Part traction channel, part revenue stream, part lead gen tool, affiliate programs can be extremely effective for everyone involved. When done correctly, that is. By definition, affiliate programs are arrangements in which a company pays a commission to affiliates for delivering conversions. Sales and leads are the primary conversions used, but some companies will pay for web traffic.
Amazon, of course, is one of the leaders in the affiliate space. Coined Amazon Associates, the e-commerce behemoth pays percentages and flat fees on sales generated from a company’s website or social media account. Say you review baby products on your blog. You can apply (and hopefully get accepted!) to the program, attach a tracking code to links to the product page you are reviewing and you’re set. In this example generating a sale of a car seat would net you 4.5% of the sale price. A bonus? Commissions don’t just apply to the product you are linking to. Any purchase from a customer you drive there counts!
Keeping with the baby theme, recommend your readers signup for the Amazon Baby Registry and you get $3 as soon as someone adds one item to the list.
Do Your Research
Just like anything on the web, some services are better than others. And when it comes to affiliate programs there are a lot of shady operations. Does it seem too good to be true? Well, it’s probably not. Look out for clumsily put together websites, a lack of terms and conditions and an unorganized fee and payout explanation. You should never pay to join. Anything that says “Get Rich Quick” should be avoided. And make sure the products you would be recommending are legit. The last thing you want is to get scammed out of commission AND your readers or followers scammed as well.
Bottom Line: Do your research, read reviews and talk to associates.
Staying True to Your Brand
It’s important to keep in mind that while you’re driving revenue and making a living that you are still a trusted source of information for your readers. So you certainly don’t want to be mentioning products you don’t recommend just because they have a high price tag. Further to that point, the best affiliates are transparent, noting on their site or in the article they are making a commission over referral purchases. The New York Times does a great job at that when they publish their books bestseller lists.
Why Should I Engage in Affiliate Marketing as a Big Brand
Because it’s noisy out there and you can use all the help you can get! Similar to business development it’s a relationship that is a win for you and a win for the partner. You can almost consider an affiliate network your own paid street team. You just don’t have to pay them until there is money in your pocket.
In terms of who, let’s extend the street team analogy. Who better to market your product than your loyal customers? They are already educated on your brand or service and the promise of occasional discounts in addition to a commission could be a powerful motivator. You’ll, of course, need to vet them and make sure they have a platform worth your effort, but the impact of a team of influencers could be huge.
One place to start would be with your analytics. Who has purchased the most from your store or who opens the most amount of your emails? Is there someone who is always liking, sharing and commenting on social media? Isolating these super users and then vetting them prior to reaching out can save a lot of time.
Looking for some simple tips on setting up your affiliate marketing program? Check out this tutorial!
Engineering? In marketing? From first glance, the two terms don’t appear to invoke thoughts about being complementary to one another. For digital marketers, it’s a powerful combination and can be an incredible asset to any agency. “Engineering as Marketing” is building and using tools to reach more people and gain traction by providing value to users.
Creating tools that your target audience finds useful can do wonders for your business in the long-term. Ideally, making this tool free for your users is best for businesses looking to grow rapidly.
HubSpot
A good engineering as marketing case study comes from the marketing automation software company HubSpot. They used the traction channel to improve the quality and quantity of its leads. In the early years of HubSpot, the founder Dharmesh Shah spent quite a bit of time manually scanning through websites to check on the quality of its inbound marketing. Tired of this process, Shah decided to create an application to automate it. Then he made it public as a way to gather emails. Since the app’s launch, Marketing Grader has been used by well over 4 million websites. Also, it can be credited for a large percentage of the leads HubSpot receives monthly. Talk about a win!
The key with the engineering as marketing traction channel is to really pinpoint what service will provide the audience value that you can build off your existing services. It serves as a first step to getting your customers to look into what your business can offer.
GeoFli
Another example to consider is one that’s close to home. In fact, it’s an example taken from within our own agency.
Over the past five years, there has been a steadily growing interest in marketing strategies focused on targeting users based on location. As customer data continues to provide more value to marketers, knowing a user’s location has sparked some innovative and clever strategies in marketing. Such strategies fall under a variety of names: geofencing, geotargeting, geomarketing, location-based targeting, etc. This method of targeting users within a certain geographic radius is applicable across advertising platforms. For example, marketers can serve ads to regions with region-specific ad copy or adjust organic content based on a user’s location.
Taking note of this trend early on we realized there could be a marketing tool engineered to fit this need of marketers. Enter GeoFli, a software as a service (SaaS) product that complements the digital marketing work we do at Pintler Group. GeoFli is a website personalization tool built for marketers (by sympathetic developers!) looking to surface relevant content that lives on their web pages to specific geographic markets. This tool allows marketers to create geotargeted content on their website that adjusts to the viewer’s location.
Say you are a recruiter at a college. With GeoFli, a web visitor from Boston will see different content than a web visitor from California. GeoFli takes away the confusion of coding and web design. Additionally, it makes it easier for those looking to market their content more effectively to different markets.
GeoFli is a complementary tool that we offer through our digital marketing services. However, we do offer visitors the ability to try GeoFli as a free trial in hopes to receive more qualified leads and reach an audience that truly benefits from its value.
Final Notes
Still unsure about how to develop your own engineering as marketing tool? Just remember these parting notes.
Look within your site and think about what tools or widgets would improve your experience.
Keep it simple and user-friendly.
Always keep your target audience in mind. Provide a tool that is useful to that audience.
When we say the word virus, what do you think of? Probably that sickness that kept you home from work for a few days last year so you didn’t pass it on to your co-workers. Just like a virus spreads and bounces from person to person, a viral marketing campaign is one that is spread from person to person where everyone impacted by the campaign brings at least one person to conversion for the business. The conversion might be a sale, a website visit, an email list sign up, or whatever else is important to your business at this time. Wow, sounds like a great, easy way to market your business, hu? Well, that isn’t necessarily the case. Let’s dive into the 3 steps associated with this unique traction channel and figure out what it really takes to create a successful viral marketing campaign.
Step 1: Awareness of Your Business
In order for a virus to spread, someone has to be its first victim. This same thing has to happen in viral marketing (except, let’s call them customers instead of victims). In order for your viral marketing campaign to be successful, you need to have early adopters who aware of and interested in your business.
Here are a few ways to increase awareness of your business:
Create great content. From blogging to creating podcasts or infographics, engaging content can help people recognize your brand as topic experts and ultimately who they choose to purchase from.
Establish partnerships. Working with other businesses (both local and digital) can help you reach a larger audience. Try to promote your products together, host connected giveaways or even just trade social media posts about each other. You can also partner with local non-profits or other organizations that align with the morals of your company. Giving back to your community is a great way to gain positive press.
Advertising your business. From Google search ads to billboards, there are many new and traditional ways to advertise your business and increase awareness of your business. Check out this video on offline advertising for some more tips and ideas.
Step 2: Customers Tell Their Friends
You might have customers who love your product, but if they don’t share with their friends, family and acquaintances then it’s not viral marketing.
Here are some tips for encouraging your customers to tell their friends:
Offer a referral program. Try offering your customers or clients a special deal if they refer a new customer or client to your business. This might just add the small push they need in order to make a recommendation.
Make it easy and fun to share social media posts and emails. With fun content that can be easily shared with a click of a button, your customers and clients will be quite likely to pass your name on to their friends.
Branded gear. Let your customers become walking billboards by offering clothing, stickers and other gear with your brand on it.
Ask for reviews or customer engagement in social media. Studies show that potential customers trust what other people similar to them so give your current customers an avenue to share their love for your product or service by collecting feedback, reviews and other types of engagement. For example, you know how many grocery stores and fast food services hand you your receipt and say, “fill out the survey on the back for a chance at $1,000?” Well, that is because they know the value of customer satisfaction, quality control, and reviews.
Step 3: New Customers Participate
Word of mouth can be extremely powerful, but it doesn’t always equal conversions. Once someone hears about your business from their friend they need to decide whether or not they will purchase anything. Here are a few ideas for encouraging new customer participation:
New customer discounts. Give your new customers an incentive to purchase right away by offering them a first purchase discount.
Have an easy to find website and social media pages. Additionally, make sure that information about your product or service is easy to find. While referrals from friends (step 2) help, people often do their own research once they get a referral.
Moral mission that people want to get behind. Many people like to purchase products and services that do good in their communities and the world. Therefore, if your business has a community-focused mission be sure to share that publically. It might just end up being the factor that creates a conversion for you.
Create a sense of urgency. Do you have a limited time product? Do you book up quickly? Don’t be afraid to let your customers and potential customers know this to create a sense of urgency. When people feel like there’s a time constraint on their potential purchase they are more likely to purchase than if there isn’t anything pushing them.
Want to learn more about viral marketing? Check out this video and be sure to follow our YouTube channel.
Visit our blog and listen to our podcast for more information on the 19 Traction Channels.
Just like unconventional PR and search engine marketing, social and display ads are one of the 19 traction channels recognized by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares in their book Traction. Basically, these are any advertisements you see on social media or around your computer screen as you surf the internet. Chances are, you have already seen multiple social and display ads today. Do you remember any of them? Better yet, did you click on any of them?
As you are deciding to run social and display ads for your own business you want to make sure your ads have the ability to cut through the noise and be remembered (and clicked on) by your potential customers. There are many ways to create an effective ad, but sometimes it can be really challenging to know where to start, and once the ad is created, it can be difficult to know where to go from there. Here are some of the tricks we use to create effective digital advertisements that lead to effective landing pages.
Ad Assets
An effective ad starts with a design that catches the viewer’s attention. Many attractive ads include three main pieces of information: the company’s logo, its value proposition, and a call to action. These three pieces of information help the viewer understand who the ad is from, why it is important to them, and what steps they should take next if they want to participate with the brand. Once you have your logo, value, and call to action figured out it is time to design what the ad will look like to the viewer. If you do not have design skills, we would recommend outsourcing this small project to a graphic designer. While this might be more expensive, in many cases, having an effective and attention-grabbing ad will be worth your spend. Regardless of whether you design the ad or pay a designer to do it, make sure it is the correct dimensions and easy to read right away.
Ad Assets Quick Tips:
Include a logo, value proposition, and a call to action
Once you create an attractive ad that people want to click on you need somewhere to take them, and a landing page is one great option. The point of your landing page is to supply relevant and desired information to the viewer so they either visit another page of your site, sign up for your email list, make a purchase, or complete whatever your goal may be. In order for your landing page to complete your desired goal, you need to understand your audience and what they are looking for when they visit this page. Try to understand their current emotions, needs and frustrations and play to those within the landing page copy and design. An effective landing page is straight forward, attractive, easy to look at and mobile-friendly. Make sure your landing page supplies the offer or content that the ad that brought them there promised.
Ad Landing Page Tips:
Really understand your audience
Keep it straightforward, attractive, and easy to read
Search engine marketing, or paid search, is a powerful, and heavily invested in, traction channel. But looking at a blank campaign and wondering where to start is equivalent to watching a blinking cursor on the blank first page of the next great American novel. Where to begin!
Luckily there are a lot of tools out there to get you out of the gate and headed towards the finish line. One that we love is Google Trends. After all, who knows more about Google than Google!
After identifying your goals and KPIs it’s time for the keyword research portion of your campaign. And Google Trends is a great place to start. The platform is to SEM what Google Search Console is to SEO. It allows you to identify keywords that are trending, research volume of searches over time or even just browse for new keywords.
While it’s understood that keywords with higher search volume are going to cost more on average, you also don’t want to invest in keywords that aren’t being searched for at all. Or ones that are sharply declining. Or invest in regions with very little activity.
So let’s run through an example. Say you’re a clothing company releasing a new line of tank tops and are looking to support with a paid search campaign. Here are three simple ways you would use Google Trends.
Identify Search Volume By Time of the Year
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that search volume for “tank top” is going to ebb and flow with changes in the weather. But the beauty of Google Trends is that you can get even more specific than just spring, summer, fall or winter. The following chart illustrates search volume over the past 12 months.
It, of course, confirms our hypothesis. But it also shows that search volume starts to drop off earlier than you might expect and identifies the peak towards the end of June. That makes sense given Independence Day. Using this data you can schedule your campaigns appropriately but also consider increasing or decreasing your max CPC bids accordingly.
A by-product of gathering this data for your ad campaigns is that it can inform business decisions. Knowing when the search volume starts to increase for tank tops could be a factor in your new product release schedule. It can also inform when you run promotions or incorporate other traction channels into your overall marketing strategy.
Geographical Relevance
As with any ad campaign, you only want to pay to surface messaging to people who are most likely to convert. Again using “tank top” we ran a geographical analysis to determine what states are producing the most searches.
Given the company has a limited budget we wanted to drill down as far as possible to really optimize our spend. So we filtered by cities rather than states.
As with the timeframe chart, the numbers on the right are indexes, not the total volume. The number 100 means that location, New York in this example, is the location with the highest frequency of searches as a percentage of its overall search usage. That’s important to note has it pertains to the overall population. A smaller city or state that has an above-average amount of searches for “tank top” is going to rank higher than a bigger city with an average amount of searches. But that doesn’t mean the volume is higher.
While the timeframe analysis tells us when this tells us where for our ad groups. We can either target cities and states specifically, or flip the list and exclude areas that aren’t going to net the results we are looking for.
The Keywords You Didn’t Think About
Google Trends is not only a good resource for researching and testing out keywords you have identified but also discovering ones you may not have thought of thanks to the “related queries” feature.
Once again using “tank top” the tool was able to tell us whether more people as a fraction of overall searches are looking for women’s versus men’s, or which color people most frequently search for.
There are a lot of powerful keyword research tools, including SEMRush and Google Ads Keyword Planner, that you will want to employ in your campaign planning, but starting with Google Trends is never a bad thing.
While these are three high-level uses, there are a ton more ways to use the platform. And it’s not just limited to standard searches. You can filter by images, video and more. We encourage you to spend some time there experimenting. Just be forewarned, it can be quite the rabbit hole!
To learn more about search engine marketing check out our podcast and this video.
We can all name a company who has pulled off a crazy stunt or unique campaign. But do we know why some are easier to remember than others? Here at Pintler Group we are diving in to find out why some of these ideas stick and some are forgotten. Public relations (PR) is the act of creating and maintaining a favorable public image. Unconventional PR is simply maintaining this image by using unexpected and abnormal methods. It can surface in many ways including publicity stunts, viral videos and customer appreciation. Here are five successful unconventional PR campaigns and why they worked for the brand who pulled them off.
On October 5, 2018, many wealthy, art enthusiasts gathered at a Sotheby’s auction where one of the pieces for sale was a painting done by the mysterious artist, Banksy. Right as the hammer fell to indicate the sale of his piece, the painting titled “Girl with Balloon” began to self destruct by shredding.
Typically, we think of PR as a way for businesses to maintain a positive image. But brands and individuals such as Banksy use it as well. This stunt was successful because not only did it draw attention to Banksy’s art from all over the world, but it also addressed a social problem that the artist found to be important – the obsession we have to apply a monetary value to art.
Watch the video below and try to not let your heart break a little bit as the $1.4 million painting is shredded. This stunt sure has shock value. It also makes each viewer reconsider their values which is a powerful and memorable thing to do as a brand.
The painting is now estimated to be worth $2 million now. So we can say with confidence that this stunt did a great job of increasing the value of Banksy’s art.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, McDonald’s flipped their famous golden arches upside down to showcase a “W.”
There were some people that didn’t like it, which is a risk of unconventional PR. But many did like it and McDonald’s did a great job understanding the political climate of the time and making a move that would resonate with many of their customers. This simple flip caught the attention of many people around the country and gained a positive image from many.
One way to use customer appreciation in unconventional PR is hosting a contest for people interacting with their brand. The Do Us a Flavor competition by Frito-Lay is a great example of this. First, Frito-Lay calls for flavor ideas from the general public. Next, they select the top ones and have them created. Then shoppers can buy the new flavors and vote on which one should stay.
This is a successful campaign because not only does it get customers involved in product creation, but it encourages people to purchase and try all of the new flavors. Unique flavors that were dreamt up by every-day-people and made a reality are very popular to other every-day-people. This competition increases brand awareness, customer loyalty and, of course, sales.
A very popular and well known viral video example of unconventional PR is the video of Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits between two moving trucks (watch below).
With over 92 million views, there is no doubt that this unconventional PR attempt was effective in gaining attention. The point of the video was to showcase the stability of their steering system. But beautiful imagery and a very unexpected and extremely difficult stunt captivated audiences and made the video viral.
Another great example of an unconventional PR viral video is DollarShaveClub.com’s “Our Blades Are F***ing Great.”
With over 26 million views this video is successful because the content is very funny and entertaining yet it very clearly addresses the value proposition of their business and introduces the viewer to the exact problems their product solves. Try not to laugh when you watch the video below.
To learn more about unconventional PR check out this video and be sure to follow our channel on YouTube!
Visit our blog and listen to our podcast for more information on the 19 Traction Channels.
In a time where technology allows for instant access to content, journalists and bloggers are always looking for a new story. For many years, press releases were a solid channel for sharing company news and receiving free publicity. Nowadays, the chances of small businesses gaining coverage through press releases are dwindling. According to a report conducted by Muck Rack and Zeno Group in 2018, approximately 53% of journalists surveyed in the United States don’t look to use press releases as new story topics. However, just because the reported numbers are down doesn’t mean your business should nix the channel of press releases completely. The way we look at it, these numbers tell us that journalists are bored and that there is an opportunity to revolutionize the tired, traditional process of writing press releases.
So how can your business capitalize on this opportunity? Mix in the new with the old.
Step 1. Establish the goal of the press release.
Press releases need to be drafted with a goal in mind. What news are you trying to spread? Are you actually sharing something newsworthy or are you writing just for the sake of writing? Take the time to plan out what you want the press release to achieve and then determine whether it makes sense to push it to media outlets or if should it only live on social media or your website.
Step 2. Write with your audience in mind and provide value.
Targeting the right audience can make or break your marketing efforts, and press releases are no exception Keep your audience in mind when writing. Consider their language, the value they will receive from your business – or highlight it if they are not aware of it! – and make it known that your business cares. To take targeting one step further, segment press releases based on your audiences when considering what media outlets or platforms to share with. Writing a press release for the launch of new tech? Push to technology-focused bloggers and post on LinkedIn targeting users you know would benefit from your services.
Step 3. Tell a story.
Out with the bland, in with the storytelling. While there will be some releases that need to be “just the facts”, take the time to get a little creative with your writing. Think of how social media is used to share the news but in an engaging manner and try replicating a similar narrative for the release. Readers will retain the message – and your brand – better when they can associate a feeling with the content.
Step 4. Include infographics or media assets.
It’s no surprise that attention spans are changing in the age of technology. According to Wyzowl’s descriptive infographic, the attention span of an average person lasts about 8 seconds. When it comes to information, humans are gravitating more toward descriptive visualizations in a clean-looking format or watching short videos. To mix in new with the old, consider infographics or adding media assets to the press release. Capture the focus of the readers and entice them to continue by offering more than just black and white text.
Step 5. Maximize your efforts.
Don’t be disheartened if the media does not pick up your press release. It will happen. We all can empathize seeing our efforts not live up to our expectations. However, take advantage of this channel and incorporate SEO and keywords into press releases. Just because the media didn’t run with your release doesn’t mean you can’t still drive awareness of your brand. Align these methods with the goal and audience of the press release and strive to push traffic to your brand. Two birds, one stone.
Bonus Step. Build relationships with media.
Pitching press releases can be rough. Try to make meaningful connections with the journalists and bloggers you want to reach. Nothing frustrates a journalist more than receiving bland pitches of equally boring content. Check out this Twitter account for real-life examples to avoid. Be thoughtful with the narrative of your pitches, but keep them short and simple. Avoid gimmicky subject lines and keep it respectful. Make the effort to meet journalists in your community.
For more insights on getting the most out of publicity, check out our podcast about press release strategies and this video about publicity in the digital world.
Digital marketing is noisy. For those with little to no marketing experience, trying to market your business efficiently and affordably can be a difficult and frustrating process. How can one stand out to prospective customers amongst the seemingly endless onslaught of advertising? In email marketing especially, it’s easy to overwhelm both yourself and your audience. How many emails do you send to subscribers? What kind of content connects most with subscribers? Are email-only campaigns successful on its own?
In our Cutting Through the Noise series – delivered through podcasts, videos, and blogs – we’re here to help you navigate the nuances of digital marketing on a higher level. Even the most novice users to marketing understand that there is more than one way to reach and connect with customers. These methods, commonly referred to as traction channels, vary across mediums and when used smartly, can help you find what tactics grow your business most effectively. This series will cover the 19 traction channels defined by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares in their book Traction, starting with email marketing.
Traction Channel #1: Email Marketing
As discussed in our first Cutting Through the Noise video, email marketing is a powerful channel for any business to take advantage of. At Pintler Group, we believe that combining email strategies with other channels often leads to more successful campaigns and results for our clients.
For example, let’s walk through our Golf Giveaway campaign we ran for our retail client UPTOP back in May.
UPTOP Case Study
UPTOP, a retail company based in Montana, has a pretty devoted following. Ranging from those who proudly wear gear showing their school, state or country pride to those who support the brand as a lifestyle culture, UPTOP has carved out for itself a nice market in the western states. This past quarter, we set out to reach a goal of increasing total email subscribers for this client, with a focus on reaching new customers on a national level. When brainstorming strategies for this goal, our team noted that quite a few UPTOP followers are avid golfers. This sparked the idea of creating a campaign designed to attract golfers across the United States in hopes of increasing the existing list of email subscribers. Thus, our team at Pintler Group racked their brains together and devised a strategy uniting platforms to seamlessly achieve this goal.
Leveraging Facebook Lead Generation Ads
It shouldn’t be surprising that Facebook is a powerful tool in the world of advertising. Given that there are 2.38 billion monthly active users on Facebook, marketers have a great advantage in using this platform to reach relevant audiences. We started off this campaign by designing both a video and still image creative to test through a lead generation focused the campaign on Facebook, with a simple message: “We’re giving away more than $100 in UPTOP golf apparel.” Once a user clicks on the “Sign Up” call-to-action button, they’re taken directly to a form prompting them to provide their name and email address. Simple as that!
Automated Integrations
So, we’ve got the ads up enticing users to sign up for the chance to win UPTOP gear. Now what? Manually download and organize the data gathered from the lead forms? Talk about a tedious and boring process…lucky for us, automation exists! Zapier, our preferred integration platform, allows for you to set up “zaps”, or a set of rules, to connect multiple platforms based on actions taken by a user. For this campaign, we activated a zap that gathered the form data from Facebook to feed straight into our Mailchimp master list for UPTOP, then sent us an email notifying us of any leads submitted. Once entered into our master list, we could now start developing a relationship by sending predesigned automated emails through Mailchimp.
Automated Emails
Email marketing is a channel designed to be personalized and designed with the customer in mind. You need to think like an email receiver, not a sender. At what frequency do you get exhausted with your subscribed emails? What type of language turns you away? The point of getting email subscribers is to build a long term relationship with your customers, not a “get to this number quick, then lose them after a week.” It’s a delicate balance testing how your audience will respond, but that’s what makes email marketing powerful: the ability to optimize and test different strategies to make each email relevant and engaging to the subscriber, which allows for relationships between a customer and a brand to develop.
With this campaign, we kept our automated emails light. We knew part of this audience would only want free stuff, and too many emails upfront may scare them off. After a user submitted a form, our Mailchimp campaign would activate following the Zapier trigger and send only one email welcoming the user to the UPTOP community. After the golf giveaway completed, a scheduled email was sent informing the subscriber that it was over but included a gentle reminder that there was a 30% off the entire store using a special code – promising the receiver future perks as a subscriber.
Moving Forward
Following the end of this campaign, we now have a new audience to learn and engage with – an audience of 355 unique users! Tagged in MailChimp as our Golf Giveaway subscribers, we can target these subscribers in other platforms and connect through more engaging content. With Zapier integrations, we can continue to automate processes between ads and emails to improve the efficiency of our tracking. Through Facebook, we can implement the email addresses collected and show ads relevant to their interests, such as announcements of new golf gear, future giveaways, and sales. Email marketing is more than sending mass emails to a passive audience. It’s an opportunity to provide value to your customers and strengthen the brand perception. It’s noticing trends in customer behavior and sending emails at the right moment after actions are taken.
Be sure to check out our Slideshare deck on Email Marketing and our podcast discussing Email Automation, and this video on Email Marketing Framework to dive deeper into strategies to try for yourself!
I continue to be impressed with the changes Google has made to Search Console in the last year. From an easier to manage user-interface to more robust data points for digital marketers to work with, any growing business looking to win on organic search should be taking advantage of this free software. Check out the video below for a quick screenshare of our favorite Search Console tactics.
If you’re not a career technical search engine optimization (SEO) professional, you might have logged into Search Console a couple years ago and thought: what the hell am I looking at? You’re not alone. While the platform held some truly powerful data like search position, ranking and trends, it was tough to find, difficult to decipher and riddled with industry acronyms. Though Having spent the last six years bouncing in and out of the different Google marketing products, Search Console remained an enigma. Until this year. It was too easy to glance at “organic traffic” referral in Analytics and see it improving month over month. I didn’t need to ask a ton of questions because there was always something more important to do.
Here’s a quick snapshot at the high level helicopter view metrics Google Search console can provide. Different than analytics (at least before connecting with Google Search Console), these metrics can give you info on interest before users ever reach your site. Imagine 50 fish swimming around your hook, Google Analytics tells you which fish you caught. Search Console lets you know which fish got away.
Google Search Console Investment:
The good news is, the application is free. The bad news, you’re going to need to put in some effort to like what you see on the dashboard. When the software side of our business, website personalization software GeoFli, started to get more and more leads from our website, it quickly became clear this was a result of our haphazard SEO efforts. Whoa. What if we spent time actually honing that effort and better understanding what keywords were driving the most qualified traffic. More importantly, what keywords are we ranking for in position 5, 6, 7 that we might be able to at.
If your customer acquisition looks like the flowchart below, SEO might be a good investment of time and resources. You can’t get users to your site, and they’re not converting once they’re there. But when you do acquire a customer, they stay for life. The key here is to use the early acquisition and activation strategies of content writing, SEO and other early marketing traction channels to acquire qualified traffic to your site.
Search Engine Optimization:
Where should SEO rank as a traction channel for your business? If you have $5,000 to spend on marketing, should you spend it on Facebook Ads, pitching at trade-shows or producing content to help your website rank? Our team loves investing in content that has a long lifespan. We call it evergreen. This includes simple video, articles and photos that add value to your customers’ lives. Remember, people go on the internet for one of two reasons: information or entertainment. If your content can do one of those two things, you’re leagues ahead.
Adjacent Traction Channels:
Blog Outreach:
If you’re not getting a lot of site traffic, find someone that is. Now, it’s not going to work to reach out and beg: that’s kind of sad. Instead, find ways to add value (notice the trend here). We did this with our personalization software, GeoFli. We reached out to platforms we used like Mailchimp, Trello, MaxMind and Zapier and gave them a quick pitch about how their service really helped our company grow. We used some data, some flattering testimonials and some screenshots. Oh, and we included a back-link to our site in our paragraph. We were picked up by Trello and MaxMind and featured on their sites! To this day, those two back-links still refer traffic our way.
The reason this traction channel is adjacent to SEO is because inbound links are an important piece of any SEO strategy. Even if you don’t have a “strategy” but just want to climb the mountain to organic search one step at a time, targeting blogs with valuable insights and education on your area of expertise is a great way to do it.
Using Search Console to Select a Content Topic
As described in the video below, Google Search Console is a gold mine for figuring out what articles to spend time writing, and which ones to avoid. Unless you’re starting from a completely blank slate, you’ll be able to look at the queries your website is ranking for most often and tackle head on.
Pro Tip:
We like to look specifically at impressions compared to page position. In the screenshot below, our in-house personalization software, GeoFli, allows anyone to change website content based on location. There are a few things a user must understand before taking steps to purchasing a starter subscription. One is understanding their website traffic. “how to measure website traffic” is a great example of a keywords with a lot of impressions (500/month) that we’d like to own. And we’re currently ranking in position 13. I think we can improve that by writing some valuable content that meets user intent. See video for more info on how to navigate these screens.
Pro Tip # 2:
Improve organic click-through-rates by testing language. Phew, that’s a lot of marketing jargon. Take a look at the screenshot below. Both are in position 1.8 in search results (nice!) but one has a 32% click through rate (percentage of people that see the search result vs. click) and one has a 3.6% click-through-rate (CTR). The far right is position, green is CTR.
Use this opportunity to test the meta descriptions of the blog posts driving traffic. If you get 1,000 impressions and go from a 10% to a 20% click-through-rate simply by improving the title and meta description of your article, that’s an increase of 100 free website visitors a month!
Test out Google Search Console:
I’d highly recommend checking out Google Search Console for your business. The insights are extremely valuable and there are dashboards through Data Studio you can build, integrations with Analytics of course and you’ll be able to quickly see what users are searching for to land on your site.
Next Steps:
If you’re looking to glean some of these insights, head to Google Search Console. Warning, verifying your site can sometimes be a headache. If you use Tag Manager, great. You’ll see the verification tag live on your site and it still will tell you it’s not added yet. You can verify with Analytics and that works about 25% of the time. Frustrating? As always we’re here to help. And as always, we hope you learned something.
When it comes to marketing firms in Montana, the options can feel a bit overwhelming. Then there’s companies calling themselves marketing tech, then there’s specific PR firms, creative agencies and design firms to choose from. What are the differences? Do you need all? None? We’re here to help you navigate the landscape of digital marketing firms in Montana.
Freelancers:
This is how I got my start. You pick up some work writing website copy, designing Google Ad campaigns or helping an entrepreneur articulate their value proposition. Sometimes it’s a specific task like building a five page website or setting up email automations. Other times it’s consistent work like 20 hours a month focused on Google Ads.
Pros: The benefit here is expertise in a specific channel. Hiring an individual that knows search-engine-optimization inside and out is a good example. They can make recommendations on meta-tags, use programs like Screaming Frog to identify opportunities in organic search results and deliver reports from Google Search Console that you didn’t know existed. A local freelancer is in your time-zone, can be at your place of work and you can meet them face-to-face. They can see your business and meet the team.
Drawbacks: Freelancer have over time gained a reputation for being a little unreliable. Need that SSL certificate updated? Sorry, traveling to the Dominican this week. Design drafts stuck in drafts? Sorry, it’s conference week and I’m swamped! Without the power of a team, it can feel like the freelancer is working on an opposite time-zone … and sometimes they are.
Pintler Group looking at Product Hunt promotions for a software client.
If you’ve ever seen a pitcher in the major leagues step up to the plate, it’s pretty hilarious. Sure they can throw a 95 mph fastball, but that doesn’t mean they can hit one. That’s what designated hitters are for. Imagine a freelancer as an all-star pitcher. That’s only one piece of the team. Marketing teams with 3-5 people should compliment one another. Analytics, design, strategy, paid search and email. These digital marketing firms move fast and often act as a full-time marketing team for a company that wants to simply outsource these services.
Pros: These teams move fast and work best when each person on the team contributes to your marketing needs. Perhaps your firm has a marketing director responsible for promotion, events and communication. That’s a huge role. These firms are perfect for the marketing director that wants to keep the ball moving forward when their own plate is full. Too often marketing directors are responsible for a couple big events which suck up resources, time and energy. That’s where the agile marketing teams assist in keeping momentum.
Drawbacks: There are times when a freelancer is a better fit. Just need a simple design for a flyer? That’s a freelancer or an UpWork assignment. A rule of thumb to think about when looking for a marketing firm in Montana: you don’t want to be their smallest client, and you don’t want to be their largest. Get a good understanding of the work from the agency. Do they have experience with video? What is their belief on content?
Large Marketing and Creative Agency: 6+ people.
These firms traditionally exist in Montana for some of the larger brands and promotions. These are the marketing firms you might imagine on television: brick walls, glass walled conference room and post-it-notes on brand-boards. They tackle large branding projects spanning months and sometimes years.
Pros: The power of a team is real. With 20+ people, you might have a specific account rep or marketing director responsible for your account. Experience is a plus here with some firms existing for 20+ years or longer. They’ve seen the transition from TV and flyers to digital.
Cons: Whether they’ve adapted to that transition is another story. With 20+ people and brick walls comes a lot of overhead. Overhead that you pay for when you hire them. Sometimes the ideas generated from post-it-note sessions can be million dollar ideas, but who is responsible for executing on them? Your team? Their team? Is that included in the scope?
Programmatic Advertising Firms:
Programmatic flowchart.
There is a difference between marketing firms and media buying. We wrote an entire article about whether or not programmatic advertising is right for you. These firms can throw a lot of complicated language and fancy acronyms at you quickly. CPMs, DSPs, Third Party Inventory, CTR and CPA. The business model is predicated on the more you spend as a marketing team, the more money they make. Typically charging $25 cost-per-thousand impressions online, these firms charge a specific amount and usually have a minimum ad-buy. This means you might be in for $5,000 a month in advertising. At the end of the month, you get a report showing results.
Pros: The invoicing is actually pretty simple. In the awareness stage, programmatic advertising can be powerful but expensive. These companies experience rapid growth and you’ll have your own account executive helping determine where you’d like to place ads. The targeting capabilities are impressive.
Cons: There are a few. First, the effectiveness of display ads (those ads you see on your local newspaper website) have unbelievably low click-through-rates which corresponds to unbelievably high cost-per-conversion (sales, lead, booking). As Google and Facebook compete for ad-dollars, the targeting capabilities within each platform continue to improve. Google’s custom-intent-audiences, for example, are extremely powerful and cost-per-thousand impressions come in closer to $2.50. Just understand that ad-tech, marketing tech and programmatic advertising firms don’t (or shouldn’t) call themselves marketing agencies.
How to Find a Great Digital Marketing Firm:
Video conference.
Unlike lawyers, doctors, teachers and nurses, the marketing profession doesn’t have a “bar exam” equivalent. Facebook Ads, Google Ads, email marketing, and search-engine-optimization management come with trainings and “onboarding completion certificates” but nothing that couldn’t be achieved on a rainy and disciplined weekend.
Should there be a certificate? I think back on my time as a marketing and recruitment associate at Missoula College (then the COT). I remember talking with the nursing faculty about Anatomy and Physiology (A&P). If anyone you know is a nurse, they just shuddered a little bit. Doesn’t matter where they are, they shivered with fear. That’s because it was coined as a “weed out course”. A course meant to thin the herd or aspiring nurses. If that sounds harsh, it is. It should be. Competency is pretty important when it comes to that IV in your arm and if that means the ability to ace A&P, I’m okay with it.
When looking for a Dentist, you’re not first concerned with their certification. You trust that someone somewhere gave them a license to practice dentistry. Then the market decides which dentist is best. For me, that’s which dentist has the best magazine selection in the waiting room. “Whoa, Carnival Ride Rodeo May 2017?!”
Lawyers study for months only to potentially fail the Bar exam. To interview for a job as a teacher in a school district, you need a teaching license. That’s not a controversial topic.
In all of these scenarios, there’s a barrier to entry. Perhaps that’s what makes finding and choosing the right marketing team so difficult. Sometimes you’re making a decision based on experience, but not all experience is created equal. Do you count, for example, 20 years of printing brochures and business cards as marketing experience?
Questions to Ask A Digital Marketing
Nick and Kyle answering questions about marketing software.
We put together a quick list of questions to ask your digital marketing firm in Montana, or anywhere for that matter.
What is your process for getting started with someone new?
This helps filter the cookie-cutter approach. The plan should most certainly include understanding and potentially honing the value proposition early and often.
Describe how you think about goals and conversions?
There are media buying companies, and then there are marketers. Understanding the (really vast) differences will help you make an educated decision. When you hear experts talk about media, typically what they’re describing are display ads and large advertising purchases. These are usually priced at a CPM level (cost-per-thousand-impressions). So 1,000 people see an ad online, how much should it cost? To media buyers, the answer is usually around $25. To marketers, 1,000 impressions doesn’t mean much because we like to measure based on conversions. Sales, inquiries, applications, phone calls, and revenue. We think about goals and conversions internally as well as with our clients when we market our website personalization software, GeoFli.
What type of communication can I expect?
Inbound Marketing Communication
This is one of the most important questions to ask a potential online marketing firm in Montana or anywhere. There’s a spectrum of answers here. One includes a monthly dashboard that automates to your inbox. The other end of the pendulum is a digital marketing extension of your existing operations. It depends on what you want to focus on and what your budget can afford. Just make sure you’re not paying high dollar for a monthly PDF (but it’s interactive!) and if you’re looking for more of a team, meet the players on the team.
The last thing to consider when searching for a digital marketing agency in Montana is access. Can you sit across the table from them if you need to? Is that something important to you? We see tremendous value in being able to talk through campaigns, marketing spend and quarterly goals.
Note: You Should be Doing Most of The Talking.
If it seems like the marketing team you’re meeting with is doing a lot of the talking, it’s an early indicator they won’t be great listeners. Marketing is about communicating to the world what your super-power is. How are you different from everyone else doing what you do? What is your value proposition? If a marketing firm isn’t curious enough to dive into your value proposition in the first conversation, the mark has been missed.
Understand that when condensed, there are roughly 19 different traction channels businesses can use to acquire new customers to their product or service. Sometimes these tasks are performed in-house. Sometimes firms contract one or two of them out. Increasingly, firms are looking at digital marketing as a good opportunity for some expert assistance and coaching on the some of the strategies below. This comes from the book “Traction” by Gabriel Weinberg (a book we keep in our HQ at all times). These include:
Traction by Gabriel Weinberg
Viral Marketing: Share this uber-code, refer a friend, get $200 Visa gift card when a friend signs up. In campaigns I’ve run using the “my friend jumped off a bridge, maybe I should too!” approach, I’m always amazed at how well they perform. Hotmail, while not too prevalent these days, owned the world of electronic mail (yup, I called it that) by a simple viral marketing statement to “share with a friend” at the bottom of every email.
Public Relations: media coverage and publicity. There are firms specializing in this space. You could be on Oprah. You get a conversion! You get a conversion! But it’s tough to track the immediate return on investment and can fall sideways.
Unconventional PR: I always think of Redbull. Certainly jumping from space with a parachute on is unconventional. Did it sell more energy drinks? Probably. Was it really cool to watch? Most definitely yes.
Search Engine Marketing: Google is a search engine … and an advertising platform. Purchasing keywords and display inventory comes with the promise of sales, but it can be illusive. Best practice in our experience is a simple exact match – phrase match – broad match modified system to setting up search campaigns.
Social Ads: Mark Zuckerberg didn’t volunteer his way into that Lake Tahoe Estate. Facebook is a staple in the digital marketers toolbox. Though easy to initially launch, there are becoming more and more toggles and tactics to be aware of to efficiently target your budget and measure return-on-ad-spend.
Email Marketing: teach an old dog new tricks like automation, triggered retargeting email and growing your email list through other traction channels. Email can be extremely effective and you have complete control over the content. For example, Facebook can’t update an algorithm that removes 5,000 emails from your subscriber list. Your email list is your email list. Ask us about how to show messages to your email subscribers and friends of your email subscribers.
Google has 200 ranking factors. There are people that study all of them and dream about them. Literally there is a periodic table of ranking factors! We believe it’s important to be updated on new algorithms, but ultimately great content (maybe like this article) will rank. Provide real value and think about user intent. That has withstood the test of time … at least the last few years or so.
This is a strategy that has evolved since Gabriel Weinberg wrote Traction. I would also include Q&A sites like Quara, Facebook Groups and Influencer marketing in this category. Ultimately, targeting blogs includes defining a really clear persona, and spending time getting in front of them digitally. People go on the internet for education or entertainment. How can you help educate your target audience on your product in a non-spammy way. Sometimes it’s guest posting or contributing value to a Facebook Group.
If digital marketing was the royal family, content marketing would king. Yes, content is indeed king. Today, the bar is high: video, podcasts, articles, photo: there’s a lot to keep track of. Producing content in-house can be an extremely effective way to communicate to specific personas. For example, if you’re a sporting goods store, you could write articles about lacrosse and you could write articles about women’s soccer. Then you could promote those articles specifically to those demographics.
One of our favorite traction channels because it’s one of the least used. Think about a time when you’ve downloaded an interactive how-to guide or submitted a mortgage calculator. In exchange for something of value, maybe they collected your email address or phone number. Sometimes called Engineering as marketing. We’ve built calculators, degree finders and choose-your-own-adventure style business finders for companies that want something better than a “subscribe to our email” form. And example of marketing as engineering might be the subscription box calculator we build for Big Sky Fulfillment.
Montana is full of great marketers
The Kauffman Index has ranked Montana the No. 1 state for startup activity for four straight years. So what do entrepreneurs have to do with sales and digital marketing? Everything. Entrepreneurs inherently see opportunity where others might have missed. They understand their key demographics, personas, and target market even if sometimes those aren’t the words they use. They market and brand their product. Just here in Missoula, the examples of world-class marketing is everywhere. From the music scene retargeting live-performance aficionados to software companies like Submittable and OnX building global brands acquiring customers all over the world.
What Marketing Firm is Right For You:
Fortunately, the state of Missoula marketing is strong. If you’re looking for a Missoula or a Montana marketing agency, digital or traditional, it’s important to keep in mind a couple things.
If you’re just getting started, it might mean you don’t need a marketing firm at all, you need some hustle! Paul Graham of Y-Combinator recommends businesses starting out going from zero customers to one customer, from one to ten and ten to 100 do things that don’t scale. What does that mean: do things that don’t scale. We take that a step further: do things that don’t scale until you reach product market fit. Basically you should look at growing your business without marketing dollars and instead recruit customers that would make zero sense if you had 500 customers. For example, the AirBnB team sold cereal at the Democratic National Convention in 2008: Obama O’s to help fund their growing startup. Stripe recruited users early by physically showing up and installing the system at your business, sitting in your chair behind your cash register.
Product Market Fit
When you’re ready to sit down with a Montana marketing agency, if you’re a growing business, we recommend making sure you’ve achieved product market fit. We think of that based on Casey Winters from GrubHub, Pinterest and now Graylock Partners when he says “you’ve reached product market fit if your customers would be pissed you went away.”
If you aren’t there yet, keep doing things that don’t scale. Talk to customers.
When Hiring a Montana Marketing Agency is right for you:
We find the most successful companies that bring on an agency have a marketing team in place with some expertise in specific traction channels but not all. Specialists in areas like Google Ads, reporting, search-engine-optimization and content can be really difficult to find. It can also be difficult to find them 40 hours of work with such a narrow skill-set. Find a marketing firm with a track-record of managing large accounts. I sometimes advise individuals looking to hire a marketing agency in Montana that you don’t want to be the firm’s largest client and you don’t want to be the firm’s smallest client.
Montana Marketing Analytics Graduates:
While there is a lot of creativity that goes into marketing, the trend toward marketing as a science continues to increase. Data analytics, website conversion tracking, page-rank algorithms and impression share are just the tip of the marketing metric iceberg. With Masters in Business Analytics and digital marketing certificates being awarded by the University of Montana, the caliber of students graduating with proficiency not only in designing a beautiful marketing handout, but graduating with the ability to perform regression analysis on Montana tourism data is rapidly increasing. Find a firm with these skill sets under the umbrella and it will serve you well.
We had too much empty space on our whiteboard.
Digital Marketing Coaching:
Unsure still if hiring a Montana digital marketing agency is right for you? Consider taking some simple courses online. They’re free and they’ll arm you with the knowledge to either tackle steps 1-3 yourself, or at least ask the right questions of a potential freelancer or marketing agency. Here are a few of our favorites:
Have questions about digital marketing? Contact us today. We’ll fire up the video-conference and do a lot of listening. Jumping into digital marketing can be a little frightening. We’re here to help.
Use this opportunity to test the meta descriptions of the blog posts driving traffic. If you get 1,000 impressions and go from a 10% to a 20% click-through-rate simply by improving the title and meta description of your article, that’s an increase of 100 free website visitors a month!
