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Are you an attorney looking for more calls? We can help you!

by Internet Advertising

We speak with a lot of prospective clients in the legal industry.  Family and divorce lawyers, criminal defense and personal injury attorneys, etc.  Most of them have the same problem; they’re not getting enough business out of their online marketing efforts.

Many of these attorneys have tried SEO in the past, and it didn’t work for them.  It didn’t produce enough (sometimes any) phone call leads, and the law firm lost money on the SEO campaign.  We run SEO campaigns for attorneys too, and we do a great job, but there are very few spots on page 1 of Google.  If you’re not on page 1, you’re nowhere to be found, and it can take a very long time to obtain page 1 placement in these highly competitive industries.

If SEO wasn’t the culprit, perhaps they signed up with an attorney-focused marketing company, such as Avvo, Justia, or Martindale-Hubbell.  They pay these companies thousands of dollars every month for new business, but it almost never works out.  The reason for that is simple.  These websites have hundreds, even thousands, of competing attorneys on the same pages, in the same practice areas, and in the same metro regions.  There is literally no way to differentiate one attorney or law firm from another, so it’s luck of the draw if visitors call you versus one of your competitors.  You’re entrusting your marketing budget to chance.  That’s where our SEM solution comes in…

SEM, or pay per click, is a GREAT way for attorneys to grow their businesses.  In last month’s blog post I highlighted the differences between SEO and SEM, and in an effort to make our SEM services more affordable to attorneys, we have created some very attractive entry-level price points.  Depending on the type of law you practice and the areas you serve, we can run an entry-level SEM campaign for as little as $2,500 per month.  That gives you top of page 1 placement on Google (when your ad is shown), and unlike with SEO, there is no waiting for the results to start coming in.  You WILL receive targeted clicks, and likely new phone calls leads, in month 1.

So if you are an attorney looking to expand and grow your practice, give our SEM solution a try.  We have a decade of experience running these types of campaigns for attorneys, and with our new entry-level pricing solution almost any law firm can afford our expert digital marketing services.  What are you waiting for?

best seo company Denver

The tradeoffs with SEO and SEM (pay per click)

by Internet Advertising

First of all, a very happy new year to the handful of people reading our first blog post of 2017.  All of us at DanMatt Media hope you have a wonderful year ahead of you.

Ok, onto the topic at hand.  One of the biggest questions I’m asked by prospective digital marketing clients is the difference between SEO and SEM (pay per click).  Both channels use the world’s largest search engines (Google and Bing) to advertise your company’s products and services.  Both have ads that are triggered by select keywords that are relevant to the type of business you have.  And both are an outstanding way to advertise and reach/sign new clients.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is organic search, meaning you are not paying everytime someone clicks on your ad.  As such, budget is not a concern, and your organic ad will run 24/7.  It will never come down.  Our version of SEO involves both on-site work (optimizing your meta data and title tags, rewriting content, adding schema optimization, etc) and off-site work (custom link building, video SEO promotion, citation building, etc).  Both are necessary to improve your rankings and drive more eyeballs to your website.

The great aspects of SEO are that it is always less expensive than pay per click, and that your ad will never come down due to budget restrictions.  The downside to SEO is that it takes time to reach page 1 of Google.  Typically at least 6 months, and sometimes it can take a year to get there.

With SEM (pay per click) you ARE paying everytime someone clicks on your ad.  When your daily or monthly budget is exhausted, your ads will no longer show until your budget renews (the next day or the next month).  As such, you must have a large enough budget to be able to run your campaign for at least a few hours per day, and at least 4 or 5 days per week.  Your budget has to be robust enough to allow you to bid on at least some of the important keywords that you are after.  What all of this means is that the downside to SEM is that it is always more expensive than SEO.

But the great value-add that a DanMatt Media SEM campaign brings to the table is day 1 results.  You will literally be on page 1 of Google, in the coveted Top 4 positions at the top of the page, for at least some of the keywords you need right away.  We will not take-on a new SEM campaign if the budget doesn’t allow us to obtain some of those top ranking positions, so what you are getting for the increased price is immediate results.  With SEM, you’re going to start receiving phone call leads in your very first month.

There are always trade-offs in life, and marketing is no exception.  SEO should be viewed as a longterm marketing solution that you use every single month.  It is less expensive than SEM, but takes longer to generate an ROI.  On the other hand, SEM campaigns can be run seasonally (they are perfect for seasonal businesses) and generate immediate results.  They are more expensive, but typically obtain a positive ROI very quickly.  Whatever your marketing needs may be, we can help you.  Give us a call or send us a website inquiry to find out which service is right for you.

SEO company Philadelphia

How can we help you? The short and sweet version.

by Internet Advertising

Unfortunately we are not Southwest Airlines or Apple, and neither are our clients.  By that I mean that we can’t sit back and wait for customers to come to us.  Sure huge companies like Southwest and Apple advertise (though sadly not with us), but they can rely on their enormous brand recognition and market share to augment their media buying strategy.  We cannot, and neither can our clients.

When either myself or our staff are speaking with a prospective client, we try and show them exactly how we can help them in as short and sweet a manner as possible.  They’re busy people, and their time is precious.  They want to know what we can do for them, and why we’re different than the 10 other digital marketing agencies they’ve spoken with this week.

We can always point to intangibles like great customer service and no longterm contracts.  Indeed we do offer our clients both of those benefits, but what we really offer is the knowledge and expertise required to put your business in a position to be successful.  On the paid search (SEM) side of things, it means that we create keyword lists, ad groups, and ad copy that will generate not only a lot of exposure, but the right kind of exposure (meaning the potential customers who are interested in the products or services that you offer).

On the SEO side of things, it means that we actively drive customers to our client’s websites and phone lines via our off-site services, rather than simply optimizing their website and sitting back, hoping that customers will find them.  And on the print side of things, it means that we create stunning and evocative display ads, placed in the most relevant markets, to send our clients the customers they need to continually grow their businesses.

In essence, when you partner with DanMatt Media, you’re gaining access to our decades of experience in the online and offline worlds.  You’re gaining access to the strategy and execution that can take your local or national company to the next level.  And most importantly, we won’t waste your time.

pebble-18th-hole

My top 10 golf courses

by GolfInternet Advertising

I’ve been very fortunate to have played a lot of great golf courses in my 38 years, and I get asked quite often what some of those golf courses are.  With the end of the golf season upon us I thought it might be a good time to share my Top 10.  Here goes…

10.  Congressional Country Club Blue Course (Washington, DC area)

9.  Castle Pines Golf Club (Denver area)

8.  Olympic Club Lake Course (San Francisco area)

7.  Olympia Fields Country Club North Course (Chicago area)

6.  Muirfield Village Golf Club (Columbus area)

5.  Los Angeles Country Club North Course (Los Angeles area)

4.  Shoreacres Golf Club (Chicago area)

3.  Chicago Golf Club (Chicago area)

2.  Oak Hill Country Club East Course (Rochester, NY area)

And my # 1 course?  That would be Pebble Beach Golf Links, in the Monterrey, California area.  I was fortunate to play there three times in a week while I was in college (for the grand sum of $110 total), all during a national championship (the US Amateur).  You can’t really beat that…

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Saving for retirement

by Internet Advertising

For whatever reason I woke up this morning thinking about retirement.  Maybe it all started as a wonderful dream (being retired and perpetually on the golf course), but by the time I was in the shower I began thinking about my 401K account balance and my average rate of return.  At that point, I knew I wasn’t in the middle of a wonderful dream any longer…

Like a lot of people our age, my wife and I are trying our best to sock away as much of our hard-earned paychecks as we can for retirement.  It’s not easy, what with taxes, daycare bills, mortgages, college savings, etc eating up a large chunk of our income.  I did a little research this morning and found that almost 50% of all American adults have nothing saved for retirement.  Many that do have retirement savings accounts are woefully underfunded, and that includes younger earners in their 20s as well as older earners who are rapidly approaching the age of retirement.

Those stats are pretty scary, and unfortunately very common in our country today.  Many Americans in their 30s and 40s are counting on social security to be their main source of income during their golden years.  The problem with that is that social security was never designed to be a retiree’s main source of income, and as a result the program itself is vastly underfunded.  In fact, by the time people my age retire, there may well be nothing left in social security for us to collect.  If that’s the case, it would be the largest ponzi scheme in history (think about it, you pay into it every two weeks for your entire working life, and then never collect a dime once you retire).

So what’s the answer to these retirement woes?  My financial advisor has a pretty good outlook on it.  He recommends that you look at your retirement savings like any other bill you have each month.  In other words, it has to be paid in-full and on-time, just like everything else.  The best way to do that is to set up an auto withdraw to your 401K or retirement account from each and every paycheck.  By doing so, you never forget to transfer that savings over, and you learn to live without it as a part of your discretionary income.

But that’s the easy part.  The hard part is learning to live below your means, so that you can afford to pay yourself every two weeks for retirement.  That’s not so easy to do.  We live in a country that rewards instant gratification.  There is always something shiny and new to buy.  The “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality is always out there, and we all have unexpected bills that pop up from time to time (medical bills, car repairs, etc).  But if we can all learn to live below our means and fund our retirement accounts every pay period, we may well be able to turn things around.

Just don’t cut out the advertising budget…

marketing agency Denver

Metrics and stats

by Internet Advertising

I field a lot of questions from potential and current SEM and SEO clients about metrics and stats.  Specifically, what stats do you/we track to measure whether a marketing campaign is working.  Well, that depends on which side of the aisle you are on.

From our end, the stats we look at are the ones that are under our control.  Specifically, that means your keyword rankings for either the paid ads section of Google (SEM) or the organic listings (SEO).  Obviously we want to place our clients in a position to be successful, which means we want them ranked on the first page of Google for the keywords that are important to their business.  It stands to reason that the more visible a client’s ad is, the more exposure and phone calls they will receive.

We also look at metrics such as clicks, page views, session duration, and bounce rate, but those numbers can be misleading.  For example, if you have a million page views on your website in the last month, but 99% of them were from spammy individuals, then you really have nothing.  If you have a couple hundred thousand clicks in the last 30 days, but they are all from foreign countries (and you only service customers in the US), then what have you gained?  Not much.

Of course the metric that means the most to our clients is ROI.  They need to earn more from their SEM or SEO campaign than they are spending on it.  Typically that means phone calls from potential clients who are actively seeking their products and services.  While that stat is of course important to us, it is unfortunately not under our control.  Our job is to place our clients in a position to be successful, but we cannot force people to do business with them, even if they see their ad on the first page of Google.  As such, we tend to focus more on the metrics that we can control, although we do realize that in the end what our clients are seeking is increased revenue.

ROI can be a difficult metric to measure, but we’re confident that our innovative, best-practices approach to online marketing is a good fit for most of the people who are seeking our services.

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Yep, we offer web design services too…

by Internet Advertising

Lately we seem to be receiving a lot of inquiries regarding web design services.  Businesses seem to be interested in updating and improving their online presence of late, and that’s a good thing.

To be clear, DanMatt Media is not a web design agency, and we have no plans to become one.  We are first and foremost an advertising and marketing company, focusing heavily on areas such as SEO, SEM (paid search), print advertising, and market research panel and survey recruitment.  But long ago we recognized that in order to be able to offer our clients the best SEO and SEM services in the country, we would have to add the ability to update their websites, convert them to WordPress, add mobile friendly themes, and improve their user experience.

As such, we now offer all of the web design services listed above.  We do require that our web design clients sign up with us for SEO or SEM prior to any work being done, and in doing so we are able to offer these customers a large discount on their web design work, because we know we are going to be partners in their new marketing efforts.  If you think about it, it’s a win-win for everyone.  DanMatt Media will handle all the web design and digital marketing work you require, and in return, you receive not only a great new website, but also a properly designed and executed SEO and/or SEM campaign, and all for a lot less money than you would pay elsewhere.  Sounds pretty good, right?

If you’ve been looking to spruce up your site, or convert it to a mobile-friendly theme, in addition to beginning an SEO or paid search campaign, give us a call or send us a website inquiry.  Chances are, we can help you.

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Keeping Dory and Nemo

by FishInternet Advertising

You’ve no doubt heard that the “Finding Dory“, the follow-up to the wildly successful film “Finding Nemo“, has hit theaters nationwide.  With the popularity of both movies, I thought it might make sense to share my thoughts on keeping the two main characters (Dory and Nemo) in your home aquarium.  Finding a Dory (the Pacific Blue Tang, Paracanthurus Hepatus) and a Nemo (an Occelaris Clownfish) is easy.  Keeping them healthy for years to come; maybe not so much…

The common clownfish, which the Nemo character is based upon, is readily available and fairly inexpensive.  They do not require large fish tanks (20 gallons is sufficient to keep a couple of common clowns) nor do they require an anemone.  Indeed, anemones are delicate animals that insist upon good water movement, high quality water, and fairly intense lighting.  Most clownfish species (including the Occelaris) are available as small tank-raised specimens, and this is always a better option than a wild-caught fish.  Tank-raised fish are accustomed to captivity and less-than-perfect water quality, are conditioned to eat captive diets, and do not harm the native population of fish.  You may pay a bit more for a captive-raised clownfish, but it’s well worth the increased cost.

So what type of aquarium makes a suitable home for a clown?  Well, the bigger the better, but a simple 20 gallon saltwater system will suffice.  The tank should have some rock work for aquascaping, and some sand or crushed coral for a substrate.  The tank should ideally be equipped with a protein skimmer to remove dissolved organic waste, and it should have at least a reasonable amount of water flow (a minimum of 10 times the tank volume per hour, but ideally more).  Lighting is not a concern, and clownfish will readily eat most omnivorous foods (I personally prefer Spectrum pellets, by New Life).  In summation, common clownfish are fairly easy to keep, but still require good water quality and a varied, nutritious diet.

The striking Pacific Blue Tang (Dory) is less suited for a beginner aquarist.  Blue Tangs require much larger systems (small ones can be kept in 4 foot long tanks of 75 gallons and up; large ones will ideally have a 6 foot long tank of 125 gallons and up).  They require more rock work to hide in (ideally live rock, with a healthy growth of algae to nibble on) and more much more susceptible to parasitic infections like the dreaded saltwater Ich.

Like all tangs, P. Hepatus will need to be fed at least twice per day (they are grazers in the wild), and will most certainly need a good protein skimmer and a high water flow in the tank (ideally 20+ times the tank volume per hour).  Blue Tangs do not require intense lighting to do well, but will appreciate living in a live reef system, complete with better lighting and plenty of live rock.  They too are omnivores, but will need dried seaweed sheets on a daily basis.  In summation, Blue Tangs can be kept by reasonably novice aquarists, but will require much larger tanks, with better water quality and a more varied, vegetable-rich diet to thrive.  It’s probably best to wait 6-12 months to purchase one, until you’ve gotten the hang of keeping easier species in captivity.

I have kept my Pacific Blue Tang in my 90 gallon reef for 8 years and counting.  When I purchased her, she was a 3 inch sub-adult, and she is now a full 6 inches long and pleasantly plump.  When properly cared for, both Nemo and Dory will make for long-lived and extremely beautiful pets.  Just make sure you do your due diligence before buying either fish, and make sure that you are willing to commit to the care requirements of both species.

 

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Finding the right person for the job

by Internet AdvertisingOnline MarketingPrint Advertising

For a service-based company like ours, there are few things that are more crucial to success than finding and hiring the right people.  Service-based industries cannot rely on a product to sell itself, so they must take great care to find the right employees, whether those people are outward facing (for example, sales staff) or inward facing (project managers, programmers, etc).  Having just gone through this process recently, I thought it would be a good time to share my thoughts and observations.

I don’t believe you can hire the right person if you don’t know precisely what you’re looking for.  Hiring managers and company executives should take a hard-look at their organization and really drill-down on the type of person they need to fill their crucial roles.  Think about what qualities and skills the role really requires, and make sure those are communicated clearly and effectively in the job ad.  It’s nice to hire a team-player and someone with a good attitude, but for a sales role those may not be the most important qualities to look for.  To save your valuable time, you’ll want to screen-out as many applicants who do not fit the role as possible.

Once you’ve weeded-out the obvious non-fits, you’ll probably want to schedule phone interviews for those candidates with potential.  I like to keep the phone interviews fairly short (30-45 min or so) and use that time to really ascertain if someone has the skill-set and experience that the role requires.  Resumes rarely give you the full picture of someone’s aptitude, but it’s hard to fake competency in a phone interview.  I ask a lot of tough questions, and I follow-up immediately on the answers to those questions.  I press, but in a nice way.

The last step in the process is of course the in-person interview.  I’ve already asked most of the tough questions over the phone, so during this time (typically an hour or so) I like to get a feel for the candidate up close.  Does he or she seem engaged and interested in the job?  Do they seem like the sort who will give our clients the great customer service they deserve, and protect our brand image?  Are they really a good fit for this role, or is it a stretch?

I’ll close by saying this.  When you’ve found someone that you think would be a great fit for the position, extend them an offer right away.  If a candidate is that good, you can bet he or she is likely to be fielding offers from other companies as well.  At the same time, if you don’t find someone you really like, I don’t believe in making an offer just to “put a butt in a seat”.

Nothing costs a company more problems than a bad hire, so take your time in finding the right sort, and then go out and hire ’em!

best seo company Denver

Maximizing your marketing ROI

by Internet Advertising

Here at DanMatt Media we have many clients.  Some are big, some are small.  Some are located all over the country (and even overseas) and some are in a single state.  Some have big marketing budgets, and some have small ones.  But all of them have one goal, namely to achieve the best ROI possible with whatever marketing investment they are making.

We offer many advertising and marketing services, including SEO (organic search), SEM (paid search), print advertising (including pay per call), and performance-based market research panel and survey recruitment.  There are times when a client can benefit from multiple channels, and times when a single service line is in order.  So how do we go about obtaining the best ROI for our clients?

It starts by listening.  Simply put, we listen to our clients.  We find out their goals, their needs, and their dreams.  What are they really looking for in an advertising agency?  Once we have a good feel for what they need, we find out what they can invest.  We say invest (as opposed to spend) because marketing is really an investment in your company’s future.  Think about it.  The goal of any adverting and marketing campaign, whether online or offline, is to grow brand awareness and bring in new business.  To do that, you have to invest in your organization’s future, and that’s why our clients engage our services.

So now that we know what a client wants, and needs, and what they can reasonably invest in their marketing spend, we go about designing a customized plan to bring them the best ROI possible for their investment.  That may include a combination of multiple advertising channels, and it could be an amalgamation of traditional offline media buying (print, TV, and radio) and online media buying (SEO, SEM, banner, and email marketing).  But the goal is to create a solution that maximizes ROI and exposure, while minimizing risk.

We’re not the only advertising agency in Washington, DC and Denver, Colorado, but we do like to think of ourselves as one of the best.  We take the time to listen to what our clients need, and we have the expertise to help them achieve the best ROI possible for their hard-earned dollars.  And in the end, that’s precisely what our clients are after.