If I was starting a digital marketing company over again, what would I tell myself?

It’s been a long road since I started Feedbackwrench back in 2015, and it was started from scratch after I had decided I could no longer be in partnership with my old partners in a tax firm I had started.

I’ve started out as a financial advisor, then started a tax and accounting firm and then our web design and marketing company.

We are nothing like we were in the beginning, and I’ve often thought fondly of how far we’ve come.

But what advice would I have for someone starting out their own digital marketing company? What things should you know if your considering making websites, starting an SEO company or becoming a PPC firm?

Enough with the keyword stuffing 😉

SEO is squishy & unpredictable

The first learning I had is that while SEO, helping your client show up without ad spend, is best, it’s not something you can rely on for your clients.

I started with keyword optimized on page SEO, and our customers have gotten great results over time, but it didn’t produce results predictably or quickly.

I now know SEO is a very very important part of the equation, but I place it 4th in my overall importance behind:

How I prioritize marketing:

  • Strategy & messaging
  • Web design & fundamentals
  • Paid advertising & remarketing
  • Content marketing & SEO

I’m sure a bunch of you just reacted strongly to that, but hear me out.

Your website needs a great layout, sound fundamentals of keywords and content, should have schema markup and deep content on the subject matter – that’s just a good website.

I’ve learned that Feedbackwrench web design ends up being what most companies charge for SEO.

Not only is the on page SEO done to perfection, but we also ensure the core citations are setup.

To me, real SEO is done with high quality content marketing and collaboration with other websites for content & outreach.

SEO takes a long time since penguin and Googles reactions to the 2016 election.

You can’t look a business owner in the eye and assure them they’ll beget lots of consistent business with your SEO strategies.

What you can tell them is that while you need to win the battles of daily and weekly client acquisition so they can predictably scale their business, we must also go into a “Cold War” of SEO.

SEO is like winning the Cold War against your competitors, where you become the 10 ton gorilla in the room with the most dominant online footprint that’s undeniably more worth of trust than others.

Another quick thing to hit on is that SEO for most local businesses is driven by their Google My Business.

Google my Business local ranking factors certainly takes into account your website SEO signals, but it is fundamentally driven by building credibility through lots of authentic reviews.

Customers need to work to get more Google reviews than their competitors so their profile dominates.

Priorities for Local SEO

  • Setup the GMB properly
  • Get lots of reviews
  • Setup citations
  • Build a great website with strong services ontology & structure
  • build backlinks
  • Write SEO optimized content over time

You can’t rely on SEO

If I was starting my digital marketing company over again, I would tell myself that you should prioritize search engine optimization behind strategy, branding, web design, paid advertising in remarketing, and then I would hit on it.

I would also tell myself that an excellent set up, with really thorough fundamentals of SEO on the website and across the web, is going to be better than what 90% of the other so-called search engine optimization companies are going to do.

Organize Your Approach Visually

Another thing I would tell my younger self is that a visual will help make this complicated stuff for real.

These concepts are actually incredibly hard to keep organized in your mind, and your customers are generally not people who have deep understandings of the tech world which makes it even more confusing.

Nothing improve my business more than putting together a thoughtful and organized approach through visuals on my website.

As good as any website might be, it’s really hard to close the gap between a really great initial consultation done by a person, and your online presence.

Generally speaking, even an online business specializing in digital marketing and digital communication will rely heavily on in person engagement through some sort of consultation.

I was starting to miss out on deals and not close, which got me concerned.

In response to having lots of these consultations go without closing, I ended up taking time to developing a framework, process, and approach visually.

When I put it together visually, I started to close most of my consultations.

You must work hard to make your approach clear, organized and smart.

Strategy & Messaging is Paramount & It’s Valuable

You should read Marketing made Simple by Donald Miller and follow his storybrand approach.

When you help a company work through their approach, their value proposition, their benefits, the stakes of choosing someone else and put it all together, there’s huge value.

Most business owners brains are filled with gold about their customer, but most of them never take the time to write it down in an organized fashion.

How you can help with strategy:

  • What are the problems your customers have?
  • What does your customer really want?
  • What does your customer battle against?
  • What’s the core problem?
  • What are the benefits the customer gets when they choose you?
  • What’s your simple process of getting started?
  • What questions do your customers have about the industry?
  • What are the competitive advantages they have over competitor?
  • What are the company values, purpose and mission?
  • What are the messages for each of the sub services?

Your customers need this help, and you can’t really build anything that’s meaningful unless you have these answers.

Building credibility requires starting small, one customer at a time

I already knew this when I started feedbackwrench, but I didn’t know it when I started my accounting firm.

You have to walk before you run, and you need to test your solutions with customers and keep making adjustments to improve your processes.

I would recommend that you start out finding lots of small customers to do things for cheap or free, and then get results.

It all starts with getting some results for someone

Once you get a result, capture their testimonial and show the results off, and leverage it moving forward.

Build up lots of credible testimonials and reviews, and have work you can show off, then you can leverage it moving forward.

You have to start somewhere, so that means you need to prospect and start out for cheap or free and build from there.

Start cheap or free, get results and then get reviews and use those results to sell.

You must Prospect & Get Meetings

You can’t sit back and hope your digital marketing works.

Good businesses have two hands on the wheel of their business, and you need to get them to pause so you can see if they’d like help building something that grows their business.

If you want to get good clients, you need to prospect in person and actually intersect with these high protein folks.