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7 Steps to Building a High-Performance Digital Marketing Team

December 24, 2018 • Featured, SEO 101 • 799

Digital marketing is a wide-ranging discipline that has grown to incorporate a lot more than just some SEO knowledge and how to make online ads. This has resulted in a businesses requiring a team of digital marketers, all with their own specialities. But how do you build a high-performance digital marketing team that works?

Built not just by chance

One of the key things to understand when working through these seven steps is that a great team doesn’t just happen by chance, it is built by design. Start out by hiring ambitious employees who are flexible and creative employees who work well with others. View team building as an ongoing project from the beginning and make sure the team always has the right tools for the job.

Hire people for their hunger

When hiring, look for a creative attitude and a hunger for the job. Someone that is always looking to learn, take initiative and have great personal drive. Experience is nice but can quickly be obsolete. Don’t be afraid to give interviewees a real-life marketing project to work on. Use situations that your company has dealt with and see what kind of solutions they come up with. Also look for samples of their work in the past.

Look for employee specialisation

The most successful team will have specialists that handle a specific part of the digital marketing business. You don’t have to employ them as specialists – you can work with them to help them become specialists.

Help them to learn

It is important to help employees grow and build some structures in the training process to help them become specialists in a specific area of digital marketing. Tools like five-year plans and monthly one-on-one’s can help with goal setting and providing company guidance. It should also include time for them to experiment and gain experience during this process. Conferences, webinars and even curated reading lists can also complement this goal.

Don’t over-staff

There’s a balance between “just right” and too many staff. Don’t be tempted to over-staff with too many employees just because the budget affords it. A steady hiring pace can ensure you get the right employees who fit your needs while making sure there is a need for each hire. Let your team grow naturally over time. Bringing on the wrong person or hiring too many people at once can interrupt the dynamics of your team.

Create a collaboration culture

One of the side effects of success is that collaboration becomes increasingly difficult as the company grows larger. Oftentimes, employees are working at their own pace and on their own projects that seem to have no relationship to other projects. Our goal is to cultivate collaboration both in real life and in the cloud.

With the use of team work sessions and collaboration software, team members can have a better idea of the project objectives, their responsibility, and how their roles fit in the larger picture.
It’s a good starting point to encourage collaboration, a sense of teamwork and a happier workplace.

Building a team

Telling people they are a team is one thing – making them feel a part of it is another. As your team grows, you will need to find team building activities designed for larger teams to nurture their relationships and optimize work performance. Creating a culture that encourages shared goals, ambitions, and a collaborative work environment is one of the key ingredients of a successful digital marketing team.

A successful approach

By taking these steps when you are building your digital marketing team, you increase the chances of success. Having a team of happy employees who complement each other is the best approach to creating happy customers and repeating clients.
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10 Tips on How to Kickstart your Digital Marketing Career

November 29, 2018 • SEO 101 • 484
Digital marketing is a huge growth area – in the US alone, the rate it is growing is three times that of national GDP and here in the UK, it is growing at a similar rate. That means there’s never been a better time to kickstart your digital marketing career. And here are 10 expert tips to help you.

1. Be keen to learn

Digital marketing is a huge growth market and is also a hugely changing one. Not a day goes by where some new tool, technique, approach or methodology seems to emerge, and this means you need to be keen to learn. You need to be someone who loves to try something new, to learn and to explore their topic so they always know what might work.

2. Keep up to date

As well as being keen to learn, you also need to know how to keep up to date with the latest developments and where to go to get the best possible information. That often means having a system for the latest news and a way to check the most reliable sources for the information you need. For example, you might use an RSS feed reader to collate the latest news. Examples of authority sites include:
- SEO – MOZ, SEO Gadget, Search Engine Land
- PPC – PPC Hero, Search Engine Land, AdEspresso
- Social Media – Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today
- Content marketing – Hubspot
3.    Learn to network

Networking is a traditional approach that has gone digital and remains as important as ever. You want to have a network of people to refer clients to you, to help with areas you don’t do and to give you support as you build your business. You can also attend industry meetups and other in-person events for the chance to do some traditional networking.

4.    Use personal projects to test

Good marketers are confident in what they do, not just because they have learned but because they have tested. That’s why having personal projects to test ideas and concepts is a vital part of digital marketing success. This might mean testing on your own business or even having a side project such as a blog or an online store that you can use to experiment with. These results can then be used in case studies to show clients.

5.    Know the terminology

While you don’t want to throw a load of jargon at customers and confuse them, you should still know it all and be able to use it where appropriate. Terms like PPC, SEO and SEM are going to be core to what you do, and you need to be able to explain them to customers – in particular, why they matter to the customer.

6.    Have a personal brand

When you are your business, you are also the face of your business and that often means having a personal brand. This is something that can be used to show who you are and what you do but also creates that sense of trust with customers. A website is crucial and social media profiles for your business and you are also important.

7.    Consider being a ‘T-shaped marketer’

This is a term created by Rand Fishkin of MOZ and refers to someone who has a basic understanding of a number of different marketing disciplines but specialises in one or two areas. So you may be able to offer general advice and tips on On-Page SEO, Rich Snippets and Schema, what tools to use and more. But you may be a specialist in PPC advertising or social media marketing.

8.    Cultivate your inner numbers nerd

If there’s one thing marketing needs, its numbers. Numbers are what you aim for and what you measure with. So it is important to cultivate that inner numbers nerd and get used to looking at, understanding and even getting excited by numbers. You can also use these numbers to show what you do to clients. Of course, a side order of graphic design skills, coding or other areas wouldn’t hurt either.

9.    Know key metrics

Metrics are the things that we measure to see what works and what doesn’t. Success as a marketer is knowing which of these to study and which to disregard. Obviously, the money made by a client is always the most important metric, traffic to the website may be key, conversion rates on ads or how much traffic you can get from a certain social media following. Know your metrics, why they matter and how you find them.

10. Certification

Digital marketing is still an industry where having a certificate can add to your appeal for customers. There are a few different options such as Marketing Digital, who offer help with getting a Diploma in Digital Marketing. Use this training to showcase what you do by having a certificate to prove it.
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Think Your Business Doesn’t Need SEO? Think Again

November 22, 2018 • SEO 101 • 433

Established Businesses Need to Focus on SEO

Even the most mature and successful business will derive benefit from a good SEO strategy. Don’t let yours miss out.

If you operate a successful business that has thrived for a number of years, then you will know that it did not achieve its success by standing still. The competitive marketplace has always been a place of constant change and evolution, and no more so than today, where traditional business methods blend with online and digital strategies.

With that in mind, it comes as something of a surprise to corporate marketing specialists when they hear businesses say that they do not need to worry about SEO because they are already well established.

Presumably, the reasoning is that they are already ranking well, and so SEO is “done” – but if that was the case, why would Google itself feel the need to hire an SEO Manager to boost its own rankings on Google?

If the company whose name is synonymous with those very search engines on which we seek to rank feels that there is still scope to improve its SEO, then clearly, there is no room for any of us to rest on our laurels. Here are four reasons why:

Everyone uses search engines

Despite all the hype over social media, warm leads content marketing and so on, the fact is that more than 90 percent of online experiences start with a search engine. If your organisation is not optimised to rank as well as possible, it will inevitably mean you are missing out on a huge amount of potential business. Even if your numbers look good and your business has seen growth, it could be so much better with a committed and professional SEO strategy, delivered by a freelancer or an established SEO agency.

Competitors don’t stand still

If you are not interested in ranking well on Google, you can bet that your competitors are. The implications are obvious – you need to be at least as committed, just in order to stand still, and if you are not actively working on your SEO, you will go backwards and be overtaken. Of course, the problem is that SEO is not a magic panacea – in fact, a recent survey of SEO consultants revealed that it usually takes somewhere between four months and one year to see palpable results. Fall behind, and it can be a real challenge to catch up.

Web design and SEO needs to be aligned

Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that SEO and web design are two totally separate services, however, the two need to be planned and developed together for optimal results. The type of web designer businesses work with are those that ensure a technical SEO team is working in partnership them from the outset of any new project. Taking this approach creates a more robust foundation on which to build a digital marketing campaign – a solid website built on a fast and secure server with sound site architecture and logical navigation will always be easier to rank well in Google.

The competitive marketplace is changing

The Penguin and Panda updates made a real difference to the competitive marketplace. Suddenly, small businesses were able to compete on equal terms with the large, established organisations. This is because Google placed far more weight on the quality and relevance of content. Market share and a fat marketing budget are no longer enough to reach the top of the rankings.

Search engines are evolving too

As Google has demonstrated, SEO is not something you “do” and then forget about. This is because the algorithms used to crawl the web and find the best results are changing all the time. A simple example is Google’s mobile-first strategy, which penalises sites that are not mobile friendly, and brought about what some people termed Mobilegeddon when the update was released in 2015.

In order to stay at the front of the pack, it is essential to have a coherent SEO strategy and an experienced SEO expert on hand, to help you roll with the punches and make sure your business takes all the positives and none of the negatives out of every Google update.

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Guest Posting: The Solution For Your Blog’s Low Traffic Volume

October 29, 2018 • Featured, SEO 101 • 1040

Whether you are engaged in blogging for business or even for personal reasons, blogging is way more fulfilling, professionally and personally, when you have a large audience. But what if your blog has a low traffic volume? What can you do to increase your market? Among the many different search engine optimization (SEO) techniques you can try is guest posting.

Guest Posting

Guest posting (also known as guest blogging) is a fairly new digital marketing approach which has taken the SEO industry by storm. It works by exposing you to the audience of another blogger’s blog, thus helping you establish authority among a wider and more comprehensive viewership.

In practice, guest posting is done by contributing relevant content or a write-up in another person’s blog. In the body of the article, anchor links which link to the blogger’s own blog site are then inserted. This is the consideration in return for the relevant contribution by the “guest poster” or “guest blogger” to the other blog. These backlinks will then increase the value of your blog to search engines, making it more accessible and easier to find in Google, Yahoo!, Baidu, Exalead and Bing among others.

In order to get more traffic with guest posts, you must not only make sure that you find a blog site or a website which has a large traffic volume, but you must also make sure that your contribution fits the publisher site. For example, if your target blog site is dedicated to publishing content related to wedding event how-to’s and wedding preparations, you need to make sure you write something related to that. It would be out of line to post something about President Donald Trump in that site. Moreover, the blog owner, more likely than not, will reject your contribution.

Your contribution must be relevant and appropriate to the target audience.

Also, to increase your chances of getting accepted to guest post in a popular blog, you should try to make yourself known or, at the very least, recognizable to them. You can do this by commenting on their blog posts and/or tweeting about them or their articles in order to get their attention. But take note that not all blog sites or blog owners are open to guest posting or guest blogging.

In the fortunate event that you have been accepted to guest post on a popular blog site, make sure to familiarize yourself first with their content. Are the articles on the site predominantly long or short? Do they discuss topics in a very general or very specific manner? Your contribution must be aligned with the format and idea of the previous posts on the blog. Giving excellent and relevant guest posts to the other blog will build a good business relationship between you. This will increase your chances of providing another guest post to their site in the future, so always give good content.

To end with…

If you are relatively new to the SEO field, chances are you do not have access or connection to popular blog sites with high traffic volumes. But you are not left with no recourse in this case. There are many website-based businesses which offer their clients guest posting services. They guarantee more clicks and more traffic by matching the character and drift of your site to the other site where the guest post is to be published.
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Why Useful Content Brings In Leads

October 18, 2018 • Featured, SEO 101 • 939

I’d like to tell you a story, so make sure you’re sitting comfortably. It begins like this…

Once upon a time, there was an inbound marketing agency. The people who worked there were very happy and loved their jobs. They loved helping companies to grow and reach more customers. The only thing they didn’t love was when clients would ask them to use magic. Magic had been banished from the agency and no one had a magic wand, so they had to explain to their clients over and over that no one would perform any magic, all they could do was work hard.

Sometimes, they would have new clients who were still under the spell of evil marketing agencies. These companies would take bags and bags of gold from them and promise that they would use magic to get what they want. The only magic that the evil agencies could conjure was making their gold disappear. Every time someone got tricked by an evil agency, they would explain how the hard work method works.

This is how hard work pays off…

– You first have to understand who your customers are and what they need from you.

– Then you have to work out how these people make decisions and what information would be useful to them at every step in the process.

– Next, you need to create content that will help to solve their problems, whatever they might be. Some agencies sometimes get help with this content creation from external parties.

– The most important thing to remember is that you HELP your audience, you don’t help yourself. For example, if you’re an architect, you might write guides for interior design, or a glossary explaining the most complex terms in your industry.

Let’s return to the story

One day, a worker at the agency found a piece of software that he liked using because it made his day easier. It wasn’t related to marketing, but he decided to write a blog post about it anyway as he was sure it would help other people out. The blog post was really helpful and lots of people found it through search. Although it had nothing to do with the agency, it helped a small business owner to solve a problem.

And they all lived happily ever after

The small business owner loved the post so much that they got in touch with the agency and told them about their troubles with their marketing. The agency said they could help, so they created a contract and started working together the very next day.

What’s the point of all this?

This isn’t just a fairy tale, this is how inbound marketing works. When you create useful content that helps to solve real-world problems for people, you bring qualified leads to your site. They might land on your site looking for information, but you also have the chance to tell them about your business and convince them that you are the right person for the job. It’s not magic, it’s just a bit of hard work.
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