• FAQs

          Search engine optimization (SEO) helps businesses drive visits to their website through organic search traffic. Given that the top organic search results receive a third of the clicks, a decline in ranking could be detrimental for your business. Implementing SEO best practices on your website will help to ensure that your web content is seen by as many potential customers as possible. The more visitors you have, the better your chances are of converting those visits into sales!

          Local search engine optimization (SEO) helps local businesses gain visibility by optimizing their local business listings for local search. A business that leverages local SEO will include its address, phone number, local opening times, and exact location in the form of a local citation. The goal is to rank for local searches which are usually performed by people in a specific geographical region looking for a business near them.

          We typically see results within the first 30 to 60 days, but when it comes to SEO, there are many factors at play. It's important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy and results may not come as fast at you wish.


        • FAQs

          Digital advertising uses the internet to send advertisements to customers who are online through different websites and social media platforms like Google, Bing, LinkedIn and Facebook.

          The price for Google Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.

          The price for Social Media Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.


        • FAQs

          This depends on the complexity and size of a redesign and if eCommerce is needed. On average, it takes around 14-18 weeks from the web design intensive stage to launch.

          If your website experiences the following issues: it’s not responsive on all devices, has a slow loading speed, the design appears old and tired, users don’t spend long on the site, sales are stagnant, or your business is going through a rebranding - your website needs a redesign to boost your brand awareness and sales.

          Sometimes there’s no need to rebuild a website. Minor edits, refreshing page content and images, or restructuring page layout for SEO best practices can boost traffic and sales.


        • FAQs

          Semantic search launched in 2013 with the release of Google's Hummingbird update. Since then, Google's search engine has become more complex. The integration of machine learning, with RankBrain, and NLP, with BERT, has enabled the search engine to better understand the context of a query and deliver more personalized and targeted results. Semantic SEO is the process of creating machine-readable content using structured data and linked open data to help search engines better understand your content.

          On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page SEO refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. From meta tags to page content, website structure, and HTML, on-page optimization services are focused on making your website more visible to search engines.

          Structured data refers to any organized data that conforms to a certain format, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways. Structured data involves using a piece of code that is laid out in a specific format easily understood by search engines. The search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a more dynamic way.


        • FAQs

          An SEO agency has experts in different areas of search engine optimization that may be out of the realm of your marketing team's abilities. SEO can be very complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, as search engine algorithms change it can be difficult to stay current on the latest ranking factors and strategies for improving online visibility. You will likely see a greater return on investment and better results from using a professional SEO agency than you would from tackling this on your own.

          As a digital marketing agency, SMA Marketing provides products and services in four areas: SEO, Local SEO, Digital Advertising, and Web Design

          We focus on building authentic, long-lasting relationships with our clients. We’re goal oriented and results driven and believe in doing good and making a difference in the world.

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How to Use Content to Align Sales and Marketing

When you hear the term “content marketing,” what comes to mind? For most people they think blogging. While that is an aspect of content marketing, there are many other uses and avenues you need to explore if you want to have marketing success online.  Content not only plays a vital role in marketing, it is also essential in sales. Check out this week’s video to learn more.

Video Transcript:

Hey, thanks for checking out this video. If this is your first time watching or maybe you’ve been watching before and you haven’t yet hit subscribe, please do so now and don’t forget to turn on the notifications so you get updates every single time we publish a new video.

We’re going to be talking about how content plays a role in sales and marketing. A lot of times when we’ve talked about content marketing, a lot of people think blog posts. They’re like oh my gosh, do I have to blog for my website? I hear that all the time when working with business owners, they get frustrated because they’re like why am I blogging? Why do I have to blog? I don’t want to be blogging. I don’t have time to blog. But content is not just blogging, content is your e-mail, content is video, content is slide decks, and promotional material. Content can be used in a variety of different ways and it should be used throughout the marketing and the sales funnel.

A lot of companies have two different groups that are kind of interacting with prospects and clients. The first group is the marketing team. We’ll give them a big M here. Now marketing, it’s their job to create blogs and videos and slide decks. A lot of companies think oh we got to put them on social media and that sort of thing. Marketing’s job is to get people aware.

It’s the sales team’s job to close the deal. This is how a lot of businesses operate, and there’s really a disconnect between this content creation, what’s happening in these three phases of the funnel, which is typically what marketing is responsible for, and then what sales is responsible for. This is not to say that salespeople don’t do anything and they’re not responsible for anything. Salespeople have a lot to do between closing these SQLs into a customer, into a sale, but what makes companies that close a lot of their leads and a high percentage of their leads are those companies that build synergy between these two groups of people here?

When marketing and sales are collaborating and working together on creating content and aligning content, it allows them to make sure that they’ve got content for each phase of that life cycle, for that lead. When they’re coming into the site, they can have those top-level pain points because here’s the cool thing that sales has, sales is having those conversations with customers and prospects all the time, so they hear what people like, what people don’t like, they know what causes somebody to hang up, they know what causes somebody to say hey, stop e-mailing me, and they also know when somebody says this is awesome, this is really solving my problem.

You can get a ton of information by aligning these two groups together when you’re doing a content strategy. A lot of times what happens is you outsource maybe to an agency, an agency says here’s some keywords or here’s some fun topics. Oh, lists are really popular right now so we should do a blog post on lists because that’ll get your social likes up but the reality is Facebook likes aren’t going to be driving your business. Those are vanity metrics.

What you want to do is find content that’s not just going to get people in your pipeline but that’s going to walk them through the stage of the journey. You might find out that blog posts are really good at your top level leads and they’re generating people coming to your website and helping them engage and maybe they’re subscribing to your blog, but you may find that this blog content isn’t actually pushing them into an MQL or a SQL. What you need here is some sort of content access. You need a deck or an infographic or a media one sheet.

If you’re just making these to make these, you’re not going to have a lot of success. What you need to do, marketing and sales can work together and we can say hey, this blog topic on the ten top sales tips for 2019 was really good but what sales professionals are really struggling with is how to leverage their CRM. You could do a quick guide on how to get the most out of your CRM from your sales team.

Well, that might cause them to go now into the next bucket. Now let’s say you’ve got some sort of sales tool, that’s what we’re using for this example, networks, but now you want to move them along the funnel even further and you notice that hey, people like to watch video. Video is obviously a very powerful platform, that’s why we’re using it right now, and the sales team may have some insight saying like hey, I’ve been watching a lot of these videos on how our specific tool can integrate and make their life a lot easier. Well, marketing should get together with sales and then create that video.

Now you’ve got a blog post that leads them to this initial offer right here, which would be a deck or something, that leads them into a call to action, which is then sales, which is a low barrier of entry because they’re not actually having to talk to somebody yet so they don’t have to really commit too much of their time, which then once they take that action on sales could help the sales team close the sale because now they’ve got some content that’s working all the way through the funnel.

Now this may look like a really weird football play but in reality if you take a step back and you start to look at these, you can see that if marketing was doing this on their own, they might have created a fun little blog post here, posted some images on some social channels, drove some people to the website that did something, and then that would be the end of the day. Sales would be cold calling and saying why aren’t we getting leads that want to know anything about our business.

If sales and marketing come together and align, they look at the different stages of the life cycle of a prospect and can start to build out different types of content assets that they can use along the way. That’s not only going to help marketing get more meaningful conversions, but that’s also going to help the sales team to have more people in their pipeline that are interested in what they’re selling.

Content is a powerful tool to align. It’s not a magical tool, you have to take some time and think about the strategy, but when you align it between sales and marketing, you’re going to get that content to go a lot further for your business and actually turn it into revenue, which is ultimately why you’re doing it and spending all this money on marketing and sales in the first place.

If you have any questions on how we do this for our own agency or how we do it for some of our clients, we would love to continue to conversation. Until next time, Happy Marketing.

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