BUSINESS BUILDING FOR SEO FIRMS AND DIGITAL MARKETERS FACES SOME PARTICULAR AND PECULIAR CONSTRAINTS.
Online marketing is an intensely competitive market space. Prospective customers can choose from multitudes of potential firms and agencies, and they are not limited to local options either. They can easily work with firms based out of state or even in other countries.
That overabundance of options can turn business building into a mad scramble.
Worse, SEO and related firms also face some challenges specific to this industry. For example, they must navigate a lack of client understanding of what, exactly, they do. This can impose a one-two punch on legitimate, high-quality digital marketers and SEOs. First, it gives less legitimate, fly-by- night operators more room to make claims that customers won’t have the technical understanding to be able to refute or question. Second, it makes the process of selling services more challenging in the first place.
Of course, the standard tactics that work for any company will also work for SEOs and digital marketers: search engine optimization for themselves, content marketing, search advertising, networking, attending conferences and tradeshows, and the other usual suspects of marketing and business growth still apply.
But given the constraints described above, there are two general types of marketing that SEOs and digital marketers should strongly consider and prioritize if they want to grow.
The first is education-oriented marketing. This refers to informational materials that help prospective customers to understand what you do with greater clarity and depth. But there’s more to this than meets the eye.
The second is trust-building marketing. Here, you lean on tactics designed to generate credibility in the eyes of the customer, so they have more confidence in your organization’s ability to deliver the results they want.
These are the two types of tactics that will work best in business building endeavors. What exactly do these tactics entail? What are the specific activities and actions that they should include? And how exactly do they help?
Those are the questions that this paper will address. Let’s get started.
In This Paper...
1: Introduction
2: Education-oriented marketing
3: Trust-building marketing
Education-oriented marketing
A very real knowledge gap on the client side can complicate the sales process: “My experience has been that when you apply traditional selling techniques to SEO, you end up with prospects who aren’t that sure exactly what they are buying or why,” writes Will Critchlow, CEO SearchPilot, for Moz.com.
So, by favoring marketing materials and strategies that inform and educate your prospective customers, your firm can better demonstrate value and make a sale more likely. According to Cornell University, “Research also shows that brands that teach customers how to do something are generally able to differentiate themselves from the pack in highly crowded and competitive industries.”1
But the key is to educate clients on multiple levels. It’s not enough simply to educate them about the technical side of what your firm does; you want to help your prospective customer to be able to connect the dots between your service offerings, the outcomes those offerings will generate, and the advantages or benefits the customers will reap as a result. If, at the same time, you can subliminally demonstrate the sheer depth and breadth of expertise and work required to bring about successful outcomes – to convince customers who might be wondering why they shouldn’t just “do it themselves; SEO is easy” – so much the better.
At heart, though, education-based marketing is about cultivating client confidence in your firm. “In its purest form, education-based marketing is the use of shared knowledge to generate trust from your target audience,” one marketer told Cornell University.2
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Example SEO ROI Calculation |
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Help clients understand what you do |
Clearly establish the value of what you do |
Showcase your technical expertise |
Help clients understand what they can do |
Most SEOs and digital marketers already do this education-oriented marketing, at least to some extent. Almost everyone publishes blogs, articles, papers, and videos; many offer webinars and other learning-oriented activities.
However, it’s worthwhile taking a closer look at these works. Often, the effort is incomplete. Instead of addressing all four goals of education-oriented marketing, as laid out in the table, they focus on only one or two. In particular, they often miss the most critical: establishing the value of SEO services. For any campaign designed to boost sales as its principle goal, increasing customer understanding is a means to the end, not the end itself. Ask yourself:
- Do your educational and information programs and materials clearly align with your end-goals?
- Do they comprehensively achieve all four goals listed in the table?
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Types of Education-Oriented Formats |
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Written |
Written materials like articles, blog posts, and white papers are one of the most common forms of informational marketing. They’re also incredibly flexible: they can range from short to in-depth, from targeted to broad- based, from casual to formal. The key is to keep the focus on the four goals noted above: not just educating customers what you do or what they can do, but educating them on the value of the effort and showcasing your technical expertise at achieving that outcome |
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Multimedia |
Beyond written materials, multimedia content can also be a great way to build an audience and pipeline of potential customers. Video pulls incredible engagement, e.g. video drives 12 times more social shares than images and text combined.3 Audio formats like podcasts have also proliferated in recent years due to skyrocketing popularity. |
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Interactive |
Speaking of engagement, nothing beats interactive formats like webinars/ seminars, apps, speaking engagements, etc. Remember, your marketing (educational or otherwise) is not about you at the end of the day. It’s about your customer. When customers can interact with you, you can get insight into what they care about and make sure that your educational materials address that. |
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Reviews |
You might not immediately think of reviews as educational per se, but in fact, they help prospective clients to learn from other SEO customers about what’s achievable – and who can help them to achieve it. The Harvard Business School says that reviews can “fill in the gaps by providing a tremendous amount of information on which to base decisions.”4 |
Trust-building marketing
As mentioned, the SEO industry is intensely competitive, and it’s littered with companies looking only to make a quick buck. These unreliable firms take client money without returning results. It’s also plagued by companies whose staff know only enough to be dangerous and do not possess the true competency required in a field that is so dependent on specialized technical expertise that is constantly in flux.
But here’s the thing: your customers already know all of this. First, they know that they have plenty of options. Second, they are already skeptical of those options because they know there are a lot of sketchy, suboptimal SEOs and digital marketer firms out there.
In fact, many clients will have already been burned by a bad SEO, or they will know a peer who was. All of this generates distrust and skepticism, and you can expect your audience in this field to immediately push back against – or at least doubt – your sales messaging. This is particularly true if your sales messaging inadvertently commoditizes your offerings, just saying the same things and making the same basic claims as all of your competitors.
Education-oriented marketing is a good start on building trust because it showcases knowledgeability. This is one of the concerns your potential customers are going to have: do you really have the expertise and competency required to execute your promises? If you can demonstrate that the answer is yes through the educational materials you produce, you’re already on your way to building credibility and instilling confidence in your customers.
But there’s far more you can do to successfully instill confidence in your clients.
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Types of Trust-Building Marketing |
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Referrals |
People trust their peers more than they trust you. Almost everyone (92% specifically, according to Nielsen) trust referrals from people they know, and consumers are four times more likely to buy when referred by someone they know.5 By setting up a referral marketing program you can begin generating a business-building pipeline of potential customers who are predisposed to trust you. That means establishing a standardized set of processes by which you regularly ask for referrals from customers, partners, and other contacts. You also want to cultivate relationships with third parties like other marketers with different specializations who might be able to produce an ongoing stream of referrals. |
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Case Studies |
Case studies prove results. In fact, case studies work perfectly in tandem with educational materials. The educational item showcases what you know, while the case study showcases the outcomes that you can generate. So, you can hand a potential customer a something like a white paper which shows depth of expertise in a particular area, and then hand in the case study that shows what you can do when you apply that expertise in a real-world situation. |
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Types of Trust-Building Marketing |
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Testimonials |
One of the best ways to sidestep the fact that many consumers will not trust what you have to say about your own business is to let other people say nice things about you. Specifically, testimonials left by happy customers and partners are considered trustworthy statements that credential your own claims. Testimonials can be very powerful; they can boost buying decisions significantly, as much as nearly quadrupling conversions according to some studies.6 Just make sure that the testimonials, like the educational materials noted above, emphasize value and advantage. |
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ROI |
You can also try forecasting ROI to quantify value. This can be challenging, but if you can get clients to share their average lead-to-sales conversion rates and average revenue-per-sale, you can begin to calculate revenue effects from improved search ranking. One of the biggest challenges facing SEO firms and building business is that it’s really difficult for customers to understand the value of what they’re getting. By translating abstract value into hard numbers, you can convince more leads to become paying customers. |
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Familiarity |
Familiarity breeds trust because it helps to overcome the “stranger danger” impulse built into human instinct. “Mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus object enhances his attitude toward it,” says researcher Robert B. Zajonc.7 Thus, ensuring your firm has a robust presence online so that it repeatedly shows up as potential clients perform online searches, visit directories and review sites, and consume information about the subject can strengthen trust. Note, however, that they need to actually see you, however. If your listing is too far down in a Google search or on a review site, it does you no good. Paid search and promoted listings can overcome this issue. |
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Reviews |
Honest and transparent reviews are incredibly powerful at cultivating trust, particularly when they appear through third-party channels that the SEO firm cannot directly control. In fact, while 83% of consumers distrust advertising, 88% of consumers view online reviews as being as trustworthy as personal recommendations.8,9 However, reviews introduce a challenge: if you can’t directly control them, they can potentially work against you. It’s crucial to implement a review and reputation management program to ensure your reviews build trust instead of eroding it. |
References
1 https://blogs.cornell.edu/cornelldigitalmarketing/2018/02/28/research-proves-value-in-education-based-marketing/
2 https://blogs.cornell.edu/cornelldigitalmarketing/2018/02/28/research-proves-value-in-education-based-marketing/
3 https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/03/08/video-marketing-statistics
4 https://cxl.com/blog/user-generated-reviews/
5 https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2012/trust-in-advertising--paid-owned-and-earned/
6 https://www.powerreviews.com/blog/exploring-how-reviews-affect-conversion-rates/
7 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8721.00154
8 http://searchengineland.com/88-consumers-trust-online-reviews-much-personal-recommendations-195803
9 https://statuslabs.com/reputation-management-stats-2019/
