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Seafoam Media, LLC. |
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August 22, 2016 Issue |
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CEOCFO MAGAZINE |
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Global Digital Marketing System and Consulting for the Manufacturing, Industrial and Engineering Industries providing Web Design, SEO, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Social Media and Email Marketing Campaigns |
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Owner & Founder
Seafoam Media, LLC.
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published - August 22, 2016
CEOCFO: Ms. Bisel, what is the overall philosophy and concept behind Seafoam Media? Ms. Bisel: Our “why” behind what we do is that we are trying to make our clients’ businesses smarter. The way we do that is by targeting their marketing systems. Our goal is to build a smarter marketing system that really works for our clients. The way we do that is through services like SEO, pay-per-click advertising, social media, email marketing, so on and so forth.
CEOCFO: What do you mean by marketing system? Is more technology involved? Ms. Bisel: We do like to use the word system because I think it conveys some of the things we do a little bit differently. We are highly focused on clarity, precision, direction, and measurement. When you typically look at a marketing strategy that most companies have, their strategy actually ends up being pretty diluted and usually really complex. It has no real direction which makes it incredibly difficult to measure or to find any clarity or vision. The reason we use the word system is because what we do we think of it almost more like a blueprint than anything else. Before we are able to execute on anything, before we are able to perform SEO, pay-per-click, all these services we provide, we have to take 10 to 20 steps back and figure out some of the basics, some of the core components of what our clients are seeking to do. We look at it kind of like a pyramid where if SEO, pay-per-click, email marketing, if these services that we provide are the top of the pyramid, the bottom of the pyramid, what supports those services are things like core demographic. Where does that demographic spend their time online. How do we speak to that demographic? What is the persona of an average buyer for our client? Once we can figure out those things, that is what then lets us put together a detailed plan of action for that system. When we have that system in place, it lets us then review our system on a bimonthly, quarterly, or biyearly basis. It lets us review our system, look at the data, figure out what was going on in the past, what can we optimize in the future and what new technologies or new ideas can we implement into that system.
CEOCFO: Are clients turning to you because they understand the difference in your approach? Are they often surprised, hopefully grateful, that you do look at it this way? Ms. Bisel: That is a really good question because many clients who come to us for the top of that pyramid. They come to us for the service level items, the SEO, pay-per-click. When we explain to them our value added approach where our idea is that, instead of 1 + 1 = 2, we are looking to make 1 + 1 = 3 and the best way to do that is to know what drives your core customer so that you can figure out how to get more of those core customers. In traditional marketing or advertising a good way to put it would have been, you can design a beautiful billboard but if you put that billboard up on a highway that nobody drives down, it is not going to do anybody any good. Our goal is to figure out digitally what are the highways that people travel on and how can we put up that beautiful affective billboard where it is going to make our clients the most money.
CEOCFO: Who tends to turn to you for services? Ms. Bisel: We have worked with clients in all different types of industries all over the country. A couple in Mexico, a couple in Canada but one of our most affective relationships that we have had is with companies in the manufacturing and industrial sector. Engineering too. The reason for that I think is because they are coming at their business with a very similar mindset as we do with our marketing system. We are looking at it very analytically. We are trying to create a very organized, methodical approach to what we do. I think that tends to resonate really well with those types of industries.
CEOCFO: What is your geographic range? Ms. Bisel: Geographically we work with companies all over the country, a couple in other countries. About 50% of our clients are here in St. Louis with us and the other 50% are elsewhere.
CEOCFO: How do you reach out? How do people find you if they are looking? How do you jump off the page where there might be so many others as well? Ms. Bisel: The three biggest ways we find new clients are first online. We are a digital marketing company and we would like to think we have done pretty well for ourselves in that space. Many people find us online. The second way people find us is through referrals, which we are always grateful to our current clients for. The third way people find us is we have a list internally of who we love to work for, our core clients. Just like we try to help our clients to find for themselves, we have that internally and we will pick companies and we will purposely go out, do our due diligence, research their company, figure out what we think they should be doing and approach them with that plan and say “listen, you meet our core criteria for clients we have had the most successful relationships with. If you are interested, we would love to present our ideas to you.” That is a great way that we have won business too.
CEOCFO: How are you able to present it so it does not sound like someone else doing cold call marketing? How do you get people to pay attention? Ms. Bisel: It is definitely difficult to get people to pay attention especially in our industry because there is so much cold calling and cold emailing. I think it is always beneficial in our industry to do that with local companies because so frequently the cold calls and cold emails that a company will get are from an SEO company that is thousands of miles away from them. To approach a company who is local, you have a unique perspective. I think that is what has been most important for us to convey when we do that outreach is that we do not just have a unique approach and process, we also have a very unique perspective. So maybe it is an industry that we have done a lot of success work in before that separates us. Maybe it is that the client that we are reaching out to is just down the street from us. Whatever it might be, it is how can we convey our unique perspective and convey that idea that we are doing something that most of our competition is not doing? How do we communicate that unique selling point in a way that does not seem too gimmicky that is very real, honest, and open.
CEOCFO: When you are doing your initial discovery period with a client, what do you look at that perhaps less experienced people do not think belongs in the mix or do not understand needs to be part of the basic understanding? Ms. Bisel: On the front end of any relationship, we are asking a lot of question to try and get a feel for the landscape. So questions like what types of digital marketing have you done in the past? What has been successful what has not been successful? If you were doing marketing in the past, what was wrong with the relationship that you developed with your other marketing agency? Were they not performing to your expectations? What was the reason for that dissolution? All the way to questions that really just try to get to the heart of what that business does. We like to figure out how they started. What is their general sales process? What is their lead-time? What is their current cost per acquisition? How many employees do they have? We like to try to better ourselves as much as possible within the way that that company operates as a whole so that we can mirror and match their branding and culture as much as possible.
CEOCFO: Do you tend to have long-term relationships? Ms. Bisel: Yes, absolutely. The average number of months that a client is with us has been at a minimum of 36 months so we have a very high retention rate. Most of our services are performed on a recurring monthly basis. At a minimum we are keeping clients for usually about three years or so which is hugely beneficial because we are able to truly see that transition from point A to point B and kind of get that before and after shot.
CEOCFO: What is next for Seafoam? Ms. Bisel: We are always working. I think what is next for us is drilling down a little bit. One of the things for example that we are working on right now is communicating some of the strategic work that we do that underlies some of the services we provide. Let’s say we are running a social media contest for our clients, the work that is involved in that is not just top level. It is not just writing the content for the social media campaign, publishing it, scheduling it. It is not just that that type of stuff. All of the work that goes in ahead of time is extremely strategic. It is looking at which social media sites are we going to use and why? So which aspects, which pieces of our core demographic are using those sites? What time of day are they on there? Is our goal to get these people to share a contest or to just participate in the contest and then forget about it? Do we want people to go to the website and fill out a form? Do we want people to post on the Facebook page? There is so much detail and effort that goes into something like a social media contest or anything we do. Part of what we are focusing on currently is how do we convey that value to the client and how do we help them leverage that into other components of their business? In other words, how do we take some of the data that we find from that contest in this example, provide it to the client, tell them how and why it is important, teach them about that data, but also teach them how to use that data in other things that they are doing so that they can create a 1+1 = 3 type of situation?
CEOCFO: Do you see some point where you might make that data available to others by licensing? Ms. Bisel: Probably not, only because it is specific client data and the contracts that we usually have with clients would prevent us from sharing that data. We do have a pretty good process that we have developed internally for how we gather that data. We would not be able to share the data itself or license the data itself but in terms of how we garner that data and then utilize it we have a pretty good process. That may be a little too far down the line for us. It is just something that I have not put too much thought into.
CEOCFO: What has surprised you as the company has grown and evolved? Ms. Bisel: That creativity and humanity are still the most important thing in marketing even if it is digital marketing. I think it is easy to assume that in digital marketing when we talk about SEO, pay-per-click, and all this data that it is all numbers, algorithms, and math but it is not. We accomplish things by those means. What has surprised me the most and what I have learned the most through my team members and through working with our clients is that none of that does any good if you do not think in a creative sense and if you are not thinking about the human element of marketing. The best example of that is with SEO where it is really easy to fall into the trap of just playing to the search engines, using certain keywords, targeting certain things and certain places based off of the data and based off of terms and algorithms. That is all fine and good but when it comes to then converting someone who clicks on a website link on a search engine when it comes to converting them into an actual paying customer that is when it is time to speak to a human versus a robot or a search engine. That is when you have to truly speak to someone’s problems or needs on behalf of your client and help that prospect reach your client to hopefully become a paying customer of theirs. |
“We do like to use the word system because I think it conveys some of the things we do a little bit differently. We are highly focused on clarity, precision, direction, and measurement.”- Nikki Bisel
Seafoam Media, LLC.
Contact: Nikki Bisel (314) 200-5515
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Nikki
Bisel