Red Evolution Opinions & Musings

Alto is a staple of the local business community here in Aberdeen; offering managed IT support and security services to companies all over the city. 

Choosing an agency is probably one of the biggest decisions you’ll make for quite some time. Choose the right one and you’ll find yourself working with a long-term partner who prioritises your growth and works tirelessly to make sure that you’re inundated with decent leads. 

Noticed your rankings bouncing around like a pogo stick? You’re not alone. Google rolled out 3 major changes to its core algorithm this summer, making for an incredibly turbulent June and July.

They might sound clinical, almost medical, but Google’s Core Web Vitals are actually a set of metrics designed to measure the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of your website.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm heading off to work. It's Friday morning, so a good day, great stuff, the weekend's here. I'll get some fun stuff done at the weekend although plenty of fun stuff happens through the week to be honest.