Recently, it was pointed out to me that our own digital agency needs to focus more on its own SEO. Not gonna lie, in making sure to maintain all of our client's digital marketing needs, sometimes we neglect our own. We are a B2B business, like many of our own clients, and we also need to consider where to invest a finite amount of resources, just like our clients do. In considering how and where to invest our resources for our own lead generation and business development, I looked to our past. Where have our clients with the highest budgets over the past 8 years come from, SEO or some other source? The answer is some other source, namely existing client referrals. In looking at the volume of leads we get from our website and the number of those leads that actually convert into new business, there is a wide gap. On our website we tend to get inquiries from companies looking to get prices but not yet ready to hire an agency. They seldom have a brief prepared and seldom have a budget in mind. However, when it comes to referrals, there is a much higher likelihood that we will convert the lead into new business. The referrals usually know exactly what they are looking for and have a budget in mind. So how do we get more referrals from our existing clients? We need to continue delivering the best creative and digital marketing services we can to our existing clients in Thailand, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Another source of leads for us with a high ROI has been investing in sponsoring conferences. Every year we will at least sponsor 1 conference outside of Thailand in order to gain exposure in more international markets (not sure if we'll get the chance this year). Most of the time this is in Hong Kong and Singapore, but we have also invested in China and the US in the past. The fees may seem high at a couple hundred thousand baht (a couple thousand USD) for sponsorship and speaking opportunity in one event, plus flight and accommodation, but the investment always pays off.
A third source that we haven't tried but it's been recommended to us is entering competitions for recognition, i.e. Campaign Asia. We have been told, and I can't verify this because we have not done it ourselves, but we have been told that many times you can win recognition just by paying the fees, investing in some of the marketing products in those competitions and submitting your work. It has been described to us as more an exercise of whether you can be organized enough to submit all the requirements on time, than a true judgment and competition. Again, this is not from direct knowledge. It does remain something in the back of our minds, not so much for business development, but to garner recognition for our team's hard work and recruit more awesome talent. Perhaps 2021 will be the year we enter to showcase the team's creativity in delivering quality creative digital content for our clients during this Covid-19 work from home situation.
All that being said, yes, SEO needs to be prioritized. Not only to attract new business, but also for the benefit of attracting new talent. Like we tell our clients though, SEO is not something a digital agency can do once and then just let it be. It requires regular work both onsite and offsite, from new content, new backlinks, quality backlnks, website updates based on Google's changing search algorithms, website structure and many other factors. Google itself has some pretty useful information for those of you interested in learning about SEO for your own websites or in wanting to become more informed before choosing an agency to help you.
Google SEO Resources:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
- Beginning users, do you need an SEO?
- Webmaster Guidelines
I wrote this article to show that we, and I would say most digital marketing agencies, face the same challenges as our clients. We also look to invest our own marketing budgets in the best manner possible. We consider ROI. We look at performance over time. We change direction when we see something not working and we A/B test. For example, this article is a test between two types of content in our blog. We get lots of traffic from our blogs focused on specific platforms, i.e. WeChat, Facebook, so we want to see whether a more general digital marketing blog will attract more or less traffic to our site. Thanks for reading and I hope our honest experience can help you in your planning.
