Mediaboss Marketing

Quba's Owner and MD, Matthew Williams, is optimistic about this coming year. Reflecting on what went well in 2019, he explains that collaboration between specialists is much more important than being a Jack-of-all-trades.

2019 was an interesting and turbulent year - to say the least - but we all got through it and Id like to think theres an air of optimism as we have the whole of 2020 laid out in front of us.

Much of our success in 2019has been down to an outward-looking and collaborative approach to how we do business; and I believe that way of working will be one of the biggest trends and growth areas for the entire marketing and digital sectors.

The term collaboration does tend to throw up some rather dodgy marketing speak connotations, butits all about adding value to our clients. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do; fromhow we work with our clients and suppliers, to how we communicate internally.

But more and more, its been focussed on working more closely with other agencies who can deliver first-class and complementary services that we dont offer for the ultimate benefit of our clients.

Let me wind back a bit... In my view, full service agency is a bit of a misnomer for most of the companies that claim to be one. You need tobe specialists in what you do.

For example, a PR or ad agency that brings in a junior developer to work on small scale projects and then claims to be a digital or full service agency isnt being honest.Theyre simply not one.

You can count the number of truly full-service agencies - andmoreimportantly, first-class ones -in the UK on a couple of hands. I dont want to knock anyone as were all trying to do the best we can, but it takes courage to focus on one thing, ignore the noise and do what you do well.

We should all be proud of what we can deliver, but when the need arises the most switched on and commercial firms look outside for the extra skills that are going to add the most value.

Take our own sector, for example. The scope and breadth of software used within the marketing and digital industries has expanded exponentially over the last 10 years.For example,software like CMS platforms have become far more complex to build in and they have to do a lot more than just manage page content; the growth of CRMs and marketing automation software has been unprecedented; whilst cloud software such as Azure has taken off in a huge way.

This means that from a technical perspective, all but the very largest of agency networks are able to fully deliver all the potential requirements a client may have via their internal resources. So my question is this: why do companies still feel the need to be seen as full service when theyre not?

The answer is simple - agencies dont want to turn work away and they dont want to risk their client looking to others to deliver their projects, so they claim to be all things to all men. However, it doesnt have to be this way - if onlywe all started to work together more strategically and openly, by building stronger relationships with other agency partners. We shouldnt view each other as threats, but as opportunities to grow and develop together.

During 2019 we took the decision to take specialising to the next level at Quba. We decided to pull out of providing SEO and PPC services. We felt the market had become too diverse and that we would actually provide a better service to our clients by using a select number of specialist SEO and PPC partners.

Over the past 12 months, this approach has benefited Qubas bottom line. By building a trusted network weve been able to be 100% transparent with our clients and they really appreciate that honesty. They know who is delivering what and they can see the benefits that collaborative working brings.

This has particularly been the case with our larger and more complex clients as they just want the best tools for the job rather than a one-stop shop. They appreciate quality, insight, strategic knowledge and technical expertise over and above anything else. In the most simplest of terms, they now know that with great agency integration comes great work and first-class results. Thats all they care about.

On a far more practical level, collaboration also makes agencies far more competitive and nimble as it mitigates the need to take on the extra overheads and the expenditure of additional staff, training or technologies in order to service what may only be a short- to medium-term client or requirement. Partnering with another agency removes all of this, as you can spin up the resource quickly and with minimal financial outlay.

My prediction is that collaboration will become much more the norm and the growth in networks likePimento, Agency Hackers and The Network One clearly backs this up. Agencies just need to become far more open to partnering and realise that its the best way to retain clients and provide the highest levels of service.

My advice? Choose your partners carefully to ensure they fit the blend of clients you have, and ensure your clients know you've spent time ensuring you use the best possible partners, and havent just pulled them out of a hat. Finally, be loyal to each other, be transparent and work together when things dont quite go to plan.

Read the original:
2020: The year of greater agency collaboration - Prolific North

SEO can sometimes make you draw back in horror. It's a process that can often be confusing, it ends up changing often, and if you want to stand a chance of staying relevant, it's important to improve it. Whether it's a website you're running as a side hustle or as a main business, here are some tips to better your skills when it comes to SEO.

Keep Up With The Basics

The basics of SEO are pretty easy to manage and something you can likely do yourself without too much hassle. These can be adjusting images so that they are compressed and at size that allows your webpages to run a lot quicker. Fixing broken links is something your website's host site will often remind you so that you can go in and fix them. There's nothing worse than a first-time visitor to your site, clicking on a link that doesn't work. Changing your alt texts to match the keywords used for the article are also useful. These are the basic SEO tips that you can do on a daily or weekly basis to just keep on top of, particularly if you're in a position where you can't hire the professional support yet. Always check up on your site to make sure that it's loading quickly and that everything is easily navigable. There are plenty of SEO training videos out there for you to utilize.

Analyze What Needs Work

There are going to be areas of your website that need work so it's always good to check in on your site to make sure it's performing as it should be. You may want to think about making adjustments to your website design or layout in order to keep it updated and looking fresh. As a regular visitor, it can be nice to see a change or update in the way a website looks every so often. Try to elevate areas of it where you can and always have that attitude of constantly being able to improve it and make it better. Be sure to look at your analytics to when it comes to where your visitors are going on the site and where there might be issues that are causing users to move off from the site. It could be due to a broken link or simply being a page that is boring to look at or read.

Ask For Professional Help

Professional help is useful to use when you've exhausted all your own personal skills and knowledge when it comes to SEO. As a process, it's something that is constantly changing, and so it's necessary to get additional assistance in order to grow the influence of your website on the internet. You can also learn and grow your own skills in SEO by seeing what changes the company you use are doing. When it comes to search engine optimization, it's something that will often need constant work, but it's worth the investment when it comes to the overall success of your site.

Use Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is a wonderful thing to have and to take advantage of because they know you best. Ask them for regular feedback on aspects of the website from the layout to how much they might love certain articles. You can either do that or get some unbiased strangers to test out your website and to make comments on how effective your site is. Both work extremely well, and both are worth doing to help improve the look of your website.

Always Aim To Learn Something New

With SEO, every day is a new change to something within this process. Whether it's something the search engines change or an addition to your site that's worth making. Learning something new every day is certainly a mantra that's worth using. So look at what you've learned so far when it comes to this process and what you're still struggling to understand. Make it your goal to learn a new element to this process and hopefully you'll find that you've got a more professional grasp on how it all works.

Bettering your skills when it comes to SEO is useful, so don't let yourself fall behind and become irrelevant.

2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

More here:
How To Better Your Skills When It Comes To SEO - Tech Times

The start of a new year always feels optimistic and full of promise and you might as well take advantage of that momentum and learn a new skill in 2020. The best way to show employers that youre worthy of a raise or even a promotion is to prove that youre constantly investing in your own growth. These eight trainings are focused around some of the most desired, marketable skills this upcoming year. And you can learn (and relearn) these lessons on your own time, if necessary.

The Premium 2020 Project & Quality Management Certification Bundle

Develop your project management chops with this highly comprehensive project management training. It includes 11 different courses that will help you complete business projects on time and on budget all while minimizing waste and increasing quality. It even includes courses covering the highly coveted Scrum and Agile methodologies.

Find it here for $45.99.

The Complete 2020 IT Certification Exam Prep Mega Bundle

When it comes to technology, developing your acumen can be a vast and tricky grounds to navigate. Thats where the Complete 2020 IT Certification Exam Prep Mega Bundle comes into play, covering the most in-demand IT exams. That includes AWS, CompTIA, Microsoft Azure, Cisco and more. Its what you need to add to your repertoire of skills or even start a brand new skill set.

Find it here for $39.

The Complete Videography Bundle: Beginner to Expert

Create beautiful, professional looking videos with this Complete Videography Bundle: Beginner to Expert. Video content is a surefire way to keep users engaged with content, and this bundle includes ten different courses that show you how to use multiple tools to edit and produce compelling videos.

Find it here for $29.99.

The 2020 Full Stack Digital Marketing Certification Bundle

Any well-rounded marketer needs to know how to use digital platforms to better optimize their campaigns. This 2020 Full Stack Digital Marketing Certification Bundle includes 12 courses that cover Google Analytics, YouTube, Google AdWords and more plus the methodologies that back them up, including SEO best practices, optimizing sales strategies and more.

Find it here for $39.

The Complete 2020 Adobe CC Certification Bundle

Adobes Creative Cloud is an essential part of virtually every designers skill set, and this training can get you up to speed. Learn to beautifully edit photos using Photoshop, develop creative vector graphics with Illustrator and much more. This collection even covers the latest and greatest Adobe techniques, so if youre already advanced/intermediate with Adobe, youll still have something new to learn.

Find it here for $39.

The Complete Microsoft Excel & VBA Bundle

Whether youve been avoiding Microsoft Excel or use it daily, the Complete Microsoft Excel & VBA Bundle will show you how to use this powerful problem solving platform to its true capacity. From automating your most repetitive processes to crunching huge datasets, youll learn how to use Excel to develop business insights.

Find it here for $29.99.

The Complete 2020 Google SEO & Growth Hacking Bundle

If you want to learn quick ways to grow your company, look no further than this Complete 2020 Google SEO & Growth Hacking Bundle. This bundle shows you marketing growth techniques that help you grow your audience exponentially from bringing in thousands of leads and subscribers, to optimizing your website for sales, and more.

Find it here for $25.

The Premium 2020 Learn to Code Certification Bundle

The Premium 2020 Learn to Code Certification Bundle is your ticket to learning the worlds most popular and fundamental programming languages, to the most niche, in-demand languages right now. Its the perfect learning bundle for both beginners and experts.

Find it here for $45.

Prices subject to change.

You cant beat free! Get $70+ worth of premium Mac apps for free today!

stackSonar('stack-connect-p', '283');

More:
Learn A New Skill in 2020 With These 8 Training Bundles - The Daily Caller

Digital marketing in the coming decade will be a battle fought on multiple fronts. Companies are finding their customers on more web outlets than ever, and they're not getting any less fickle.

It can all be pretty confusing for anyone looking to make their brand breakthrough, but the 2020 Full Stack Digital Marketing Certification Bundle is one of the best resources for anyone looking to cut through the noise.

The package has 12 courses that serve as instructions for all the best tools in the marketer's belt. No "rah-rah" pep talks here, just raw info about how you can use today's biggest platforms to elevate your brand.

There are specific looks at what draws face time on YouTube, Google Ads and Facebook. You'll learn how to use Google Analytics to track and act upon shifts in incoming traffic. And of course, you'll get expert, up to date advice on how to use SEO effectively across the board.

The bundle is already over 90% off the cost of the individual courses.

Getting ratiod, getting dunked on, the dynamics that happen that we think arent as healthy are definitely part of our thinking about this.

This is the future, I guess.

Softbank-funded unicorn Zume ran out of dough

The mind is a powerful tool and, like any great tool, it can be easily misused. Mindfulness is a great buzzword to throw around, but how do we actually achieve it? Anyone can find a personal trainer for their body, but its not like there are brain trainers out there for hire. Or are []

Its hard to find a web-based profession or any profession, for that matter that doesnt require you to deal with PDFs. Theyre universally recognized, theyre used for tons of official documents, and theyre stubbornly resistant to editing. Thats by design, of course. But technology always finds a workaround. And if youve got a []

When real athletes train, they clearly dont go into it blindly. Balance is important, and the recovery is just as important as the workout itself. As for the rest of us, we barely have time for the workout, much less a professional massage afterward. Thats why a professional-grade hand-held massage gun like the DEEP4s might []

Read more:
Become an in-demand digital marketer in 2020 with the help of this training - Boing Boing

SEMrush is one of the go-to tools for both specialists and generalists interested in search marketing.

We were lucky enough to catch up with the companys Head of Communications, Fernando Angulo, to find out more about his role, and his advice for those new to the industry.

Im the Head of Communications at SEMrush, which means that I implement public relations strategies with our clients through various social media channels. I am also a key spokesperson for SEMrush across the globe, which usually requires me traveling to up to three different countries each week to represent our brand.

I report to Olga Andrienko, who is the Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush. SEMrush, being such a global and diverse company, has a fantastic internal culture of regular reporting which really gels the global teams. Each team is able to report directly to the company from anywhere across the globe via conference calls and email updates. It means I can easily stay updated by various regions and provides an opportunity to acknowledge each employees diligent work efforts.

With over ten years of experience in digital marketing, I have enjoyed being at the forefront of the companys marketing activities and have built a great marketing team. Being one of the major brand faces, I am able to attend several prestigious conferences all over the world, on everything from B2B search marketing and e-commerce to influencer marketing and marketing team training.

With almost anything accessible at the click of a button you need to work smarter, not harder. To survive in a digital industry that moves this quickly, our company embraces change. SEMrush is constantly evolving to enhance and improve our customer offering, using the insight and trends we constantly monitor within the organisation. One compulsory skill that enables me to work effectively is being able to adjust to these trends and changes, and quickly. Having an open mindset to embrace new challenges along the way is a must.

Monitoring a trial and error workflow model to stay on top of key trends is crucial. There is no right or wrong way of working, but by monitoring patterns of success we are able to see what works best for us. Enthusiasm and energy always see me through the day.

During a typical working day I spend a lot of my time in airports, speaking at conferences and my favourite networking and meeting new people.

I find its very beneficial to fill my time travelling with useful administrative tasks. Just yesterday for example, I woke up at 5am and while on the long journey to the airport, I checked and replied to recent emails and was able to prioritise the ones that needed special attention. Whilst on the plane, I reviewed my daily to do list and ticked off everything that had been achieved, creating new tasks with realistic goals and deadlines. By midday I had landed and was able to have a catch-up call with my team, as we do on a daily basis. Despite all of us working from different countries or travelling the globe, this ensures we are all updated on each others tasks, be it for planning or to bounce ideas off each other.

On a personal level I have found the Keto diet suits my lifestyle and provides me with the perfect energy boost I need to get through the day and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

I believe no other office workplace offers what SEMrush does. Imagine an office space that feels like home thats where I work. I love the workplace culture there is a perfect balance of freedom and responsibility which perfectly positions you to help build SEMrushs brand.

I think it is extremely important to acknowledge that the World Health Organisation recognised burnout to be an occupational phenomenon earlier this year yet despite this, more than half the world remains unsure of what burnout is. We recently found that searches online for what is burnout? increased by 55% on average from 2018 to 2019. The most common cause of burnout is in the workplace, so belonging to a company that encourages not only development for your career but social, physical and mental health balance too means avoiding issues further down the track.

It really sucks to know there are so many people who have joined the company that I havent been able to meet yet. When I started at SEMrush there were only around 18 staff. Now we have expanded to more than 800. As you can imagine, it is not physically possible to talk to that many people on a personal level. Thats the one downside, as its a shame to not be able to say you personally know all of the colleagues you work with!

My main goal is to create brand awareness, so I need to reach as many people as possible, be it other tech companies or completely parallel industries in order to educate and inform others about our solutions and teach them how to use SEMrush products. We use Referral Traffic, Social Reach, Social Engagement and Mentions Sentiment as our main KPIs.

The tool that makes my life much easier is the SEMrush Poster its a tool that allows me to post relevant insights we unearth with my followers on every single social media network. All you need is 10 minutes writing a post on Poster and it does all of the heavy lifting for you you have weeks of hard work done.

Another tool that makes my life easier is Slack, I couldnt work without it. Slack makes communication much easier to manage which is fundamental when you work with teams across the globe. Calendly is also key for my time management when it comes to arranging meetings with several people. My to do list is always up to date thanks to my organisation pal Evernote.

I completed my studies in World Economy and International Economic Relations at the Saint Petersburg State University of Economics and Finances in Russia. When I finished my degree I had several opportunities to work in the financial world, but I decided that the marketing and sales industry was where I belonged, and may be a little more interesting. I applied to work at a major travel organisation, where I learned how to use SalesForce at a senior level with marketing SaaS tools back in 2009. After three years working in that industry I became familiar with a tool called SEOquake, which happened to be (yes, you guessed it) a SEMrush tool. I soon discovered they were hiring a marketing and sales manager with linguistic skills, so I was lucky enough to find my calling.

I would say that the majority of positive change relates to paid advertising. There are a lot of tools that enable marketers to understand the users behaviour, along with several new features for advertising itself.

On the contrary, when it comes to SEO there are numerous restrictions, penalties, algorithm changes, position droppings, and new Google SERP Features all of which make the outcomes much more interesting but simultaneously make it extremely difficult for SEO to deliver the same results today as seen in the past five years.

I think that Booking.com is doing really well when it comes to featured snippet optimisations, as they are getting more than 1,000 Keyword rankings for their specific featured snippet which was already utilised internationally for a major voice search study.

The best thing to know before entering this industry is that you have to create a habit of learning on the go. If you dont understand something, educate yourself. Take an online course, subscribe to a blog or a podcast and absorb the content there is a lot of truth in the saying knowledge is power. The best thing about society today is that so many resources exist, and most are free and accessible. If you make a habit of seeking new knowledge and learning for 30 minutes a day then your wealth of new skills will take you much further in not just your career but life too.

Read the original post:
A day in the life of... Fernando Angulo, Head of Communications at SEMrush - Econsultancy