The Digital Marketing Podcast with Mandar Marathe

Let's re-frame the question a bit. Should you ONLY rely on paid advertising? A lot of small businesses or startups that come to us for generating traction / leads / demand rely heavily on Paid Digital Marketing. So, what is paid digital marketing - It is advertising on Social Media Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. It is also using Search Engine Ads on Bing or Google (Google Ads) or using Amazon Ads to advertise your eCommerce products. Essentially, businesses are relying heaving on paid mediums to generate traffic / leads / sales. Is this the right approach to rely heavily on paid Ads? Well, what we recommend for most of our clients is to diversify from Day 1. You should focus on content creation, SEO and other channels also. Here's why:

1. Google & Facebook command 70-75% of the spends done by most brands online. There are advertising options available with LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and other Ad Networks. Over the last few years, CPC's are shooting up for most brands across Google & Facebook. It means that the market is getting more competitive in the paid media space. Since a lot of brands have taken to advertising on Google & Facebook, it is but natural that the bids would go up in the auction and hence the CPC. Higher the CPC, higher the cost per conversions and hence keeping in check the customer acquisition costs is getting slightly difficult.

2. Going Omni-channel: There are other channels available with digital marketing to get your message out. You could leverage email marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing (Organic), Affiliate Partnerships (for B2B companies) and so on. We recommend utilizing 20% of your budget toward content creation. Start by creating videos - Put up the videos on YouTube in an optimized format, convert the videos to audio and put them up as Podcast episodes across multilpe platforms. Transcribe the videos into long-form blog articles and have them on your website. Find questions on Quora and answer them with the content you have. Basically go omni-channel with your content.

3. Do not disregard Paid Ads: Paid ads are still highly effective to achieve your business objectives. Just get smarter with them and utilize your funds on the platforms with prudence. Only invest on channels that are not too crowded and are getting your the returns or positive RoAS (Return on Ad Spends).

Clients are the lifeline of an advertising industry. No clients, no business, no revenue, no agency.

This is a universal truth. And if you are a client servicing person, you know it more than I do. For those who have opted to service clients (and be the face of your agency), it’s time to understand and learn the rules of engagement. If you follow these three golden rules, you will have a happy client, a happy boss and a happy pay check ;)

Rule No. 1: Clients are human beings

Just like you and me – some clients are smart, some unreasonable, some number driven, some go by their gut, some give your nightmares and some give you a pat on your back. To err is human and so is to service clients. Treat them as human beings and try to understand their psyche. If you have a degree in human psychology or you are a natural expert at studying human behaviour, you are one up on your client servicing peers.

Over a period of time, try to get into the psyche of your client(s). It will help you devise good solutions to all marketing briefs (Remember: The first target audience for your brilliant idea is your client.)

Rule No. 2: Clients need to be educated

‘The client is always right’ – whoever said this needs to be shot in his head, twice. All of us need education. For folks working in the digital advertising industry, the web transforms every single day. There is new stuff to learn and old stuff to unlearn. While you learn, it is important that your client learns with you.

Share industry reports with your clients on a regular basis, proactively. Clients love to see that you are taking pains to learn their business. Make sure that you send a competition scan or a relevant blog article to your client. A case study shared would be icing on the cake. All clients love to be pampered with data, industry insights and new learning.

Do this to expand your horizon, and your clients understanding of the advertising industry. For client servicing folks in the digital advertising industry, here is a small 6 slide presentation structure that will wow your clients:

Slide 1: Internet trends – growth of the internet vs. growth of your client’s business category (industry)– You can get this data from Comscore

Slide 2: Competition website traffic comparision graph (YOY) – from Comscore or from Alexa

Slide 3: Search insights of competitors, and growth relative to category. – From Google Insights for Search or Google Trends

Slide 4: Snapshot of competitors on Social media – manual research

Slide 5: Display media activity of competitors– from Nielsen or ViziSense

Slide 6: Summary and Recommendations

Rule No 3: Clients need attention

We are working in an economy where attention is a scarce commodity. As client servicing people, we work on multiple accounts and service multiple clients. While this is challenging in itself, our attention spans are going down. We are on Facebook, on Twitter and on YouTube, and in between that we work on client campaigns and answer pressing emails.

Clients need attention. The better you get at turning around stuff quickly, the less attention clients will demand. Try and make sure you live by these productivity rules –

• Be on time for meetings – value time
• Keep your plate clean – If you get work, do or delegate.
• Inform clients – one of the critical mistakes we do is not communicate. Let the clients know how much time will it take to complete the work and schedule accordingly. Pick up the phone. Emails are getting obsolete.
• Time for yourself - If you have developed a good relationship with your client, let them know when you hit the gym or are not available to take calls. Keep time for your family. Do not pick up client calls after a certain hour of the day. I am saying this publicly to sensitize clients that we (CS) are human beings and our teams (creative, social, search etc.) are also human beings.
• Effective networking – Know your client’s boss and his/her bosses boss. Know everyone in the hierarchy. Call frequently to make sure they recognize your voice and know your phone number. Networking should be effective, not just for the sake of it. Make sure your conversations are meaningful, especially if you are talking with someone higher up.

I shall turn over this post to you. What do you do to provide quality and god speed client service? Any other rules that you need to bring to notice for the greater good of the client servicing community? Share your comments.

The terms paid, owned and earned media have gained some importance in digital marketing. With the world economy in a recessionary state, brand managers and chief marketing officers are forced to deal with reduced marketing budgets. Consumer decision making process has undergone a transformation, leading to an increased focus on owned and earned media.

What can a new age CEO /CMO do to transform their organisation’s marketing and sales efforts and align them with today’s economic scenario. Here are three crucial strategies that your organization can leverage.

Hire the right people for the job

Make these critical hires, irrespective of your marketing budget.

• Social media and online reputation management: Either hire an adept digital agency or hire smart people who can orchestrate your social media efforts. Social media marketing is not a choice, it’s a mandate. Figure out the people part first, tools for social media and online reputation management are a secondary concern.
• Search engine optimization: All your owned media – website / blog / mobile site needs organic traffic from search engines. SEO is a low cost, long term alternative to driving relevant traffic to your owned properties.
• User design: Your owned media needs to be user friendly; otherwise they are a piece of junk. Most organizations lack design thinking and this malaise comes from that fact that top executives don’t understand the science of user design and make decisions based on their gut. Hire a digital creative agency or visual designers that have a reputation / formal education in design.

Allocate marketing budgets wisely

It’s a CMO’s job to allocate marketing budgets. Along with your top marketing team, make rational choices.

• Consciously decide to invest in long term projects over short term initiatives. Be brutal while ideating. Throw out ideas that don’t fit the following guidelines:
  • Heavy focus on paid media
  • Short term
  • Results cannot be measured
• Split your marketing budgets between paid, owned and earned media. Pass on this mandate to everyone in your marketing team and to your partner agencies.
• Forge strategic alliances / barter deals: Invest time and muscle behind forging strong industry relationships. Structure deals that are mutually beneficial and long term in nature.

Revisit your customer

Your customer has changed. He has moved on with time. Consumers research on the internet before making a purchase. They check and compare product prices before stepping into a retail store. They log on to social networks to get opinions of friends and family. It’s time to revisit your customer. Unearth the latest consumer behaviour survey (or ask a consumer research agency to do one).

Once you understand how your customer is making purchases today, invest wisely in every step of the consumer purchase cycle. Here are some thought starters:

• Consumers research on the internet – Invest in SEO and paid search.
• Consumers seek opinions on social networks – Get on social media.
• Allow consumers to buy online – Make your site ecommerce enabled.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are hyperlinks from external websites that point to web pages on your websites. Why are backlinks important? They have been the core or crux of Google's PageRank algorithm. Google give a lot of importance to links from external websites to your website. Even today, backlinks are considered as one of the important factors for ranking your page in search results.

How can you build backlinks using competitive intelligence?

First and foremost, I'd like to say that link building is very tough. In today's time its one of the toughest job to get someone else to link back to your website. Lets look at it smartly. What I am going to do is, I would go to Google and search for the keyword for which I want to build a backlink. I would type in the keyword phrase - for e.g. "seo company in india" is a keyword for which I would want briefkase.in as a website to rank higher in SERPs. I will see the top 10 results in SERPs. You can also use UberSuggest and type in the keyword there. You can get a list of pages that are ranking for this keyword.

From what I understand, there are 8100 searches happening for the term "seo company india" every month. If we rank on position 1, then we would be getting 35-40% of the clicks i.e 3500 - 4000 visits to our website, just for ranking for this keyword. The traffic analyzer tool by Neil Patel gives you the backlinks for websites. Just type in the domain name of the top ranking websites. For "seo company in india" we have ezrankings.org and techmagnate.com are the top 2 websites that rank. EZrankings gets 21k visitors for /seo-company-india page and 9k visitors for /seo-services page on their website. So 30k visitors to their website for just these 2 pages. If we consider a 1% conversion rate, they generate close to 300 leads from their website.

You can export the back link profile of the pages that rank high for your focus keywords. For "seo company india", EZRankings has 166 back links and for "seo services" they have 66 back links. You can also use SEMRush / ahrefs to get the backlink profile of specific web pages. Export this data to a spreadsheet. Now this data will have domain authority, page authority score for all the URLs from where the competitor has received backlinks. It will also have the anchor text on which they have received back link. Make a list of unique domains. Do this for all the web pages that are ranking on top - EzRankings, Techmagnate, SEO.in and so on. Combine all the data in one table to find out the unique domains and then categorize these domains based on DA / PA. We now have a prioritized lists of domains from where you can build links.

For some domains, you can go ahead and build links all by yourself. These are may be company profile websites such as Goodcompany or Clutch. Go ahead and build these company profiles or list your business on Google Maps. Start with content outreach to all the websites from where your competitors have received backlinks. Try to fill in the gaps to improve your backlink profile using competitive intelligence.

In early June 2019, Google launched two updates to their algorithm. The major update was rolled out from June 3rd to June 8th which coincided with the diversity update rolled out from June 4 - June 6th.

Diversity update: Google wants to diversify the domains that are appearing in SERPs. i.e. for a search query, lets say "restaurants in mumbai", zomato.com would occupy 3-4 slots on the first page. With the diversity update only the strongest page for the search term would rank.

Core Algorithm update: The core algorithm update also led to fluctuations in rankings across many businesses. What experts say is that the core update devalued older pages on websites. For example, if you have 150 pages on your website, and 80% of these are not updated regularly, then they might loose ranking on SERPs and your traffic might drop.

How do you counter the drop in Organic traffic due to these updates. 1. First and foremost, you need to understand which pages on your websites have seen a drop in traffic. Just go to Search Console and go to the Search Analytics report. Click on Pages and then pull out a report for date comparison. Compare traffic before the algorithm updates (May 2019) to last 30 day traffic (post algorithm update). For all the pages, check the Avg. position and see which pages have a drop. Make a list of all pages that have seen a drop in traffic.

2. Now you need to work on these pages. Essentially, Google has devalued these pages as they are either old or because of the diversity update. If the page is old, then you need to refresh the content on the page and overall make the page stronger by adding different long tail keywords and sections to the pages. You can look at the keywords for which these pages are ranking (go to the queries tab in Search analytics) and then identify long tail variants (LSI) for the primary keyword. Include content related to these keywords / theme on the old page.

3. Getting leaner: As a website, you should always look at getting leaner i.e. getting rid of pages that have very less content / no content and do not show up in SERPs. So if you have 100 blogs and only 10 blogs are giving you all the traffic, either update the other 90 blogs to make them more comprehensive or get rid of blogs that cover the same subject / weak blogs. This way you will have lesser pages, but more stronger pages that are indexed by Google.