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

by 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 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.

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Is Pay Per Click worth it? You betcha!

by Internet Advertising

Here at DanMatt Media, one of our primary service lines is Pay Per Click marketing, often referred to as SEM or Google Adwords.  Pay Per Click is a highly-targetable and very useful form of advertising.  Though it is more expensive to run a Pay Per Click campaign than say an SEO campaign, there are decided advantages to it.

If you look at a standard Google search query (for example, “Denver dentist”), you will often see 3 or 4 paid search ads at the very top of the page.  They are designated by a green “Ad” icon next to them.  These are the Pay Per Click ads, and there is a reason why they are at the very top of the page, and why they are likely the first thing you will see.  Google doesn’t make any money on SEO (organic search) but they make a whole lot of money on Adwords campaigns.  Every time someone clicks on those ads, Google receives a fee for the click.  As such, Google has a vested interest in having those ads seen by as many relevant people as possible, which is why they are at the very top of the page (there are also typically paid search ads at the bottom of the page as well, with the organic SEO ads sandwiched in the middle).

Pay Per Click campaigns can easily be three, five, ten, or more times as expensive as SEO campaigns.  The reason for that is that you (the client) are paying every time someone clicks on your ads.  That isn’t the case with SEO campaigns, which do not charge per click.  But while Pay Per Click campaigns are more expensive, they tend to produce a lot more leads (usually phone calls or website form submissions) and they drive those leads much more quickly.  The reason for this is simple.  With Pay Per Click, we can position your ad at the very top of page 1 of Google on the first day of your campaign.  If your budget allows for it, you can literally have the top ranked ad in your industry and geographical area.  That is not the case with SEO, which can take many months to achieve a page 1 ranking, let alone a # 1 ranking (and that may never happen).

So the real question isn’t whether Pay Per Click is worth it.  It is.  The real question for clients to consider is how quickly you need to see results (new leads), and what you are willing to invest each month to obtain those results.  Ideally, a client’s marketing budget should include several facets of digital media buying, including both Pay Per Click and SEO.  But when we get the sense that a prospective client is looking for results right away, we almost always recommend the SEM channel.

 

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Do you travel for work?

by Internet AdvertisingTravel

I’ll be honest.  I’m not much of a fan of business travel.

Fortunately I don’t have to travel all that much for work.  I might do 5-6 work trips a year, and those usually entail visiting our company headquarters in the DC area and meeting with new clients in-person (which I very much enjoy).  I’ll occasionally travel to a trade show, but work travel isn’t a huge part of my job.  Most of what I do is over the phone and on the computer, and that’s a good thing, because traveling these days is a real mess.

Flying is terrible, with 17 inch wide seats (and every one of them is taken), travelers attempting to cram huge bags into the overhead bins to avoid paying baggage fees, long lines in the security area, and of course the ubiquitous delays (my flight out to Washington DC this week was an hour late, due to mechanical issues).  The TSA defines incompetence, and even the nicest hotels are still just hotels.  Nothing beats the comforts of home.

But business travel is very much a reality for a lot of people.  My wife travels at least once a month, and sometimes twice a month, for her job (she’s in marketing for a large food company).  Consultants are often gone Monday through Thursday of every single week when they’re on a project.  I don’t know how they do it, especially when you have young children.  It’s tough being gone that much.

We’re fortunate to live at a time when technology has made the world much smaller.  Smartphones, the internet, and video conferencing have all diminished the need for business travel, and by and large I think that’s a good thing.  Some business travel cannot be avoided, but for the most part it is entirely possible to work with clients and vendors all over the world without actually having to meet with them face-to-face.

Maybe if I could score a few first class upgrades my outlook on business travel would change…

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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.

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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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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.

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Are blogging and social media necessary for your business?

by Internet AdvertisingOnline Marketing

One of the questions I’m often asked, by potential clients and current ones, is whether blogging and social media are necessary for their businesses.  The answer is yes, and no…

A blog is a great way to keep the content on your website fresh and updated.  Blogs are an excellent opportunity to alert your potential and current clients to specials, promotions, and new services that your company is now offering.  It can be a great way to communicate success stories and helpful information.  But it will not, in and of itself, bring you more customers.

At this point you may be asking yourself how often you should update your website’s blog.  Well, in general, the more frequently the better.  Most industries do not change often enough to require daily blogging (tech, sports, and news would be the exceptions), and most business owners are too busy to blog on a very frequent basis.  But you don’t want a blog section on your website that hasn’t been updated in a year or two.  That gives off the appearance that you don’t have any news to report, and that you don’t care what user experience your viewers enjoy.  As such, we counsel our clients to update their blogs at least once per month.  That gives your website new content 12+ times per year, without adding too much to your already full plate.

In a similar fashion, your company’s social media pages (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,  etc) can be an excellent way to spread your message to the world at-large.  You can think of your social media pages as an extension of your blog.  In fact, we advise our clients to post their new blog updates to all their social media pages at the same time they are updating their website.  But you don’t have to wait until you have a new blog entry to post a social media update.  The more frequently, the better.

Blogging and social media outreach will not grow your business by themselves, and truth be told many successful companies do not blog or update their social media pages on a regular basis.  But they will help to increase your brand awareness and engage potential and current clients.  So long as you’re not posting anything offensive (and why would you do that?) there is no downside to getting your company’s name and message out there for everyone to see.

Thanksgiving 4

It’s November. Here’s what I’m thankful for…

by Internet Advertising

November is a great month.  The NFL is in full swing.  The leaves are changing and the air is getting crisp.  The weather is still warm enough to play golf, and the golf courses are still green.  And one of my favorite holidays, Thanksgiving, is right around the corner.  So it’s in that spirit that I thought I’d list some of the things I’m thankful for…

First, I’m thankful for a good job.  It sounds trite, but work provides more than just an income.  It provides structure, adult interaction, and most importantly, a sense of accomplishment.  Having to overcome obstacles and earn a paycheck feels good, even if work can get rough sometimes.

Second, I’m thankful for our clients.  Without our clients, item # 1 doesn’t exist.  Our clients have allowed us to partner with them to grow their businesses, and I am grateful for that opportunity.  And for their on-time payments…

Third, I’m thankful for our employees.  They say good workers are hard to find, and that’s true.  But we found ’em.  DanMatt Media is a small, family-owned business, but we’re blessed to have some of the best people in the industry working for us.  These guys (and girls) are the engine that drives the machine.

And last, but most importantly…

My family.  My wife has put up with me for the last 16 and a half years, and still finds a way to give me a kiss goodbye every morning before work.  She’s the glue that holds our family together.  My kids drive me nuts sometimes, but they’re the cutest, most wonderful children in the world.  My family is the reason I work so hard, and one day I hope my children will join their old man in the family business, as I did with my dad.

That’s an abbreviated but sincere list.  This Thanksgiving, my hope is that whomever reads this post has a few great things in their life to be thankful for as well.