[Case Study] The Story Behind Award-Winning Chat Marketing Agency Orca Marketology

Speaking at national conferences. Running the six-figure Chat Marketing agency Orca Marketology. Lively podcast guest and ManyChat Community Moderator with iconic blue hair — this is how we know the Chatbot Queen herself, Mackensie Liberman. 

Life for Mackensie was different a few years ago. In the early 2010s, she was a cytogeneticist who paid her bills by analyzing chromosomes for abnormalities in a medical lab. According to Mackensie, it was the career for the rest of her life until she was 65. Which, after university and a stockpile of student loans, is what she expected. After all, it’s what she studied so hard for years to achieve.

What she didn’t expect was how the coming decade would impact her life. Mackensie and her husband had kids, a busy life agenda, and an unfortunate layoff. She battled a corporate hierarchy against endless schedule changes and illegal hair colors. Being stuck in a medical lab away from her family wasn’t an option anymore — she needed to make a change.

The hectic schedules and windowless labs, however, gave her a remarkable gift: the drive to learn Facebook advertising and get her first (awful) client. And since then, the years of work she put in became Orca Marketology, and it changed her life, as well as the lives of many other people inspired by her bot building. 

Fast forward to 2019. She can finally wear blue hair to work every day — a big win for Mackensie. Her interests in Facebook Ads led her to learn more about Messenger bots, which, in 2016, was the fastest-growing marketing channel. After admittedly having accounts with a few of the top Messenger bot providers, she chose ManyChat for it’s easy-to-use and powerful automation capabilities. 

This decision also led to Orca Marketology breaking the six-figure revenue ceiling in 18 short months, and so much more. 

Here’s the story of Orca Marketology and it’s partnership with ManyChat, plus a few great marketing tips you can steal to grow your agency. 

Why ManyChat? 

Mackensie chose ManyChat as Orca Marketology’s Chat Marketing software for three big reasons:

1. Rules and conditions. These capabilities help send timely reminder messages for lead generation flows. Mackensie swears by them, they are her most used feature. It also makes automation more concise and relevant, moving users through her flow to her final call-to-action. 
2. Text messaging (SMS). With all the Facebook updates and changes, Orca Marketology plans to leverage ManyChat’s new SMS feature to improve marketing efforts for its clients.
3. A reliable partner. Change is constant in marketing. The only way to stay on top is being able to adapt. Mackensie relies on ManyChat because of its ability to stay ahead of the curve. You can’t run an agency without a reliable software partner. 

How Orca Marketology became a leading Chat Marketing Agency

Orca Marketology has built bots for different niches of clients, including local brick-and-mortar businesses to multimillion-dollar e-commerce companies. In the beginning, Mackensie explains, it took her five months to find her first paying client.   

“My first client was a local junk hauler,” she tells us during our Meet the Speakers series for Conversations 2019, “I got a flyer in the mail and was like, ‘Well, he’s obviously spending money on advertising. It’s print advertising.’” She called them up; much to her surprise, they were interested in running Facebook Ads, and low and behold, Mackensie got her first client. Her strategy was the traditional Facebook Ad to landing page funnel. The results were great, but the relationship didn’t last very long.

It was around this time that she began to hear about Messenger bots from podcasts like Perpetual Traffic with Molly Pittman and Amy Porterfield’s Podcast. Sandwiched in between her research job and family-life, she taught herself how to market on Messenger.

“I was learning about Messenger bots and thought, “Ok, I need to pitch this to a client,’” she explains, “I went to two restaurants and dropped off proposals for each. When I followed up with one [a pizza place] they told me, ‘Oh, we’re going to stick with flyers.’” Fortunately, the second restaurant, a local Mexican restaurant, was interested in her newly found Messenger Marketing services. 

Then, her birthday giveaway campaign went viral in the Messenger community. You may know it as How to Deploy a Birthday Bot Guaranteed to Make Your Subscribers Celebrate. The promotion has been running for two years non-stop.

“The birthday ad runs in the background at $5 a day. Because of Facebook’s targeting options, the ad targets people whose birthday is within the next week. So every week there’s a new audience and new offers,” Mackensie explains, “which is great because the ad doesn’t hit high frequency or get fatigued. People only see it once a year.”

This Messenger Marketing campaign catapulted Orca Marketology into the big leagues. Mackensie says she still gets consulting and bot-building leads even to this day. Fifteen months after jumping into the digital marketing space, she was able to quit her job in the lab, focus only on her agency, and the rest is history. 

“It’s amazing to think that working even one day a week was holding me back in terms of focus. I was splitting up my focus between my agency, my job, and my family. Quitting was a huge change,” she says, “Since then it [Orca Marketology] has taken off. You never know what can happen in two years”.

Life now is good for Mackensie. She explains how she can spend more time with her family, enjoy vacations, and has even been able to pay off her student loans since only focusing on building Orca Marketology. 

A few marketing tips to grow your agency 

A guiding principle for Mackensie and Orca Marketology is the Zig Ziglar quote, “If you help enough people get what they want, then you will get what you want.” 

For the Chat Marketing agency owner, the saying keeps her motivated to help and inspire other marketers to build a life they believe in. With that, we pulled out four tips from our talks with Mackensie on how to grow your marketing agency. 

1. Share results and stories online in niche communities. Mackensie strongly believes in getting involved in relevant communities to share information and meet other like-minded people. She originally shared the results from the Mexican restaurant case study, mentioned above, in the ClickFunnels group and ManyChat Community. It still continues to bring her leads today. 
2. Even if you work remote, network. Mackensie got involved with a small group chat of digital marketing friends in 2016. She claims it’s helped her a great deal refining her marketing skills and growing her agency. It’s also good to not be stuck on your own island in the middle of an ocean — make some friends.
3. Invest in yourself with cold hard cash. Orca Marketology may not exist today if it wasn’t for Mackensie’s initiative to buy a Facebook ads course. It’s what got her into the industry and set the foundation for growth. 
4. Run a lot of similar style campaigns for different industries. Solve one problem and solve it well. Orca Marketology works with various types of businesses, but their marketing model follows a certain strategy. Of course, with a little experimentation here and there.

Are you an agency looking to grow? Apply for the ManyChat Agency Partner Program and get 20% revenue sharing, priority support, access to our private Agency Community, and more.