Episodios

  • Developing Marketing Expertise and a Personal Brand with Dave Gerhardt

    Developing Marketing Expertise and a Personal Brand with Dave Gerhardt
    May 24 2021
    Dave Gerhardt is an expert's expert.He's the author of Conversational Marketing: How the World's Fastest Growing Companies Use Chatbots to Generate Leads 24/7/365. He's the CMO at Privy, a leader in eCommerce marketing for small businesses and entrepreneurs. He's the former VP of Marketing at Drift, a Conversational Marketing platform that combines chat, email, video, and automation to make it easier for customers to buy by helping them start the conversations they want to start on their terms.Dave even has his own marketing community, DGMG, a place where you can "get the marketing education you never got in school," a podcast, and a community where B2B marketers join forces to learn from one another.He's the guy who genuinely loves everything marketing, and so has found multiple ways to have fun doing it.He's also focused on the metrics that matter most to CEOs, namely, the amount of revenue that a marketer can generate for a company. If you're ready for some down-to-earth, no-nonsense insights on how you can improve your performance, you won't want to miss this one. The highlights:[2:07] Dealing with imposter syndrome.[5:46] Getting it all done.[7:52] Evolutions in Dave's marketing philosophy.[13:08] Why you don't have to prove the ROI of every last marketing activity.[19:41] Branding strategies.[21:17] Branding an individual vs. branding the agency.[26:44] Dave's cause.The insights:Dealing with imposter syndromeIf there's one thing you learn while interviewing some of the smartest marketers in the world – very few of them are immune to imposter syndrome. Some only face it at the beginning of their journeys. Some continue to grapple with it even while they're standing in front of live audiences at some of the biggest events in the world. Dave's no exception. "It's exhausting, at times, worrying about or thinking about whether someone's going to react the wrong way or be mad about what you've posted. I don't like that headspace sometimes."Dave admits that imposter syndrome has plagued him from the beginning."I remember being at Constant Contact. I was 24 years old. It was when I really got into startups and being part of the startup community. I graduated college with no clue about real marketing, or what to do. I just got a degree because I needed to graduate. I got into internet marketing and social media. I saw a lot of people in that industry had blogs about: hey, here's what I'm doing. I wanted that. I wanted a public forum to share what I was doing."He scratched his initial itch with a podcast called Tech in Boston in 2014."I wasn't even working in marketing. I was an account manager at the time. I started this podcast where I interviewed local CEOs in Boston. That's where I started to build my brand." Dave stresses that he doesn't feel like he did anything special."I was literally the only person who had a podcast about startups in Boston. That got me meetings with top CEOs and top VCs, and you know, once you get in that loop a little bit you can say: wow, that was a great interview, who else do you know that I should talk to, and all the sudden you're connected to someone else." From there, he went on to Hubspot, where he created The Growth Show. He wasn't even a full-time marketing person until he went to Drift."When I got to Drift they said: we're going to see how this goes, Unknown Guy, go ahead and do your thing."No pressure, Dave."So I got to get our website out for the first time. Launch the blog. Launch the podcast, do paid advertising, do SEO, do AdWords, do events. I literally got to do all those things for the first time, myself. I think that was a great benefit to the company to have an earlier person, early in their career to grow, and that kind of built from there. At Drift, I got to do marketing to marketing people, as a result of that I didn't have a personal thing because I was sharing to the world through Drift."Bottom line? If you're grappling with imposter syndrome? Keep putting yourself out there. It will pay off. It's just a feeling! If Dave, of all people, still feels it, it's not going away, so you might as well get out there and rock the world. Getting it all doneLet's take a moment to marvel at Dave's prolific productivity. How does he get it all done?Dave successfully adjusted to the Covid-19 crisis."Right now I can use my time how I need. I can run down to my office on Saturday at 1:00 AM because I had an idea. I do not think this would have been at all possible before being unchained from the whole cubical life."He contrasts it by noting that he used to spend up to 10 hours a day at the office."You're just there. You gotta do whatever's there. You're asking me how I'm able to do DGMG now? Well, I'm also able to pick up and drop off my kids now. Not that I do that every day. Go for a walk every day outside. Work out every day. This is one of many benefits I'm seeing from being fortunate enough to be able to work from home." Evolutions in Dave's marketing ...
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    29 m
  • Selling and Prospecting for Agency Owners and Consultants with Brooklin Nash

    Selling and Prospecting for Agency Owners and Consultants with Brooklin Nash
    May 21 2021
    Sales, sales prospecting, and outreach. They’re always tricky. Agencies and consultancies rely on them, especially in the early stages of their business, but trying to figure out how to make these activities effective is a constant uphill battle. In addition, it's difficult to get it right without coming across as too salesy, and in a way that gets the right value in front of the right people at the right time.Meet Brooklin Nash, the Head of Content at Sales Hacker.  Sales Hacker is a website that offers discussions, articles, podcasts, videos, and sales training. It's a community that is "100% geared to helping salespeople gain new skills or improve their game." If you're running an agency, are a freelancer, or are part of an agency sales team, that means you. So don't miss today's podcast. Sales are integral to agency success and Brooklin has some great insights from his experience and community.The highlights:[1:35] The importance of researching your prospects, and what you're looking for.[4:46] The right amount of time to spend on research.[8:20] Where a cold email strategy starts to go off the rails. [10:30] Good strategy for cold emails.[12:06] How Sales Hacker approaches content.[14:01] The most successful pieces at Sales Hacker.[15:28] Traffic sources.[17:56] Favorite sales outreach tools.[21:07] Brooklin's causes.The insights:The importance of researching prospects, and how to do itBrooklin stresses that anyone engaging in the sales process should spend a lot more time on research than they probably would otherwise think to."Don't just do a light search on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, pull up a list, and then reach out to blast the whole list. Taking time to really qualify who you're reaching out to and why will be time well-spent before you ever send your first email." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIf3xD0mlQQAs for what you're looking for when you do all this research?"One, you're looking for a company matching your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). If most of your clients are of a certain size and in a specific niche, start there."The other thing you're looking for is a signal that they might be ready for help with their marketing."They have a new Director of Marketing or a VP, and the new executive came from a place where they ran a strong content marketing presence the new company doesn't have, for example." Brooklin says hiring can be another signal."If they're hiring for their marketing team, there's a good chance they're going to be looking for external help too. They might not just be hiring those content marketing managers. They may be looking for contractors and agencies to actually execute on the work. You can look for those signals pretty easily with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and build your list from there."Finally, Brooklin says you're looking for information that can help you with your outreach efforts."A podcast they just did. An article they just published. A question they asked. Something that puts the value first and the content first. Instead of: hey, you're in marketing. We're a marketing agency. Can we help you out? Start with where they're at, first."The right amount of time to spend on researchWhen we already have so many demands on our time, all this research can feel like a lot of wasted effort. So how much time is optimum for making the process work?Brooklin admits it’s hard to quantify."It's going to depend on how much you're reaching out. But unless you're a giant agency, you're going to be better served reaching out to ten dream clients than even a few hundred clients that maybe don't fit your ICP or who might be harder to work with or might be past your niche a little bit. So take the time to focus on the right prospective clients and I think you're going to have better conversations down the line."Brooklin has spent up to 30 minutes on an email in the past. "Quite a bit of time from a cold outreach perspective, but it paid off. We were only looking for a handful of new clients, so it didn't matter that it didn't scale well." He has also tried other strategies where he sent out hundreds of emails and tried to automate the process."I spent a couple of hours and only used intent data. When I sent hundreds I got a 15% reply rate. Only one of them became a client."Where a cold email strategy starts to go off the rails"The number one place a cold email strategy goes off the rails is when you make it about you vs. them. And that's something you can scale. Not as well as those hyper-personalized emails that take 20-30 minutes. You can take the time to make it about what their problem is, and then as the footnote what your potential solution is."Brooklin stresses that you really can't make it about what an amazing agency you are."It's: hey. I noticed you were working on this. Or you started this campaign. Or you just started this new job. How's that going? Make it about them first. This is essentially Sales 101, but I think content marketers often forget that, ...
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    26 m
  • The Secret Digital Marketing Life of Franchises with Neel Parekh

    The Secret Digital Marketing Life of Franchises with Neel Parekh
    May 14 2021
    Ever wondered how your agency can start working with franchises? For many agencies, they're practically a "holy grail" client. Want the insider take on what it would require to impress someone who runs one?Well, listen to today's podcast and you'll get your wish. Today we're talking with Neel Parekh, Founder and CEO of MaidThis, a residential and Airbnb cleaning franchise that is rapidly expanding across the U.S.MaidThis is a tech-savvy up-and-comer that leverages every available digital technique to win and to help their franchisees win. That means Neel is also well-versed in the digital marketing world and has plenty of insights for agency owners and consultants. Check it out now:The highlights:[1:02] The business model.[2:15] Why franchise?[3:52] How MaidThis approaches digital marketing.[6:11] Educating franchisees.[10:46] The best way to get your foot in the door.[16:20] The best franchises to target.[19:05] Growing a remote culture.[20:46] Neel's cause.The insights:The MaidThis business modelThe MaidThis business model is fairly straightforward. It's a cleaning company that allows customers to schedule weekly, biweekly, or monthly cleanings through their website. Everything is automated.The other niche is Airbnb cleaning for vacation rentals, which brings its own unique challenges."One guest checks in at 11, the next guest checks in at 3. There's a bunch of stuff which has to happen between them, like checking for damages, replacing supplies, things like that. So we just link up with the host's calendar and automatically schedule cleaning after the turn-around."Neel says he really likes approaching this business in what he calls a "new age way.""As opposed to the old-school cleaning model where you get an estimate, you don't really know if they're going to show up or not, and you have no phone notifications." Why franchise?Neel says franchising was a really big decision for his company.He offers some background."I started the company in 2013. I did a couple of years part-time when I was working in finance. Eventually, I wanted to travel. So I left for five years before Covid, just traveling the world. That's why I made the business remote. Because I had to."At MaidThis, the only people who don't work remotely are the cleaners."In 2020, we decided we wanted to expand. The question was: how do we do that? Do we do it ourselves, or do we do it with a franchise model? A franchise model can expand more rapidly because you can multiply your efforts. We had the system set up in such a way because I was working remotely. We had to be highly, highly systemized to make it work. So it was very conducive to the franchise model."He says this approach is giving him a huge boost over other cleaning companies."I love that a lot of other cleaning companies in the franchise space are from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, so their digital marketing is not the best. The way they're targeting customer interaction with the crowd they're targeting is not the best. That was the reason we decided franchising was the way to expand. And so we launched in late 2020, at the height of the pandemic. We awarded our first franchise in Denver in late 2020 and are just going to keep  going from there." How MaidThis approaches digital marketingNeel says he really loves local marketing, and that love is helping him dominate the competition. "I think cleaning companies are two years behind the curve in terms of marketing and digital marketing. They're late with everything. As long as you're on pace with the way digital marketing is going, you're already ahead of the competition. It's not that hard in my opinion to beat most of the competition just by doing base, foundational stuff. A lot of local companies don't know what they're doing. If you're a marketer and you know what you're doing, you're ahead of the competition." Neel says it's critical for the success of his franchisees."Having an optimized website. Doing email capture. Actually doing email marketing. You'd be surprised. Most local companies don't do it. 45% of local companies don't even have a website."This is one area where Neel offers his franchisees a great deal of support."We provide the actual playbook of what can work. Here's how you set up a profile. Here's the ad copy you can use for your AdWords. It would be on the franchisee and maybe an approved vendor of ours to actually get that done. A lot of stuff is proven out."He says that there are a lot of changes from market to market that are good to be aware of."For example in Los Angeles, Yelp is huge. Yelp is huge in California. In the midwest, it's not that big. They like Angi. We don't want to force what's happening in their local market." Educating FranchiseesNeel educates each of his franchisees from day one and focuses on two key areas of digital marketing.The first is filling the funnel through SEO and email marketing."Afterwards, the number one key for us is Google reviews. I don't care where in the ...
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    23 m
  • The Beauty of Meeting Governance with Hiba Amin

    The Beauty of Meeting Governance with Hiba Amin
    May 7 2021
    Do you hate meetings? Are you frustrated by how much time they seem to waste? If so, then this is one of the most important episodes you'll listen to this year. We're about to fix your meetings for you.Or rather, Hiba Amin is. She's the Sr. Marketing Manager at Soapbox. Soapbox is an "app built for managers," designed to "streamline objectives, meetings, and morale into one workflow that gets you results." Meetings are hard to get right but so essential to making the most of your day-to-day, because they’re necessary. Hiba shares concrete steps you can take to transform the nature of your meetings moving forward. Take the steps she suggests, and you'll master your meetings, ending frustration, saving time, and getting critical time back every week. The highlights: [1:38] Hiba's philosophy on meetings. [2:48] Crafting meetings that are worth having. [6:16] The efficient way to plan and prep for meetings. [8:25] The power of ten reclaimed minutes. [10:38] The place where most internal meetings go wrong. [13:37] The most effective way to organize an agency-client meeting. [16:08] Etiquette for meeting follow-up. [17:50] Iterating on your company's meeting structure. [19:55] Creating meeting management templates. [22:27] Hiba's cause.The insights:A meeting philosophy to live byHiba's meeting philosophy is pretty straightforward."If there's no point or goal to the meeting, don't have it!" Hiba doesn't have more than 4 internal meetings per week, because she doesn't need more. That number can vary by company or team size, of course, but the point here is to be lean with your meeting planning. "If it's a status update, add it in Slack. Add it in email. Or just add an item to your agenda and tackle it asynchronously. But don't have a meeting for the sake of having a meeting."Crafting meetings that are worth havingHiba notes there are four types of internal meetings to address here.1:1 meetings.Team meetings.Company meetings.One-off meetings.Crafting a meeting worth having means matching the activity of the meeting to the meeting type."For one-on-ones, the whole point is for managers and employees to continuously exchange feedback, to talk about their growth, to find different levers to engage their team, to talk about blockers, to use it as a coaching session."She says you can really accomplish a great deal in a one-on-one."The baseline is just to build trust, to exchange feedback, and continue to build so much rapport that the feedback exchange becomes easy and natural, which I think is really important between managers and employees." Next, Hiba addresses team meetings."Team meetings are to keep your team in sync. Let's talk about the blockers, but I also want to make sure you're not just waiting until a team meeting to talk about a blocker, either."A blocker is anything that keeps someone from achieving a goal or completing a project. "Don't wait two weeks, if that's the [meeting] cadence, to say: I'm actually stuck on this one project. You could have solved that two weeks ago. The team meetings just really keep the team in sync.Talk about goals. Make sure you're aligned. Make sure that you know you have all the steps in place to be able to hit your goals and not wait until the end of the quarter to say: oh crap. Didn't hit that goal. Don't do a retrospective of the past three months. Do the retro for two weeks. Fix your problems."What about company-wide meetings?"At least at Soapbox, they're really short. We have a 15-minute company-wide meeting every Monday. That's ultimately walking through our goals, giving everyone visibility into things like our MRR, weekly sign-ups, all those things that are the core metrics we measure and track. We do this every week because it gives us 52 chances to correct the ship. If we release a payment modal and our sign-up numbers from free-to-paid go down, we know so we can revert that change and not wait 3 weeks to say: holy crap, we lost 20 potential customers as a result of this change. We can do that immediately in the following week." Finally, one-off meetings."Things are going to happen. You're going to have to meet about making specific decisions. Maybe you want to launch a campaign and you need to have all the stakeholders in there. I think the important thing there is, again, what's your goal? What do you want to accomplish? Go in with an agenda, give everyone access to that agenda. Then they can just come in prepared to talk about all the items that matter. And that will help you not stray off."She even suggests appointing someone to keep each meeting on track, a role she calls the Accountability Officer."Someone to say: hey ya’ll. Let's get back to the meat of the conversation. This is straying really far off.This prevents the types of meetings we all hate, the ones where everyone spends 20 minutes talking about nothing." The efficient way to plan and prep for meetingsSo how much time should you spend planning and preparing for meetings?"I think I'm ...
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    26 m
  • Local SEO White Labeling with Dani Owens

    Local SEO White Labeling with Dani Owens
    May 3 2021
    It's not uncommon for agencies to overlook a potential source of clients: other agencies.Yet Dani Owens has cracked this code. She's the founder and owner of Pigzilla, and some of her biggest clients are fellow marketers: people who use her white label local SEO services to get the job done.She also offers a variety of consulting and training services to SMBs, which offers them a more affordable local SEO option than simply paying a consultancy many hundreds of dollars per month.It's a model that shows all of us that there's more than one way to, uh, bring home the bacon!So tune into today's podcast and learn about a different way to structure your agency.The highlights: [1:43] What local SEO training looks like. [3:39] Businesses more likely to DIY vs. businesses more likely to hire a consultant. [5:53] Cautions for DIYers. [7:56] A great way to warn clients that Google's a fickle beast. [8:43] What white labeling SEO services look like. [9:57] Setting up a business arrangement with another agency. [12:35] Trends, and predictions for the rest of 2021. [15:06] Creating white label reports. [18:00] Shout-outs. [20:18] Dani's cause.The insights:What does Local SEO training look like?Dani admits that Local SEO training is a challenge."There are so many different tools and methods for completing certain SEO tasks. So trying to get that documentation together can be challenging. Local SEO training could include videos, walkthroughs, and of course, SOPs."She has put together a local SEO training database that stores all of her training documents in one place."It comes with a timeline so you can work through the tasks that need to be worked on. It's not super simple."Of course, the big challenge for many local business owners is they have to focus on actually running the business. "For them to start trying to become an SEO is a totally different discipline. It's similar to learning another trade. For them, I think it's challenging because they have to decide. Do I want to become an SEO expert? Or do I want to hire someone to take care of that?"In spite of the fact that training is a major part of Dani's business model, she nevertheless believes it makes more sense for most SMBs to hire an SEO  to take care of the work unless they are someone who is very interested in learning SEO for its own sake. Which businesses are more likely to DIY?The SMBs who take the most advantage of Dani's training services tend to be smaller businesses. "They want to get the work done, but they don't have the budget for it. Local SEO is expensive."She says there are a few things that can help SMBs keep their costs down."Clients can start collecting their own reviews. Sending out emails or asking people they've serviced to go ahead and leave them reviews using tools like GatherUp or Grade.us. They can write their own blog posts because they're experts in what they do. If they just created one blog post a month about a topic they get questions on, that helps."Dani notes that SMBs can often even do their own basic link building."Maybe they have a partnership with a company. They could simply ask: hey, would you mind linking to my website, or putting a badge on your site saying we're partners? Those are practical things that the small businesses can do that don't require a bunch of SEO knowledge." Of course, there are pitfalls."With GMB, you know the categories that are assigned to the listing are super important. Just shuffling those around could have large impacts. Somebody could go into a GMB listing just to optimize it and maybe they destroy the rankings it has, or they're thinking they're going to put a keyword into the business name, which could get them suspended. They can definitely damage their SEO efforts by not knowing the full story before they start working on things." A great way to warn clients: Google's a fickle beast!One challenge local SEOs often face is that when Google starts suspending listings or changing their algorithms, clients get impacted, and they get upset. This was especially prevalent during the pandemic where Google limited its support staff, ensuring it takes longer than ever to get help."It also seems like listings are getting suspended much more easily just for making simple edits to the listings. It takes a little while to get reinstated."Instead of trying to crack the code on turning Google into a helpful entity, Dani worked on finding a way to help her clients understand that this is all part of the process."I love to set the expectations. I want people to have realistic ideas of what's going to happen. Because otherwise, it just leads them to disappointment and frustration. I do like to tell them that SEO is optimizing the best we can for the search engine. The search engine is in control of everything. They're going to be deciding where and when to show your website. The expectations are super important to me."What white labeling SEO services look likeDani offers several options to ...
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    23 m
  • Making an Impact On Local SEO for Clients with Levi Williams-Clucas

    Making an Impact On Local SEO for Clients with Levi Williams-Clucas
    Apr 26 2021
    Want insights from someone who is crushing it in the Local SEO game? Meet Levi Williams-Clucas, SEO specialist at StrategiQ, an award-winning full-service agency in Suffolk. This agency works with a huge variety of both local and national businesses and has produced some incredible results. Levi has excellent insights to share. If you love everything local and are ready to nerd out a little bit, tune in to today's episode! New Local SEOs, in particular, might really love the insight at 13:44, where Levi shares the amount of time it takes to get results for clients.The highlights:[1:34] Levi's biggest GMB challenges.[3:48] Review recommendations.[5:55] Getting reviews in industries that face review-generation challenges.[9:04] Local keyword research and strategy.[13:44] The amount of time it takes to make an impact with local SEO.[17:00] Insider tricks that can generate excellent results.[20:23] The one feature GMB is lacking.[23:11] Levi's opinion on whether pay-to-play is in Google's future.[26:18] Levi's cause.The insights:Levi's Biggest Google My Business Challenges"Support."Levi says that the support Google has been offering is pretty non-existent."It's not their priority because it's a free service. They've had all their staff working from home. There are reasons behind it, but it's been frustrating."She says the other major challenge is client-based."Getting clients to really embrace reviews. I think a lot of people really underestimate the value of reviews. It's something I'm really passionate about. I talk about it all the time. I tell my clients: please, get more reviews. You have to push. You have to ask for them."Recommendations for Review Generation StrategyGarrett asked what Levi's recommendations to her clients were in regards to generating reviews."The first thing I always say is: are you actually doing a job that's worth the review? Assess what you're doing. Are you doing a 5-star job? If you're not, make sure you are before asking for nice reviews. If you're asking for reviews, people are going to be honest."As for generating more reviews?"We find the most success in email campaigns, in general: emailing existing customers, generally loyal customers, people who tend to come back a lot. Just after the purchase, right after they've got that really nice serotonin boost from making a purchase. Automated, if you can." Levi says they use a script that sends people to all the different review platforms so they get a nice spread against all the different ones the client uses. She again stresses the need to ask."Just say to people, look, if you had a good time today, if you think we did a good job, please leave a review. The number of people who will do it, just because you ask nicely!" Getting Reviews in Industries that Face Review-Generation ChallengesThe industry that Levi has seen struggle the most with review generation is the medical and pharmaceutical industry. "Obviously there's a lot of sensitive stuff that goes on in that industry, a lot of stuff you can't just talk about."She says that finance tends to have the same sort of problem. "Some people don't want to talk about the companies they work with, even if they've done a fantastic job."B2B also struggles, but Levi has solutions."Don't go to the business owner. Don't go to the company as a whole and ask for a review. Go to the individuals. The actual people that are either in the company you've serviced, the individuals that have experienced the service, perhaps one step down, not directly dealt with you, felt the benefit of the company they've worked with. That's the sort of person you want to target for reviews."She also has solutions, in general, for all industries that struggle to get reviews. She tells them to stress the fact that customers don't have to get into the gory details of the service or product they received."All they need to say is the company is worth contacting or worth working with. Sometimes you don't have to say that, you can just leave a star rating, do it under a pseudonym, whatever works."Certainly in other industries, we've spent some time going over how one might get meatier, more useful reviews. But if you're working with an industry where you're struggling to get them at all? The focus is probably going to have to be on getting a good star rating and a few words in the review text, rather than getting an in-depth review. Take a look at competitor reviews and see what might be reasonable for you to expect. Local Keyword Research and StrategyLevi warns that Local SEO in particular may need to approach keyword research a little differently, thanks to regional differences in how people might say different terms. Here in the United States, for example, we might say "cat door." In the UK, they say "cat flap." We might say we want someone to install it, they would say "fit me a." She urges Local SEOs to layer keyword research with actually performing the searches in the local areas. "It's one of ...
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    30 m
  • Getting Meta: Marketing the Marketing Agency with Amanda Milligan

    Getting Meta: Marketing the Marketing Agency with Amanda Milligan
    Apr 23 2021
    Amanda Milligan is the Marketing Director at Fractl. She writes tons of guest posts and tackles the "meta" job of marketing the marketing agency. Fractl itself is a content marketing and growth marketing agency. In 2019, it was named one of the Top Content Marketing agencies by Clutch. Amanda also hosts a podcast, called Cashing in on Content Marketing. Its tagline is "Get the buy-in and budget you deserve." It's all about proving the ROI of your content marketing work, a skill every content marketer needs to get and keep clients, or to get what they need to create the kinds of content that perform. Today, though, she and Garrett get into the nuts and bolts of her daily job, which is marketing the marketing agency. Often, marketing agencies let their own marketing fall by the wayside while spending all their time servicing clients. Fractl is a rare agency that has a dedicated person devoted to making sure their name continues to get out there.So tune in! You'll walk away with some insights about how to keep your own agency in the spotlight.The highlights:[1:15] Amanda's role at Fractl. [3:06] Amanda's approach to content marketing for her agency.[5:25] Where to focus agency marketing efforts.[6:31] Prioritizing and scheduling tasks.[10:03] Integrating marketing with sales.[14:42] Maturing content to appeal to the right leads.[16:33] How Covid impacted client relationships at Fractl.[18:47] Predictions about the future of content.[21:28] Amanda's cause.The insights:Amanda's Role at FractlAmanda's career path offers new marketers some tantalizing glimpses of what a marketing career on an upward trajectory might look like."I've been with Fractl for six and a half years. I've done a lot of different things there. I was hired initially to do copywriting and copyediting. Then I was doing the projects themselves. We call that creative strategy at Fractl, which are basically the people putting these content packages together. They oversee the creative direction. I was doing that, mixed with a little project management. Then I was doing account strategy. I was basically the point of contact for our clients managing overall engagements."Now?"Now I have the meta job of marketing a marketing agency, which is just as fun. It's separate from the client work, but it's actually getting to talk about all the other stuff at Fractl I know so well and explain how it can be valuable to businesses. I've been in this role for two years, all those guest posts are part of that, and it's been a blast."Amanda's Approach to Content Marketing for Her AgencyAs mentioned (and as known, sheepishly, by agencies everywhere), agencies in general struggle to market themselves. Amanda has an approach that works, however.One part of that approach is to avoid over-planning."Sometimes we have these grand plans like: we're going to plan out the year! It never goes that way." Amanda says you should expect to have to recalibrate every few months. Other than that, you have to do the same things for your agency that you do for your clients."We create, for our clients, these data journalism and content projects, then pitching those through digital PR to the media. We do the same thing for Fractl. I've been involved with initiatives like that while dabbling in these authoritative ways to continue. That's an authoritative play as well, link building projects, the podcasting, the guest posting on Moz and TechCrunch. People just see your brand being mentioned. We dabble in a lot of different things, and then over time, we measure. You have to have different goals for everything, and not expect conversions every time an episode goes live." Where to Focus Agency Marketing EffortsAmanda says she really focuses on the top of the funnel."We really focus on inbound. We're really just honing: okay, what is really helpful for people, what's working, what's getting them engaged, what's the next thing we can provide to help them?"She says this year she's been focusing on on-site content."We hadn't put a lot of time on it in the past. We've had some great things in the past, but it's not as optimized as it could be, it's not as updated as it could be. That's been really fun to focus on."Amanda says she enjoys watching the leads come in. She likes seeing what kinds of questions the clients are asking so she can create new content pieces that answer those questions. Prioritizing and Scheduling TasksDay-to-day prioritization is another challenge most marketers are familiar with. Here's what Amanda's been doing with her days."I'm getting a little more involved in sales. I'm really excited about that because I think we're all aware of how tied [sales and marketing] are. Now that I'm taking these initial calls and vetting leads, I'm hearing people explain why they reached out and what their problems are."This lets her know more about their ideal clients, how sales help them through those initial conversations, and how those conversations can continue to align...
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    24 m
  • Assessing User Intent for SEO at Scale with Suganthan Mohanadasan and Andy Chadwick

    Assessing User Intent for SEO at Scale with Suganthan Mohanadasan and Andy Chadwick
    Apr 19 2021
    Whatever you do, don't call Snippet Digital an agency.Suganthan and Andy will be the first to tell you they are SEO Consultants, not an SEO agency – and that many SEO agencies are among their client base.Right now, though, it's not their consultancy that's getting all the buzz and attention. It's their new SaaS product: Keyword Insights.While Keyword Insights is still in beta and actively courting testers, this product can supercharge your SEO strategy by helping you research over 100,000 keywords at a time. You can then group them by intent and rank them, allowing you to create a more efficient, modern approach to SEO and content creation.Want to learn more about this awesome tool and all the problems it solves? Tune in! The highlights:[1:32] Why Suganthan and Andy are so adamant that Snippet Digital is no agency.[5:15] Why they built Keyword Insights.[10:26] Solving the problems of keyword intent.[16:16] Using the tool to generate a content strategy.[19:06] Beta test feedback.[25:41] Keyword Insights: the main value prop.[27:52] Andy's cause.[30:01] Suganthan's cause. The insights: Snippet Digital: We're No AgencyWhy are Andy and Suganthan so adamant that Snippet Digital is not an agency, and never will be?Andy says that in part it's because they do a lot of work with agencies. "We'll work with agencies just as much as we'll work with our own clients."Andy also ran a 17 to 20 employee business in the past and didn’t like being responsible for so many people. Now Snippet Digital uses freelancers, but Suganthan and Andy remain hands-on.Suganthan adds: "We like to stay small. I personally feel we can add a lot more value to customers. When customers come to us personally, we work on the project. It's not like we onboard a client and have ten other people deal with the client. We deal with the client. We actually look at the nitty-gritty of that client's SEO." They get in there and do most of the work themselves. This has resulted in them having to spend zero dollars on marketing, as they've been bringing in clients through word-of-mouth and referrals only. Cracking the Code to Categorizing Queries for Search Intent with Keyword DecipherAndy explains how he had begun to approach the problem of taking a large number of search queries and using machine learning to filter them into different buckets. Suganthan was excited to work with Andy to build on some of those initial strategies."I came from a global agency. We were doing keyword research on 50K to 60K keywords at a time. Keyword categorization would be done manually by someone with some clever Excel logic. It still took weeks, 50-60 hours maybe."While he was still at this agency, Andy programmed a PHP tool to do the job a lot quicker, cutting the time down to about 20-30 hours. "When Suganthan and I got together I showed him what I was doing he got excited and we started bringing machine learning into it, which was the next stage."Andy admits currently the tool still is not as automated as he might like, but 60 hours of work have now been cut down to 7 or 8 hours.  This collaboration resulted in Suganthan and Andy creating a tool that hasn't been released to the public yet called Keyword Decipher (and might not necessarily go public). "We categorize and load all that data in. It's built on Panda's framework. It's a really nice UI. It's not Google Sheets. It allows us to do keyword research that's massive and works a lot better than Google Sheets, and you can pivot the data any way you want."Suganthan notes that they also practice over time."For our Keyword Decipher platform clients can choose their keywords, and can go back 6 months. 6 months ago, this intent was fragmented, but now after 6 months, Google has changed the Top 10 results. It's widely considered that they use behavior analysis to figure out how people use the search results. It seems like after 6 months Google has decided to show the product page over the blog post. They find more users engaging with that better. That's an actionable insight for the client."  Leveling Up Keyword Intent Categorization and Actionable SEO Strategy at Scale with Keyword InsightsSuganthan explained how they could take the power of Keyword Decipher and add a complementary layer of actionable context with Keyword Insights."We realized when we looked online at the way everyone is trying to solve the intent problem, everyone is pretty much using the same sort of formula. A basic formula to say: hey, if the keyword asks why or how it's informational. This is a very rudimentary way at looking at intent."Suganthan says they realized quickly that what they thought the term implied would often generate unexpected results when one actually plugged those terms into Google."Often Google's understanding of a keyword is very different from what we think it is. Most people are doing guesswork. We went and said: we're going to just look at what Google is thinking, and we're going to literally copy that idea,...
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    32 m