How to Make a Strong Digital Start in 2020

by | Dec 17, 2019

 

Fast Out of the Gate: How to Make a Strong Digital Start in 2020

by Chris Glazer

When I was in business school, I was introduced to many impactful minds of past and present business leaders. Somehow, the quote that stuck the most is from perhaps the oldest modern business leader, Peter Drucker, known as the father of modern management. 

He wrote, 

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” Peter Drucker, Father of Modern Management

This insight has stuck with me for the past several years, in part, because it is quite simple, but also because it rings true with every company I have encountered. Working in a marketing agency, I come across countless organizations- from B2B technology firms to large e-commerce companies to small local service companies. These businesses differ vastly in specialization, focusing on selling their SaaS product, golf clubs, air filters, pest control, or popcorn, but they all have a few things in common: they have a vision for what makes them different from their competition and they have innovation that makes them special. However, they also typically struggle to properly market themselves in the vast digital landscape we find ourselves in. Marketing has evolved significantly over the past few decades, and there are now so many ways a business needs to market themselves that it can become dizzying.  

The difference between a great idea and a great business is marketing. It is said that Thomas Edison, who invented some of the most important inventions in the 20th century, was a terrible businessman and never made much money from his inventions. In this day in age, the struggle for businesses remains the same: how do we market ourselves correctly and create loyal customers? 

How can you push the envelope in 2020? Focus on marketing. Read on as we explore.

Focus on Finding the Right Ways to Reach your Customers

Every business needs marketing, but with so many techniques and channels, where should the focus be? The quick answer is that it depends on your business, as there is no one channel or technique to successfully market your business. You must analyze which channels are most profitable for you and test different marketing channels. If you are not engaging in digital marketing online, your first goal for 2020 should be building a digital marketing plan- because your competition most certainly is. For some companies, the tried and true mailer is still the most important marketing technique. Likewise, other companies successfully use cold calling to reach its customers. However, almost all companies can benefit from digital marketing online, but don’t take my word for it- just see what your competition is doing. The following are three of the most important channels for online marketing that all companies should be testing, analyzing the ROI for, and building new strategies for in 2020. 

Social Media in 2020

Social media can be an important part of your digital marketing mix, but don’t expect your organic social to do much for you. Most companies need to make sure their profiles are built out and appear professional on major social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram), but unless you have already built up a giant following, spending too much time on organic social can be a waste of time and money. To reach the audience you need on social media, expect to spend money on paid social. You also need to pay attention to which social media channels you are investing in and test to figure out where you get the most engagement for your money. This helps ensure you are reaching the audience you need to reach. Social media should also be thought of as top-of-funnel, meaning building awareness to your brand. Social media typically does not yield strong conversion rates, but some business types are able to do it quite successfully.  

# 1 Social Media Tip for 2020 from Apogee

Pay to play in the spaces that matter most to potential customers. Social media is at its most powerful at the brand level, introducing new audiences across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok to the products and services provided by your business. This introduction cannot be made without using the advertising systems in these channels. 

To acquire new audiences for your brand, craft audience targeting around your topics of expertise and their interest in those topics. Serve those audiences with short, easy to consume video content formatted for mobile. And then retarget engaged users to guide them along the customer journey. 

Using social media advertising in this way creates highly qualified audiences at a much lower cost for audience acquisition than depending on paid search alone. Michelle Stinson Ross, Senior Social Media Strategist

Paid Search, Google Shopping, and Display in 2020

Paid search can be a highly effective way to reach your customers. In 2020, most people use Google (and other search engines) to find what they are looking for. If you are selling a product, you need to be on Google paid search, Google Shopping, and be remarketing with display ads. Be careful of overusing display, however, as we can all get sucked into the pure volume of traffic without doing a full ROI analysis. Display is cheap, but the traffic is typically poor quality. Within paid search, shopping, and display, there are many different targeting tactics and campaign types. Make sure you are endlessly testing and analyzing your results to maintain as high an ROI as possible. 

For companies that are not directly selling a product online, or who are selling a low-cost product, paid search should be used more sparingly. It is increasingly expensive, particularly in competitive spaces, so make sure you are running a professionally managed, granular account. For some companies, paid search will not yield the results they are looking for. It should always be tested as a channel to possibly break into, but if you aren’t doing paid search already, make sure the person who is running it knows what they are doing and that you have a significant budget (and patience) for such a test. 

#1 Paid Search Tip for 2020 from Apogee

Many advertisers we see do not have extensive extension options built into their ads. Having multiple extensions at the account and/or campaign level can really bolster up an ad. The extensions we most often see in accounts are callout extensions since they require the least information/time. Having sitelink extensions helps lead the customer to a more specific page so they are more likely to spend time/convert. Call extensions are great if you have a sales team built out and are able to direct calls efficiently. Review and location extensions can especially help when a customer may be in a hurry to find an item or fulfill a need.

Going into 2020, customers will continue to want efficiency in their quest for goods and services. Having extensions helps you by bolstering your ads in size and accuracy but also helps the customer see when you offer exactly what they want. Lena Sidhu, Senior Paid Search Strategist

SEO in 2020

Search engine optimization is a marketing technique that is crucial to most companies, and yet, it is typically the most neglected channel. Why is this? The answer is two-fold: it is difficult to understand, and it takes time to see results. Companies do not want to be patient, with board members and CEO’s demanding instant results, but strong SEO work often yields the highest ROI over time. If you don’t have a specific SEO strategy in place, 2020 is the perfect time to start. SEO includes three main tactics: technical SEO, on-page or content SEO, and off-page SEO. All are important. 

  • Technical SEO is the practice of ensuring that Google (and other search engines) can properly understand your website and, in turn, serve your webpages as results in their Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This is of the utmost importance, because if Google cannot understand your website, it doesn’t matter how good your content is. 
  • On-page or content SEO is a process of understanding what keywords users are typing into search engines and optimizing your web pages so they properly target these queries. 
  • Off-page SEO is a practice of building links from other websites back to your website. This tells Google that others find your content important. 

All three tactics are important, but you need to make sure that the person or agency who runs your SEO is competent enough to keep up with Google’s constantly changing search algorithm. 

#1 SEO Tip for 2020 from Apogee

Companies need to spend more time talking about what they do in natural language. 

We can’t rely on keywords as a data source alone and need to focus on true questions people have about products/services that the company offers. Search is changing and queries need to be answered in plain english, hindi, spanish or what have you. 

According to Google’s recent update “small tables end” = “small end tables” = “good end tables for my living room” this is not new per say, but Google has announced they’ve gotten better at assessing content for natural language and human readability. We have seen sites that do this well gain more traction and sites that do this poorly start to lose rankings in recent months.  Brent Schiffman, Senior Search Engine Optimization Strategist

 

Most of All, Don’t Give Up

Marketing can be frustrating. You can try multiple practitioners, agencies, and tactics but still not get the results you need. It is important to remember, however, what Peter Drucker said. All too often, I see when a company begins to struggle, the first budget that is slashed is marketing. The instinct makes sense from a human psychological standpoint, but ultimately, it is the opposite move to get your company back on track.  

Our capabilities in digital marketing include organic and paid search, local SEO, social media marketing, content strategy and development, and influencer marketing. We have proven results over 20 years across a broad range of businesses. Our difference is in our proven capabilities, industry thought leadership and client focus.   

We know the way is not always clear. Don’t brave the digital marketing world by yourself. Connect with us and let us join you in developing your digital footprint.

 

Chris Glazer is the Senior Director of Client Operations at Apogee Results. He helps clients grow. His responsibilities include sales, managing and growing high-priority clients, and acting as an operational leader for the company. He strives to look at the whole picture of a business and use marketing to help companies achieve their goals.

To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.

Cutting through the Clutter: Reaching Your Prospects Online During the Holidays

by | Nov 18, 2019

 

Cutting through the Clutter: Reaching Your Prospects Online During the Holidays

by Lena Sidhu

The holiday season is upon us. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, fall clearances, winter specials, end of year liquidations, and so many more names are given to the various sales that companies will have to incentivize consumers during the holidays. And why not? Consumers spend on average over $1,000 on gifts and non-gift holiday purchases. One-third of shoppers report holiday purchases are driven by promotions. What can you do to cut through the clutter? How do you reach your prospects when it seems like their inboxes are jammed with promotional offers from a multitude of companies? The answer is zeroing in on your prospective customer.

Targeting

Who is your ideal customer? Someone who visits pages about computers? Homeowners or people that rent? A couple with children interested in toys or a single female interested in women’s clothing or cosmetics? Where do your prospective customers live and what time of day are they more likely to purchase from you?

Most digital marketing platforms have a multitude of targeting options. You can really cut out a large portion of consumers who would not be interested in your product in order to better focus on those who would. Why waste spend trying to reach everyone, when you can use that spend to reach more relevant consumers who are more likely to purchase your product?

 

Creative

However, targeting is just one piece of the puzzle. Next, think about what differentiates your product from other products on the market today. Try to put yourself in the consumers’ shoes. Is your ad clear and direct? Furthermore, is it enticing enough to click on? Be sure to emphasize any sales you may have or new products you just got in stock. If you can make product recommendations, this is an ideal way to boost sales.

Channel Distribution

If your company is not as well-known and you want to increase awareness of your product, try using digital marketing platforms that focus on impressions. If your product is well known and people may search for it, search ads can be great. Display ads on websites, apps, social media through banners or other ad formats can be another great way to reach target customers. Regardless of which ad type you decide to use (you can also use multiple) you can target your ads to your ideal audience.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a popcorn company selling in only one state and your average customer typically visits a certain set of websites and is in a specific age demographic. You have competitors in the area that are larger than you. In this scenario, search ads may be a bit expensive to run. Display ads would be a great option. You can target your ads to the specific state or even city/zip code you are able to sell in. You can also target specific age demos. Lastly, you can target people who have visited your competitors’ websites or websites like their websites. This way, when someone is searching for popcorn and happen upon a similar site to your competitors, they will potentially get served a display ad for your popcorn later.

Targeting can save you money – money that is better spent when it presents ads to consumers that are more likely to buy from you.

When fighting the holiday clutter of ads, remember: You don’t need to compete against every competitor for every ad space. You just need to compete for the most relevant ad space for your business and target customer. Set up takes a bit longer, but this makes things much more manageable and cost effective for you in the long run.

How Can Apogee Results Help you?

Do you need help figuring out the best way to promote your products this season? Curious about paid digital advertising? We have proven results in digital advertising over 20 years across a broad range of businesses. Request your complementary assessment of your digital advertising strategy and results, with recommendations on how to get the most from your ad dollars.

Lena Sidhu is a part of Apogee’s paid marketing efforts. She has previously managed multi-million dollar per month campaigns with positive results. Lena worked in-house at a large insurance company prior to starting her career at Apogee. In her current role, she is responsible for developing strategy for clients and the subsequent implementation of that strategy.

To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.

2019 Award Winning Agency

by | Oct 14, 2019

2019 Award Winning Work

 

by Michelle Stinson Ross

 

 

During the fall conference season, Apogee Results was honored with the recognition of our industry peers for a sample of the work we do all year long for our clients. On October 9, 2019 the outstanding local campaign we created on behalf of The Bug Master was named the Best Local Campaign of 2019 for the US Search Awards.

Our CEO, Bill Leake, and I had the privilege of traveling to Las Vegas to represent the agency team and The Bug Master for this prestigious award for digital marketing in the United States. 

Erika Tapie, an SEO Associate here at Apogee Results, was also named a finalist for the Young Search Professional of the Year.

Over the years we have provided internship and training opportunities to young professionals starting out in their marketing careers. Erika Tapie has demonstrated an outstanding level of progress in less than a year. We are incredibly pleased with how Erika has taken the opportunities here at Apogee Results and become an accomplished SEO Specialist on her own.

Erika is now taking the leadership role for all editorial review of content written in the shop. She is also now the lead writer on several projects and guides tactical SEO writing through strategic implementation.

With The Bug Master in particular, she started out providing content guidelines based on the query and intent research. From January to June of 2019 she has written all of the content published on behalf of The Bug Master and works directly with the client on topic ideation and seasonal timing. She has become the client’s resource for further strategy steps.

As an agency, it is an honor to work with such an accomplished young marketer and a pleasure to see those accomplishments recognized in the industry she represents.

US Search Awards 2019 on Wednesday, October 10th, 2019 at the Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. Photographed by Adam Shane of CorporatePhotographers.com on a Nikon D5.

When we first wrote this case study back in July, we were just in the beginning stages of some truly outstanding results.

In December of 2018, we saw an increase of 33.21% in year over year sessions. From this point forward, our gains became increasingly dramatic. Here is the growth in sessions over the last 3 months (June is just through the 26th)
● April: 66.16% increase
● May: 74.18% increase
● June (through the 26th): 98.10% increase

That was just the beginning of the story

The area highlighted in yellow represents the growth from the previous graph. If you would like to learn more about the strategy and methodology of this winning case study, please view – Content and Local SEO for the Win

 

Michelle Stinson Ross is Apogee’s internal marketing strategist. She is responsible for growing our website, blog, social marketing, industry thought leadership and advertising footprints. She is also a key consultant to the internal team and the clients.

Michelle has written about digital marketing for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and Forbes. She is national industry conference speaker for SMX, Pubcon, Digital Summit.

To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.

8 Common Ways Your Agency Is Mishandling Your Ad Dollars

by | Oct 4, 2019

8 Common Ways Your Agency Is Mishandling Your Ad Dollars

by Patrick Dunn

It’s no secret that the world of Paid Media Marketing is growing faster than ever. This is especially notable within everyone’s favorite necessity, Google Ads. With all the platform changes and constant shifts in best practices, it can become overwhelming for a small marketing team to keep up with. It is in this state of confusion that most businesses turn to a digital marketing agency to help them stay relevant in a space where it is so easy to fall behind. Let’s face it, we all turn to Google for answers these days, and if your business is not showing up for your key search terms, you’re losing customers to the person who is. While there are lots of really great agencies working honestly and passionately every day, there are also a lot of really bad ones (really, really bad ones). These are the type of agencies that give digital marketing a bad rap because they not only waste their client’s time, but they are also wasting their ad dollars. Below are 8 common ways your agency is mishandling your ad dollars.

Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

Search Partners

Did you know that not every click/ad dollar in search campaigns go toward searches done within the actual Google Search Engine? Whenever a search campaign is created, Google will automatically opt you into their Search Partner Network. This means your search ads could be shown on any one of the thousands of Google Search Partner sites, often wasting ad dollars on very low-quality clicks and conversions. When was the last time your agency spoke to you about the amount of money spent within the Search Partner Network and how they have performed?

Automatic Placements

Whether you have created a Display, Remarketing, or Search with Display campaign, Google, by default, will opt you in to automatic placements that will serve your ads beyond what you are actually targeting in hopes they can show your ad to users similar to your audience. Unfortunately, similar to Search Partners, we have found very poor performance from these settings and Google Ads does not make it easy to turn off. How much of your yearly ad spend went to poor performing placements?

Location Settings

Do you know where your ads are actually being served? Did you know that even if you are targeting specific cities, states, or countries, you can still end up spending a large portion of your budget outside of these regions? I can’t count how many times we looked at an agency run account and found, due to mishandled settings, that their ad dollars were being spent in areas they do not even serve. The fix is simple, but is your agency utilizing it correctly?

Faulty Tracking

It is very important to make sure the metrics your agency is reporting to you are correct. Whenever they report “conversions” and “cost per conversion,” what are they actually reporting? I can’t count how many times I have audited an account and saw faulty tracking resulting in double-counted conversions or unimportant actions such as button clicks being attributed as conversions. This can greatly mislead the direction of the account and result in wasted ad dollars.

Keyword Malpractice

Using correct keyword match types and regular addition of negatives are some of the most basic common practices amongst agency beginners. Even with that being known, this is still commonly overlooked. Either the agency has assigned someone very junior to the account who has not grasped the importance of keyword management, or the account manager is simply too busy to take their time and show each account the attention it needs to run most efficiently. This can result in thousands of dollars in wasted spend if not fixed over a long period of time.

Not Using Advanced Bid Adjustments

While most people understand device bid adjustments (although, you’d be surprised how many don’t), there are a ton of other useful places where bid modifiers are commonly overlooked. Whether it’s location, demographics, time of day, or specific audience segments, Google provides in-depth data about the users interacting with your ads, and if that data is not being utilized properly, you could be far overspending what you should be.

Inefficient Bid Strategies

There is a constant pressure to turn over bidding strategies to Google’s automated bidding strategies, but is it the right decision for your specific business? We see a lot of agencies toss one of Google’s automated strategies on an account without much thought given to it. However, these strategies are not one-size-fits-all and can leave much on the table if not utilized correctly.

Baseless Campaign Strategy

It seems like each month Google unveils a new campaign, ad, or bid strategy, and then there’s a rush to be a part of the latest trend. While it’s crucial to stay up to date with industry trends, not every campaign type is for every business. I’ve done countless account audits where thousands of dollars were being wasted on poorly set up video, Gmail, display, remarketing, search with display select, and more, campaign types. While these campaign types have their own place within the marketing funnel, depending on your budget, there may not be room to be in all of these spaces and it is important to focus your ad dollars on what is driving the most success.

The world of paid digital advertising can be mystifying. Do you need help figuring out if your digital marketing dollars are being spent effectively? Would you like an expert opinion on how your campaigns and analytics are currently set up, and what you could do to improve your results?

Apogee Results offers a complimentary Paid Search Report Card. We look at a half dozen key metrics and provide you with our analysis and recommendations at no cost or obligation – simply a 30-minute debriefing to help you better understand where you are and where you might be able to improve.

Patrick Dunn leads Apogee’s Paid Search department. His team is responsible for the strategy, implementation, and growth of all Paid Marketing efforts. He has experience working both in-house and at agencies in both Houston and Austin. He has successfully managed campaigns across multiple industries including several multi-million dollar a month campaigns.

To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.

Influencer Marketing: The Next Big Thing

by | Sep 9, 2019

Influencer Marketing: The Next Big Thing

by Lena Schulz

Webcology takes a deeper look at the ecosystem of the internet as it affects webmasters and web marketers. Host Jim Hedger talks with Apogee Results head of marketing Michelle Stinson Ross about the past, present and future of influencer marketing on Webmaster Radio Live. Tune into the full embedded podcast or check out show highlights below.
Listen to "Michelle Stinson Ross on Webcology" on Spreaker.

What Does Influencer Marketing Mean?

Let’s break it down. First and foremost the average person doesn’t quite have an accurate grasp on what influencer marketing actually means. Any layperson’s first instinct might be to assume that the label is reserved for models on Instagram pushing lifestyle products. However, the concept is about as old as marketing gets, predating Instagram by about 300 years. It is defined as a form of marketing that involves endorsements from people and organizations, usually possessing a high level of knowledge or social influence in their respective fields. At its core, anyone who has cultivated an audience that is relevant to your business could be an influencer for you. Be it a celebrity, a thought leader on Twitter, a journalist, a podcast or even on a smaller scale, micro audiences stemming from organic user-generated content. Even link building can act as PR and is also a part of influencer marketing. Influencers can be anyone, anywhere. Within any industry, there are influential people: it’s up to you to find them.

How Can I Make It Work for Me?

With each field best practices differ so it can be hard to generalize which channels are most effective to push messages through. Michelle recommends for most starting with building up representation on social platforms and then branching out to blogs and long-form content when applicable. As an example, a haircare brand looking to boost shampoo sales would want to pair with people representing their target demographic on Instagram, for example. This is a perfect outlet for a brand wanting to showcase how its users look and feel. With this specific brand, unusual scientific terms and differences in the product required some customer education, which is where blogs and educational articles came into play.

For Influencers

From the influencer side, Michelle says there is still a need for maturity and professionalism that still isn’t quite present in the influencer space. As this channel of marketing matures, influencers need to understand they can no longer craft their rate sheet based solely on how big their audience is and how engaged the followers are. That criteria is the qualifier that brands use to prioritize their choice of influencers. Expect for brands to ask for specific deliverables as part of their contract negotiations.

Influencer deliverables

  • How many posts are made  
  • What kind of posts
  • Level of engagement with brand posts 
  • How often the brand is mentioned
  • Use of hashtags and appropriate tagging
  • Ability to report measurable data back to the business

For Brands 

Don’t get caught up on attempting to look at Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) when it comes to working with influencers, mainly because its difficult to put a direct price point on posts. Overall, social media is very top-of-the-funnel and its main function is to drive awareness. Especially on Instagram, the average user does not necessarily click and buy anything immediately. Efficacy can best be measured by increased brand awareness and audience acquisition, not simply direct sales. It’s more relevant to focus on how much traffic has been driven to specific landing pages, how many people have filled out a form, how big the email list has grown, and how big the cookie and retargeting pools have gotten as a result of working with an influencer. 

Finding the Perfect Fit

The best way to find the right person or group to represent your brand is to full-on scout out potential as if they were a pro athlete. Dive deep, stalk them, and fully assess the pros and cons of partnering with them. Take note on follower genuineness: are the accounts engaging with real accounts or heavily overrun with bots? It’s also a two-way relationship if you get a rejection it doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t a good fit, it may have just been bad timing. Even if you find the perfect arrangement, you need to be prepared in advance for the reputation management aspect of the partnership as you have put a part of your brand identity in the hands of someone else. There is always a risk because you and your brand identity will be linked to that person’s decisions, and that can always go one of two ways in the future. It’s also a two-way relationship. If you get a rejection it doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t a good fit it may have just been a bad time. In the great search planning is everything. Marketing should begin on day one. Seek out people who align with the identity you want to represent and ask yourself what are your business goals and where are you customers. 

If you would like to learn more about how Apogee Results can help you with developing an influencer marketing plan. Request your Influencer Contract Template, fill out the contact form here in the blog post, or get in touch with Michelle Stinson Ross directly via LinkedIn

Lena Schulz is Apogee’s newest Social Media and PPC Full Time Intern. She graduated from Loyola University Maryland with a degree in International Studies and Marketing. She assists our team by providing clients with community social media management, PPC strategy and content writing. In her free time, she loves to work on graphic design, discover new foods and relax by the nearest body of water.

To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.

Apogee Results Honored in 2019

by | Jul 29, 2019

 

Apogee Results Honored in 2019

US Search Awards

The US Search Awards is regarded as the premiere celebration of SEO, PPC and content marketing in the US and celebrates and rewards the expertise, talent and achievements of the search industry. Launched in October of 2013, the awards attract hundreds of entries from the leading search and digital agencies from across North America and to those based elsewhere around the globe who are delivering work for the US market.

Apogee Results has the honor of being among the award nominees for Best Local Campaign for our ongoing work with Austin-based The Bug Master.

Recognition for the Best Local Campaign of 2019 is based around a specific geographical location that has delivered outstanding results or visibility in search engines. Entries which have shown how to capitalize on the changing search landscape and implement localized strategies that have driven tangible results make up the short list for this category of the US Search Awards.

 

YOUNG SEARCH PROFESSIONAL OF THE YEAR

Every year the US Search Awards recognizes the search professionals under 25 working in the US search industry who are achieving great results and leading the industry at a young age.

This year our own Erika Tapie is among a list of outstanding young SEOs.

Erika Tapie – Young Search Professional Nominee

Erika recently graduated from Sam Houston State University with a degree in Mass Communication and began working for Apogee Results in late 2018. New to the industry, Erika is a current SEO Associate that helps clients by providing effective SEO services and content writing. She is also the lead SEO content writer for The Bug Master nominated for the 2019 US Search Awards Best Local Campaign.

Erika played soccer for 16 years, enjoys trying new food, going on hikes, dad jokes, attending music concerts, and playing with her pups.

Stay tuned in for our next blog posting to find out the final results! Awards will be announced on Wednesday, October 9, 2019, at the SLS Resort in Las Vegas.

SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it. Their purpose is to provide a foundation for industry growth through building stronger relationships, fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry, generating research, and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing.

2019 SEMPO Global Awards

Best SEO Campaign

This award recognizes exceptional integration efforts between organic search engine optimization and using a variety of both online and offline activity through continuous improvement of technical elements, on-page content and off-page factors. Our comprehensive technical and content work on the behalf of Datical was awarded Best SEO Campaign of 2019 by SEMPO.

We will soon publish the case study related to this industry honor.

 
To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.

Humanizing Your Business

by | Jan 29, 2019

 

Legends of Marketing Series by Gary Hoover

Humanizing Your Business

 

The Internet can be an impersonal world.  As much as we love Amazon and eBay and know that somewhere behind those facades are real workers and real sellers, the customer experience can be pretty cold.

On the other hand, the recent passing of former Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher reminds us of the power of putting people at the forefront of your business.  For a great look at Herb, one of the best CEOs in American history, and his principles, see:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinandjackiefreiberg/2019/01/04/20-reasons-why-herb-kelleher-was-one-of-the-most-beloved-leaders-of-our-time/#6bee8450b311

and

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/herb-kelleher-southwest-airlines-made-world-smaller/

While most leaders understand the importance of people, that is often not reflected in their web presence

A friend once asked me to evaluate a consulting firm he was thinking about hiring, directing me to their website.  When I looked, nowhere did a find anything about the people at the consulting firm, their backgrounds or accomplishments.  Yet all a consulting firm is, is people and their skills.  While the consulting firm’s website bragged about how much they had helped other companies, I could tell nothing about the people who did the work.  This surprised me, and I told my friend I would not consider hiring them, based on what their website told me.

On the other hand, even giant organizations like Walmart and Target give great emphasis to their people on their corporate websites.  The “About Us” section is the perfect place to really talk about us.

There are other ways to humanize your website and online presence, to celebrate the human nature of your business, your employees, and your customers.

Think in terms of a bricks-and-mortar parallel.  Back in the days when record stores were still important, Richard Branson’s Virgin Music retail chain had a great website.  Instead of saying, “Contact Us,” the link was labelled “Get me a manager!”  All of the brilliant Branson’s businesses place a great emphasis on a sense of humor and humanity.  His airlines are far “friendlier” than most competitors, even in the signs and words they use.  Do you have a sense of humor?  How could your website and apps stand out from a boring crowd?

Great companies often use human stories, with real people and all their flaws.  Videos of your employees, their families and pets, and your customers and how they use your products and services can be very powerful.  I am sure you can find many examples on the web; here is a company that does a nice job of being deeply human:

Few things are more powerful than storytelling.  It is the foundational principle of the Walt Disney Company, and most great filmmakers, authors, and speakers.

Do you tell your story?  Are you proud of your history?  How did your company get started?  Who are or were the founders?  Your company does not have to date from 1806, like this great American company, to cherish its history:

Of course, the truly human enterprise goes well beyond the Internet.

How often do you talk to your customers?  At one of the companies I co-founded, Hoovers.com, one of our later CEOs spent each Friday talking to customers.  Every week, the sales team would give him a list of people to call, ranging from the smallest home office customer to the biggest enterprise subscriber.  At Build-A-Bear Workshop, the founder and original CEO Maxine Clark personally answered every single customer email, even when such emails numbered in the thousands.  One great Coca-Cola CEO spent something like eight hours a week in supermarkets, talking to workers and inspecting displays.

And Herb Kelleher always placed every single employee on a pedestal, spending what others considered inordinate amounts of time with them.

It is easy to get caught up in the big deals, working with investment bankers, venture capitalists, accountants, and flying along at “30,000 feet.”  But so often this altitude does not result in soft landings, because the real work of serving customers and leading and celebrating people gets lost in the shuffle.

 

 

Gary Hoover is a serial entrepreneur.  He and his friends founded of the first book superstore chain Bookstop (purchased by Barnes & Noble) and the business information company that became Hoovers.com (bought by Dun & Bradstreet).  Gary served as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business.  He has been a business enthusiast and historian since he began subscribing to Fortune Magazine at the age of 12, in 1963.  His books, posts, and videos can be found online, especially at www.hooversworld.com. He lives in Flatonia, Texas, with his 57,000-book personal library.

To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.

 

The Power of Cross-Promotion

by | Jan 6, 2019

 

Legends of Marketing Series by Gary Hoover

The Power of Cross-Promotion

 

The idea of working with other companies to build your sales has been around a long time in many situations.

Most of my life has been in retailing.  My friends and I built the first chain of giant bookstores, Bookstop, in the 1980s.  Barnes & Noble purchased the company and then expanded the giant store idea in a big way.  One of the most important parts of retail strategy has always been site selection.  In each of the 20+ stores we opened from Miami to San Diego, our first question was, “Who will be our co-tenants?  Will they appeal to the same customers who shop bookstores?”  Restaurants, movie theaters, and The Container Store were some of the co-tenants we sought.

Our first store was in a new shopping center in northwest Austin, Texas.  Two doors down was a young company’s second store, called Whole Foods Market.  I went to every store in the shopping center, maybe 15 of them, and offered to share in our grand opening campaigns.  Only Whole Foods’ management was interested.  We set it up so that if I customer bought enough at Whole Foods, they got a free book, and if they bought enough books, they got a free steak at Whole Foods.  All I clearly remember is that Whole Foods ran out of steaks in the promotion.

At the level of big companies, McDonald’s has worked with many others, including the makers of Monopoly.  But their greatest partnership is with Coca-Cola.  The inability to capture the business of fast food chains led PepsiCo to buy their own chains and create the second biggest fast food chain group.  Later, they spun those operations off as Yum Brands, which includes Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC.  Pepsi made sure they signed long-term contracts to have their products in those restaurants.

One of the most successful co-marketers is Intel, which sells nothing to end consumers, but backs the advertising of those computer makers who use Intel “inside” with their logo and sound bite.

And of course, the movie companies use co-marketing heavily, from James Bond and Aston-Martin to E.T. and Reese’s Pieces, from Burger King in Men in Black II to Mini Cooper in The Italian Job.

There is no marketing organization which can’t use cross-promotion to their advantage.  It’s just a matter of being creative.  When everyone else is just running low prices for Black Friday and special sales, surprise people with the unexpected, something different!

Starting questions include:

  • Who is our customer? (You gotta know that already!)
  • What else do they buy? (Think hard, do surveys or focus groups, look for the unusual or surprising.)
  • Which companies are best in those categories?
  • Which companies are most interested in tying-up with us, which are easiest to work with? (Especially if they already do some co-marketing.)

From a variety of sources, here are a few ideas – it’s up to you to figure out how to adapt them to your business:

Pool your marketing budgets and human resources to co-sponsor an event, from a marathon to a webinar to a museum exhibit.

Share in a contest – any contest.  Fill in the missing letters from famous quotes or movie dialogs, to spell out your company or brand name.  Find hidden codes in each other’s websites or email campaigns.

Have customers submit videos of themselves using both your products or services.

Exchange premiums – a gift of wine with cheese and vice-versa, a gift of cosmetics with clothes, a gift of consulting time with a valuable report or study.  Look for unusual combinations!

Create bundled products and packages that you both sell – a restaurant discount with a hotel stay, shoes with socks, website creation and social media marketing tools, and again cheese and wine.

Selectively combine frequent customer, loyalty programs, or points.  Buy ten things from us and get one from the other company.

Create affiliate programs where other companies earn commissions for driving traffic to your site or products and services, wherever they are sold.

Share content – if your food site has recipes tips, share them with the people who make the ingredients and vice-versa.

Share customer lists (within the rules and with the customers’ approval, of course!).

Get creative, look at every industry for more ideas.

Even without telling the other company, you may be able to promote their product without them objecting.  Tie something you sell to a popular TV show, movie, song, or book.  When our Bookstop employees tired of receiving book discounts as a perk, we added gift certificates from the largest local record store and people loved them (remember record stores?).

Any such program needs strong joint promotion and social media campaigns to work.  Tweet, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Yelp, and TripAdvisor a lot!  Review each other’s products on Amazon.

With the right partner and creative thinking, you can both accelerate your business!

Here are some links for further research, inspiration, and idea generation:

https://petersandeen.com/partnership-marketing-methods/

https://blog.rebrandly.com/co-marketing-campaigns/

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-cobranding-partnerships

https://www.bluleadz.com/blog/10-great-examples-of-co-marketing-partnerships-that-work

https://www.powerlinx.com/resources/types-marketing-partnerships/

https://econsultancy.com/a-complete-guide-to-partnership-marketing-part-one/

https://adage.com/article/agency-viewpoint/10-branded-content-partnerships-2017/311725/

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/254742

For small businesses:

https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/04/partnership-marketing-small-business.html

https://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing-strategy/cost-effective-marketing/marketing-partnerships-that-every-small-business-should-build

https://www.hatchbuck.com/blog/small-business-partnerships/

https://www.inc.com/magazine/201504/erin-geiger-smith/tipsheet-the-tricky-art-of-parenting.html
(The link sounds wrong, but this is about marketing, not parenting.)

For bricks-and-mortar, local:

https://townsquared.com/ts/resources/cross-promotion/

https://www.nfib.com/content/resources/marketing/10-ideas-for-cross-promoting-your-company-50506/

https://www.independentwestand.org/cross-promote-your-small-business-through-local-partnerships/

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/attract-more-customers-through-cross-promotion-2947163

https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/05/cross-promotion-small-business.html

https://www.amfam.com/resources/articles/your-business/tips-for-cross-promotion-with-other-businesses

https://www.thryv.com/blog/7-cross-promotion-ideas-small-business/

Gary Hoover is a serial entrepreneur.  He and his friends founded of the first book superstore chain Bookstop (purchased by Barnes & Noble) and the business information company that became Hoovers.com (bought by Dun & Bradstreet).  Gary served as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business.  He has been a business enthusiast and historian since he began subscribing to Fortune Magazine at the age of 12, in 1963.  His books, posts, and videos can be found online, especially at www.hooversworld.com. He lives in Flatonia, Texas, with his 57,000-book personal library.

To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.

 

Launching a Growth-Ready Business

by | Dec 16, 2018

Launching a Growth-Ready Business

by Kyle Nations

Bill Leake, founder and CEO of Apogee Results, joins the conversation on the Angel Investor’s Network podcast with host Laura Rubinstein, of Social Buzz Club. During this episode of the podcast, Bill shares his personal insights and experiences as an entrepreneur, business founder, and digital marketer. He also explains how his marketing agency is becoming an incubator for start-ups in their Venture Studio. The full interview is embedded here and show highlights follow.

Some early marketing lessons from Bill’s career as a McKinsey Consultant were: 1) the power of brand, and 2) the value of pattern recognition.

Brand

Brand is meaningful, always. Direct response marketers underestimate the power of brand, sometimes thinking anything can be sold if it is sold effectively. However, building a brand, (particularly if you are a small business) is not just helpful, it’s critical. Brand is very powerful, and if you can articulate your brand identity from Day 1, it can be extremely helpful in opening doors and helping achieving scale. People will call you back if they recognize your brand. People will respond favorably to you if they like your brand. People are more inclined to do business with a brand that has invested in building trust and relationships.

Pattern Recognition

Pattern recognition is a helpful tool as well. If you are talking to someone about their business and trying to learn more, you can take shortcuts to understanding their assumptions and how their business model works, by drawing from your own experience and looking for the similarities and patterns you have seen before, perhaps in different or unrelated businesses. Essentially it is applying your collective experience to a business problem by looking for similarities and patterns in operating assumptions, models and outcomes, from other businesses. It allows you to test hypotheses much faster – it saves time, and time can be more valuable than money.

Love What You Do

Bill says, that at this point in his professional life, what he loves most is the ability to gather the top marketing talent not just in Austin or Texas, but in the US to work with every day. The team of people at Apogee consistently cultivate a good mix of creative and communications skills, and quantitative ability. For example, our strategists need to know “how to test” and “what to test.” Top shelf digital marketing talent does not have just an agency profile, nor are they purely engineers. They are a hybrid.

Building Business for Our Clients

Although the details of building business through digital marketing vary by market segment, it all starts with “who is the customer?” It’s imperative to understand your customer and how digital helps that customer along the journey. To do this, it is critical to be voracious about data collection and leveraging that data. Marrying customer/audience data with advertising creative and content messaging is the “secret sauce” of digital marketing. That “secret sauce” impacts the types of human behavior you can initiate. Be intentional, not just getting the right message for the right customer, but also knowing the right message for each customer in terms of where they are in the journey. Account based marketing, retargeting ads to a list, is a specific example of that “secret sauce.” In this use case, we are targeting those who have expressed interest and are already having conversations with sales to get customers all the way to the finish line. Influencer marketing is another flavor, so to speak, of account based marketing. If you are trying to reach the masses with your message, it is important to reach the press, online publications. and niche bloggers too. Influencer marketing is the cheapest and best way to do this in the digital world. But whether you’re encouraging potential customers along the path to a sale or engaging the help of influencers, segmentation and targeting are the most important activities in digital marketing.

Venture Studio

Rather than focusing on growth at Apogee Results, Bill is more interested in optimizing his business to help launch more successful growth-ready businesses. When we look at the Austin based start-up community, we see a lot of companies that are great at developing products and services, but counting on inexpensive and inexperienced marketing and sales teams to take those products and services to new customers. Building a product is not as expensive as it once was, especially in the digital world. What once took 7 figures to create, can now be done in the range of $50k to $250K. Where most companies fail is not product development but getting that product to market. The knowledge base and experienced marketing talent cultivated at Apogee Results in many cases is more valuable that additional venture capital funds.

What Should Be Invested in Marketing

If you are a start-up what should you be spending on marketing? It is not the traditional 8-10% of revenue – that is an old-school rule of thumb. It’s more like 40% of revenue or more for early stage companies. If you are a start-up, and if you are trying to get the word out and you don’t have channels and don’t have viral you need to be prepared to lose money for a couple of years. Ad agencies understand and focus on paid media. PR firms focus on earned media. If your content/product/service is good, you should do both. You can increase the odds of success and get more people to link back to your business using paid media and realize a good return. If you do well with the earned visibility, pour some paid on it.

Your Baby Is Ugly

For new ventures, it is important to know if “your baby is ugly.” Don’t just evaluate the product and the market for it, also evaluate the process necessary to complete a sale and get it into the hands of customers. Consider the following:

  • Is there a market need of more than ‘one’ for your product?
  • Is the market large enough to sustain growth?
  • Have you tested your product – not just the idea of your product, but have you tested adoption at all levels?
  • Do you have the right skills, but also the passion for it?
  • Do you know what you don’t know?
  • Do you know how to find out what you don’t know?
  • Do you have the right investment partners and plan?
  • Do you understand the competition?

If you would like to learn more about Apogee Results can help you build your business, please visit our Marketing Consulting page or fill out the contact form here in the blog post.

Kyle Nations has a long career in business development and marketing, He brings both big and small company experience to Apogee Results and our clients.  Kyle has undergraduate and graduate degrees in business and two college-age sons he loves to brag about. A lover of sports, he is both participant and spectator and is particularly fond of the water, hiking, and snow skiing. To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.

Splashing Outside the Digital Box

by | Dec 5, 2018

Legends of Marketing Series by Gary Hoover

 

Splashing Outside the Digital Box

Today’s marketers and retailers, online and off, face more competition for the customer’s attention than at any time in history.

Those customers may spend record amounts of time on their smartphones, tablets, and laptop screens, but they also still live most of their lives in a real, three-dimensional, non-digital, non-virtual world.  They walk, bike, or drive streets, they visit bricks-and-mortar stores for 90% of their spending, they go to concerts, festivals, churches, schools, dinners, and parties.  Above all else, they talk to their friends about products, services, and what is in the news, what is cool.

And in this world of competition for attention and engagement, those smartphones and other devices are distinctly flat and two-dimensional, no matter how imaginative you may be in their use.  We all recently witnessed the record sales day of Cyber Monday 2018.  But even Cyber Monday is flat, the same old thing, essentially boring.  Its excitement is entirely price-driven, not exactly how you build a unique and durable brand.  Cyber Monday is not about customer experience or engagement.

In this environment, how does one make a splash?  Perhaps we can get some inspiration from the “splash-makers” of the past.  Perhaps there are opportunities to make a splash in the three-dimensional world, even for online-based marketers.

“Mr. Stanley” Marcus was the man most responsible for making Neiman Marcus a globally known luxury brand, even though during his years as company chief, they only had stores in one state, Texas.  He explained to his publicists that every media outlet received hundreds of corporate press releases each day, most going unread and into the trash.  He said the only press releases his company wanted to send out were items that were truly news, that would be worthy of making the front page.  His specific tactics included a Christmas catalog which included such items and “his and hers aircraft” and in-store two-week-long “fortnights” which celebrated the culture, art, and fashion of a different country each year.  These attracted international attention.  Today the company generates about 100 times the revenue that it did when Mr. Stanley built its reputation for fashion innovation.

H. J. Heinz built one of the most recognizable global consumer brands. At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair) in Chicago, he had a display booth, but it was relegated to an upper level gallery that was rarely visited. So he dropped coupons across the fairgrounds, offering a gift to anyone who came by his booth.  The gift was a small pickle lapel pin; the result was that the fair authorities had to reinforce the floor of the upstairs gallery due to the heavy foot traffic.  At the close of the fair, the other upstairs exhibitors gave him an award because of all the attention he brought to them.  In 1898, Heinz bought the big Ocean Pier along the popular Atlantic City Boardwalk, where he held concerts, art shows, and demonstrated Heinz products.  Operating for 46 years, the Heinz Pier drew 15,000 people a day in the peak summer season.  His competitors were left in the dust – and not just in Atlantic City!

At the same Chicago World’s Fair where Heinz passed out pickles, George Westinghouse substantially underbid larger and better-known competitor Thomas Edison’s General Electric to power the Fair’s remarkable and unprecedented lighting system.  The Westinghouse name soon became a household word.

A few years later, Westinghouse also got the contract for the giant turbines to power the Niagara Falls Power Plant, one of the largest in the world.

The power company encouraged manufacturers to move to Niagara Falls to avail themselves of the cheap, plentiful electricity.  One who did was Henry Perky of the Shredded Wheat Company.  Though a national brand, he like Heinz understood the power of attracting tourists:

From 1901 until discontinued sometime around 1946, tours of the shredded wheat factory were part of the marketing of Niagara Falls. Honeymooners saw the falls and then toured the factory. The company estimated that around 100,000 visitors took the tour annually. Perky had designed the factory with balconies and aisles that permitted visitors to see the machinery in operation. They were welcomed every day of the week all year except Sundays, in the lobby above, fitted to resemble that of a hotel. Off to one side was a demonstration area where free lunches were served to visitors that used shredded wheat products in various ways. Tour guides led the visitors through the 5.5 acre factory and up to the roof garden and auditorium where they heard lectures on diet, cooking and good living.

In this same era, in 1896 small-town (Chattanooga) newspaper publisher Adolph Ochs bought the struggling 13th-best-read newspaper in New York City.  While his primary tactic was to improve the reporting in the paper, to be fair to both sides of each discussion, and to skip sensational, bloody stories, he also had a knack for promotion.  He put a big lighted advertising sign near Madison Square, and later built the city’s second tallest building as the newspaper’s headquarters.  At the base of the building, he put the day’s news in a running electric banner.  Each New Years’ Eve, he had a lighted ball drop from the top of the building.  The city renamed the square next to the building from Longacre Square to Times Square, after Adolph Ochs’s newspaper, The New York Times.  The Times also sponsored risky ventures like Admiral Peary’s search for the North Pole and Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic.  Thus “the world’s greatest newspaper” was built.

When radio (“wireless”) came along a few years later, John Wanamaker’s New York department store put a radio receiving office on the top floor, to draw attention and publicity to the store.  Young radio operator David Sarnoff was the first to hear of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, gaining Sarnoff (and Wanamaker’s) attention and fame.

None of these promotional ideas were the norm, none were expected.  Competitors were shocked, and often thought the ideas stupid.  Bold ideas  require imagination and courage, thinking “outside the box.”

These stories may seem old and irrelevant, but surely there are modern parallels that imaginative marketers could develop.  In more recent years, we’ve seen Red Bull gain global attention with unusual sports and events, and Richard Branson spread the Virgin brand by attempting unrivaled flights.

  • Is there an opportunity for your company to leverage concerts, fairs, events, marathons, or festivals, especially in geographical areas where you have a lot of customers?
  • Is there a way to reach out to your ever-moving customers, whether that be through wrapping some cars (or trucks or scooters) with your logo?  Or running a tour bus across America, stopping in key cities across the way to demonstrate your products?
  • What can your company or brand do that no one else is thinking about?  What would really make a splash?  Even if it requires leaving the comfortable world of the flat screen where your competitors are stuck.

Gary Hoover is a serial entrepreneur.  He and his friends founded of the first book superstore chain Bookstop (purchased by Barnes & Noble) and the business information company that became Hoovers.com (bought by Dun & Bradstreet).  Gary served as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business.  He has been a business enthusiast and historian since he began subscribing to Fortune Magazine at the age of 12, in 1963.  His books, posts, and videos can be found online, especially at www.hooversworld.com. He lives in Flatonia, Texas, with his 57,000-book personal library.

To get updated information about the team at Apogee Results, please follow us on your favorite social media channels.