Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy Outdated?

00:00 Welcome & Introduction
02:15 Recognizing Outdated Strategies
07:30 Content Marketing: Quality vs. Quantity
11:45 Algorithm Changes & Their Impact
18:20 Analytics & Measuring Success
24:10 Embracing New Technologies & Trends

[00:00:00] Hi everybody. We are here today. Geek Speak with the two pros in marketing, we left the boys at home today. But today we are talking about signs your digital marketing strategy is outdated and boy, do we have stuff to talk about. And if you are joining us today you'll know my cohort here.

[00:00:25] This is. Rina Little from Littleworks Indie Media. [00:00:30] And I'm Pip Seymour Digital Media and together we make marketing a group effort. And we are here today to talk about how I have failed myself in my marketing because I got too busy and like the cobbler's children, I've screwed it up. So my marketing is no longer outdated.

[00:00:50] But it was outdated. So we thought it was a great topic. And so Rena and I are going to ask each other how we would know if our marketing is outdated. So Rena. [00:01:00] Oh, that wasn't the exact question, but okay. So I wanted Pip to ask Oh yes, go ahead. You go try it. Let's see if you get it right. Let's see if you get the question on point.

[00:01:11] If not, how do you know if you're marketing? How do you know if your marketing's outdated? Is that what you were going to ask me? Yeah, how do you know? Yeah, how do you know? Yeah, so I think we can wrap this up. You know when your marketing is not working if you don't get any sales. But there we go. [00:01:30] Oh, you've gone.

[00:01:31] What happened? Wait, no, but it's not about if you make any it depends on your business. So if you're in commerce, then yes. But if you're a, another business, if you don't get lead, if you don't close the leads and sales different, right? That is true. E commerce leads and sales are the same. The same it's been the same action, but yes, you're absolutely right You do need leads in order to make the sales and marketing people are not responsible for closing up the leads [00:02:00] When all you gotta do is say pips, right?

[00:02:01] Yeah. Yeah Except when the leads are low quality. So it's really important for your marketer person to have conversations with you and be asking you, what's your conversion rate? How are you handling that? And then also to know that as a marketer, I like to ask, what is your sales script like?

[00:02:18] Are are you able to close, because those two things need to be Organized super well in order for the whole thing to work together so if i'm if pip's handing me the most awesome leads and I have [00:02:30] zero sales training I have No script that's organized for my sales people or whoever's taking those calls and i'm not on i'm not I'm just hoping that intuitively people are going to sell buy because I'm not a salesperson.

[00:02:44] I don't want to be a salesperson. Then you're going to have some issues, right? Why is, I can see your lips moving, but nothing's happening. Cause I muted myself so that you were heard better. Oh, I see. We can't hear any of your background, so [00:03:00] you don't have to worry about that. I just get so excited and I'm like, I can do stuff.

[00:03:05] I know it's true. So those two pieces are separate, but they have to play well together. And if your marketer is sending you lots of really, lots of leads and they are not good, so we did run a campaign offshore, an offshore campaign in another country that's what offshore means, duh. But if you send a if you do a campaign in another country sometimes the actions will be different.

[00:03:27] For example, we ran one in the Middle [00:03:30] East where we got a huge click through rate, lots of bookings, but the people were not educated enough on what it was that we were selling in order to be able to make a sale. There needs to be an extra step put in place for that particular campaign. So you just have to know.

[00:03:46] And then on the other hand, um, we had one, one, one person, when you've got one salesperson that closes a large per percentage of your leads, which was happening with another client. And then they switch that [00:04:00] salesperson goes away and then all of a sudden the sales drop, the conversions drop, then we can start to think about what's going on in the sales process, so maybe it's not a marketing, you have to look at the marketing and know what to look for.

[00:04:12] And then you also have to know what to look for in the sales part to actually assess whether or not your marketing strategy is working. That's what I think so that's an interesting answer Because it's different than mine. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I know where you are going And I think that what you're going to [00:04:30] say is going to be equally important to know too But but as a concept this is the space Be thinking about first.

[00:04:37] And then how do you figure out? Where the problems. And I think that's where we're leaning towards. Next five, my five minute solution is not the end of the conversation. It is a really good point because why are we all in business? Yeah. If there's no money, there's no business.

[00:04:54] I think that's correct. That's the thing. So we've got to keep that's why I was so we kill what we eat. [00:05:00] And in, so to speak, and it sounds so brutal. Can we find another metaphor for next time? Yeah, see, I think I'm on a recurring diet. If we're going to, if we're going to make analogies, but the reality is with my marketing strategy.

[00:05:18] So what happened? So you asked me the question you asked me. Yes. How do you know when your digital marketing strategy is outdated? Yeah, so I think you're really right that it is all about conversions in the end. [00:05:30] But for me, how do I know my marketing strategies failed? I log into search console

[00:05:35] Yes, go search console. Yes. And here are the tools to discover. Is it a sales funnel problem or a marketing problem, right? And here we go. And so it's really interesting because what happened with mine and is it a fail? Here's the thing. Okay, so here's what happened. I wrote this. I paid a lot of attention to blogging two years ago.

[00:05:54] I wrote blogs. I was one of the first people to write about Google analytics for, I got [00:06:00] so far up in that, like I got on the first page of Google with some of my people I look up to, I was stoked. It was rockstar, but and, but then I wrote another article or one before that, and I picked the wrong keyword because I could never rank for that keyword.

[00:06:17] So I could maybe. It's super, just the big players are in there. So it'd be really hard. And so let's just, can we just pause and explain one little concept for people who are new on this? Yeah. You know what I'm going to [00:06:30] say? So when you're choosing keywords, you want something that people are looking for, so it has to have a high number of searches, but you also want to make sure that the volume of material that's already out there in Is not ridiculous because and there are strategies to get around that.

[00:06:47] So that's what we're talking about where, when Pip says that she, there was no way she was going to be able to rank for that. That's why. Yeah. So it'd be like in, in the ad sector, it'd be like competing with Walmart, right? Like [00:07:00] you're just, they're, they have a bottomless funnel. A pit of money that I, as a small business can never out, I probably could, but it'd be so for a long tail, longer tail keyword.

[00:07:11] So what happened was there, Google does an algorithm update and all of a sudden all my impressions. So I showed up on the search engine results pages, lots of impressions, hundreds of thousands of impressions, not that many clicks cause I'm on page like a hundred. So slowly over time, over two years, it.

[00:07:28] Went up. So [00:07:30] huge number of impressions, but no clicks. So my click through rate is off. So it's better that I don't rank for that at all. And I just start afresh. Because my, and what is you see instead of that hockey stick effect of going up. You see a tumbling down, and that's what I've seen in the search box.

[00:07:50] Okay, so you said something that piqued my interest. So would you actually start with a fresh new blog with a brand new keyword, or would you attempt to adjust the [00:08:00] keywords in the current blog post to be a long tail keyword that might get you noticed for that sort of really narrowed down niche and just adjust the content on that particular blog post.

[00:08:12] That's my question. Ah, that is a really good question. That brings up some very interesting information. So Google says is it about a single page or is it about your whole website? Does Google look at your whole website or the single page? Technically it is a single page, but when you come across such issues, you should do like a.[00:08:30]

[00:08:30] Website quality audit, at least yearly just to find if you're with a good seo person I think, you're doing quarterly or six month or yearly quality assurance updates to try to, because our job is to just make it so clients keep getting leads and we have to figure out how to prove that it's us that is the bringing the leads.

[00:08:55] Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. And so this is [00:09:00] the piece, this is the piece that I think is so under understood. So misunderstood. So actually misunderstood isn't the right term because once you get it. But so there's no misunderstanding it, but it's not understood at all. By a lot of business owners, I just handed over a beautiful new website.

[00:09:19] We found so many problems on the on the audit that we did. And And implemented like the fixes for all of them and created a structure and a strategy moving forward. And [00:09:30] then they decided to take their website work in house with some people that are not really, don't have enough experience to run this.

[00:09:38] And the reason why I know that is not because I'm judging people, but because their website had become so decrepit in such a short period of time that's the only and in the week that they've had their site There are, I got search console alerts telling me of all of the problems that have happened in one week of them having their site.

[00:09:59] So it's [00:10:00] not a good idea to think that you can run your own website unless you are actually keyed in to SEO. If you are keyed into SEO, then absolutely have at it. But if you are just simply creating content constantly and updating your website with new content, that's only one part of the battle. And that's the thing.

[00:10:20] It can really hurt you. So what most people do is they, Okay. Sorry. I only want to chime in because one of the things that we're [00:10:30] really seeing is with AI right? Or chat GPT. Everybody's so much content is out there now, but like Google's trying to discern because the one thing. Stays true, which is, it's not, it's quality of content, not just quantity.

[00:10:45] Yes, exactly. But it's not even the content that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the simple idea of not creating redirects when you take pages down, like that's, that's the most basic and that's what I'm saying. That's what I've seen happening is that. [00:11:00] People just think that they can take away content and it's no big deal because it doesn't represent their business anymore and they don't see the bigger picture of how that taking that page away affects the little SERP that somewhere on the Google search results that you need to actually take care of that SERP.

[00:11:16] So the content is related to that SERP and you'll always have to be thinking, where is that SERP and how are people going to find that link and where else have I put that link out in the world? And. Is it in a lot of places? If it is, then you're absolutely want to create a [00:11:30] redirect for all that.

[00:11:32] We get hired now just to do that part because a lot of web devs will be like, no, I don't want to do it. Yeah. That's yeah. Job, isn't it? We'll do it. We'll get it done. We'll get it done. And that's what people need to know. So with the marketing, so being outdated, I guess what we're saying is if your sales aren't working, number one, so that's gonna be a huge indicator.

[00:11:57] And then if you're seeing your [00:12:00] stats drop, right? Yeah. So declining in metrics. Yeah. And which metrics. So digging into the data, oh, my favorite. Yeah. So the one the thing that really gets me though is, and I think that probably a lot of business owners are in this position is that the big algorithmic shift that happened in March is still affecting people's results.

[00:12:21] What I noticed in my clients and there's another agency clients that I looked at people thought that Google ads were stopped, had stopped working. They were not working [00:12:30] and they kept contacting their Google ads people. But actually, when you dig into the numbers, that the ads.

[00:12:35] Click through rate and all of that hasn't changed really, but what has changed is that organic number, that organic piece that was helping boost, so your pieces organic and paid and they should be working together. So sometimes when it drops, it looks like the Google ads are dropping. So you really do have to unpack that and look at the numbers.

[00:12:57] Like, where is that? Where was that traffic coming [00:13:00] compared over time? Where are you going to find that? So you're going to. So I was talking about search console earlier, this is Google analytics where you're going to dive into, to see that, because we've actually run across that problem too, where clients like, Oh my God, my leads are down.

[00:13:13] And you're taking all of search. So all of the search engine market, we're only for them. We're only doing the Google ads. So I'm like, you can't blame me if I have no control over the. Yeah. You can't blame the apples when the oranges are [00:13:30] low. It. Yes. Yeah. And so we know that.

[00:13:32] Okay. So inadequate online traffic and conversions. Really there, there's, that's good. What about quantity over quality now? Yes, it's why are we posting stuff? And what do you think about that quantity over quality, Rina? Yeah, I don't like quantity over quality because obviously I think that bar, you want to keep your marketing budget as lean as possible in certain areas and really Put the money where it's well benefited.

[00:13:58] So a good [00:14:00] piece of quality content is much better than a whole bunch of posts that don't do anything. And when I say they don't do anything, I mean that they need to be organized, like people should be organizing their content pillars based on their sales goals. If you're, if your business goals and your content are not related and somehow, and I don't mean make sales on every post at all.

[00:14:22] So please do not understand that. 20, 20 to one differences. And so 20 posts to one sales post, 20 helpful, [00:14:30] entertaining, whatever posts. I don't even put sales posts on my organic at all. I put all of my sales posts on ads so that I'm targeting the people that I want. I don't really care If my, if my friends and family who support me on my social media channels, if they get my sales posts, because they're not going to buy from me, but I do want to be connecting with those people who have who are in certain places down my funnel.

[00:14:55] I want to be connecting that right message with where they are. And you can really do that [00:15:00] effectively on ads, not on organic in my mind. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, so quality over quantity is one thing and people get into this crazy sort of place where they read the gurus, and these people do make money because they're selling education products.

[00:15:16] But but I don't know if they actually do what they say for their own sales funnel. I would doubt it. But. Yeah. So what what they say is you have to post so many posts every day. Especially they say on Instagram, I think is one of the [00:15:30] worst. You have to do five stories, how many reels and a bunch of posts every week, and it's it's a lot.

[00:15:35] So I don't really feel like that's a good use of my time as a business owner, because I've not, I'm, I do get sales leads from Instagram, but, um, yeah. We don't use Instagram as a channel. We just, we're. I like Instagram. I like it too. I'm liking it more over the years actually. Yeah. I think Instagram can bring better results than Facebook organically speaking, for example.[00:16:00]

[00:16:00] And even Tik Tok is so global. It's hard to really, um, I've never done ads on Tik Tok to be honest. But I'm talking organic. I'm talking organic. It's much easier to target my target market on Instagram, even organically speaking, based on the way that hashtags work on that, in that space.

[00:16:19] So I'm pretty good with that. And I do get the calls, um, or the dms mostly. Okay. So that works. Interesting. That works for me. Not as often as other ways, but that's definitely one of my [00:16:30] channels that I pay attention to. But yeah, so qu quantity is not really that great because really quantity is like taking your little machine gun and going and hoping that something sticks rather than organic is to when I think of organic, I want one good piece of.

[00:16:47] I want them to be organized to my content pillars. So they're super strategic. And then I want them to go out at certain times because I'm still, even though I'm global, I am global. I'm still primarily trying to [00:17:00] target businesses in Vancouver or for my organic stuff. And and then and then you want to make sure that content.

[00:17:07] It gets the good content the ad content is where you put most of your effort into and most of the effort should not go into the Well, shouldn't, doesn't necessarily have to go into the content production, but maybe the content distribution. So that's where I put a lot of ad budget behind, I'm getting these Instagram ads all of a sudden.

[00:17:26] Actually I get them on Instagram and Facebook for people, for [00:17:30] companies who do 60, 000 a month on Google ads. So I don't think they're targeting me very well. Do you know what I'm saying? They're not targeting me. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so I find that really intriguing.

[00:17:44] So if you, and why I bring that up is because you can target people in so many ways on the ads that you can get so niche and that's really where the fun is. And when you get a higher click rate, it means that you're actually got the right [00:18:00] target and you're with the right messaging. And that's really nice.

[00:18:03] So we had one, one campaign recently that had an over 10 percent click through rate on it, which I thought was really good. That's amazing. Yeah. One, one we got, so we, we lost a client a little while, I have to say it's a sad story for the client. Because they feel they got hosed, I think a little bit.

[00:18:24] And we got, they got poached from us being, and it was a bigger company and it's gone all sorts of sideways for [00:18:30] them. But one of the things was that, uh, it will decrease their ROI. Like it will decrease their quality over quantity. And when we gave over the account, I looked at the click through rate and it was like, the conversion rate was great.

[00:18:47] The click through rate was like 6. 84, which on average, if everything's running. Okay. You aim for a 2%, right? 2 percent conversion rate, the [00:19:00] higher the click through rate, the better, because it does mean the more relevant. Oh, except for we had a huge click through rate. I looked at. This client, when they came to us, they had a much bigger click through rate.

[00:19:12] And it was really hard for me to explain why their way, why their result was better than my result. But it was because all of their, All of those click throughs that got to their landing page left immediately. So they weren't targeted well, they had, yeah, they had a [00:19:30] high click through rate and then a gigantic bounce rate.

[00:19:33] So it's that's not helpful. So you actually have to understand these numbers. You have to understand that you want a fairly high click rate, but not so high that it's so general and not so narrow that it's. There's no one going to the site. And then you want the and if that's a traffic if your campaign is a traffic based campaign, that's good.

[00:19:52] And then you're probably going to get a much lower click through rate on a retargeting situation. And also if you're doing display [00:20:00] or a display type of campaign, retargeting display. Because like you can get lots of numbers. The idea is not to get clicks, it's just to get views. Yeah.

[00:20:10] However, and that's that repetition function in your marketing that you want to have happen. And that's why you use different channels and. Different things, if you can, on different channels, not that happens all the time, but, yeah, so it used to be really great to look at the assisted conversions in your Google analytics, because then you could really get a [00:20:30] feel of how many times people had to come into contact with your campaigns and you organically all sorts of different ways before they actually booked that call with you.

[00:20:41] Okay. Yeah. So. And so we have, we're still at basically, so we got sales conversions. We have then like decreasing ROI. So measurements. And quality over quantity. And then this one's a really good one. The ignoring new technology and [00:21:00] trends. And I think this is something you should spend a minute on.

[00:21:03] Yeah. So yeah. So Gary Vernechuk, whatever the heck his name is. Vanderchuk, Gary V. Vanderchuk. Yeah. Thank you. He did a, somebody did a little analysis on him and how he calls the out and it's not out calls it calls. The says how it's going to be, which I thought was pretty interesting because he had made some comments that businesses were going to do great on Tik TOK in 2018, and now [00:21:30] he's saying that LinkedIn is the place.

[00:21:32] And he's still saying LinkedIn. He said LinkedIn last year. I likely, possibly it could also be that this person's data is a little out of date. I didn't fact check it. I didn't, take a look to see any deeper, but I think that if you want to be on the, it depends on what part of the curve you're on, it depends on how much energy you have, and it depends on all of your resources, not just energy.

[00:21:55] So you have to have time, you have to have cash. And you have to [00:22:00] make marketing happen at least one of those. And so you want to think about your budget and how much money you're putting towards your budget. Now, usually they say somewhere between five and 20 percent of your projected sales for the year is what you want to put into towards your marketing.

[00:22:14] And so if you're not, if you're not there yet, then you don't really want to be spread too thin. But if you are if you're, and if your business. If your business is going to bring people if you're looking to target people who are going to be on that sort of early curve of [00:22:30] marketing, then it's good to jump on things.

[00:22:33] But if you're not, if you're like, there's just, there are some companies that I have that I'm just not going to put on Tik TOK. And that's just the way that it is. The we don't offer Tik TOK. We're search focused and don't get me wrong. I love the video algorithm. And I love the search functionality of TikTok, but yeah, what what I do, it's a lot like strategies a lot.

[00:22:53] That's why we stick to, to mainly search. Because it's a lot, it's a lot like, we built strategies [00:23:00] around the Google business profile for bloody sake, for Hub. Yeah. So I think that it's really interesting. You got to pick your channels and then just work on consistency.

[00:23:10] I think. And if you lose consistency, what happens is if you wait too long, you'll be like me, and then you'll see all those numbers going to high health. Now. Granted, I have focused on some local SEO components for our business really well, but I have not focused on like an essential component of regular SEO, which is update your [00:23:30] content.

[00:23:31] If you're getting leads and making sales, then you always want to keep things up to date because you want that little trickle to continue of leads to come in. Because of course we all lose clients from time to time. So you want to make sure you've got somebody coming in to take that space up. What I want to make sure though, because that's clear, because this also came up with the business owner that I've been working with recently, that the way to shift, to be flexible and agile, [00:24:00] and to look at the data and see what's going on is very important.

[00:24:03] To shift from this to this, because somebody told you about local SEO, but if you're not actually a brick and mortar and you're trying to target people in the U. S. Then why would you that's not your main focus. You could implement that when you've got your right. So when you've got your marketing goals all organized, then you might want to add these little things in afterwards that will help boost you.

[00:24:24] But but this notion of this. What do they call that? It's there's a word for that term when you're [00:24:30] grabbing the ring that's constantly moving, and you're never getting a foot in anywhere. You're never staying with one thing with a consistent effort. So there's a difference between being dogged and staying with old strategies.

[00:24:44] That have been outdated for five years. So for example posting every day on Facebook that's just not going to work or that one's out organic on Facebook business pages are really, it's really quite useless. So it sticking with something just because it's been outdated. [00:25:00] Um, five years ago is not really going to be super helpful, but also making changes that aren't based on your data is also foolish.

[00:25:07] So continually jumping around, not going to help, not going to help. Like looking for that, that new shiny thing, not going to help. You need to really have a consistent strategy that you outlive over time. And try and measure the results properly. Yeah. You measure results properly, it is hard because.

[00:25:24] Yeah. As a business owner, you're running around doing everything. And and it's always that hard. It's, you [00:25:30] want to be a little bit too busy, but not too busy. You fail your clients. You want to be, like you, you want to be able to slowly grow consistently as a business owner because you want to be able to service the people.

[00:25:43] So it's a lot of give and take. And. Or you have a different way, a different plan for scaling. If you're a person who has a different plan of scaling, like you can just easily hire and train up if that's a fast and a short process. I don't ever look at hiring as fast and [00:26:00] easy. But that's, no, but there are some.

[00:26:02] But your business is different though. Your business is complex and complicated and technically oriented If you're running a coffee bar might not be quite so much. I know no shade to coffee bars. I have no idea I did but there might there are jobs that are out there that are fairly rote that you have a very easy Sop and that people can implement quite easy So if that's the case then scaling in that manner If you have capital behind you and you can hire [00:26:30] Very talented people, then that is also another way to scale.

[00:26:34] But for small businesses of our size, I think that we've all been in that hiring that awkward, uncomfortable position of where we just have a little bit too much work, but not enough that it's going to pay for another person. And that's always the difficulty. Isn't that funny, right? And when working with new people or younger people, strategies change.

[00:26:57] And you, so maybe [00:27:00] having a a collaborative approach in your office, setting, so you can get different people's opinions because everybody knows something. You don't like every single person's going to know something you don't know. So I think the Virgo in me is going this is the thing.

[00:27:13] This is why, and the other thing is specific industries. Have their niche things, right? Am I going to have an insurance company on TikTok? Maybe not, but maybe if they have, a global strategy and it's not just about having a lizard [00:27:30] or somewhere, but there's strategy involved and then they try to have a measurable outcome depending on the sales cycle.

[00:27:35] So I think, oh, and we are at a time. Wow. So fast, so easy, so great. We are out of time, but not out of touch, just like usual. We will be back next Thursday at 11 a. m. Pacific. If you're going to join us, we would love to see you. I know it's summer. I know it's hard to pay attention. Oh, I missed a comment from Steven here today.

[00:27:58] How often should you relook [00:28:00] at your keywords and search terms? That you're looking for. That is a great question. Before we go, we will answer that. Rina, what do you think? It depends if I've got somebody on a full SEO package, then I'm going to run that report every month. My reporting system will tell me what's working, what's not.

[00:28:17] If I'm looking at the whole site, then I will do that. And again, it depends on the package that the client has with me. I but my, I think optimally I would like to do that quarterly for my own business, so that probably gives you the best idea. [00:28:30] Okay I'll give you quarterly and that's where you can see, quarterly is really good because then you can make some adjustments and you should be building that into the structure of your business and looking at the numbers, which I have to go do now because it's the first of the month.

[00:28:44] All right. So that's a really great question and a really great answer. I think, we are. We're on par about that. We do not golf people. We do not golf. I think par is for golf. Yes. I am just looking at. I have no idea. [00:29:00] Okay. August 8th is next week and we are talking about what is accessible and inclusive design.

[00:29:08] So this is all about how. It's gonna be a great topic. I'm gonna watch it. I'm not talking about it, but we got our web people on it and they're gonna tell us how to do this. And I am gonna throw them an example and talk to them about it on the side. So we will see you next week. Next week. All right. Bye.