In my ongoing series featuring industry leaders, I spoke with Mary Merritt, Co-Founder, President and CEO of NerdyMind Marketing in Fort Collins, CO. Our conversation focused on digital marketing trends to consider for your business including: when to run your own PPC, hiring a digital agency, online reputation, posting your pricing, and using analytics to improve return.
If I can run my own PPC and build my own site why should I hire a digital agency?
Mary
Sometimes keeping things in-house just makes more business sense, and that’s the bottom line. In many cases, you can get a group of people with a lot of different areas of expertise for less than the cost of a full-time employee with benefits if you outsource to a digital agency. In many cases, the digital agency is set up for success if they have an in-house marketing and subject-matter expert to work with. So, I’ve always found that a healthy mix is usually a really great fit for small to mid-market companies. If you can just build your own AdWords in-house and you’re finding that the return on ad spend is healthy and supporting great profitability, I say don’t fix what’s not broken. However, sometimes you can get some fresh ideas from a great digital agency and bring them on will spark some amazing growth.
How should I evaluate digital agencies that appear to offer similar services?
Mary
I always tell potential clients to look at multiple firms to find the best fit for them, and it always depends on the internal resources of the company looking for help. Are you looking for someone to implement your ideas? Or are you looking for outside expertise in areas where your team doesn’t have as much knowledge? If you fall into the first category, normally you can find a company that is not as much consultative, but more tactical. If you fall into the second category, you are looking for more of a consultative company with some experience and a great track record. I think references are key, too – and make sure the references aren’t just a buddy. Have specific questions about the work, the process, and of course the PEOPLE.
Mary
Having a strong visual language for your brand is the key to your digital marketing firm creating ads that are synced up with your website (where we are going to drive them). Having a consistent, digestible visual experience has proven time and time again to improve conversions and overall performance. Another great thing to know about your brand is your overall language profile. Is your brand EDGY and kind of like a jerk? Is your brand helpful, sweet, and kind? When a digital marketing firm starts setting up channels, they are writing a lot of ad copy – it’s important for this ad copy to bleed your brand’s colors. Last but certainly not least, it’s very important to understand your target customer profile, their challenges, their buying state, and their basic demographics. Digital marketing companies can use your marketing demographics to target more effectively in various channels such as Linkedin, Facebook, and more and more.
What is the minimum online representation a business should have?
Mary
It really depends on the industry. We have a client that just came to us recently, and they’ve been in business for 7 years, and they’ve never had a website! They are debating even building one. However, if you put a website up and don’t look at it for 5 years…it’s outdated and it might be doing more harm than good because it’s not inspiring buyer confidence. Additionally, it is probably out of date with regard to who you are – businesses learn a LOT about themselves every year, and if the copy and overall visual branding are out of date, you might be pushing relevant people away. So I would say have a website at a minimum, but make sure you are changing it up from time-to-time to keep it fresh. If you aren’t going to post on social media, don’t have any social profiles. Only put those up if you intend to initiate a decent post frequency with a strategy behind it. If you are a business that doesn’t need a website or social media profiles or ANY web properties/presences…please teach me your trick.
Should a company list their pricing on their site?
Mary
I think it’s amazing if you can put your pricing on your website and feel comfortable with it. In the end, that’s what most people want to know first and foremost. But I battle with this myself so if any of your readers have any thoughts, I am all ears! In my case, I like to price projects and ongoing service contracts based on a mix of our client’s budget, and what marketing stack will help them reach their goals. With that, it would be hard to put pricing on our website because each client has a different budget and different goals.
How do I use data to improve return and avoid analysis paralysis?
Mary
Imagine a business comes to a digital marketing firm (looking for help) with about 2,500 unique visitors per month and a 1% conversion rate, [the average number of conversions per ad click, shown as a percentage.] The digital marketing firm realizes the traffic is low quality, so they focus on quality over quantity with their campaigns – getting rid of all those broad match keywords and really diving into the intent of a user and their search query.
[Broad match, per Google, lets a keyword trigger your ad to show whenever someone searches for that phrase, similar phrases, singular or plural forms, misspellings, synonyms. So if your keyword is “women’s hats,” someone searching for “buy ladies hats” might see your ad. This is broader than a phrase or exact match triggers. Phrase ads may show on searches that match a phrase or are close variations of that phrase, with additional words before or after. An exact match ad may show on searches that match the exact term or are close variations of that exact term. Close variations here may also include a reordering of words if it doesn’t change the meaning.]
The company’s overall website traffic drops by about 1,000 unique visitors per month, but their conversion rate lifted to 6%. So 25 leads per month vs. 90 leads is amazing…but if you’re just looking at traffic then you are missing the boat. We base all of our data on those conversion points, and whatever is driving most people to take those actions are the fruitful rabbit holes that we like to fall down.
What work are you most proud of?
Mary
I am extremely proud of our client retention and employee retention. We keep people for a long time and that just means my vision is coming to fruition. Long-term relationships built on great values like honesty, authenticity, trust, and curiosity.
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Effective digital marketing goes beyond execution. Staying aware of trends, emerging platforms, and updated featured to those tools already in use is essential. Check out the NerdyMind blog for topics like Craft CMS vs. WordPress, Google Tag Manager, Five Reasons to Fire Your Developer Friend. Additionally, Signal will continue to explore these topics and share conversation with the industry’s top experts.
You might also like my previous post – How to create brand advocates for your business