Next Lunch-And-Learn at Pizza West, January 17
When you launch a small business, you focus first on building a customer base and then reinvestment any profits in growing that base. Productivity improves. You get smarter. Economies of scale emerge. Maybe you also expand the scope or depth of your offerings, pursuing revenue streams in new channels that were previously not even on your radar when you first conceived a business plan, if you had a formal business plan at all.
Don’t let 2017 start to get away without a marketing plan that at a minimum covers the digital basics while starting to integrate with your traditional marketing efforts. Join us for our 1st of 4 quarterly Lunch-and-Learns on Tuesday, Jan. 17 at Pizza West.
The arc of growth described above is common to most businesses. It certainly was to ours, a once nascent publishing house that did well and then expanded into new areas of opportunity in digital marketing services. We did that based on what we learned sitting at the planning table selling advertising for our print pubs, but mostly listening to what our clients needed.
Ours is largely a history of organic growth. Many of our clients’ stories follow that same narrative. Maybe yours does, too.
That’s one of the reasons why consulting with clients in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts is so rewarding. One of the key attributes of our (and your) success carries that same theme — that of organic growth — this time in the form of organic traffic from searches on the web.
Getting traffic from paid advertising and social sites is wonderful, argues columnist Kristine Schachinger in this informative post at Search Engine Land, but not if it results in the neglect of your organic efforts.
Advertising builds brand awareness, regardless if it’s search engine marketing, like Google’s Adwords, or social media advertising. Think of the thousands of impressions that are created for every single click. Offline advertising, like print or broadcast, even more so. The goal is to build top of mind awareness, so a consumer finds your business when they need your product or service.
If you can’t be found in a basic web search, your advertising dollars are being wasted.
Sure, we often still recommend paid ads — and we’re certainly huge in pushing the power of social media — but maximizing your share of eyes through organic searches is the holy grail for any savvy marketer. It creates the highest click-through rates from the most relevant consumers. It’s the foundation that opens doors to higher-level marketing efforts.
It’s one of those “Do not pass go, do not collect $200” success benchmarks on your road to evolving, creating the greater opportunities that can follow, but only after that solid foundation is first firmly established.
And unlike perhaps too many of your other business decisions today, the results are obvious and measureable in the short-term.
We’re not saying it’s easy. And we’re not saying it doesn’t take a lot of hard work, but there’s nothing like sitting down with, say, two home services clients and uncorking reports showing that their organic searches have increased 40% for one and 100% for the other in 2016, one while navigating and coordinating with the online efforts of a corporate parent.
Then there was the major medical system that enjoyed 40% growth and the law firm that doubled the number of keywords it ranks for on the 1st page of a Google search, leading to a 25% increase in organic search while launching a new website.
Also in 2016, seeing home service clients turn 1-3 star ratings on major 3rd party review sites, based on a tiny number of unhappy customers, into 4-5 star ratings based on a much wider sample of their customer base.
Or delivering integrated marketing solutions that fit in with other providers, to drive the highest-click through rates and most transparent reporting in programmatic advertising and search engine marketing for an institution of higher education.
We can’t be at every planning table, but we’d love to see you at our next “pizza table” version of the same thing when we host the next session of our popular series of Lunch & Learn events on Tuesday, Jan. 17, 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at PizzaWest. The pizza is on us, so register today.
We’ll cover our organic growth and review strategies, but also hit on these topics:
- Integrated marketing across channels and measuring online
- Developments in Local SEO and Advanced SEO, including AMP, https and Schema.org
- Content marketing planning and local engagement
- Optimization, including search engine and conversions
- Digital advertising strategies in 2017 and tracking all of your marketing
New year. New ideas. Pizza. Who can argue with that?
