Search agencies: What goes on behind closed doors?
As a marketing manager at a search agency, I am often asked what our specialists do on a day-to-day basis. Yes, they increase the visibility of our customers’ websites online, but what about the ins and outs of the particular techniques they use?
Vertcial Leap's marketing manager Michelle Hill.
Whenever our customers visit, we invite them to sit with the teams so that they can see for themselves what goes on behind the scenes on their campaigns. They’re always quite taken aback by the colossal amount of data we collate and interpret in order to ensure that their brand gets in front of the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
With this in mind, we asked each of our teams to invite us into their heads and give us a guided tour of how they approach and manage their campaigns. The result is our ‘Inside Vertical Leap’ series of articles, where a specialist from each team talks you through the techniques they use to achieve the maximum return for our customers’ budgets:
SOCIAL MEDIA: The serious data behind the social showmanship
SEO: How a fix-boost-fill approach gets results fast
CONTENT: How to dig for those content marketing golden nuggets
PPC: How to continually manage and refine a successful PPC campaign
DESIGN: How to use data to influence design
You’ll be amazed at what actually goes on and will hopefully pick up some super-handy tips for your own campaigns too!
The value of transparency
In today’s digital landscape, where marketers are under ever-increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI, it’s critical that they have visibility over what their agencies are doing and how their budgets are being spent. The ability to demonstrate the depth of expertise that is required to make their campaigns successful not only helps to develop trusting relationships, but also gives them confidence that they are in safe hands.
The first thing we noticed once we started promoting these articles in our newsletters and on social media was that our email open rate increased significantly, by an incredible 50 per cent! We put this down to the fact that many marketers are frustrated with the lack of transparency they have over what their agencies actually do on a day to day basis so were probably intrigued to find out what goes on under the hood of one.
We also attributed some of the open rate success to the use of much more personal images – people at their desks, chatting with team members, brainstorming with post-it notes and so on. People enjoy reading about people at the end of the day.
The purpose of the articles was to educate so the other key metric for us was ‘time spent on page’ and getting people to the end of the articles. We wanted to provide real insight for the readers which meant the articles were quite long so we were delighted to see an increase in ‘time spent on page’ of 43 per cent. We also saw a 21 per cent reduction in bounce rates as a result of cross-promoting the other articles in the series, keeping people on the site for even longer.
Michelle Hill is marketing manager of search agency Vertical Leap.
Content by The Drum Network member:
Vertical Leap
We are an evidence-led search marketing agency that helps brands get found online, drive qualified traffic to their websites and increase conversions/sales.
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