A week ago, I had a conversation with a business owner who’s looking for a digital marketing agency to help with lead generation. He’d found us by searching in Google and needed help to make sure his organisation’s potential customers find them the same way.

To understand the context of this post, it would also help to understand what SEO or search engine optimisation is. If you prefer a more visual approach here’s SEO explained in pictures.

Last Friday, I had a great conversation with a business owner in Manchester. He was crystal clear about his businesses strategy and how many new customers a month he needed to grow his business.

The only thing standing between him and success is that the people who want to buy what he’s selling don’t, currently, find his website when they search in Google. In other words, his website doesn’t generate leads; it’s not a lead generation website.

Contrast that with the reason he and I were having a conversation, yup, he found us in Google

During these strange COVID 19 times, one thing has become clear; on the other side of this crisis, we're all going to be more aware of digital business tools. The use of video conferencing has skyrocketed, and e-commerce has increased, and they are just two examples.

This probably seems like a dumb question, especially coming from the owner of a successful digital marketing agency, but bear with me while I share some thoughts and experiences.

I recently attended a Chamber of Commerce networking event. Despite generating most of our business online, naturally, I felt it was essential to making the most of our new membership. I enjoyed it. I met some lovely people and who knows, it may lead to some useful contacts and opportunities. Plus, I met some people whose services we can use.

A couple of years ago, I was seduced into the arms of Specsavers, a big brand optician. Previously, I'd used an optician in a nearby small town, but for whatever reason, I decided to try one of the big boys.

If you're the kind of person who thinks you've nailed running a marathon by simply buying some trainers, search or digital marketing is gonna hurt, and I mean really hurt.

In a previous life, I had a boss who had a number of great sayings. One of my favourites was, "sales causes marketing". I tried to argue with him on many occasions, mainly when I was trying to increase my marketing budget, but, I have to admit, he had a point.

Recently, we received an invitation to tender (ITT) to build a website, along with some search engine optimisation. The document we received was both prescriptive and naive, and the resulting site will, almost certainly, not be what the company needs. As a digital marketing agency we receive a lot of these documents, and unfortunately they all follow a similar and lamentable pattern.

As I was heading off to bed last night, my electricity smart meter was flashing green and red. Apparently, I'd gone over my planned budget for the day. The meter was telling me our home consumption for the day had been £15.00, something that would make our annual bill circa £5500. It's closer to £800.

As I many have mentioned one or two (hundred) times, your target market is not everybody. There is always some way or other that you can narrow down who you really want to speak to, even if everybody could, technically, buy what you provide.

A Customer Relationship Management or CRM tool makes sense for so many reasons. Just like personal organisers, such as Todoist, allow people to unclutter their brains by dumping tasks into an app, CRM systems do the same for businesses.

We recently received an invitation to tender to deliver some digital workshops to businesses in and around the area where one of our offices is located. In the document, there was a phrase that went something like, "You will help businesses source new suppliers for the delivery of a website." As I've said before in other blog posts, referring to digital agencies as suppliers doesn't sit very well with me.

If I had a tenner for every time I've seen a blog where the latest post was added about three years ago, I'd be writing this from a villa in the Bahamas. It happens all the time though. Great intentions fizzle out when time is short and it can be really hard to get back on track.

I'm an engineer, a problem solver, although I now work in the field of marketing. Digital marketing to be precise. That includes web design, inbound marketing, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, paid search such as Google Ads, social media marketing, and so on. In this post, I'm thinking about branding.