Are you tired of spending countless hours on link building for your website only to see minimal results? In this article, you’ll find some risk-free tips on outsourcing link building effectively, so you can sit back, relax and watch your website rise to the top of search engine rankings.

The role of link building in SEO

Are you ready to rock your SEO game? Well, you better be because Hubspot reports that a whopping 64% of modern enterprises are investing in SEO to stay ahead of the competition.

And what’s the secret sauce to SEO success? It’s link building! A study by Ahrefs found that the number of referring domains to a webpage strongly correlates with its search engine ranking position. In other words, the more quality backlinks you have, the better your chance of ranking higher.

However, over 41% of digital marketers think link building is like rocket science. It’s confusing, time-consuming, and sometimes downright frustrating.

So, there are numerous advantages that SEO experts can reap by outsourcing their link-building efforts.

Saves time and resources

According to Seotribunal, 65% of marketers affirm link building is the most challenging SEO tactic. Partnering with a reliable provider can relieve the pressure of executing complex link-building campaigns while freeing valuable time and resources.

Provides access to specialized expertise

Link building is no child’s play. Seasoned professionals know their onions and have the required skills and expertise to execute effective linking campaigns. What’s more, their extensive network of contacts enables them to procure links with greater speed and efficacy.

Link acquisition based on experience. Source: Authority Hackers

Cost savings

When securing top-notch links, you have two ways: hire an in-house team of seasoned link builders or outsource the job to experts in the field.

Building an in-house team may only be financially viable if you have a substantial number of projects to undertake. Otherwise, attempting to build such a team could drain your resources dry in no time.

Undoubtedly, the most significant expense of running an in-house link-building team is typically the salaries. Here are figures gleaned from the Glassdoor website:

The average link builder salary. Source: Glassdoor

Imagine hiring a full-time link-building specialist. With all the time and effort they’ll be putting into research and outreach, you can expect 13-15 backlinks per month. The cost of each of these precious links can skyrocket to an eye-watering $500-$700 per placement.

Moreover, expect additional expenses such as benefits, recruitment and hiring, tools and technology, training and overhead costs. So, with an in-house specialist, one link can cost you $800+.

When outsourcing to a third-party agency, companies only pay for the services rendered and are free from worrying about employee salaries, benefits, incentives and overhead costs.

Ready to give outsourcing a shot? Here are tips on how to achieve optimal results from outsourcing your link-building endeavors.

How to outsource link building without risk

Now, let’s delve into the essential steps to take on your journey toward prosperous link-building outsourcing.

Prepare your website

Your main task is to prepare a favorable ground for link building. To prepare your website, follow these steps:

• Organize your site structure with a clear hierarchy and easy navigation;
• Create engaging content with multimedia, which can increase indexed pages by 434%;
• Optimize content for SEO with relevant keywords, fast loading time and mobile-friendly design;
• Build a strong internal linking structure to improve visibility and ranking;
• Fix technical issues, including broken links, for easy crawling by search engines.

Some link-building agencies offer to help their clients with site audits or content creation.

Choose an experienced contractor

A quick jaunt over to Clutch and a search for “link-building agency” reveals an avalanche of almost 12,000 potential collaboration options on that site alone.

Search results for “Link Building” on Clutch. Source: Top link-building companies and services

Now, let’s take a closer look at the critical factors you should keep in mind when selecting an agency to partner with.

Pricing

While you might be able to find a bargain-basement deal on some shady corner of the internet, you’re probably better off investing in a reputable agency that can deliver real results.

Take a look at this screenshot from Fiverr, where a search for “Link Building” shows these surprising prices:

Search results for “Link Building” on Fiverr

If an outsourcing agency promises to get you 10 backlinks for only $100, they might be talking about low-quality links from forums or comment sections (Google ignores them in its ranking algorithm). Here’s what John Mueller, a senior search analyst at Google, says about it:

“You could go off and create millions of links across millions of websites if you wanted to, and we could just ignore them all.”

For example, at Editorial Link, a top-rated link-building agency on Clutch, one quality link starts at $350. Sticking only to white-hat techniques, the Editorial Link team builds high-authority editorial links to create strong portfolios and bring natural traffic to linked websites.

Through outreach efforts, the Editorial Link team gets top-quality backlinks from highly authoritative sources with a significant online presence: g2.com, Hubspot.com, Cloudways.com, Clickup.com, monday.com, Wordstream.com, Similarweb.com and many more.

They do not charge a prepayment and invoice the clients only after link placement approval. The team strives for maximum transparency and is not willing to sell dozens of low-quality links (which will not make any impact on the results of their clients) for the same amount.

Transparency

It’s crucial to evaluate an agency’s level of transparency before engaging in any business with them.

Some important questions to ask:

• What methods and strategies will they use while working on your project?
• Do they charge upfront or only when results are delivered?
• Are they willing to share the results of their successful campaigns?
• Does the agency disclose domains before publication?

The last point is especially critical. In this way, you get a chance to personally check whether the site is suitable for you to get a backlink. It’s not rare for domains with high DR (70+) to sell the opportunity to place a guest post or a link. It is advisable to steer clear of websites that engage in the sale of guest posts and are monitored by Google.

Generating spammy backlinks has the potential to harm search engine rankings, painting such a bleak picture:

Traffic drop on a site that was sanctioned by Google in February 2020

Working with a transparent agency can help minimize your risk and ensure you don’t end up worse off than when you started.

Monitor the process

While trusting a provider, it’s important to keep an eye on the work process and make sure the agency follows the agreed guidelines and techniques.

• Regular communication. Regular communication allows you to receive updates on the progress of your campaign and discuss any concerns or feedback you may have.
• Performance metrics. To track the success of your link-building efforts, ask the agency to provide regular reports detailing the metrics you care about most. This could include information on the number of links acquired, traffic generated, and rankings improved.
• Quality control. While your agency may be responsible for acquiring links for your site, it’s important to review the quality of the links they’re obtaining. Use tools like Ahrefs, Moz or Majestic for that.

Red flags

Once you know how to act to mitigate the risks of cooperating with a link-building team, it’s time to tell you what you shouldn’t overlook as you prepare to accept the provider’s offer:

• Need for speed. Building high-quality links is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Beware of services that claim to get you links in just a few days. They’re likely using shady tactics like link farms.
• False promises. If a service is 100% guaranteeing you a spot on the first page of Google, they might as well be claiming they can turn lead into gold.
• The curious case. Transparency is key in this industry, and anyone unwilling to present you with the results of their previous campaigns is likely hiding something. Insist on openness and honesty from the get-go.

Conclusion

Link-building outsourcing is a cost-effective and efficient way to hit marketing goals and improve SEO results. The key to this is trust-based reliable relationships with the right link-building service provider.  

The post How to outsource link building: Benefits and tips to follow appeared first on MarTech.

Digital media channels continue to deliver more viewing options to TV watchers through on-demand streaming and live broadcasts. At the same time, the explosion of ad-supported connected TV (CTV) and over-the-top (OTT) services gives advertisers more options in delivering ads to consumers.

That’s the big story in digital media, and not a wild prediction that momentum will grow in 2023. But how will marketers ride this wave? What factors will motivate viewers to watch ads on streaming?

The new year will bring answers to these big questions and others. Below are our predictions for digital media and other adtech trends.

Premium streamers provide the inventory, price hikes increase the audience for ads

Price hikes on streaming services will continue to motivate consumers to accept ads in the new year. The ad-free tier on Disney+ got bumped up to $11 when they introduced the ad-supported tier at the end of 2022. The ad-free Netflix option is less than half the price of its $20 “Premium” plan. Netflix is also expected to crack down on password-sharing soon, so more customers overall will have to pay to play. Ads will allow them to pay less.

Prime Video’s takeover of Thursday Night Football, and free-ad-supported (FAST) app Tubi’s recent World Cup presentation lay the groundwork for more live sports and events being watched by cord-cutters. (The World Cup Final was streamed by 3 million viewers in the U.S. alone, across all available platforms.) 

For advertisers, the combination of sports and ad-supported Disney-owned and Netflix series means more premium inventory attracting big audiences in the year to come.

Real-time ads and cross-channel amplification

Viewing behavior will continue to change. Advertisers and their adtech partners will have to adapt in the new year.

In 2022, CTV overtook mobile for global ad impressions. Users stream different kinds of content on mobile devices than when they’re streaming longform programming. They could be streaming on a smart TV while consuming even more content on their phone, especially when watching live events.

“We can expect to see a proliferation of technologies that enable brands to more efficiently connect with their audiences who are tuned in to live spaces,” said Oz Etzioni, CEO and founder of creative optimization company Clinch. “On the backend (activation), this means new and innovative ways to feed ‘live event’ data into the creative. Think real-time information tied to sporting events, gaming, shopping and more, and across different channels — CTV, social, even certain DOOH (digital out-of-home) environments.”

Advertisers will experiment with new ad formats, as well as how they support CTV campaigns on other platforms.

“We can expect household entertainment names to continue launching streaming platforms as they aim to increase their subscriber base, stay relevant, and offer lower price points,” said Laura Connell, consumer trends manager for audience research company GWI. “With video-social platforms like Twitch, YouTube and TikTok in the mix, different formats will also need to work together to complement one another.”

First-party data refining CTV campaigns, a greater demand for measurement

As budgets transition from traditional linear TV to CTV campaigns, first-party data will become more crucial to justify the spend and measure results.

“Data will be king,” said Lynette Kaylor, SVP of advertising sales for FuboTV. “As budgets tighten, advertisers will need to become more efficient with their buys and have smart data strategies. Efficiencies come from reducing waste and increasing targeted media buys. For example, investing in the audiences that are most inclined to buy your product or service instead of mass reach.”

She added, “There will be a greater need for transparent attribution and measurement to show the value of audience-based buys.”

“There are far more eyes on measurement particularly as the bigger advertisers like P&G have put the pressure on for greater transparency and accountability to performance,” said Michele Madaris, media director of full-service agency Boathouse. “Every partner right now is selling their ‘unique measurement’ application and touting their connections and partnerships with industry leaders to get to a more consistent and reliable methodology. It feels like an industry-wide effort to enhance measurement, so I think 2023 will show improvements that will help advertisers tie to outcomes.”

More traction for out-of-home on social and out in the world

The out-of-home (OOH) space has seen a rapid change, both in the digital transformation of digital out-of-home (DOOH) and the expansion of programmatic DOOH. As more out-of-home ads get plugged into omnichannel campaigns, momentum will continue in 2023.

“As digital burnout saturates society and consumers continue to experience the world IRL, brands will increasingly explore OOH opportunities as a means to reach and engage consumers,” said Anna Bager, President and CEO of Out of Home Advertising Association of America. “Recent OAAA-Harris Poll research found that consumers on TikTok, Instagram, etc. are regularly seeing OOH advertising creative in photos across their feeds. In addition, OOH is viewed as an advertising opportunity for brands that enhances consumer experience while they are traveling along their hyper-connected journeys.”

She added, “Marketers have a massive opportunity at hand to not only tell their brand stories, but surround people with it, delighting and surprising them which in turn, encourages consumers to follow brands across channels. Creating those special moments by connecting in the IRL environment is one of the key values that OOH brings to advertisers and it will continue to drive growth at a substantial rate.”

Universal standards for adtech carbon emissions

Brands and their adtech partners are looking for ways to reduce the energy and carbon emissions associated with the digital ad supply chain. In 2023, adtech will step up to meet this demand from advertisers.

“Over the next year, I think we’ll see the development of universal standards for best practices that can reduce the carbon footprint by making ad inventory with low emissions,” said Matt Kendall, CTO for adblock revenue recovery company Blockthrough. “Which group will lead the charge? Could be IAB Tech Lab or others.”

“Changes in adtech tend to initiate from the economic power of the buy-side and then get pushed through the ecosystem,” said Curt Larson, Chief Product Officer at omnichannel ad exchange Sharethrough. “This is what we’re seeing with the green movement — buyers increasingly instituting green initiatives and mandates. These mandates are effectively another aspect of buyers’ SPO (supply path optimization) strategies. In the past, buyers have looked at things like take rates and discounts, directness, quality, performance, or fraud when they evaluate supply paths. They will now add to the list the carbon load of any given supply path.”

More brands will address Gen Z as co-creators

Brands won’t stop advertising to Gen Z consumers in 2023. But the smarter brands will approach this group in a more collaborative way.

“Gen Z is impacting not only culture but every industry at speed and scale through their digital behavior — but brands should no longer look at them just as consumers,” said Kaeya Majmundar, founder and CEO of Swaypay, a platform that compensates shoppers for TikTok-ing their purchases. “They should look at Gen Z as co-creators. Gen Z doesn’t live on your ecommerce site — it’s not where their sense of community and individuality is being formed. You have to actively seek them out and include them not for selling, but for sharing and co-creating.”

As a result, there will be a “radical decentralization of brand control” as more of the brand narrative gets handed over to customers.

“In 2023, continuously adding value to developing the Gen Z audience will be key — and they must be rewarded for the value they create,” said Majmundar.

The post 2023 Predictions: Digital media and advertising appeared first on MarTech.

When asked this fall, 20% of respondents said they were currently invested in metaverse experiences, while another 36% said they were considering it.

The metaverse was defined in the survey of 223 marketers as “virtual, internet-based experiences that bridge offline and online worlds, where people can customer avatars, play games, shop, interact and virtually attend live events.”

Metaverse goals. Those surveyed said they were investing in a metaverse presence to boost brand awareness and perception, and to reach customers where they are.

Here are the top reasons why marketers are making this investment:

• Build brand awareness/recognition (52%).
• New way of engaging existing customers (48%).
• Boost brand perception (46%).
• Reach audiences not found/hard to find elsewhere (42%).
• Provides an additional ecommerce channel (34%).
• It’s a good fit for our audience (28%)
• It’s a good fit for our brand (27%).
• Drive customer loyalty (21%).

Too nascent. This leaves 44% of those surveyed who weren’t yet investing in the metaverse, primarily because these spaces are too nascent or not the right fit.

Here are the top reasons why marketers aren’t currently investing in the metaverse:

• Metaverse advertising is too nascent (41%).
• It’s not a good fit for our audience (37%).
• It’s not a good fit for our brand (35%).
• We don’t have room in our budget (35%).
• We have yet to develop a metaverse advertising strategy (34%).
• Ability to deliver ROI/business objectives is unclear (32%).
• Lack of industry standards (20%).

Why we care. The MarTech flash survey taken last spring found that a quarter of marketers were planning a metaverse activation within a year, which seems to be confirmed by what this IAB report finds.

Those marketers who have the metaverse in their sites are sticking with their plan. For those on the fence, they might be nudged by a number of agencies who’ve launched committed metaverse services this year, and by self-service capabilities for NFTs that are now available.

How many of the “no, nevers” will shift to “maybes”? Time will tell as the space continues to evolve and trailblazing brands show how success can be achieved.

Dig deeper: How Adidas builds metaverse experiences and partnerships

The post Over half of marketers are using the metaverse or considering it appeared first on MarTech.

“Non-professional” content creators are defined in a release as those “exploring creative side hustles and hobbies.”

Content opportunities are huge. At Sitecore Symposium this week, CEO Steve Tzikakis observed that around 1% of marketing budgets is devoted to content, while 5% of the content produced commands 90% of the audience’s attention. The challenge is to focus on the content engaging the audience and apply that marketing budget to it.

Adobe’s detailed “Future of Creativity” study suggests this challenge is being met in part by a thriving “creator economy.” The report was based on a survey of over 5,000 creators across nine global markets.

The headlines. Among the report’s most striking findings:

• Content monetizers are earning more than 6x the U.S. minimum wage.
• 40% are earning more than they did two years ago; 80% expect to be earning more in two years’ time.
• Worldwide, just over half of creators (52%) do not monetize their work.
• One in three creators are focused on creating content for causes, with climate change, social justice and diversity and inclusion leading the pack.
• One third are “side hustlers” with other full-time occupations.
• Influencer status (determined by number of followers) increases revenue. Influencers average almost $80 per hour.

Dig deeper: How to get the best out of creative talent in a data-driven world

Why we care. It was only a few years ago that many professional journalists did not consider bloggers to be real journalists. Nowadays, few professional journalists aren’t bloggers in the broadest sense. Look how the creator economy has changed. Once upon a time, creators were (full-time) paid professionals, working for content studios, agencies, or of course self-employed. We now have a thriving “non-professional” creator economy (although when revenue from content creation makes up most of your earnings, it’s hard to continue to wear the amateur, side-hustle mantle).

What’s aligning with this is brands seeing the value of influencer content as well as user-generated content (UGC; often not monetized), not only as supplementing the work they’re paying agencies to do, but often supplanting it because of perceived authenticity, audience identification and superior engagement.

The post Adobe reports growing opportunities for “non-professional” content creators appeared first on MarTech.

This is aimed at allowing more refined audience planning, custom audience creation and improved measurement capabilities for advertisers using Canvas.

TruAudience solutions. The key value TransUnion brings to this collaboration is its suite of TruAudience solutions. The primary solution creates privacy-conscious “three-dimensional” identities by connecting people, devices and households. This sits alongside a data marketplace that currently offers some 400 audience segments and the TruAudience platform, an environment for modeling and distributing audiences.

Dig deeper: What is identity resolution?

A global media agency. Canvas Worldwide, currently serving clients such as Hyundai, Kia, United Artists Releasing and McDonald’s, will connect TruAudience’s offerings with advertisers’ needs. “As a leading independent agency, we’re tuned into new developments in the world of marketing technology and focused on making those innovations accessible to our clients,” said Greg Johns, Canvas Worldwide’s Chief Product Officer in a release.

Why we care. Adtech is getting just a shade more rational every month and year. This move brings together a significant identity solution and a big agency, allowing the direct transmission of potentially highly valuable audiences to the agency’s client advertisers. The TruAudience data marketplace serves data from a range of partners, including Comscore and Lotame; the partnership with Epsilon alone accesses more than 250 million consumer records. That’s a lot of people to market to.

The post TransUnion partners with Canvas Worldwide to boost omnichannel CX appeared first on MarTech.

In 2009, anthropological researchers made $8,000 on trinkets for which they paid just $1.25 each. What made these items feel valuable to buyers? Each trinket was accompanied by a compelling story written in the item’s eBay description. 

The fact is, stories sell — whether you’re explaining s a product or, in your case, a data set.

Learning how to tell a story with data is an important skill for proving your value to your clients; it’s how you earn their trust, sell them on your services, and get repeat business. To tell a story with data, you need to look at your raw data as pieces of a grand story yet to be told. Establish a thesis, develop a narrative, craft the story, and tell that story through powerful visualizations to engage clients.

Establish a thesis that will guide your data story

First, find a narrative within the data. Look for what your data “tells you.” That becomes the thesis of your story — your argument.

Then start forming questions about what the data is saying, identify trends, and form a hypothesis. Ask yourself the following:

• What are you trying to explain with the data? Your thesis should answer this.
• What are your goals? Your goals are what you’re trying to argue for or prove with your story.
• What is the conflict in your client reporting? This will identify the central point of the story, the conflict.
• Are you trying to get buy-in? Answering this question will help you determine how you frame your story.

After you’ve done this, look for correlations, identify trends, identify outliers and draw comparisons. These insights will form the foundation of your story.

Develop a narrative (and then tailor it to your audience)

Tailor your narrative to your audience to make sure it applies to your client. Let’s say you’re working with marketing managers who want to know how their content is performing. In this case, you’d want to tailor your narrative so that it focuses on metrics or data that are important to content marketing, like email opens or search performance.

Personalizing client reporting and telling a story with data are good ways to build trust with clients — they’ll buy into your insights more, which is good for them and for business, as it helps the client see themselves as the main character. Additionally, tailoring your narrative helps create a shared understanding of that data. It’s a way to “put everyone on the same page.”

Tailoring your narrative requires you to do a little preliminary research on your client. First, start with the audience you’re presenting to. It might be marketing managers, or it might be executives, but the point is that different audiences have different goals in mind, so you need to have different angles for each audience. This blog post explains it best: “Different employees, stakeholders, and departments want to see different data, even if they care about the same general KPIs (key performance indicators).”

It makes more sense to talk about overall business goals and performance with a chief marketing officer because they’re the ones with the power to make strategic decisions. Use the same language that your audience would use, and be sure to speak in concrete terms — no more “good,” “bad,” or “better.” Those are loose terms that leave a lot of ambiguity on the table. Focus on attributing success or failure to the brand’s overall business goals and use language that describes that success in concrete terms you can back up, like “increased or decreased” instead of “good or bad.”

Add visuals

Visuals could be any graphical representation of the data: flowcharts, bar graphs, funnels or infographics. You can use visuals to draw comparisons between two different points of data, making it easier to tell your overall story. Additionally, visuals are great for communicating with non-technical audiences — more often than not, they’re your key decision-makers.

How to tell a story with data using visual content:

1. Choose a visual that tells the story — try not to clutter your report with unnecessary charts or graphs.
2. Include a zero baseline so you can more effectively demonstrate fluctuations in data.
3. Choose the appropriate visualization for the type of data you’re displaying, so the audience only has to glance at the content to understand it.

Put it all together

Crafting a story through client reporting requires you to approach the data like an author would approach the loose fragments of a story — things like context, characters, conflict and solutions. It’s your job to tie them all together in a linear fashion. Here’s how:

Set the context for the story. What is the situation, and why are you telling your audience about it? Craft an engaging hook to get your clients involved. Good hooks — especially ones that involve the client — are great ways to kick off your client reporting and get your clients engaged.

Create characters. Ask yourself: “Who are the key players that are involved?” This will help you define your audience further. If you can position your clients or their business as a character, you’ll have a more compelling story on your hands.

Lay out the conflict. The conflict is the crux of your story, or in your case, it’s the issue at hand that your data has revealed. At this stage, it’s fair to really dig into the data and set up the conflict as something that directly involves the characters (your clients). Even if you’re reporting positive performance, you can still use this as an opportunity to make projections about your client’s growth or what they could achieve under your guidance. Setting up the conflict introduces the problem you’re trying to solve, which then lends itself to your next step: the solution.

Offer a solution. You’ve set the context for the story, identified your clients as the main character, and put their org’s performance at stake during the conflict stage. Now it’s your turn to offer solutions for said conflict. This is your opportunity to both solve the client’s problem and make a case for the value you provide.

Get the data to guide your storytelling

If you struggle with sourcing dependable, high-confidence data to craft your stories and prove the ROI of your services, try a marketing attribution software like CallRail. Attribution software uses a variety of techniques, such as call tracking, form tracking, and conversation intelligence, to determine which marketing strategies and campaigns are most effective at bringing in quality leads.

Try it today by signing up at callrail.com.

The post How to tell a story with data and elevate your client reporting appeared first on MarTech.

Data Canvas is seen as an alternative to the traditional practice of manually pulling campaign data and organizing into charts or other visual aids for presentations.

What it does. Dashboards are customizable and can represent cross-channel campaign data according to user needs. Automatically updated in real time, they allow both agency and client to review visual representations of data at any time.

The hope is that time will be saved that can be spent more usefully on analysis and strategy, and that the information provided will inform agile campaign optimization.

Why we care. Anything that improves transparency between agencies and clients is a good thing. Data visualization is nothing new of course, but as campaigns grow steadily more complex in the fragmented online/offline environment, automating data visualization in real-time should increase the efficiency of communications between agency and client.

“I believe the Basis platform showcases how agencies can improve their business relationships as well as the health of our industry overall by weaving together disparate teams, processes, and platforms,” said Basis president Tyler Kelly in a release.

The post New solution promises improved data visualization to streamline campaign reporting appeared first on MarTech.

If your company engages in advertising campaigns, chances are you have already considered using the services of an agency. Whether businesses should bring in external expertise or rely on internal talent is an age-old conundrum and knowing when and why to use a marketing agency is a tough decision to make. It requires careful consideration of industry trends and a detailed understanding of your marketing objectives and capabilities. 

With user preferences changing rapidly, you need to constantly rethink your advertising strategy to stay relevant in the advertising scene. In light of this, it may be wise to bring in an external agency with expertise in the changing advertising landscape and the best practices within it.

This article will discuss:

• Important factors when considering external help. 
• How to find the right agency.
• How are agencies adapting to changing trends?
• Resources for learning more about agency services.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Important factors when considering external help 

The decision to bring in external help is context-specific. You can choose to outsource a specific campaign or your entire marketing vertical, depending on the requirements of your business. 

Consider the following factors while making this decision:

The complexity of your campaign

If you plan to use a single-channel approach with a relatively straightforward campaign, you can use in-house talent. However, the nature of advertising has changed; most campaigns now use multiple platforms. In fact, using a multi-channel approach enables you to reach the most potential customers. 

Selecting multiple platforms and coordinating their use requires considerable time and energy. Additionally, it also requires cross-channel expertise. Agencies can guide which channels are the most effective and in what combinations. They also centrally manage your campaign, making it easier to track the impact of various platforms. 

The skills of your internal talent

The advertising landscape is subject to constant changes. Constantly upskilling and retraining your employees to match industry requirements can be a fairly expensive affair. In addition, hiring full-time employees each time a specific marketing need arises can blow up your marketing budget. 

You should also consider what technical tools your team can access and use effectively. Is your internal marketing team able to successfully track customer data and campaign performance? Certain third-party agencies specialize in leveraging data to generate high-impact campaigns. 

Cost-benefit analysis

While hiring external agencies can be more expensive than producing an in-house campaign, you should also consider the marginal benefit agencies provide. Advertising agencies aim to keep their teams updated with current market trends. Hence, the quality of the content they produce can be remarkably better than the output of your internal team. 

Is the additional cost imposed by external agencies offset by the additional benefit they provide? That is the primary question to consider from both a quantitative and qualitative lens. You can also consider your past experiences while making this cost-benefit analysis.

How to find the right agency

Finding the right agency can be a time-consuming process, especially if you’re taking external help for the first time. All advertising agencies are not the same; different firms specialize in different aspects of advertising. You should consider your marketing objectives, requirements, and budget to identify the right agency for your business. 

The following process can help you shortlist the right agency:

Do diligent research

The fundamental purpose of conducting detailed research is to ensure that an agency’s expertise aligns with your advertising objectives. First, determine your budget. This will help you eliminate agencies that fall out of that budget and focus on a smaller pool. Additionally, you can also tap into your network or analyze your competition to determine which agencies are the most popular in your industry. 

Next, outline your requirements in detail. Do you need help with the creative or technical aspects of advertising? Or do you prefer getting support for both? Certain agencies specialize in leveraging data and using sophisticated artificial intelligence tools to optimize the reach of your campaign. Others specialize in producing creative and engaging content. It is crucial to understand which agency is likely to help you meet your objectives.

Listen to pitches

Invite shortlisted candidates to present their pitches. Typically, this process involves agencies understanding your budget and requirements in detail and proposing their plan of action for your campaign and business. As part of this process, agencies might take a close look at your past and current campaigns on platforms such as Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms. 

The pitch will give you a concrete idea of what to expect from the agency and will allow you to judge whether their expertise can support the marketing needs of your business. You can finally hire the right agency depending on which pitch aligns best with your objectives. 

Finding the right agency has numerous benefits for your business:

• Save time and energy. By relying on external experts to produce high-impact campaigns, you can focus on the core functions of your business. Streamlining your core functions can considerably improve your sales revenue and reduce costs. Further, the cost of hiring and training new employees can be higher than working with an agency. 
• Leverage the latest technologies. Advertising agencies stay up-to-date on shifting market trends. From tracking data to employing AI tools, agencies can supplement the work of your in-house team to produce high-impact campaigns. This can give you a competitive edge and help engage your audience effectively.  
• Get an external perspective. An outside opinion can be valuable, especially from an expert. Being closely attached to your product, brand, and customers might narrow your perspective and be an impediment to producing an impartial and effective campaign. Expert advice and multiple perspectives from professionals can improve the creativity of your marketing efforts. 

Dig deeper: How are digital agencies helping marketers transform in 2022?

How are agencies adapting to changing trends?

The advertising industry is witnessing considerable startup activity aiming to compete with traditional agencies. These startups are leveraging cutting-edge technology, such as AI, to help circumvent the problems arising from privacy law restrictions and increased competition. 

There exists an agency to cater to every niche of advertising and marketing. If you have clear objectives and a fair assessment of the limits of your in-house talents’ capabilities, you can consider using an external agency to supplement your marketing efforts. Agencies can help you produce state-of-the-art, effective, and technology-backed campaigns that can provide the highest return on your investment. While identifying the best agency for your needs is a time-consuming process, the right agency partner can supercharge your marketing efforts.

Resources for learning more about agency services

• How are digital agencies helping marketers transform in 2022? Partnerships and outsourcing are key priorities for agencies in stepping up their marketing technology game for clients.
• Getting the right people to support your CDP implementation: ALC Renaissance Consulting’s Amanda Cardona maps out how marketers can assemble teams to help with their new CDP.
• Hiring for marketing operations, marketing support roles set to explode: As budgets climb and competition intensifies, experts say you want to make sure candidates have the right skills for the job.
• New solutions support workplace diversity and inclusion: Knockri is boosting racial and gender diversity in recruitment. KeepWOL is gamifying DEI training.

The post Why we care about marketing agencies appeared first on MarTech.

Good morning, Marketers, and have we reached normal yet?

Early on in the pandemic, marketers (and everybody else) realized how true it was that change is constant. 

Of course, this constant change has always been a reality in the evolving landscape of marketing technology. Kim Davis offered a long view on some of that change, which shows no sign of letting up.

And that’s what makes our annual MarTech Replacement Survey so important every year. What change has proven to be most valuable for marketers? That gets to the heart of the survey and of the news and insights we cover each day. We all can be agents of change, and innovative marketers are the agents of change in marketing technology.

Chris Wood,

Editor

Quote of the day. “A cohort is a form of a segment. All cohorts are segments, but not all segments are cohorts.” Eric Sloan, director of strategy at performance marketing agency Thrive Digital.

The post Good morning: Change is constant appeared first on MarTech.

There are at least three huge mutual benefits to performing a comprehensive data-driven SEO analysis of a new client’s website.

First, your digital agency shows off its personalized, professional approach to every client by demonstrating that you avoid standardized templates. This gives the client the understanding that you set goals, terms of cooperation and pricing policies on an individual basis.

Second, this helps develop trust in your relationship with the client as they get a clear picture of what’s to be expected, how you plan on achieving their goals and why they are charged the rate you set.

Lastly, a detailed analysis gives you the opportunity to lay out a clear roadmap, set the right expectations and shed light on the workflow for the now-educated client. Everyone will be on the same page when it comes to understanding what’s working for them and what areas need to be improved upon.

Let’s dive into the steps that you need to take to have a successful client-agency relationship.

1. Checking the pulse of your client’s website: What parameters to focus on

Straight away, it’s essential to understand what kind of website you’re working with. 

What you want to pin down first is the quality of the domain and how much authority it has in the eyes of Google and other search engines. You also need to check how much organic and paid traffic they are already driving to their site and how many keywords they target to achieve that volume. 

Next, see how many referring domains they have, what their quality is and how many backlinks they’re getting from those domains. Lastly, but not least importantly, check how the website is doing in terms of its technical setup.
To get started, you can use an SEO tool like SE Ranking’s Competitive Research which provides local and global data on domains in a few clicks.

Here you can see summary data on any website that includes its Domain and Page Trust quality scores, its volume of organic and paid traffic, the total number of keywords they target as well as the number of referring domains and backlinks. 

In this case, the U.S. is selected as the target market, plus you can straight away see which other markets this website is getting traffic from. However, to get the full picture, it makes sense to take a look at their worldwide stats as well.

With this data — which covers every single country in the world including a huge database for the U.S. and provides pinpoint accurate results — you can get a quick understanding of their website’s performance.

Once you’ve analyzed the main parameters of your client’s site as they stand now, take a look at how they have changed over time and determine if they have a positive or negative trajectory.

The left-hand side of the screenshot above highlights changes in traffic and keywords total, marking upward trends in green and downward drops in red. Everything is clickable, which enables you to dive deeper into any point of interest.

On the graphs on the right-hand side, you can get a good understanding of what your client’s website progress is in terms of traffic, keywords and backlinks. 

If you see a graph that is not going up as steadily as the example above and contains spikes and drops for any indicator, you can take advantage of an extremely useful feature that enables you to go back in time to that specific month and analyze what happened there. Just select a month in the top-right corner and you’ll be taken to a page containing the relevant data.

2. Understanding your client’s target markets and keyword rankings

Besides analyzing dynamics, you can get detailed information on the organic keywords the client targets and their rankings across multiple locations.

The markets that your clients are active in play a huge role in terms of revenue. You want to be sure that they’re not spending their budget on countries that won’t yield the desired results. The traffic distribution map provides a visual understanding of how much traffic the client is getting from each country in the world.

By hovering over a country, you can see the volume of traffic the client is getting from it. This data is also available in tables if you prefer to analyze it that way.

On the main dashboard, you can learn how well the site’s keywords are generally performing in search through the Distribution of organic keyword rankings chart. This allows you to see what group of keywords you can focus on to get higher rankings most quickly.

To dig deeper into the keyword list, open the detailed report. Using filters, you can see what search queries they target and which ones have improved in rankings, which ones have dropped, which keywords they only recently started ranking for and which ones they put a stop on. 

Being able to see summary data as well as switch to detailed reports is extremely helpful when it comes to analyzing multiple websites on a daily basis.

A great way to get a better idea of what’s working right for your client is to take a look at their site’s top pages and subdomains in organic search. 

Besides looking at how much traffic each of the top pages drives to the client’s site, it’s worth taking a look at the pages themselves to analyze what makes them tick and stand out in search. Since this is where most of the traffic comes to, analyzing such pages deserves your top priority.

To take things to the next level, find out what keywords each page is ranking for and, using SE Ranking’s Keyword Research, analyze the top organic results to understand what they are doing better than your client.

3. Evaluating how tough the niche competition is

A significant part of this research further down the road involves comparing your client’s website with its top and direct competitors. 
On the Competitive Research dashboard, you can see a list of a site’s top competitors along with their keyword overlaps, Domain Trust scores and the total number of keywords they target.

A semantics comparison with several top and direct competitors can help you easily expand your client’s keyword list. SE Ranking removes all the hassle by pointing out the keywords that are unique to the site’s competitors and that your client’s site isn’t targeting.

To identify direct competitors, you’ll first need to compile your target keywords list and add them to your customer’s project with SE Ranking. Then proceed to Visibility Rating. 

Basically, it takes the top websites ranking in search for your client’s target keywords and lets you know what your chances of driving traffic are.

Pro tip: To fully understand who your client’s site is going up against, analyze every competing website the same way you analyzed your client’s site.

4. Dissecting your client’s backlink profile

Moving on to the cornerstone of any SEO strategy: backlinks. The principle here is that pages with a high number of backlinks from authoritative domains tend to have high organic rankings on Google and other search engines.

SE Ranking provides a detailed analysis of any site’s backlink profile, enabling you to get a clear picture of how the client’s website is seen by the search giant. You can get a detailed backlinks report by clicking the number of backlinks on the Competitive Research dashboard or by accessing the Backlink Checker tool directly.

Right away, you’ll get top-level data on the number of backlinks and anchor text, the ratio of dofollow to nofollow links, and so on. All of the metrics are clickable.

When analyzing the backlink profile, it makes more sense to start by looking at the total number of referring domains and checking their Domain Trust scores. 

After all, you can have multiple backlinks from a single domain, which is good, but referring domains contribute way more than the actual number of links pointing to a website.

Once again, remember that you can always spy on successful competition to see what referring domains they get links from and use that data to build a healthier backlink profile for your clients.

5. Defining what technical SEO issues to fix on your client’s website

Looking at the visual components as well as keywords, traffic and backlinks of your client’s website is a must, but it also is an absolute necessity to check under its hood. The technical SEO setup of your client’s site plays a huge part in its performance in search, both from the standpoint of Google and user experience.

This is just a small snapshot of the information that is provided in SE Ranking’s Website Audit report. With this data, you can bring your client’s website’s health up so that technical issues like loading speed and duplicate content, for example, don’t prevent it from getting higher rankings in search and don’t force visitors to bounce the moment they try to access one of your client’s pages.

To recap, a diligently performed preliminary SEO analysis and audit allow you to identify realistic long-term goals and short-term deliverables, but that’s a topic for another time. The key to building a healthy client-agency relationship is diving head-first into their project to understand it practically as the client does.

So, whether you are auditing a potential client’s website, analyzing a new client’s website in detail, or are keeping track of the progress of your digital agency’s existing clients, SE Ranking is an all-round SEO suite packed with more than 30 tools specifically designed to do the SEO heavy lifting and provide support throughout the entire journey of your client-agency relationship. Join the growing 600k user-strong community and focus on what you do best.

The post Setting client expectations with a thorough preliminary SEO analysis appeared first on MarTech.