No matter what type of business you have, having a marketing plan is essential as it allows you to guide your marketing efforts. Marketing Managers like yourself spend so much time crunching the numbers, working out what marketing techniques work and creating a marketing budget. And you do all of this with the end goal of developing a very detailed marketing plan.
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How Do I Work Out A Digital Marketing Budget?
Other than marketing managers and marketing experts, not many people understand how much money, time and effort goes into a digital marketing strategy. And developing a digital marketing budget is just one of the many daunting tasks we’re faced with as Marketing Managers.
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What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the practice of making your website search engine and user-friendly so that it is listed high up in a search engine when a person searches for something.
Is SEO cheaper than PPC?
Every now and then someone says to me that PPC is really expensive and they’d rather go down the route of using SEO to generate enquiries or sales for their business. But as with all things marketing mix orientated, it’s never an all or nothing approach and it’s important to understand where each tactic fits into your plan. Read more
Unbounce Review
I’ve been working on PPC campaigns since 2007, in that time I’ve managed huge campaigns with tens of thousands of keywords spending £80,000+ a month down to small campaigns spending a few hundred pounds a month with only a select group of keywords and one of the key things that makes a successful campaign is the message and the landing page it’s on. Read more
Google SERP Heat Map Demonstrates The Importance of Adwords for Marketers
Most business people will understand the difference between paid for listings and organic listings on Google and most of them will be determined to appear highly in the organic listings as they generally percieve this (often erroneously) to be the cheapest way to get online traffic. Read more
Sexy, Fun and Addictive
The world of online marketing is a funny old place and has been described to me in many different ways over the years, recently someone said internet marketing is sexy, fun and addictive and this got me thinking about what I think about the world of SEO, PPC, SMO (and various other acronyms), inbound marketing in general, email marketing, web design and development – and all the other things that I’ve been invovled with over the years. Read more
Three Tips for Getting The Kind of PPC Traffic You Want
On Grow Traffic I very often write about what it’s like being a freelance seo consultant but as a search marketer (as well as an online marketer) I have a much broader understanding of the scope of internet marketing as a whole and I sometimes don’t shout enough about the amount of PPC management I’ve done in my time, including managing several campaigns with budgets in excess of £80k a month. Read more
Does ROI focused internet marketing spoil creativity in marketing?
Whenever I explain to people what I do and my methodology, one of the things I’m at pains to say is that I’m a marketer that focuses on return on investment.
All my career we’ve been talking about tracing how conversions are attained and working out cost per conversions. It’s a standard format however recently I’ve been starting to think about the point of marketing and how it works to change the way the marketed to interact and engage with the brand and how difficult that is in reality to quantify. Read more
Building on your strengths
I try and take a step back on a regular basis and ask myself what have I learned about myself from the things I’ve just done. It always surprises me that people are happy to plod on allowing themselves to get into the same situations where they have to make the same mistakes because they haven’t learned anything about themselves from their experiences.
Gnoshi Seauton
The ancient Greeks had a saying and although the spirit of the original meaning is lost to time, Gnoshi Seauton or Know Thyself still resonates with me today. I remind myself of this on a daily basis, whatever I do I approach it from a situation of how I will best cope with it, where it is likely to test me and how it is likely to enable me to develop, both professionally and personally.
Agency vs. In-house Marketing
I’ve worked for agencies and I’ve worked client side and it’s fair to say that when I’ve found myself in the position of a client side role I’ve hated it. There are a couple of reasons, firstly I love the variety that working a number of different projects brings, this gives me loads of opportunity to develop and hone my skill set, f I can do it in one industry I can do it anywhere. The second reason I prefer agency work is that I like being in the role of being an industry expert, maybe this is an ego thing, but I think it’s good to have that ego sometimes, I make the things happen through my advise and strategy. There is no real difference as to where this advice goes to a client or to a marketing director / managing director however it’s often harder to advise the guy that’s paying your wages than the guy that’s paying for your service, especially if you work for someone who has used various internet marketing techniques in the past.
Plan the event in advance or plan for the event / Overview vs detail
I probably bang on about this too often. One of the reasons I think I’m so good at search marketing is that I can disatach myself from the detail and see what’s going on as an overview. It’s a useful skill, sure it’s important to get a little bit fixated on the percentage of keywords on a page and where they are located however once you’ve done that you’ve got to be able to say “what’s the bigger picture, what are the general trends”.
I used to work for a guy who asked me how I knew what was going to happen with PPC, I explained it was experience, I also explained the reasons and he looked a bit blank – then I said “I just know, I cam’t really 100% tell you the complexities of how I know, I’ve been staring at this date for so long I can see the patterns.” He seemed quite happy with that response and let me carry on.