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Is the customer always right?

by with No Comment Online MarketingUncategorized

We’ve all heard this saying before. “The customer is always right”. But is it true?

In short, no. The customer is not always right. No one is ALWAYS right (except my wife, just in case she’s reading this article). But there is a right way to tell a valued client, who is spending his or her hard-earned money on your services, that they are wrong.

The best way that I have found to disagree with a client is to say nothing. At first. Let them talk, and let them vent. Let them explain their rationale and why they believe what they believe. Don’t interrupt or argue with them, even if you know and can prove that what they are saying is wrong. When they’re finished, you can address each of their points with facts and well-honed opinions. But do it without emotion, and without condescension. You can prove your point and show them the error in their ways, but always in a respectful manner. And always for the betterment of the partnership.

To be clear, there are a few things I won’t put up with from clients. Verbal abuse is one of them. I have had to reprimand several clients over the years for this, and with one exception (a real gem of a human being) they all apologized and never did it again. But I never allowed it to go unchallenged, and nor should you. We all have the right to be treated with respect.

I have also had to fire clients, because they simply would not agree to let us do the job they hired us to do. These are meddlers and armchair marketing quarterbacks, and when you have a client like that, it never works out. As a business owner, you always have to be prepared to walk away from a bad deal, and if a client won’t let you do your job, then that qualifies as a bad deal. But fortunately, instances like this have been very rare.

The bottom line is that marketing is a service-based business, and your clients are the lifeblood of that business. We don’t sell products. We sell expertise, research, business acumen, and a sincere commitment to customer service. The customer isn’t always right, but just by virtue of being the customer, they do have the right to express their opinion (respectfully, of course).

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What digital marketing success looks like: A case study for a longtime local law firm (attorney) client.

by Case Study

Client type: Local law firm

Age of partnership: 3 years and still going strong

Marketing channels used: Google PPC (Pay Per Click) and SEO (organic search)

Budget: $20,000+ per month

Leads received: An average of 25 per week, or 100+ per month

ROI: This client has consistently informed us that they are receiving an average ROI of 5X + per month on their ad spend. They are very pleased with the results, which is why they continue to work with DanMatt Media year after year in such a competitive industry.

The take away: If your business has a need for more customers, give us a call at 877-924-1543. We can design, create, and implement a similarly successful digital marketing strategy 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.

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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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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.

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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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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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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.

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Yep, we offer web design services too…

by with No Comment 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.