SEO company Washington DC

The digital equivalent of cold-calling, and why it doesn’t work…

by Internet AdvertisingOnline Marketing

Happy New Year folks! It’s a new year and a new month, which means it’s time for a new rant…

This time I’m going to vent my frustrations with the digital equivalent of cold-calling, particularly via LinkedIn and through email. I’ve had my profile (and my company’s profile) on LinkedIn for many years now, but to be honest I’m not sure why I still have it up.

Over the past week I have literally declined at least 25 requests to “join my network”. Why? Because they’re essentially spam. WIth the exception of a single market research client I picked up 10 years ago, I have never once benefitted from a cold LinkedIn connection (note: I’m not talking about connecting with friends, clients, or business colleagues that I already know, just the digital equivalent of cold-calling). Every single cold reach-out I’ve received since then has been absolutely, positively worthless to me from a business standpoint.

Typically the people reaching out are looking to sell me something. It might be the latest and greatest software solution to whatever problems my business might encounter, or it might be a competitor who either hasn’t read the list of services we offer or for some reason thinks we need to find an outsource partner at this very minute (another note: we don’t outsource). Sometimes I’ll even read things about a “partnership”, but I can tell you from experience that the sender’s definition of a partnership is very different than mine. In this case, the term “partnership” means we send money to them, in one direction, and it never flows back to us. That’s not what I would call a partnership.

Moving forward, I’ve decided that unless someone can provide a compelling reason for me to connect with them on LinkedIn (beyond lining their pockets), I’m going to reject these cold reach-outs. It’s not that I mind having a bunch of irrelevant connections on a social media platform. That doesn’t really harm me in any way. What I don’t like is the bombardment of emails and messages that come with them. For every one of these irrelevant connections I allow in, I receive at least 2 or 3 emails or messages asking me to get on a call that I know will not produce anything of value for my company.

For what it’s worth, I see the same thing in cold emails as well. I probably receive 10 or more of these every day, and just like with LinkedIn, they never prove valuable. Sometimes they’re not even addressed to me (“hey” is my least favorite way to begin a business email). As someone who relies on bringing in new business to keep his company afloat, I would suggest a better way of attracting new prospects.

Run a quality digital marketing campaign, like a targeted Google PPC program for example, and when the phone rings take the time to answer your prospect’s questions and provide them with solutions to their problems. Give them prices that make sense for both parties and commit yourself to honesty and transparency in all that you do. Doesn’t that sound like a better approach?

And leave the spammy, cold LinkedIn and email reach-outs where they belong. In the trash bin.

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What digital marketing success looks like (Part 2): A case study for a longtime local dental practice (client).

by Case Study

Client type: Local dentist (general dentistry services and Invisalign)

Age of partnership: 2.5 years and still going strong

Marketing channels used: Google PPC (Pay Per Click)

Budget: $2,000 per month (up from an initial $1,500 per month)

Traffic received: 90% of this client’s website traffic comes directly from their Google PPC campaign. 

Progress: Since we began running this campaign, this client has received a 10 fold increase in the number of website visits and booked appointments. As a result, they agreed to increase their initial monthly budget by 25%.

The take away: If your business has a need for more local customers, give us a call at 877-924-1543 or reach us at https://danmattmedia.com/contact/.

We can design, create, and implement a cost-effective and highly successful digital marketing strategy just for you!

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Difficult to see the future is…

by Internet Advertising

One of the most difficult things for any business owner or strategist to do is to forecast the future. Case in point: even Jedi master Yoda couldn’t forsee the Sith threat in the Star Wars prequels.

When DanMatt Media was founded way back in 1994, the only service we offered was yellow pages advertising. Search engines and social media weren’t really around back then, and the yellow pages were in full-force and in high demand as an advertising channel. We knew that we had to expand our suite of services to continue to stay relevant as an advertising agency, and so we began the uphill battle of creating and establishing ourselves as a leader in digital marketing.

Though the yellow pages are still used (predominantly in the middle portion of the country) their usage has declined significantly in the last two decades. As a result, these days our growth is predicated not upon the yellow pages, but rather on digital marketing channels such as PPC (Google Pay Per Click), SEO (Google organic search), and SMM (Social Media Marketing). But while those channels aren’t likely to disappear at any time in the near future, history tells us that they cannot be counted on as a viable form of revenue forever.

That’s why we’re currently hard at work researching and identifying the next revenue stream for our company, while we still have viable and in-demand marketing channels to offer our clients. Identifying the next channel that your company can hitch its wagon to requires foresight, hard work, and a lot of luck. Let’s hope we have more success predicting the future than master Yoda did.

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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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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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.

Arlington Advertising SEM SEO

New year, same commitment to our clients.

by with No Comment Internet Advertising

First of all, a very Happy New Year to everyone reading this blog post.  I hope 2018 brings you all many blessings and good fortune.

As we enter into a new year, I’m reminded of how often things change, and yet still stay the same.  The digital advertising world is very fluid.  Clients come and go, budgets go up and down, targeting and demographics change, and strategies are constantly being adjusted and altered.  But one thing will never change, and that is our commitment to our clients.

Everything we do revolves around what is best for our clients.  We don’t cut corners, we don’t put our needs above those of our customers’, and we don’t fail to listen to their opinions.  We are your partner in advertising, not your vendor.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a product to sell.  We don’t have a shiny car or a cutting-edge piece of electronics that we can show off.  Products like that help to sell themselves.  Our value-add lies in the marketing knowledge and experience that we bring to bear, and the tremendous customer service that we offer to our clients.  Selling a service is a lot harder than selling a product, but it’s what we do.

If you have been looking to grow your business, especially through Pay Per Click (SEM, also called Google Adwords) and SEO, and you’re looking for an agency with a proven track record of success and a sincere commitment to our client’s goals and needs, give us a call.  Chances are we can help you, and likely for less money than you may have thought possible.

 

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All of you guys are dirtbags…

by with No Comment Internet Advertising

“You’re all dirtbags”.  “Everyone in your industry is a crook and a liar”.  “What you guys do doesn’t work”.

Sadly we’ve heard all of these things when prospecting for new clients.  We’ve even heard these things from personal injury lawyers (true story)!  None of these statements are true of course, but they usually come about because business owners have partnered with the wrong marketing agencies for their SEM and SEO campaigns.  They were promised results (typically with unrealistic timeframes) and when they didn’t get them, it soured their take on the entire online advertising industry.  They felt like they’d been taken for the proverbial ride.

As we approach our 23rd year in business this month (virtually unheard of for a digital advertising agency), I wanted to take a few minutes and dispel some of these rumors.  Not everyone in the SEM and SEO industry is a dirtbag.  We’re not all crooks and liars.  And the services we offer do work (very well in fact), provided you partner with the right agency and you have realistic expectations.

The goal of any reputable marketing company is to place their clients in a position to be successful.  That’s it.  It’s not to quintuple a client’s ROI, or bring them tons of new business every month.  Those goals are laudable, but they are not under the agency’s control.  Think about it.  No one can force a customer to do business with someone, even if they see a perfectly formatted and highly-relevant ad at the very top of the search engines.  It just doesn’t work that way.  But getting that perfectly formatted and highly-relevant ad at the very top of Google is precisely what we strive for.

Unfortunately anyone with a shingle and a dream can call themselves a digital marketing agency.  You don’t have to graduate from advertising school or pass the marketing version of the Bar Exam.  And because of that, there are a lot of people out there promising huge results from SEM and SEO campaigns, despite not really knowing what they’re doing.  It’s why we always take time to educate our prospective clients on what it is that they can expect from us, what we control and what we do not control, and the realistic timeframes for success.  None of that guarantees that a client will be happy with their digital marketing campaign, but it does guarantee that they will be well-informed and not misled.

If you’ve tried working with some of the less-than-scrupulous people in this industry, and you’re frustrated with their lack of transparency and lack of results, give us a try.  After all, you don’t stay in a cutthroat industry like ours for 23 years if you don’t know what you’re doing.

 

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

by with No Comment 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?

marketing agency Denver

Metrics and stats

by with No Comment 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.