In episode 106, host Eric Dickmann interviews Steve Wiideman. Steve is an SEM & SEO expert, writer, educator, and business consultant. For over 22 years, he has been helping startups, SMBs, and Fortune 5000 companies develop creative growth strategies to ensure sustainable growth.
With his passion for SEO and growing businesses, Steve started Wiideman Consulting Group where he advises clients on SEO, link-earning, multi-location ranking factors, and PPC advertising.
His current projects include experiments to better understand the impacts of voice search, featured snippets, and structured data have on search results. Steve also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of California San Diego and California State University Fullerton.
For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/measuring-inbound-marketing-success-s7ep6/
A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.
The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at:
In episode 106, host Eric Dickmann interviews Steve Wiideman. Steve is an SEM & SEO expert, writer, educator, and business consultant. For over 22 years, he has been helping startups, SMBs, and Fortune 5000 companies develop creative growth strategies to ensure sustainable growth.
With his passion for SEO and growing businesses, Steve started Wiideman Consulting Group where he advises clients on SEO, link-earning, multi-location ranking factors, and PPC advertising.
His current projects include experiments to better understand the impacts of voice search, featured snippets, and structured data have on search results. Steve also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of California San Diego and California State University Fullerton.
For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/measuring-inbound-marketing-success-s7ep6/
A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.
The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at:
Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. Hey, Steve. Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today.
Steve Wiideman:Thanks, Eric. Glad to be here.
Eric Dickmann:I'm glad to have you on the show because you know one of the topics that we cover here, an awful lot is talking about things like inbound marketing, organic search, and the kinds of things that you can really do to drive people to your website without necessarily having to spend a ton of money. But really creating that great content that's going to drive people in. But one of the things that we don't get as much opportunity to talk about is really how you measure the success of those efforts. And so I know we're going to get into that a little bit today, but to kind of kick things off, I would love it. If you could just share with the little, with the audience a little bit about your background.
Steve Wiideman:Sure. I'm kind of a serial entrepreneur, I suppose. I've been in the digital marketing industry now for about 22 years. I spent my corporate days working for IBM global services, Disney parks and resorts where I manage Disneyland and Adventurous by Disney paid and organic search. Jumped into the small business world as as a sole proprietor in around 2010. Hence, we incorporated as Wiideman Consulting group in 2013. My goal 10 years ago was to sort of pivot from being a practitioner of digital marketing to teaching and doing other things that I've really wanted to do in my career. So a couple of years ago I started teaching as an adjunct professor at a few colleges. Now I'm teaching nine classes between UC San Diego, where I'm teaching SEO tools and analytics, at Cal State Fullerton. You know where as you mentioned, there's so many different ways to do marketing. One of my classes is Digital Marketing Landscape, so we go through everything from inbound marketing and media buying and, you know, display, and we get into affiliate marketing and so forth. And then I also teach a strategic SEO course. All that teaching culminated into the opportunity to write a textbook. So recently I published a textbook which includes courseware and lecture slides, and everything for those teachers who teach or want to teach digital marketing. Um, it was about a year in the, uh, in the making and my coauthor Scott Kelly was absolutely incredible at really helping keep the scholarly part of my writing. Cause sometimes it's so hard to go off on a tangent and say, oh, all these things and case studies and lessons. And so he really helped kind of structure it down. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. I'm teaching. As I mentioned, I'm working on this courseware that we have to update every year. And I have 19 members here that are supporting a few restaurant chains and other smaller businesses around search engine marketing. So they'll come to us and they're like, Hey, I've got some people doing some things, but I don't feel like we really have a strategy. You know, what should we be doing? How should we be measuring it? Where are we right now compared to our competition? What's the full ray of what we could be doing to maximize everything around search and display, and email. And so we help connect the dots for them so they know at least what their roadmap should look like, whether they have the resources at the time to work on it or not yet.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, I'm such a big believer in creating that marketing strategy so that you really know what your objectives are. What are you trying to accomplish? And then what are the tactics that you need to employ to make that happen? And I think it would be helpful. You know this podcast is really geared toward small and mid-sized businesses, but maybe let's just start with some definitions just to make sure everybody's on the same page. So you know, when we talk about things like inbound marketing, when we talk about SEO and SEM and SMM, Just give us your sort of a base level definitions of what these terms mean. Just so we've got that as we go forward.
Steve Wiideman:Yeah, absolutely. So obviously the one everyone hears about every day is SEO, search engine optimization. The goal there is just to appear as high and as often as possible for keywords that, that are specific to what we do. Not broad definition terms, right? Leave those to Wikipedia and Merriam dictionary. But those that describe our service, our product, and our service and product details. The SEM side, everyone's kind of got their own definition in our industry. SEM used to be search engine marketing, which encompassed everything, organic search, paid search ads. You know in other ways that we utilize search in different networks. But over time, it's somehow became known as the paid search side, SEO and SEM. SEO was organic as SEM is paid. I don't know why it happened, but it happened. And what we're talking about there is when you perform a search and you see those first three ads at the top, that's paid search. You pay per click.Then there's you mentioned, SMM social media marketing. So that's us creating a strategy around what are our recurring themes are going to be that our customers and potential customers would subscribe to that they find interesting or engaging, what are the different vehicles we can use to do that from quizzes, polls. You know, features, research. You know we come up with what those things are, we build some campaigns and objectives, and we've got ourselves a social media strategy. Mentioned something if I heard it right, but I thought I might've heard something like CRO conversion rate optimization. This is you know, if you're getting a thousand visits to your website, and you're getting 5% of them to become customers, our goal is to try to get that to 10% or 15%. So conversion rate optimization is the activity of trying to get your page to convert more of your visitors into customers. Then there is email marketing, right? That's where you're collecting emails of your customers may be potential customers. And then you know, building a strategy to retain those folks as subscribers and to encourage them to get other people to subscribe as well.
Eric Dickmann:And this is where it gets confusing for a lot of businesses, right? Because we're talking about a number of different things each which has a very specific work effort associated with it. Some of them have bigger budgets than others because you know on the paid side, obviously you set a budget. That budget gets spent as those ads run. On the organic side, you're really creating content that could have a pretty long shelf life, but it also takes some time to be found and discovered. So I know one of the things you know, we're huge believers here on this podcast about inbound marketing, about creating great content, content of value that people can find. And that you know does have this long shelf life. When you think about inbound marketing, One of the challenges is of course measuring the success of that, right? Because it does take time. So when you work with clients and you set up sort of an inbound strategy to create sort of organic search results, what do you tell them? Like in terms of what their expectations should be? You create a great piece of content, very keyword focused you've got it out there. You've got a nice landing page where people can find it. What do you tell people in terms of how long they should expect to wait before some of those results get noted?
Steve Wiideman:Right. Well, I think it varies based on the brand. But I think I always start with you know, buckle your seatbelt because it's going to be a wild ride. The way that I'm explaining it to some of the students in my classes, because they get asked this all the time, how long is it going to take me to rank? And if you're dealing with an existing brand that's been around for a while that's doing other types of marketing, people search for them by name, they're known, people might recognize them in the search results. And your goal is say, I want to rank for this new keyword. So you've got this page that you have to create to address that search term and it's derivatives. So the goal is you know, scrape this page first, let's look at the keywords. We want to tie in for Google to do that initial crawl of our sites, that page and sort of index those words and say, Hey, I'm going to try this page for these words and see how it performs. That content task is something that usually takes, I would say, three to four months before you really start to see it show up somewhere on the second page of the search results. And then as, as other websites are mentioning your name and those keywords on their websites, maybe even linking back to your page or to at least to your homepage so they can crawl to that page, then you've satisfied sort of that off page SEO signal. I mean PageRank is something Larry Page at Google came up with in what, 1997, before the Google search engine even was created. And the goal was to use links and external signals to rank webpages instead of just trusting that the webmaster knew what they were doing. So those off page signals again, another three to six months. So we're, we're already using. You know, six to nine months now between our content and our off page SEO to get right on the first page of the search results. And you'll see yourself there at number nine. Going, God, I got to get that number one spot and I'm stuck there at the number nine position. My content's great, my links and off page visibility is consistent. What do I have to do? That's where the user behavior signals come in and that's where you could almost remove all the content and just put a big image if you want it to. Just to test to see how irrelevant keywords really are at that point, and how links hit this sort of what's the law of diminishing return, right? It really comes to that place. So you've got more links and better links in your competition. You've got better content you're like, but I'm stuck there at number nine. It's normally because users have 10 choices and they're not choosing you, right? Our goal is to make sure that when Google does display our results, when we are a number nine, maybe you were even number five, you know one out of a thousand times that were displayed, they want to see that people are choosing us more often. So that's going to be really testing. better and improving better titles, descriptions, maybe doing some work with our web developer to provide more rich results, maybe star ratings, maybe a few questions and answers, maybe a video or an image thumbnail next to our results, some sort of a call to action or value proposition along with that keyword that we want to appear for. Maybe looking at the results that are at the top or in the first page to see what types of rich results Google's already displaying and then go to the developer, I want this. Right? And then they'll go to a site called schema.org, and they'll find that markup, they'll add that code to your page. And now you'll stand out in the search results more. And as long as we're we're providing, like you said, the best content possible, right around that year point, again somewhere in that middle range you know well enough, but you know, not a brand new website. You should see yourself in the top few positions. You know again, there's, there's special circumstances, such as words like credit card or mortgage, you know, we've got these companies that have been really building a brick house for the last two decades, you know, to own those positions. They're not going to go away quickly. So if you want to beat them, if you want it to be better than with them, it's probably going to take a few years, you know, to rank for those really competitive keywords. So we encourage our clients to start with some of those upper funnel questions that people ask. Go to a site, like, um, answer the public and come up with that answer. So, so anyway, when we get with our clients, that's how we answer the question. How long does it take to rank? Um, You know, basically three or so or so months until we're on the second page, it's going to be about six to nine months until we're on the first page and a year or more until we see ourselves in the top position. I think that's setting a good expectation. But in terms of how do you measure? I think the first question to ask is you know, do you already have an existing SEO suite where you're tracking all your rankings andand your traffic. If you're an enterprise brand, you might be using Conductor Searchlight, you might lose use Search Metrics, you might use BrightEdge. If you're a small business, you probably do just fine with a tool like SEMrush or AHRefs, ahrefs.com. You could probably use Moz, MOZ. There's a lot of those tools that are available, for the most part, about a 100, 150 bucks a month. And they really help give you a way to measure everything in one place from your keyword rankings you want to track to your web traffic statistics. I like to use this new tool as well called What a Graph,
Eric Dickmann:Oh, I haven't heard of that one before. Yeah.
Steve Wiideman:It's as if you're from you know, somewhere in Texas or in the East Coast, you might heard of What a Burger, It always reminds of that. And just because of the name. So if that helps you remember it's called What a Graph. And what it allows you to do beyond just having better data to look at from Google Analytics, from SEMRush from Google Search Console, it puts all that into one place for you, but has a much prettier interface, but it also allows you to create KPIs and no other tool that I know of allows you to do that. There's no you know, what's your goal and here's how close you are to hitting that goal. Nothing exists that can get you there. So What a Graph does have that functionality. So when we're on a call with whether it's Applebee's or IHop or whoever, we can say, Hey, our goal for the year, you know, was to increase search revenue from search by 10%. And based on that KPI goal and where we are right now, you know, we're going to hit or we're not going to hit that goal. And it's just great to be able to see that in one place, but then we can hold all the stakeholders accountable and say, guys we as a team agree that we're going to do these things, and we've hit some roadblocks. There's three months left in the year, let's see what we can do to knock those out so we can hit that 10% KPI goal. And your goals are going to be different based on your business model. For e-commerce websites, if you sell products online, your KPIs are going to be revenue, Transactions, average, ordinary value, you know, and the growth of those attributes. If you're a local business, you're going to be paying attention to you know, your average position in Google Maps, you're going to pay attention to how much traffic you're driving from the website and appointment links within your Google maps profile, or your Google My Business account. If you are sort of a lead generation company and you're bringing in leads and you don't have a brick and mortar location, and you're not doing e-commerce then your goal is going to be probably how many leads was I able to drive from organic? Is that a primary KPI? And if you want to get a little bit more granular, you could break it into a couple different groups. The first group might be technical, looking at things like accessibility, security, privacy, core web vitals, right? All of those things can be measured and improved and use these KPIs for the internal teams. I don't know if I would talk about those with the key stakeholders of the business for say, if you're a small business, maybe. But a lot of times it feels overwhelming and technical. So I would just say, Hey, webmaster, fix these things over the next 12 months, you know, and, and you'll have a job.
Eric Dickmann:Well I do think it's interesting because what you're saying, there is a lot of complexity to this and you know, we talk about SEO all the time on here, and there's a reason there are so many companies out there offering SEO services. Not that they're all great, but it is a complex thing to implement correctly and I think for many smaller businesses that don't have large marketing teams, there are really lots of factors that you can consider. You rattled off a number of tools, which many small businesses might not even have access to. So there is real value in bringing in experts who understand how all this stuff works and what you need to do to really get the best rankings out of your content.
Steve Wiideman:At least to create the roadmap for you. I'm going to get a lot of like a lot of hate emails from saying this, but for small businesses, you really can. In-house SEO yourself. You can absolutely do it yourself. You can bring in a college intern, college marketing students, for a reasonable part-time salary and that person can be responsible for making sure that those different SEO focal points are paid attention to the technical, the content, and the off page. They don't have to do the work, but they can be the person responsible for it. And then what you could do with that person is you can use tools like, Writer access, you know to provision new content for the website. You could use freelance sites such as guru.com and Freelancer, or codeable.io as a resource to get periodic coding needs that you need. You can, you can use some folks that are really good at digital PR, we like to use Otter PR, they're fantastic. And they'll do some outreach to get us, to be able to contribute to articles and features, and things that really help us to build links organically. So that being said, I don't think you need to spend 200 to a thousand dollars a month with some tool, some company that's going to basically take over your digital marketing and maybe threaten you to not give it back when you try to leave with them and instead bring it in house, spring that part turn prime person in, maybe your front desk person has an hour, a day free, and you can parse out an hour a day for them to do some of that work to help you with some of your local SEO, to make sure that you're appearing locally. And you know, we can talk through what some of those strategies look like. But honestly, the big picture is if you're a small business, I would stay away from using a lot of agencies and third parties, I haven't seen the longevity or sustainability with it. And we have to remember a lot of them are also doing the same work for your competitor. So
Eric Dickmann:Well, true.
Steve Wiideman:You can bring it in house, give somebody some training, because it's not rocket science.
Eric Dickmann:Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting too, because there are real pros and cons, right? I think that sometimes when you bring something in-house, you've got to sort of give people the runway to start to see the success of their efforts there. And if you're bringing a junior level person in, there's obviously some education that needs to happen, there are obviously some tools that you need to bring in order to do that, so you've got to be willing to make the commitment to do it. But you're right, once especially for some businesses, this doesn't have to be a huge effort. It can just be a part-time effort for somebody that's on the team. I'd like to switch gears a little bit and start to talk about the paid side of things a little bit. So let's talk about going out and purchasing keywords. I mean that's so important for many businesses to drive that traffic to be up in those top rankings on Google, but don't want to wait a year to start measuring that, right? Like you would maybe with some organic results. How do you advise people to sort of engage in a paid strategy and then measure and monitor that to see if it's being effective?
Steve Wiideman:And a lot of small businesses are jaded because they'd spent money on ads without having the right education to be able to do it themselves. They didn't go through the Google ads training program, they just jumped in, create a new account, try to follow the wizard, right? And the wizard says, you use these broad search terms. And then they see, Hey, wow, I spent a thousand dollars this week.And if they figured out how to go into the search term report to see what actual search terms triggered their ads when they're bidding on these broad keywords, they go, oh my God, these search terms have nothing to do with me. And they feel like they just wasted a thousand dollars, and they're jaded, or more. I've seen businesses waste a lot more. So you're right.. The best place to start with a paid ad strategy is to get with someone with some experience and have them put together a plan for you. Put it into a Word doc or a Google sheet, Google doc. Here's the campaign, here are the ad groups. Here are the keywords. Here are the extensions. Here's everything that we want to recommend that you create. That way you've got a roadmap and if you want to do it yourself still using that roadmap, great. If you want them to deploy it for you and then show you how to manage it, because of all the way that you can automate bid management and bid strategy now. You've really, I hate to say it, but a lot of the paid search vendors that you're going to use aren't doing a lot of monthly work, because Google's AI does all that stuff for you. The bid automation is automatically bidding up or down based on what you're willing to spend per sale, per lead, per action, or even ROI. If you get down into some of the e-commerce things that you could do, it's doing it automatically for you. Yeah, there's some nurturing that they could be doing to test new ads, test new campaigns, test new audiences. But unfortunately, when you're, when you're outsourcing, you really don't get much of that team's time and energy. So I would say to start, if you're a small business, get somebody to help you set it up, teach you how to monitor and manage it and show you some things you could do. And then if you've got the budget for it and it's working, there's some of the revenue that you gained from search back into those resources to continue chipping away. But make sure that they tell you before the month, what their plan is to optimize. Otherwise, if you put them on autopilot, they might go a few months without doing any work. And you won't even know unless you go into Google ads and go to the specific log files. So if you are an e-commerce website, you might set up campaigns based on your product categories and the product detail pages might be where you put your ad groups. If you have lead generation, you may base your campaigns off the navigation. You know, one of the things I remember doing with some of the e-commerce brands we'd worked with was looking at our budget allocation and saying, Hey, we've only got$10,000 a month and we've got you know, 20 campaigns. How should we do our budget allocation? What I've seen be the most effective is starting with the business name and campaign first, because it helps your account score, your super relevant, your cost per clicks, really low, and you're protecting your name. The next would be the product name. So let's just say you're, I don't know you're selling Sketchers, and one of your products is Shape-ups, so Sketchers is the company name campaign, and the product name campaign is Shape-ups. Those also convert really well, they're your names, you own them. You're not going to pay very much per click and your ad score is going to be really high. The next campaign I would create would be product type running shoes, walking shoes, casual shoes, work shoes, right? So I create a campaign for each product type. And then this is by budget allocation, right? First company name, then product name, then product type, then product benefits. So maybe you're going after something like exercise clothes, fitness clothes, fitness, apparel, and shoes are part of that, even though it's not necessarily you know somebody looking for socks or for running shoes. And the last campaign that I would do, if I'm doing well across all of those, and then my quality scores are great, they're performing amazing, you might test during some competitor conquesting where you bid on some of your competitor names. Just keep in mind that your cost per click is going to be higher, your score is going to be lower because you're not as relevant as they are to those search terms, but in some industries, competitor keywords tend to work really well, especially if you don't have a lot of brand recognition already. So that's how I would organize an ad campaign for search. Then you can get into display, you can get into remarketing, and bring them back into a sequence of seeing different ads until they convert. You can import data from your customer database and target people who've already purchased from you in the past. You can use affinity audiences or people who Google themes is having an interest in that particular product or category. Or you could even do in-market where they've already looked at competitors and they've done searches and gone to competitors, but they haven't gone to you yet. So it's almost like doing remarketing, but instead of them visiting your website first, they're visiting your competitor first, and that can be really fun. So one trick is you are setting these things is create separate campaigns for each of them when you start testing. That way, they don't cannibalize each other in terms of budget. So if you're testing in market and affinity in the same campaign, and you've got a$10 a day budget, you know, you're, you're not really giving the system enough, um, enough resources to work with. So again, I would break each campaign down and into a really small target, um, or one audience. You see what works and what's once you've got a few months, maybe even a year or two, depending on your budget of data, then you can take the top performing keywords, the top performing ads, the top performing placements and audiences, and move them into their own campaigns called top performing, reduce the budget on all the old ones. So they keep going, just at a slower speed so new opportunities can come in and keep getting moved over. When you do that, now you're building an account architecture that's inclusive of only ads, keywords, and placements that have evidence of performing well for you in terms of conversion. So that's how I would approach a paid search strategy if were doing that.
Eric Dickmann:No, I think that's great advice,. I like the way you laid that out. I think that's very actionable. And you know, sort of when you're talking about a keyword program, right? You're talking about these words that you go after, where you think that people are going to be searching for your products or services, and then you move over to the social media side and there it's much more about audiences and interests,
Steve Wiideman:All audiences, Eric.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah, it's a very sort of different way of approaching it, but it's alsp hugely popular and successful because these social media platforms are collecting so much information about the clients who are using them. So as you sort of look at that side, the social side, you have to wear a little bit of a different hat, right? And one of the problems that I see oftentimes with smaller businesses is that we all use social media, we're all on these platforms, but being a user of the platform doesn't necessarily make you an expert for marketing on the platform. So talk to me a little bit about how you talk to clients about how they can use social media, both kind of from an organic, just posting things for free as well as for paid ads.
Steve Wiideman:Sure. And you know what Eric, I'm going to give you some links after the can share with the audience. The first will be that KPI template. It's the same one I share with my students who, you know, are going to go off into the job world and they're going to be asked, how are you going to track KPIs? So I'll give you that so that everybody can see that framework of what you could track and the measurements, ability for you to be able to do that and delegate it. Social media, I have something on Bitly. I think it's bitly/contentmarketingtemplates, content-marketing-template. And I'll send it to you again after the meeting. But it really breaks down what we talked about earlier in regards to creating specific themes, right? And I think the example in that sheet is like underwater basket weaving or something, right?
Eric Dickmann:Right. The old classic underwater basket weaving.
Steve Wiideman:Why not? So you look at different things that you can do to see how users respond in different industries and different businesses are going to do, or have different results. So ideas include doing like research and study. If Apple put up a page up that said, Hey, do you know what app that 95% of all iPhone users like to use? Would you be interested in finding that out? So doing research and coming up with proprietary data that only you know about from your studies, from research, from focus groups, from your own database of what you know about your customers is a huge click for you, in terms of content for social media, other other things could include you know, doing things like a comedy thing, right? Where you're doing something funny or engaging, or you're creating sort of a voice or a personality for the people who work at the company. Another one could be conference highlights, right? So there's a lot of different ideas in there that you can kind of pick and choose from that allows you to create campaigns. It also has columns for what you do once you've actually got those campaigns queued up, right? And then you're going to you know either set a cadence of Hey, every Tuesday I'm going to do this theme, every Wednesday, this theme, every Thursday, this theme. We'll take Friday off and you'll find what and when is the best time to post. then once you've got that calendar going and you know what those themes are, then it's just sort of building out the next few months of content, having it ready to go, getting other influencers and names involved in some way or another so that they can help share it. So it's not just throwing stuff out there and hearing crickets, but instead throwing shots up out there and then following up with people who would be engaged in that content to help you to share it and to promote it. So there's that part of it. Hey phase one, we did the research, we know what we're going to do. Phase two. We wrote up some really cool stuff and got some really great graphics and video. Phase three, we got other people involved who we hope will share it, experts, industry, authorities, whatever, book authors, it's a good one. And now we know after we've launched, so we've launched now. We're going to do the fast follow to get those people to help engage with it. And then you just rinse and repeat. Week after week after week. That's an organic strategy. And I would remember that social media isn't a place for you to reach out and say, me, me, me, us, us, us, right? It's the place to say you, you, you, and what do you like? And here's something you know, that you might enjoy that's helpful, here's questions that people ask about this product, or here's a funny meme that we created that you might relate to because we know that you're into this type of thing. You know it's really creating content that is fun, engaging, humorous, maybe borderline controversial, you know, or teaser controversial when you actually read it, you're like- Oh, this isn't controversial, but it got my attention. I think that's a good organic approach. And then you augment that with the paid side, right? You build your audience with the focus of trying to get them to subscribe. So you take all that great content and where you see your engagement's really high, and people really interacting with that content, boost those, promote those. Don't put too much money into it until you've really learned what works and what doesn't, but boost those posts because you know people already engaged with them well, and the audience you'll be targeting are those of your competitors, which is easy to do. You know, the demographics and interests that you think your audience have, and then it feels a little wasteful, but for the first, I don't know, three to six months and paid search and paid social, it's a little bit of an investment with very little return. The advantage of doing it is now you've got six months of data, you can take what works, the demographics that worked, the ads that worked, you know, and then you can start to mold a campaign that, you know, will be effective and use your budget a little bit more efficiently. So it is an investment in the beginning because you're learning, you're letting the system learn, and the people interact. And then you know, you take all the data from what worked and then you create a brand new campaign based on what you know already works. And then you just keep rinsing and repeating. But the great thing about doing paid and social is that like you said, there's so much audience demographic data. And remember these search engines and social sites have algorithms. So once you do finally start to get it dialed in, it's going to work on its own. It's just automatic money all day long. If you have the patience to invest, to collect the data, to create campaigns that are going to be effective, then you set your cost per acquisition, your cost per sale, and then you just let it run.
Eric Dickmann:Yeah. Well what I love about that too, is if you've done a good job with your marketing strategy, you've built out your buyer persona. You really understand who that target customer is, that ideal customer is. It's a little bit easier to create an audience around that. Then it might be to figure out, well, what are they searching for? Because sometimes your business or product, like you said, you could be going after something in the banking world where there's so many people going after banking terms and whatnot. It can be very hard to say, what are they specifically searching for that would lead them to my website? But if you understand who they are, what their interests might be, you can understand that audience and you can put some ads up that are likely to hit the mark.
Steve Wiideman:Absolutely.
Eric Dickmann:I love the way you lay this, some of this out. I can tell you're an author and a professor because you lay things out very systematically that people can follow.
Steve Wiideman:I have my moments. But still, I'm learning every day, we all are. Digital Marketing is not plumbing and electricity. It is this dynamic world that requires a lot of patience. You know, it requires a lot of being open-minded to change. It's math, art, science, creativity, it's all those things. And for small businesses, sometimes all those character traits have to be held by one person who has to be analytical and be able to do research and look at spreadsheets and numbers, while at the same time, write really compelling, persuasive content for that lower funnel or write really casual, helpful, engaging content for that upper funnel to build your brand or be charismatic enough to pick up the phone and say, Hey, I'm working on this cool thing, I'd love to work together because I want to earn a link, you know? And it takes the introverted extrovert and sometimes the extroverted introvert, you know to carry the role of SEO specialist. So I can see why it feels so overwhelming for a lot of small businesses. But I'm telling you, I've met these marketing students, and in every class there's at least three that are really passionate, that want to learn, that want to try. And a lot of them will work for you for free to get the experience. So reach out to the colleges and say, do you have any digital marketing students that want to volunteer and do some free work to help me get going? And by the way, this Wiidemann character, right has this free course that you could take that they could reference to have their templates and to build their roadmap and you know, and then they reach out to us or to any other industry expert for advice. We help students as you know, as an industry, more than anyone, because trying to build the next generation of ethical SEOs.
Eric Dickmann:Well, that's actually a great segue as we reach the end of our show here today. Where can people find out more information about the free course, about you, about your company? I'd just love it if you could do that and we'll make sure to have all this linked up in the show notes as well. Yeah, absolutely. So right now we're building out academyofsearch.com. It's a brand new kind of program we've created to try to help share a lot of knowledge of what we learned in 22 years of doing this stuff. Your listeners can get free access by using code- SEO Steve. So feel free to go to Academy of Search, choose that SEO program. It's like 600 bucks or something, but use SEO steve, you'll get it for free. I'm everywhere online. I use SEO Steve as a handle. But if you want to hit up anyone on the team here, there's nine of us, look for Wiideman, W I I D E M A N, across every social channel. We love to help small businesses, we're not in a place where we're looking to grow our agency again. We're moving over to more of the education side. So any help we provide will be at no cost. So we're happy to help them see what we can do to move along your digital marketing. You know, for a guy who has two ends at the last name, part of his last name. You've got 2 I's in there, spellcheckers most love you too.
Steve Wiideman:You know it's actually funny as a few times that I've been declined things like getting pictures developed because it has two eyes and the name of the photographer, but two I's on it. And it's like, well that's, We, that's you know, in the NES game system and its trademarks, you can't use it. I couldn't get my license plate to say Wiideman, because it looks like I'm trying to sell drugs or something. So in my last name, it's interesting, but it's definitely had its downfalls.
Eric Dickmann:I I can sympathize with you on that. I really can.. Steve, this has been great. I've really enjoyed having you on the show today. Thanks so much for sharing all of this. I'll make sure to put all of the things that you've mentioned today in the show notes, so that people can find you. But I've really enjoyed our conversation.
Steve Wiideman:Likewise, thanks again for the opportunity.
Eric Dickmann:Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.