From the social media savvy millennials to the grandma that’s buying a blanket for her grandson, SEO is here to stay, and that’s because it’s become a part of our everyday life.
Whenever we want to find out about what happened to that one actor from “Growing Pains” or when we’re looking to cram for our geography final, the majority of us will use search engine sites like Google or Bing to help us find the answer. Our reliance on search engines has led businesses of all sizes to push their advertising efforts towards building strong SEO potential. It’s a good business model, and companies who aren’t focusing on SEO are sorely missing out on large growth opportunities.
As the premier advertising agency in Utah, we work with a variety of clients. We love our clients. We wouldn’t exist without them. Productive feedback and communication is key to successful advertising. We love when our clients give us feedback because it helps us realize their visions and meet their needs.
We have heard tales from other agencies, though, of clients whose feedback wasn’t exactly helpful. Here are a few professional tips for how you, as the client, can offer the most helpful feedback to your advertising agency.
Know What You Like
When you approach your advertising agency with feedback, make sure you know what you want. It is easy to say, “I don’t like this.” That’s not the most helpful feedback, though, because it leaves your agency thinking, “So, what don’t you like about it?” and “What do you like?”
If you don’t like something, have specific reasons why you don’t like it. Explain the exact elements that concern you, and don’t forget to offer up something positive as well. People will be more responsive to making change when they feel that their initial efforts were valued.
Have a Plan
If there is something you don’t like, offer a solution or a direction to achieve what you do like. For instance, if a design came back in a shade of royal blue, don’t just say, “We do not like royal blue.” Instead, say, “Royal blue really isn’t our thing. We prefer to use a solid navy. Could you make this navy?”
Back It Up With Numbers
If you want to make major changes, it’s helpful to have some data to back up your thoughts. It could be as simple as past customer feedback surveys or an industry trend report. Professionals love numbers, and they’ll want to create products that work with the data, not against it.
Be Open to Advice
At the end of the day, always be open to advice. Your advertising agency may create a product that is different than anything you’ve ever done before. Your reaction may initially be, “I don’t like it,” but give your agency a chance to explain its reasoning. Sometimes, it takes stepping outside of your comfort zone and trying something new to beat the competition.
Since its onset, advertising has remained an every-changing industry. Though Madison Avenue once wasn’t a place for women, that paradigm continues to change. The anti-feminist culture behind old advertising tactics is no more.
However, if it weren’t for the pioneering women of the past, we may have been doomed to be “damsels in distress” forevermore. So without further ado, we celebrate a few of the women who helped shape advertising into what it is today. Here’s to a future of endless innovation.
Helen Lansdowne Resor
Resor was determined to change things from her work environment to her life. She was active in the suffrage movement and fought to push boundaries that men had placed around her. Resor confidently led an entire department of women copywriters at J. Walter Thompson’s firm. She used sex and feminism in her work, and was the first woman to be successful in national ad campaigns. Modern digital marketing firms admire the footprint she left in the industry.
Caroline Jones
Living in a nation that was still in turmoil over racial boundaries, Miss Jones did everything in her power to break race and gender barriers. She started as a secretary and copywriting trainee who worked her way up to the position of Creative Director. Jones started her own agency. As the executive vice president and Creative Director, she saw success with campaigns for McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and American Express.
Jane Maas
Mass is considered to be one of the founding mothers of advertising. If it weren’t for her work, digital marketing firms wouldn’t be what they are today. Maas was the brains behind the “I Love New York” tourist campaign that has grown to be legendary. With over 47 creative awards and five published books under her belt, she continues to inspire new generations of women to take on the challenges of the world of advertising without fear.
There’s a great adage from Oscar Wilde that speaks continually more truth as our society evolves: “Talent borrows, genius steals.”
Instagram has taken Wilde’s words to heart recently by releasing its newest feature, Instagram Stories. The app will now let you post videos and photos of your daily shenanigans that people can view for 24 hours. After that, the content disappears.
If you’re a Snapchat user, that feature probably sounds wildly familiar because the company implemented that same conceit into its app months ago and users and digital marketing companies alike used the feature to help broadcast their brand on a larger scale and a more creative way.
“Instagram is a follower platform where Snapchat is more of a best friend platform,” VP of platform partnerships at VaynerMedia said to Advertising Age. “Snapchat hasn’t encouraged brands to build up huge followings.”
Instagram Stories is a no-brainer, especially since the company is considered to be very brand friendly for companies who look to advertise on the app. Digital marketing companies are also looking to take Instagram Stories more seriously than Snapchat Stories because the audience base is so much larger. Snapchat revealed they have 100 million daily users, whereas Instagram has 300 million daily users.
The differences between the audience reached between the two users has already been notable. Within 24 hours, a video from Nike on Instagram Stories had 800,000 views. Nike’s most viewed video on Snapchat Stories has been 66,000.
For digital marketing companies and other businesses looking to make a name for themselves, it looks they’ll be better off investing their efforts into Instagram then Snapchat. Not only does Instagram have more users, but they tend to have a larger base of both millennials and people in their 30’s and 40’s, whereas Snapchat is almost exclusively a millennial audience.
The greats in any field — whether they’re Olympians or mathematicians — might be gifted with some talents that others might not have, but at their core, they’re people just like you and I who spend their days and nights practicing, theorizing and outworking their competition.
The same has to be done for those who want to succeed in the SEO industry. You have to outpace your competitors, and you have to always find innovative answers to the impossible question. As the #1 digital advertising agency in Utah, we know a thing or two about dominating the SEO field.
Never Stop Studying and Strategizing
SEO is constantly changing. It’s still a newborn in the advertising field, so those that hold the keys to all of SEO’s abilities, like Google, are still trying to figure out what’s the best way to utilize the tool for brands and companies in Utah and beyond. The best way to keep up to date with changing search engine trends is by following the blogs that are navigating where the industry is going. Blogs like Google Webmaster Central, Search Engine Land, Moz Blog and SEMrush Blog are all crucial to helping you how to approach your next SEO strategy.
Understand What Is and Isn’t Working in SEO
Quick rule of thumb about SEO: Never trust your feelings, only the numbers. As I mentioned before, search engine optimization is a new field, so it’s important to trust the numbers over your past experiences.
Visiting SEMrush’s winners and losers report will help you get a better understanding of how certain website are able to build a large audience just because of their search engine presence.
Talk Is Cheap. Work Is Priceless.
It’s crucial to implement a strategy on how you’ll approach your brand’s search engine potential, but you can’t spend countless days theorizing the best approach. Sometimes the best way to succeed in SEO is by strategizing, implementing, failing and repeating. After a strategy or two, you’ll start to see some sort of success, but if you don’t, it might be best to go back to the previous steps, and see where you might’ve gone wrong. Keep your SEO actions consistent by developing a plan and timeline that you commit to.
Don’t Settle in Your Success: Break The Glass Ceiling
This tip is vital. If you follow the previous steps, you’re on the right path to SEO success, but if you stay satisfied with that success, you’ll become stagnant. Success is fleeting, especially in the shifting landscape of marketing. Take your success and invest it in resources and strategies that will make you even more successful.
If you go your entire life not seeing “Field of Dreams” then you’ve wasted your life.
Harsh, but accurate.
“Field of Dreams” was a pop culture phenomenon that still holds some resonance today thanks to its meme-tastic quote: “If you build it, they will come.” That quote is a good streamlined metaphor for how some SEO agencies treat their online presence. If you build good content, then people will come to your website.
That’s unfortunately become an oversimplification of what’s needed to help build your SEO potential, especially if you’re looking for your brand to reach beyond the nearest borders in your surrounding Utah neighborhood. Good content is vital, but so are a few other factors.
First, Let’s Define, “Good”
We can get all philosophical and existential on you, but we’ll keep to the basics of “good” content. It needs to be unique, useful, entertaining, and relevant. That’s just the bare bones of what good content is, and you need a lot more than just those factors in order to make any dent in a search engine’s rankings. But before we jump into the more technical stuff, it is important to emphasize that good content is essential to SEO potential, it’s just not the only factor.
Getting Your Content Shared
In a perfect world, only the best content online would get shared, and you’d be known as the SEO Guru because your content is just so good that people are dying to share your next inspired thought. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world. We live in the world of Buzzfeed lists and Grumpy Cat movies, and it’s hard to get any other kind of content shared.
It’s hard, but it’s crucial. If Google’s algorithm sees your content is being shared, then it will place you higher in a search engine’s rankings. There’s a lot of different strategies on how to get your content shared on social media and on other sites, and it’s a good idea to see which one best suits your brand. A relatively common strategy though is to simply ask people to share your content. That strategy can work, but it’s important that your shares and links are always organic.
The Tech Behind Content
Template sites like WordPress give you a good foundation for spreading your content, but you need to make sure that your site has an extensive and updated sitemap, created metadata and title tags, intricate site security and exceptional site speed. Google and other search engines take these factors into consideration when they figure out where your content should rank. Your good content won’t do anything for your SEO potential if your website is riddled with toxic links, slow load times and convoluted site navigation.
Look Out Into The Future
It’s going to take you a while to become a notable presence on SEO. While you’re waiting for that to happen though, you need to ask yourself important questions about your content. You need to figure out who your audience is, what keywords you want to rank in, and how your content can be integrated in other parts of your brand’s campaign.
Think of good content as dirt. Dirt’s essential. Kevin Costner needed dirt to build his baseball field in “Field of Dreams.” He needed the proper tools though to turn that dirt into something more than just dirt. That’s what your content needs also: tools to turn it into something more.
Advertising agencies in Utah and throughout the rest of the United States are always trying to push boundaries. We want to do things that no other agency ever has before. Agencies have to be careful, though, that in their quest to be creative and innovative they don’t go too far and produce advertisements that are in poor taste.
At Fusion 360, we pride ourselves with being the leaders in content marketing. From our offices in Utah, we set precedent, make waves and basically make everybody wish that they were as cool as we are. Well, we’ll let you in on a little secret of how you can be: Set trends when you can and follow trends when someone else thought of an awesome idea first.
The year 2016 has set a lot of amazing trends in content marketing. Here are a few top trends that we think you should be aware of and use to produce the most effective content.
‘Content’ is one of those marketing buzzwords that gets passed around more frequently than your weekly office bulletin. And for good reason — after all, what would content marketing be without the content? But too many people working in businesses from Utah to New England don’t seem to have a good grasp on what content really is — and all the different forms it can take.
Written Content
Probably the first thing you think of when you think ‘content’ is written content. Written content can be a lot of things, from the most basic copy on your website to the most intricately detailed how-to guide.
The most common kinds of written content are:
Blogs
Articles
Stories
Lists/listicles
How-to guides
EBooks
Blogs, when updated regularly, are great for building consistent readership, and provide a forum for addressing topics that may be relevant to the target audience. Articles and stories may cover current happenings in your industry, and lists (or listicles) are a format of written content that’s easily digested and shared — perfect for content marketing.
How-to guides and eBooks are a little more elaborate, but can act as powerful methods for sharing your expertise with your target audience. Work for an adventure sports company in Utah? A comprehensive guide to outdoor activities in Utah is sure to do wonders for your company’s authority within your field — and it provides value to your target audience.
Visual Content
Visual content consists of well, visuals. Visual content is usually created in the form of photos, graphics, infographics or even memes.
Infographics are the pinnacle of visual content in the world of marketing right now. Infographics are more likely to be viewed and shared, and some research even indicates visual information is significantly more likely to be remembered later on down the line.
Your average photo or graphic can be used to liven up your blog posts or company webpages, but they can also boost engagement on social media. As any content marketing expert knows, a Facebook post or Tweet with an image attached gets significantly more engagement than a text-only post.
Finally, memes, a relatively recent phenomenon on the internet, can be used for humorous purposes — and that’s pretty much it. Don’t overuse these (or try to use them when you don’t really understand them) or they may end up devaluing your brand.
Other Media – Video, Podcasts, Interviews
Besides text and visuals, other media formats such as videos, podcasts and interviews can be great ways to liven up your content marketing. Consumer engagement with video has grown tremendously in the past few years, and experts don’t expect its progression to slow anytime soon.
While video is great for the audio-visual audience, podcasts are best for the audiophiles. Invite an expert or panel to join you for an interview on a particular topic, update your podcast regularly and make sure you’re getting the word out. Your audience’s morning commute from Farmington, Utah will never be the same.
Optimize Your Content for Different Platforms
As you can see, there are many different kinds of content, and we’ve only just scratched the surface. Whether you’re a content marketing analyst for a startup in Utah or a marketing director in the Big Apple, transforming your content for all different kinds of mediums is truly powerful.
Looking for an example? Just look at this infographic and video we’ve got to go along with this post.
While Facebook and Google fight each other to see who will reign supreme in mobile advertising, every other company seems to not even be trying in the ad space.
Mobile advertising is the fastest growing digital advertising format in the US, but there seems to be a hesitancy with businesses investing in it. Some marketing agencies are trying to get ahead of the curve by investing advertising dollars in apps, but some companies that dominate the mobile space like Twitter and Alibaba don’t take that as a sign that companies want to advertise on its mobile platform. Google and Facebook are betting that is what companies want, and the bet has paid off big time.
Together, the two companies own about half of the mobile ad revenue in the entire world, and that revenue keeps growing in the billions. The weird thing though is that Google and Facebook’s investment in advertising on mobile devices doesn’t seem like that big of a gamble to begin with. Twitter’s small investment in mobile advertising seems like a much bigger gamble.
Think about it: You can’t walk down the street without seeing at least a couple of people on their phones checking their social media, reading the news or playing “Pokemon Go.”
Google and Facebook have an excess of information on pretty much everyone — from your favorite type of music to what you’ve been shopping for online. Those analytics help marketing agencies understand what type of ads to place on your phone, which is invaluable information for them.
The biggest caveat to mobile advertising is the increase of actual purchases made on your phone isn’t increasing. Entering in your credit card number or buying plane tickets is just way easier to do on a laptop than a phone still.
But there’s hope that the problem will still be fixed. According to BI intelligence, Marketing agencies and companies alike are expecting to spend nearly $42 billion on mobile advertising.
