This site is part of the Yourmetalife group
Do you or your agency offer digital marketing solutions?
Would you like to develop the capacity and knowledge to offer your clients safe, reliable, and cost effective digital marketing?
Yourmetalife agency solutions gives your business the opportunity to enter this important and lucrative market.
The aspects covered include;
- Writing contract winning propositions
- Providing expert competition analysis
- Creating great content for your client’s sites
- Managing social media
- Establishing and managing safe, effective link profiles
- Engaging with online communities
- Preparing professional client reports
- Tracking ranking progress in SEO
- With a keen eye on your return on time and cash invested.
Yourmetalife – Your source for digital marketing client management.
Why Aren’t You Offering Digital Marketing To Your Clients?
As a creative agency Gambit Nash were looking to expand and scale up their client facing propositions. We understood that, in terms of our products there were lucrative areas that our typical client was looking to move towards that we did not offer.
The most obvious and commonly encountered one of these was digital marketing
We would build a website, write content, create the art and video assets for their promotions and brand and write the code for their customer analysis stems and CRMs. However almost every client we managed at some point during the discussion asked about digital marketing.
If your business offers any sort of digital product I can almost guarantee you’ve had these conversations;
The Questions We Were Asked…
- How can I rank well in Google?
- That website you built for us is great, but we don’t get a lot of business with it. Why is that?
- Is Facebook useful as a marketing tool for my sort of enterprise?
- What is content marketing?
- We’d like to be featured on websites where our likely customer base is. How can we achieve that?
- Who are these websites above us in Google? I’ve never heard of these companies.
- We get lots of website visitors, but no-one buys. What are we doing wrong?
- Can you help us make our website a commercial success?
- A few years ago, we tried SEO but it didn’t work for us now our website is not on Google at all. What happened?
- Is PPC a scam? We tried it once and it cost us a lot of money.
What became apparent to us quite quickly is that digital marketing is not a “one size fits all” product and that our clients had a range of issues and in turn, providing solutions for these clients would need us to develop a wide range skill set.
Our Own Competition
Looking locally, we assessed the other agencies that were offering digital marketing solutions. There were no small number. With services ranging from a few hundred dollars per month to many thousands.
A deeper analysis of the testimonials and examples on the sites of these digital marketers showed that at the low end of the cost scale the solutions offered, while still costing an amount that would raise expectations for their client, were not particularly effective.
At the high end some of the prices were in the tens of thousands of dollars per month and, while many of the agencies had great testimonials of adding value for their clients there were others that seemed to offer very little.
We knew we could do better than this. And so can you.
Two Hurdles to Offering High End Digital Marketing Solutions.
- Firstly, getting the skill set on board to oversee the enterprise. Skilled experienced marketers with a proven long-term track record of getting results.
- Secondly, a system of working. A methodology that was robust, repeatable, and provided great results across a wide range of market activities.
I joined Gambit Nash as the answer to the first issue. With 19 years’ experience in digital marketing and a skill set that included all the required elements.
The second issue proved to be a little tougher to crack.
There are many solutions out there. Many S.A.A.S products that will assist in the range of activities a digital marketer needs to undertake and quite a few stand-alone applications that seemed to fit the bill. Allowing us to reduce the “busy work” of report preparing, competition analysis, rank tracking, social media interaction, link prospect assessment, conversion rate optimisation and PPC.
But they all had the same problem.
Their cost scaled hugely with each new client you added.
- Social media management tools that started at a very low-cost base or “coffee change” prices ballooned to thousands of dollars per month once you needed to service five or six clients.
- Rank tracking and link analysis tools that set limits on the number of times reports could be run and the number of links they would fetch and analyse meaning that, as soon as we moved the tool to an agency environment, the costs went through the roof.
- Outreach, CRM and client acquisition services had the same problem. Cheap and affordable for servicing one small website. Incredibly expensive once we looked at the Enterprise or Agency level of membership we would require to service our own client base
In short almost every tool we looked at suffered from this issue of exponential cost scaling for agency level resources compared to single website/single user solutions.
A good process supported by great services, applications and outsourcing options allowed me to scale my one-man digital marketing business from 5 clients to more than 20 while maintaining my profitability per client.
Yourmetalife provided ideas for solutions I had not considered. Some great ideas and very well supported.
Online marketing. Yourmetalife’s advice has helped us make the most of our resources and achieve a wonderful return on investment.
Digital Marketing Offered Real Value To Us And Our Clients
We Had To Find A Solution
The choice was either to add these costs to our client’s monthly invoice – which in some cases would involve doubling the amount we would need to charge each client. Or, finding better solutions that scaled in a more linear fashion and allowed us find, service, and report to as many clients as our other constraints allowed for little or no on-cost.
Below is the tool set we found for doing just that, and it’s no exaggeration to say, these services might well have meant the difference between success and failure for us as a business offering digital marketing.
They might well make that same difference for you.
Most of them are free to trial, and as long-term users here at Yourmetalife we can offer exclusive discounts that you won’t even get from the developers own site.
Take a look. We have compiled comprehensive work-flow examples and detailed reviews on every tool to help you decide which ones should go in your own digital marketing tool kit.
Hi, A quick introduction. I’m Paul Rone-Clarke. Some of you may know me as “Scritty”. I’ve been in DM/IM for almost 21 years at the time of writing this. Full time for almost 10. When I started Google did not exist, social media was almost a decade away (even MySpace), email marketing was too expensive for most to contemplate and the internet was quite a jumbled and disorganised place.
The organisation and legislation of the last 20 years has changed the landscape considerably, and these changes are likely to continue for many more years to come.
What this means is that, in practice, the lessons of the past are often not applicable to the present and may well move on again the future. Yourmetalife is an attempt to make sense of these changes and is particularly aimed at creative and web design agencies looking to break into digital marketing via cost effective, efficient, repeatable white label services and automation. And lone internet marketers and affiliates looking for a way to scale their operations effectively.
Please browse the site, comment, criticise and suggest. You are all most welcome.
Site Content and Content Marketing
The content on your site represents you and your business. It needs to explain your product or service, provide information on pricing and availability and give an insight to any potential customers as to your reputation and reliability
It has the secondary function of being a major contributor to your search engine rankings. Google need to see relevance, honesty and uniqueness in your content.
The issue many business owners and webmasters have is not knowing what works for their customers and how to manage the slightly dualistic requirements of customers and search engines.
Yourmetalife provide comprehensive advice on the subject of content as well as access to the best tools and methods for getting this vital aspect of your website working for you. In the age of multimedia we look at the tools and techniques used to create video, audio and still visual content as well as how to craft and present written content to the best benefit.
We can tread the fine line between exactly what your site visitors and customers want, and what the search engine bots who crawl and read your site might expect to find to enable you to rank highly for the words and phrases that offer the best commercial value to you.
Outsourcing content is currently a real value proposition. Reputable content bureaus that have skilled authors on their books who understand language, structure and are capable of doing some level of research into niche topics and translating that research into solid readable copy for a website can be a very cost effective way forward.
Offsite SEO and Link Management
SEO (search engine optimization) has had a mixed press over recent years but still represents a fantastic way of achieving excellent visibility on the internet via a high position in the search engines.
SEO is a mixture of optimization on your website, ensuring that the search engines read your content as relevant and consistent. Your website also needs to offer a good user experience via good page load speeds, a professional set up, careful and precise use of meta-data and content that encourages your visitors to stay on your site rather than “bounce” to an alternative.
This effort on your own site is balanced with the way your website is perceived by the wider internet.
That is to say your website’s inbound link profile.
For Google, inbound links from relevant authority sites still play a major part in the algorithm that is used to decide just how high your website ranks – especially in highly commercial. In short, unless you are already a well known brand name, you will need these inbound links to compete against your online competition in commercial markets.
We look at safe, sensible, ethical and effective ways to encourage links and to manage your profile. From the broadcasting of valuable content to managing relationships with other webmasters. We cover all the options.
Keeping an eye on a client’s link profile, and perhaps just as important, spotting poor link profiles from potential clients before you sign them up and find you are dealing with a real problem, is something that can be done in a very cost effective manner.
Showing a potential client in a proposal that you understand not only their own website structure, but also their offsite presence, is a real game changer when it comes to positioning your competency. In short – having this level of insight and having the knowledge and skills to act on it will often be the difference between gaining a high value client or not.
Competition Analysis
There are two common errors that internet marketers make with their analysis, and a third error that is frequently seen in the execution of a digital marketing campaign.
In the analysis phase it is common for marketers to assume that their offline, bricks and mortar or traditional competition will be the same as their online competition. The same companies with the same strengths and weaknesses. Although a lesser or greater degree of overlap is common, a complete symmetry between online and offline competition is rarely seen, and in some cases it can be wildly different. Only proper analysis will reveal the truth of this.This is rarely the case
The second, slightly less common error is to consider that you real competition is the search engine you are looking to rank in. That the fight is against Google or Yahoo. It isn’t. The search engines set the rules and decide the game. Your competition is your competition, and if you want to be successful online you need to know who that is and how they operate. Learn from the best, take advantage of any weak points and progress with strong long term plan to succeed.
The most common error we see is in client/customer targeting is to target your competitors rather than your potential customers. This might seem an odd claim, however, we have experience of service providers who, when asked who they are marketing to, supply us with lists of other companies providing the same products and services as they are. It’s an easy mistake to make. For example real estate companies who mistakenly target keywords for PPC and SEO advancement that only other real estate companies would use and not the terms that those looking to buy property would use. We show you how to assess your real competition.
Social Media Promotion and Community Management
Since 2007 social media sites have taken over from search engines as the first place visited by most people accessing the internet.
Sharing ideas and concepts, particularly to end user consumers (B2C) now has a massive, new and still largely unexplored market place where your company can build a brand, share your idea and, ultimately, sell your products.
Social Media does not have the commercial intent of search engines and is biased towards selling to end users rather than other businesses. The “hard sell” is rarely appreciated out of context and unless you have natural brand momentum and a very popular product, a “brand first” marketing approach is often more appropriate and will results in better long term results on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
The larger social media sites now come with comprehensive marketing tools. The Facebook Power Editor presents the marketer with a range of powerful options for demographic sorting and sales management with strong elements of programmatic marketing and remarketing possible.
Twitter, while newer to advertising (having once said they would never offer a commercial platform to third parties) is improving its own sales portal.
Yourmetalife explores the options these powerful platforms offer, giving you the best possibility of leveraging these powerful markets in the best way possible.
When scaling up and really looking to leverage social media across a range of clients or with many different markets, the cost of most social media management tools goes off the scale.
While entry level costs for social media management tools are often very competitive (or, in some cases completely free) the step up to agency or enterprise usage comes with a massive increase in cost – often measured in hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month
Tools such as Buzzbundle offer a superb self hosted alternative. A way to interrogate the internet for conversations and groups, get involved in communities and manage multiple clients of markets at the same time for a fraction of the cost of many well known online services.
PPC and Direct Marketing
Advertising on other websites or for exposure on social media channels or search engines directly is a viable option for many markets.
Yourmetalife understand that the key to success here is to both understand and monitor your return on investment (ROI).
Every direct marketing channel offers different opportunities and every one works in a slightly different way – but the key to success is always the same; establishing and improving a profitable ROI.
We look at the channels themselves from Google Adwords to Facebook Power Editor and Twitter Advertising Portal and examine how to set up effective campaigns, how to create media to support these campaigns and vitally how to measure results and set up continuous improvement methods so that you are always getting the best value for your advertising spend.
Hi, A quick introduction. I’m Paul Rone-Clarke. Some of you may know me as “Scritty”. I’ve been in DM/IM for almost 21 years at the time of writing this. Full time for almost 10. When I started Google did not exist, social media was almost a decade away (even MySpace), email marketing was too expensive for most to contemplate and the internet was quite a jumbled and disorganised place.
The organisation and legislation of the last 20 years has changed the landscape considerably, and these changes are likely to continue for many more years to come.
What this means is that, in practice, the lessons of the past are often not applicable to the present and may well move on again the future. Yourmetalife is an attempt to make sense of these changes and is particularly aimed at creative and web design agencies looking to break into digital marketing via cost effective, efficient, repeatable white label services and automation. And lone internet marketers and affiliates looking for a way to scale their operations effectively.
Please browse the site, comment, criticise and suggest. You are all most welcome.