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You can’t build your business on a house of cards…

by Internet AdvertisingMarket ResearchOnline Marketing

Recently, while talking to an old friend, I was reminded of a company I know of (to protect myself from the overly litigious I won’t mention how I know of them, what my relationship was with them, or even where they were located) . This company (which is now out of business but shall remain nameless all the same) sold online traffic to clients in all types of industries. They were a performance-based marketing company, meaning their clients only paid them for the traffic they received (leads, sales, etc).

This company had many problems, from poor management to a flawed business model, and just about everything in between. But the biggest problem was that their entire operation was based on a house of cards. More to the point, what they were doing was fraudulent. Specifically, the traffic they were sending to their clients was garbage, and they knew it. The traffic was called “incentivized” because users were compensated to complete offers (such as surveys, quotes for auto insurance or credit cards, or even purchasing actual products). Once those offers were completed and the users received their rewards, they would promptly opt-out of the surveys or cancel their quotes or purchases, usually leaving the advertisers (their clients) with nothing to show for it. Eventually of course the advertisers would wise-up and cancel, occasionally sending an official cease-and-desist letter in the process. They would then have to find new clients to replace those that had left. It was a shell game. Not surprisingly, and most deservedly, the company eventually went under.

I promised myself that I would never engage in business practices like that, and that I would do everything in my power to make sure that our services were not only legitimate, but also in the best interests of our clients. I’m happy to say that at DanMatt Media both are true.

The traffic we use comes from either the world’s largest search engines (Google, and to a much lesser extent Bing) or from our vetted collection of online and offline pay-per-call publishers. None of these sources reward their users for completing offers or buying products. That vastly improves traffic quality and ROI for our clients. To be fair, not every marketing campaign we run proves successful for our customers. Some do not obtain the ROI they are looking for, and eventually cancel. But that’s not because the traffic is fraudulent. Sometimes things just don’t work out, but if the intent was honorable and the traffic is legitimate, we can always hold our heads high.

One can learn a valuable lesson by studying this unnamed company. You can’t build your business on a house of cards. There is no get-rich-quick scheme in business that works longterm. Offer your clients a valuable service, based on legit traffic, and give them the customer service they deserve, and you’ll be rewarded with a successful career. It won’t work out for everyone, but by and large it will work well for most.

best seo company Denver

Why you need diversification in your marketing plan…

by Internet AdvertisingOnline Marketing

Diversification. It’s something we all hear about from our financial advisors and nutritionists. Turns out, you need it for your company’s marketing plan as well.

Here at DanMatt Media we have a lot of clients. Big ones and small ones. Local ones and national ones. But one thing that many of them share in common is a lack of diversification in their approach to marketing.

We offer all kinds of solutions to help grow your business. Pay Per Click, SEO, Social Media, Print, Direct Mail, Radio, and TV advertising, to name a few. And though we always harp on our clients to use as many of these channels as possible, many of them choose to only focus on one of them in order to save on costs.

The problem with that approach is that you’re leaving too many sales on the table. You’re not reaching enough people to actively and aggressively promote your products or services. It’s like choosing to only eat grilled chicken for every single meal. Sure, it’s healthy, but you’re missing out on the valuable nutrients you’d receive with a balanced diet. The same is true in marketing. You might be doing really well on Google organic (via your SEO campaign) but you’re missing out on the paid search traffic (Pay Per Click) and the social media traffic, and that’s costing you a lot of new customers and the subsequent growth in revenue.

I know what you’re thinking. “Sure, I’d love to use all of these channels, but my budget doesn’t allow for it”. We get that, and it’s a reality we face with almost all of our clients. But that’s precisely why you hire an expert marketing team like us, so that we can do the research for you and apply our decades of experience to advise you on which channels make the most sense for your company, all while staying within your budget constraints. Typically, that will involve all or some combination of at least SEO, Pay Per Click, and social media marketing.

When you’re ready to get started with your diversified marketing approach in 2019, give us a call or send us a website inquiry. We’re here to help you grow!

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It’s Thanksgiving. Time to be thankful!

by Internet Advertising

I don’t believe there is any greater feeling in the world than gratitude. After all, if you’re grateful and thankful for something, you can’t help but have warm feelings about it. In that vein, it’s time for my annual list of what I’m thankful for. Hopefully, you have some or all of these things in your life too…

Health: My wife is healthy (very healthy now that she’s on her healthy eating plan). I’m reasonably healthy (though I could certainly drop 20 pounds). My kids are healthy. Even my fish are healthy. It’s true that without your health you have nothing.

Business: I’m thankful for my job. I’m thankful for my clients (the big ones and the small ones). Without them, I wouldn’t have a job and no one would be able to read this incredible blog post. And I’m thankful for my co-workers, who not only put up with me, but take great care of our clients as well.

Golf: Even though my golf skills have seriously diminished of late (see last month’s blog post) I’m very thankful for this greatest of games. Golf gets me outdoors, burns calories, and gives me some much needed diversion from work and parenting. If you’re not yet a golfer, I urge you to take up the game.

Perspective: Unfortunately my wife and I have lost family members and friends in the last few years, all of them too early. Their deaths have given me a greater perspective on life. It’s short, precious, and shouldn’t be wasted worrying about things that don’t really matter. I try to remind myself of this when I lose a client or my kids have a tantrum. Easier said than done, but I’m working on it.

Tomorrow: If you’re healthy, there is always tomorrow. Tomorrow brings the promise of new opportunities, new experiences, more snuggles with my kids, and maybe one more round of golf in the 60s (this is the first year I haven’t broken 70, even once, sigh…).

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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Is this the beginning of the end of my amateur golf career?

by Internet Advertising

Last week I played in the Colorado state Mid Amateur Championship. It’s the championship for the best amateur players in the state aged 25 and older. I’ve played in this event most years since I moved to Colorado, and in the past I have almost always finished in the Top 10, and even contended for the title a few times.

But that was in my 30s. I’m 40 now, with two young kids and a busy job. I don’t practice and play golf nearly as often as I used to, and I hit it shorter now than I ever have. This year’s event was held at a golf course that is universally considered to be a “bomber’s paradise”, meaning it’s wide open and very long. Simply put, that’s the worst kind of golf course for me. I hit it short and (usually) straight. I need shorter, tighter golf courses to level the playing field.

This year I made a 30 foot putt on the 18th hole in my second round to make the cut right on the number. In the past, I never even considered the cut line, as I was usually around the Top 10 after the second round. But this year, after a tough first day, I knew I had a lot of work to do to make it to the final round. I played well in round 2, and was happy to make the cut, but it reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for the last year or so. Should I really be trying to play golf at this level anymore?

I read the post-round article and compared the clubs I was hitting into greens to that of the winner. The 15th hole is a 510 yard uphill par 4, and it was cold the last round. I hit a good drive and had a 3 wood into the green. The winner hit a gap wedge. The 18th hole is a 590 yard uphill par 5. I hit a good drive, a solid hybrid to lay up, and a little 8 iron into the green. The winner was pin-high in two shots. It was the same way with most of the other holes that day. So what does all this mean? It means that I don’t hit the golf ball nearly far enough to keep up with today’s modern mid-amateur golfer. My lack of distance, especially at a wide-open and long course, puts me at a huge disadvantage. The same can be said for my lack of practice and lack of tournament golf throughout the year. It’s become too difficult to compete at this level when you’re spotting the field 50 yards off the tee and playing one quarter as much as they do.

As much as I hate to admit it, the time has probably come for me to consider gracefully bowing-out of competitive golf. Sure I’ll still play a select tournament or two each year. Maybe my club championship and a two-man team event, where I have a partner to help carry the load. But competing for individual state and national championships is likely behind me now, and somehow I’ll have to come to grips with that. Every athlete has his heyday, and eventually the game passes all of us by. Time to embrace casual golf with friends…

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Does SEO really work?

by Internet Advertising

One of the questions I’m often asked by prospective clients is, “does SEO really work”? The answer is yes, but it depends on your expectations.

Unlike SEM (pay per click marketing) where you can outbid your competition for the coveted spots at the top of page 1 of Google, with SEO you can only outrank them if your site is deemed more relevant and worthy of that lofty ranking by the geniuses at Google. How Google goes about determining that formula is due in large part to their murky and mystical algorithms, and no one outside of the tech giant really seems to have the answer. But that doesn’t mean that SEO is a complete crap-shoot.

There are many tried and true methodologies for improving traffic and keyword rankings in Google organic. On-site SEO services like rewriting meta descriptions and title tags, and creating and optimizing relevant and keyword-rich content all have their place in SEO success. Off-site SEO work like back-linking and citation building are certainly critical to success as well.

But Google search, whether paid or organic, is a page 1 or bust operation. So while moving an important keyword from the number 100 position to the number 20 position is impressive, it’s not likely to result in any new business for the client. To get anything out of SEO, you really need to be on page 1, and ideally in the first few spots on Google. The problem is, there are only 10 organic spots on page 1, and typically half of those listings are taken-up by sites with enormous amounts of traffic that a small to medium sized business will never be able to outcompete. That only leaves a handful of page 1 slots available for all the competing businesses in a major city or metro region. So what to do?

We tell prospective clients that real SEO success doesn’t mean all of your keywords are at the very top of page 1. That’s laudable, but unlikely to happen unless you have almost no competition. In the real world, the way we measure success in the SEO channel is to obtain SOME page 1 rankings for SOME important keywords. The more the better, but the goal is to have at least a handful of page 1 rankings for keywords that drive new business. That’s a far more achievable goal, and if reached it usually produces a positive ROI for the client. In other words, they get enough business out of having some of their important keywords on page 1 of Google to easily justify the cost of running the SEO campaign.

In the hyper-competitive world that we live in, that’s what real success looks like in the SEO channel.

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Sales: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

by Internet Advertising

I recently purchased a new car. The process wasn’t too bad, but I didn’t like the sales person I dealt with, and that got me thinking about the nature of sales.

A big part of my job is to bring in new business. That’s sales. It’s not all I do, as I wear a lot of hats, but it’s one of the most important parts of my job. I can’t say that I love to sell, but I don’t hate it either. I enjoy helping people, and partnering with them to help grow their businesses certainly qualifies as that. I’m a people-person who enjoys creating and fostering relationships, and that’s a big part of sales too. And you can make a nice living if you can sell, and that’s a big plus too.

But there are aspects of sales that I don’t like. I hate cold-calling, and even though it can be an effective sales strategy I don’t do it much anymore. It’s rarely well-received these days. And I don’t like the inherent mistrust that is associated with salespeople. We’re not all crooks, liars, and thieves. Some of us are actually good people, and I’d like to think that’s me too.

One thing that I have learned in my decade-plus of sales is that people by and large do not like pushy salespeople. They don’t want to be bullied into buying something, whether they need it or not. As such, I don’t push. Either we’re a fit for you, or we’re not. From the sale side, my job is to present our marketing solutions to a prospective client and discuss how we can help him or her, and why we’re a better fit than our competition. It’s not to convince them to sign-up for something they neither want nor need, nor to push them into something that isn’t in their best interest. If it’s a fit; great. We’re excited to be your longterm marketing partner and we’ll work as hard as possible on your behalf to ensure that you receive the ROI you’re after. And if it’s not a fit; that’s fine, and I wish them the best of luck with their business.

If this sounds like the kind of partner you’re after for your marketing efforts, give us a call.

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What do good rankings for SEO really mean?

by Internet Advertising

In many ways SEO is the mystery of online marketing. By that I mean most people don’t really know what goes into an SEO campaign, and what the success metrics look like.

If you ask the average business owner, he or she will likely tell you that they’ve heard of SEO, and many know that it’s a form of online advertising through the world’s major search engines (such as Google, and to a lesser extent Bing). But most can’t tell you what a successful SEO campaign should yield. Most don’t know what it really means to succeed in the SEO channel.

The goal of any SEO campaign should be to have your ad appear as close to the # 1 position on page 1 of Google (and Bing, ideally) as possible, when someone searches for the keyword phrases that are most important and relevant to the products and services that you offer. That’s really all there is to it. By doing so, the amount and relevancy of the traffic coming to your website and phone lines will increase, and it’s highly likely that you will receive more phone calls and leads as a result. And more phone calls and leads SHOULD turn into new business.

Often a business owner will want any and all possible keyword phrases to rank on page 1 of Google. That’s a laudable goal, but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever have all of your relevant keyword phrases ranking on page 1. Especially if you find yourself in a highly-competitive industry like legal services, roofing, plumbers, electricians, etc. What is a far more realistic goal is to obtain page 1 rankings for at least some of these important keyword terms. For example, a personal injury attorney might realistically expect to obtain page 1 rankings for terms like “motorcycle injury lawyer” or “medical malpractice attorney”, but may not not be able to obtain page 1 rankings for terms like “personal injury lawyer”. The reason for that is that page 1 rankings for incredibly competitive terms like “personal injury lawyer” are very hard to come by. Out of perhaps hundreds of personal injury law firms in a given metro area, there are only 10 spots on page 1 to be had, and that’s a tall order. The key though is to obtain page 1 rankings for some of these important terms, so that your organic SEO ads are being displayed to prospective clients.

In a similar fashion, may business owners want and expect all of the pages on their website to rank on page 1 of Google. Again, this is unnecessary and unrealistic. What is really important is to have your main service pages appear on page 1 of Google. Using the example above, a personal injury attorney would want his or her dedicated medical malpractice page (you do have dedicated website pages for each major service you offer, don’t you?) to appear in the ad on page 1 of Google when someone searches for a term like “medical malpractice attorney”. Having their blog page or their contact us page appear on page 1 won’t help. You want to connect your ad and your corresponding website page with prospective customers at the moment they are searching for the service in question.

If all of this still sounds like a mystery, give us a call or send us a website inquiry form. We can help you sort through the confusion and obtain real success via SEO.

SEO company Washington DC

Keep it small, keep it all.

by Internet Advertising

Perhaps you’ve heard the old saying, “Keep it small, keep it all”. In business, it typically refers to containing or minimizing the size of your business and overhead, in order to make sure that your company is profitable. This is doubly important with small business, and especially necessary when you’re talking about businesses in industries that change rapidly.

DanMatt Media is one such business. We’re small, family-owned and operated, and we are in an industry that changes very fast, sometimes even daily. Unlike traditional media channels such as print, radio and television, ads in the digital world can be put up and pulled down every single day, and sometimes multiple times in a day. But with that flexibility comes a very real problem; lack of continuity. These days, more than ever, clients come and go. Budgets get increased and then slashed, and customers more and more use price as the single most important factor on which agency they choose. What this all boils down to is that you can no longer count on anything, or anyone, for solid revenue every month. All of this necessitates keeping your digital marketing agency streamlined, in order to help ensure that you stay in business.

My last company (the name of which I won’t mention here) didn’t understand this concept. Perhaps out of vanity, or perhaps out of ignorance, their payroll grew to 4x what it needed to be to run the company. They had an entire floor of a high-rise building downtown, when what they really needed was a small office in the suburbs. This came about because the CEO assumed that the heydays of high revenue would continue in perpetuity. Of course it didn’t, and when it didn’t the company fell on hard times. The company became overstaffed and underfunded. It has subsequently been sold, rebranded, sold again, and is now out of business. The lesson here is that a small business must always plan for the future. The good times never roll month-in and month-out, so you can’t allow your overhead and work force to be dependent on your top quarterly earnings. You have to plan for the lowest common denominator.

Doing so not only ensures that your company can weather a storm of poor months or even poor quarters, but it also allows you to pass some of those savings onto your clients. And that in turn helps you to land new ones, which in turn helps you to grow, save, and ultimately stay in business. Small business owners would therefore be wise to ensure that their overhead and payroll are commensurate with their lowest monthly revenue figures. When the good times are rolling, save the profits and re-invest in your business, which can include additional hires, but only when necessary. And skip the fancy downtown office.

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Give us 3-6 months. We’ll show you what we can do!

by with No Comment Internet Advertising

In my job I speak with a lot of business owners and executives, most of whom have already tried SEM (pay per click marketing) and/or SEO (organic search).  And if they haven’t tried it yet, you can bet they’ve been approached with those services before.

All of these people have been told (correctly) that it takes time for the results to come in.  In the case of SEM, we typically see very good results in month 1, and those results improve in months 2 and 3 as we collect more and more data to analyze and optimize.  We make the changes and tweaks required for success, but we need enough time and enough data to be able to ascertain which strategies are working best.  For SEO, we still typically see good results in month 1, but it can take much longer to obtain page 1 rankings for important keywords.  You can’t outspend your competition with SEO, so you have to out-rank them with relevancy and quality, and that is never instantaneous.

This is why we ask prospective clients to give us at least 3 months with a new SEM campaign, and to give us at least 6 months with a new SEO campaign.  Those timeframes give us a very realistic opportunity to prove ourselves and obtain the results our clients are looking for, while simultaneously mitigating the client’s risk.  After all, we’re not asking them to stay with something forever with no results to show for it.

Unlike many marketing agencies, we do not require clients to sign longterm contracts.  Everything we do is month-to-month.  But we don’t have a magic wand, and great results take time to materialize, especially when we’re talking about a new SEO campaign.  So if you’re looking to get started with an agency that has a proven track record of success, give us 3-6 months and we’ll show how great we can be.  You won’t be sorry that you did.

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ROI

by with No Comment Internet Advertising

ROI (Return On Investment) is perhaps the single most important aspect of any marketing campaign.  It’s something that our clients track regularly, and unfortunately it’s one of the few facets of a campaign that we have no control over.

As an on-line and off-line advertising agency, our job is to design and implement marketing campaigns that place our clients in a position to be successful.  Typically, that means that we get their ads in front of interested buyers at the moment that they are searching for the products and services that our clients are offering.  That holds true whether a potential customer is running a Google search (SEO and SEM) or looking through an old-school yellow pages directory (print advertising).  It’s the same thing; we want searchers to see our client’s ads right when they’re looking to buy.

The problem is that once they see these ads, we have no control over their behavior.  We can’t force them to call the phone number in the Google ad or in the yellow page ad, and we certainly can’t force them to buy from our clients.  If we had that ability, I’d be writing this from my yacht in the South Pacific, and not from my office in Colorado.

Ultimately, the ROI that our clients receive (revenue earned minus revenue spent) is the ultimate litmus test for campaign success.  Fortunately, over the last 24 years we’ve gotten quite good at creating custom marketing campaigns (in both digital and traditional advertising mediums) that put our clients in a position to be successful, and to obtain the ROI they’re looking for.