groundhogg plugin adds a CRM (customer relationship management) tool to your WordPress admin console.
Keep in mind: it doesn’t affect the appearance of your website. Instead, it lets you handle CRM-related tasks from the convenience of the same console you use to create website pages.
Why Groundhogg?
Tobey says that modern-day SaaS-based CRM solutions are “too expensive, convoluted, clunky, confusing, and well beyond the grasp of a new business owner or inexperienced marketer.”
CRM shouldn’t be complicated or expensive. Fortunately, Tobey is here to make the lives of marketers easier.
And, better yet, they can use Groundhogg from the convenience of a console that they’ll likely use every day: the WordPress admin console.
But what does the tool do? Quite a bit.
Groundhogg Features
Groundhogg gives you access to the full suite of automation and design tools that you’ll find with modern-day alternatives:
- Marketing automation – Build customer journeys. Set up triggers and actions to create brand-specific funnels.
- Email marketing – Use the tool’s drag-and-drop interface with blocks to create slick email messages. Personalize your emails with contact info. Broadcast email messages to subscribers.
- Reporting – Check the results of your marketing campaigns with helpful analytics. Monitor your funnels. Visualize your data with easy-to-follow charts.
- Contact management – Segment contacts based on tags. Auto-scrape for profile pictures. View a contact’s history. Add all the custom fields you want.
- Optin forms – Build responsive opt-in forms to expand your subscriber list.
Additionally, Groundhogg is compliant with GDPR, CASL, and CANSPAM.
Destined for Continued Success
As of today, Groundhogg boasts more than 2,000 users.
The company was profitable in its second year.
Additionally, more than 1,400 Groundhoggers joined the company’s Facebook group. That points to a level of loyalty among the plugin’s user community.
As for the plugin, it’s got a 5-star rating with more than 90 reviews on the WordPress plugins page. It’s used in more than 35 countries.
Groundhogg also integrates with more than 30 top WordPress plugins, including WooCommerce, Zapier, and Twilio.
Clearly, it’s a quality product and Tobey has done an outstanding job bringing it to market.
I look forward to seeing where he takes the company in the future.
