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Thanks to Our Customers & Talented Employees, NP Digital Wins Agency of the Year

I’m proud to announce that MediaPost, a well-respected media, advertising, and news publication, recognized NP Digital as the Search/Performance Agency of the Year.

This announcement is a testament to the hard work of our growing pool of talented employees as well as our major enterprise and SMB clients.

As a previous finalist in 2021, winning this year’s award is especially meaningful due to all of the extra hard work and dedication our team put in. The achievement recognizes NP Digital for its substantial growth, continues expansion globally, services diversification, and impact on the industry.

What was the biggest change between this year and last? We were. Here’s how we did it.

 

Why We Won: Our Employees

Our employees are the best in the business. Not just because they have so many years of agency experience, but because they embody the true values of NP Digital.

Our growing team is dedicated to implementing innovative, adaptive, and data-driven digital marketing plans that help brands connect with their audience.

We’re also committed to giving back to the community by offering team members paid time off to volunteer and matching donations to nonprofits.

We’ve increased our global workforce by 106 percent in the last year, expanded our presence in EMEA and Australia, and grew revenue by 169 percent. Paid media was a notable growth area, with a 372 percent increase in managed paid media budgets.

As a minority-founded and minority-run business, we’re committed to an inclusive workplace. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because a diverse workforce helps us help our clients succeed.

 

Why We Won: Our Clients

Our clients are the driving force behind NP Digital. Their success is our success.

This is why we deliver new success stories every month.

There are approximately 20 to 30 success stories delivered every month for the different digital marketing services we offer, in the different countries we operate. Every month, we use our internal championship process to choose the top success stories to highlight.

Not all success stories go to our website right away, as they go through an editing and approval process with clients, others prefer not to disclose due to strict compliance rules, but if you visit the case study part of our sites, you’ll see new case studies every month.

Want to be a part of a team that stands apart? We’re hiring world-class digital marketers around the globe. View open opportunities on our NP Digital career page and NP Accel career page.

 

Our SMB Clients

Our team is committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow. That includes small and medium-sized businesses that might not have a huge budget.

Why? Because we’ve been there. We know what it’s like to have a fantastic idea and lack the marketing chops to succeed.

That’s why we’re committed to using our experience to help SMB clients reach their full potential. Some of our best stories include:

 

Boho Pink

This mother-and-daughter-run clothing and fashion site was struggling to reach its audience base. By implementing SEO best practices, we increased their organic traffic by more than 114 percent in six months.

Since being with NPA I have learned a tremendous amount about SEO and how to run my business more efficiently. Our sales have increased and we have been able to expand the company full time.

– Sophia, Boho Pink

Read Boho Pink’s full case study.

 

Waterdrop

Waterdrop is committed to providing people around the world with access to safe water through a range of water purifying products. When they came to NP Accel, they struggled to get organic traffic, relying mainly on Amazon for sales.

Our team got to work optimizing their content and improving user experience. The results? A 2000 percent increase in organic traffic.

Sales online have grown, website traffic is WAY up, and we have been able to invest more in our charitable foundations. Our team is busy implementing and following NP’s instructions.

– Hannah Lu, Marketing at Waterdrop

Read Waterdrop’s full case study.

 

The Shelf

The Shelf is a fast-growing influencer marketing agency that helps brands create authentic connections with their customers. They were struggling to increase qualified demo sign-ups through Google Ads.

In six months, we helped take The Shelf from 35 leads a month to 73 leads a month — a 108 percent increase!

NPAccel has helped us not only increase the number of qualified leads we’re getting every month but also build up our sales funnel. We are very pleased with the results we’ve gotten from our paid campaigns since partnering with NPAccel.

– Anthony Nestel, Director of Digital Strategy at The Shelf

Read The Shelf’s full case study.

Want to be our next success story? Contact us to learn how we can help your SMB grow.

 

Our Enterprise Clients

Enterprise companies have unique needs and big challenges. They may or may not have an in-house marketing team. They often target multiple personas and market several different products at the same time. We get it.

In the past few years, we’ve helped some of the largest companies in the world reach their full potential with data-backed strategies and cutting-edge technology. Their success is one of the reasons we’re where we are today.

Here are a few of the amazing enterprise companies that have helped us reach new heights in the search industry:

 

Adobe XD

Adobe XD is a powerful platform that helps teams create and collaborate on designs for websites, apps, games, and more. They lacked brand awareness for their new offering despite the Adobe name and had multiple Adobe domains competing for the same keywords.

By partnering with their team, we secured a #1 spot on Google for primary key terms, exceeded traffic expectations in Q1 by more than 27 percent (without paid ads), and drove a new audience to Adobe to learn about XD.

“With NP Digital’s support, we saw an immediate impact within the 1st quarter that resulted in impressive keyword rankings, website visitors, and product downloads for Adobe XD Ideas.”

– Becky Ruden, Adobe XD Principal Content Marketing Manager.

 

Contentful

We worked with Contentful, a leading content platform that helps businesses create and manage digital experiences, to build a successful campaign that was awarded the 2021 Drum Award for Search in PPC – Best B2B Campaign.

Our paid and search teams collaborated to achieve a 600 percent ROAS during a rapidly changing search landscape caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We hit our cost per acquisition goal. We hit 100 percent of the goal and you guys actually carried us!

Caroline Beschel, Contentful

 

SoFi

SoFi is a personal finance company offering a range of finance products including student loan refinancing, mortgages, and, now, a cryptocurrency investing product.

They needed help reaching a new market, so we built a strategy targeting four keyword themes, built a content marketing roadmap, and implemented technical SEO best practices. In less than a year, SoFi saw a 509 percent increase in natural search sessions from first-page ranking visibility.

You guys are the smartest team I’ve worked with on this topic, and you’re so fun!

AJ Smith, SoFi

Want to learn how we can help your enterprise company grow? Let’s talk.

 

The Future of NP Digital

We’re incredibly proud to be recognized as the Search/Performance Agency of the Year by MediaPost, but we’re not slowing down. In 2022, we plan to open agencies in more countries as our brand new offices in Australia and the UK continue to grow while keeping the momentum of our US, Brazil, and India offices boom.

We’re also planning to launch a new initiative, Neil Patel University, in 2022. We’re planning to launch segmented market research to help industries improve their results in digital using SEO BIG DATA — as we have dozens of information about over 16 billion keywords on Ubersuggest.

Our team is leaning into machine learning and will be partnering with Google to prepare for a 3rd party cookieless world.

And much more…

Stay tuned for more details!

A huge shout out to MediaPost for the award, and a big “thank you ” to our team and the clients who continue to support us. This award is just the start of big things for the NP Digital team.

Want to talk about how we can help your business grow? Let’s talk.

Source: neilpatel.com

Find the Right B2B Influencer or KOL for Your Brand

B2B KOL and influencer programs are a topic of nearly every conversation these days. Our friend Lee Oden at TopRank Marketing conducted a survey in early 2021 about the use of B2B influencer marketing and found these incredible stats, along with many others.

• 74% of marketers agree that influencer marketing improves customer and prospect experience with the brand
• 63% of marketers agree that marketing would have better results if it included a B2B influencer marketing program

From our view, we don’t see that trend slowing down anytime soon.

 

Influencer vs. KOL

Some may say it’s merely semantics but the word “influencer” infers a YouTube or TikTok celebrity smiling big to schill their use of the latest teeth whitener and the term, “key opinion leader” (KOL)” is emerging as the preferred term for B2B partnerships.

Key Opinion Leaders are what the B2B community is looking for, right? These partnerships are MUCH less about “buy now!” and more about learning something new from a trusted source or having a brand experience where sales are the last metric to be measured as the success of a partnership.

At Convince & Convert, we’ve concepted, recruited, created and managed dozens of KOL programs for clients over the years. Almost every project revolves around helping the audience gain insights or perspectives from KOLs in their area of expertise and not about direct sales.

This is the case in our most recent work with Cisco to source and creates short-length video series and blog posts for their partner marketing platform.

Over the course of the program, we’ve built relationships with our KOL’s and the partner audience at Cisco has also built affinity and trust in the knowledge they bring each month.

Not a week goes by that our own Jay Baer isn’t approached to be a KOL for various brands and contribute his thought leadership, marketing prowess, and digital personality to a campaign or brand platform.

Other C&C team members including Zontee Hou, Mary Nice, Daniel Lemin and Jenny Magic also get asked to contribute content as a KOL around digital marketing strategy and customer experience.

Working on both sides of the KOL programming has given us unique insights about how to make a program successful and what matters when negotiating a rate.

 

How to Approach KOL Selection

TopRank’s survey found that “39% of marketers say their top challenge with influencer marketing is that the process is too manual” and we couldn’t agree more! Our clients look to us to take out that manual work for them and deliver KOL results with as minimal extra work as possible.

Having perspective on what content creation and campaigns need from both a brand and a KOL perspective has given us a unique angle when working with KOL engagements.

 

Sourcing B2B KOLs for Your Brand:

We use our network of contacts as well as subscribe to several software platforms which support our discovery and vetting of potential KOLs.

Software platforms we currently use include:

Once we have our starting list we make KOL dossiers that outline each potential KOL, the reach, content types, audience profile and other interesting information about the individual.

The dossiers bring the KOLs to life, similar to how personas would in a marketing plan as well. It allows our clients to see and relate to potential KOLs much more so than a spreadsheet of text.

This takes the work the software provides for surfacing potential KOLs and overlays actual manual review and research from one of our team members.

(We visit each KOLs page, watch multiple pieces of content on all channels, review other brands they may work with, assess quality and style of content produced and confirm audience reach numbers from the software).

We like to research 2-3x the number of final KOLs our client is targeting so that we have provided a solid look at the opportunities and competition (or not) in a category.  From the set of dossiers, we narrow in on our top individuals to pursue.

 

Selecting B2B KOLs:

Now comes the educated guesstimate part of this work.

Each of the KOLs will have different levels of compensation, preferred channels to activate and affiliation with our client.

Before we pick up the email or phone to approach a KOL we hyper study the following parts of our dossier:

From there we work on a payment range we believe to be equitable based on the work request and experience.

 

KOL Payment: The Wild West

Some of you may know I worked with Jay in the early 2000s at an ad agency in Phoenix. In those early days, I would place the online media for our clients. One such campaign was for a client who created and sold koozies.

Their koozies had suction cups on them so that the gel coat on your boat wouldn’t get ruined as you enjoyed an ice-cold beverage while cruising around the lake.

As media kits and banner ads overall were few and far between, we would literally search the web for sites we thought would be a good fit and call (on a desk phone!) the owner or main contact of the site.

(see: title of Webmaster) We’d start with an offer of a hundred dollars and see how it landed to know if we completely offended them or had just made a great deal, working our way down the list of potential banner placements.

And even in 2021, B2B KOL negotiations feel a lot similar but certainly more than a few hundred dollars.

We took this question to our friends at Onalytica, the biggest B2B influencer database. With a platform like theirs, it is easier to negotiate and process payment for a KOL, but it still requires conversation and a fair bit of guesstimation.

Each individual person and set of content pieces come with their own negotiations. Valuing the relationship and offering a fair and equitable rate will go much farther in B2B KOL partnerships than budget savings.

Onalytica platform

 

The Good News For Finding B2B KOLs

Lucky for all of us, rate cards and reports in the area are increasing, giving at least a clue or a starting point to custom negotiations with KOL’s of interest.

Even for Convince & Convert, we’ve worked on a general rate card in the form of our media kit for the types of content we regularly create for clients.

It takes into consideration the expertise our collective team brings to any KOL engagement.

As we work on behalf of clients to strategize and plan their KOL engagements, we use our rate card as the barometer for gauging the starting offers and rate negotiations with the KOLs selected.

A recent report by Intellifluence included more than 1200 influencers asking them about compensation expectations for mainstream pieces of content. And while the influencers included were likely working with more B2C than B2B brands, we found these areas to universally apply:

• Cash is preferred. “Nearly 70% of those surveyed said they liked to get paid in cash and in the product.”  For B2B marketers – particularly MarTech brands, think about how you can sweeten your offer or enhance the relationship with a KOL by offering a license, upgrade or similar in addition to direct payment.
• Particularly for C&C clients, video is a common content type in our KOL programs. In the Intellifluence survey, influencers wanted brands to realize how much pre-work goes into creating a quality video.

For B2B marketers, when you are working with KOLs acknowledge that the hard work is in the prep and polish of a video. While the output may be only a few minutes of finished content, a worthwhile KOL will spend time to plan, script, and use quality equipment to shoot the video.

One area we tend to do for our clients is we do the post-production work – asking a KOL to send us clean video and we add any captions, logos and bumpers to the final cut. This works well because most of our KOL interactions are part of multi-episode shows.

Frequently Asked Questions:

 

Working with B2B KOLs is a Work in Progress

Someday we’ll have the “ultimate pricing guide to B2B KOL engagements” but until that is created, we’d break it down to building a relationship with your KOLs is key and fair compensation and clear deliverables go a long way in a long term partnership.

The post Find the Right B2B Influencer or KOL for Your Brand appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

Source: convinceandconvert.com

Your Annual Target Audience Check-Up

If you know marketing, then you know: it is absolutely crucial that you are hitting your target audience right in the bullseye, every time. And if you don’t know marketing we are so glad you are here to learn!

In this article, we are going to teach you how to do a quick “check-up” on your current target audience to make sure your advertising is being pointed in the right direction!

Skeptical about the need to reassess your target audience?

Maybe you have more followers on Facebook than all of your competitors combined!

Pretty impressive, right?

Well, maybe.

A high follower count can play into a common misconception that Alexandrea Harrelson, CEO of Harrelson Media, dubbed “the follower fallacy”

which is the idea that the number of followers you have determines your influence.

In reality, it is more important to have a high engagement rate than a high follower count.

For example: if you have 100,000 followers with a 10% engagement rate, you are essentially reaching fewer customers than if you had 50,000 followers and a 50% engagement rate.

The moral of this paragraph is to keep reading and keep an open mind!

So here is the check-up.

There are 3 checkpoints—each one represents a key component of a perfect target audience.

This is a great chance for self-evaluation and to potentially catch any issues with your current advertising direction.

Anytime you just aren’t seeing the conversions you want or you are worried that your audience isn’t cutting it, just run through this target audience check-up, and get yourself back on track.

 

Checkpoint 1: Are You Making Followers or Friends?

Obviously, most people trust their friends more than they trust advertisers.

And let’s be honest, that’s smart of them.

But what does it mean for us, as the marketers who are trying to initiate symbiotic relationships between our customers and our businesses?

It can encourage a healthy identity crisis.

In checkpoint 1, you want to make sure you aren’t falling prey to the follower fallacy.

Remember that calculation we did at the beginning?

Let’s use simple numbers this time.

You have 10 followers on Instagram, but your posts average around 3 likes and 1 conversion.

That means you have 7 followers who do nothing but inflate your ego.

Ideally, you want all your followers engaging with your content and getting excited about your product, but in this scenario, you would be best off buckling down and making sure those 3 fans who liked the post know you see them and you’re grateful for them!

This creates brand loyalty and what we like to call friendship.

This lets you better cater to who really cares about your business, instead of chasing down dead leads.

It also gives you greater bandwidth to figure out what you are doing right and do it!

So it is your job to transform your followers into friends.

Followers might drop a like or a comment,

• but friends will also be loyal and maybe even introduce you to their friends…
• who may turn into more friends…
• who will introduce you to their friends…

it’s a beautiful cycle.

Properly focused target audiences will make your followers/friends feel seen and promote that symbiotic relationship we were talking about earlier.

You’re prioritizing them and giving them a great product, while they are coming back, again and again, to re-buy or bring in new customers.

If this “friendship” idea feels foreign to you, we encourage you to step back and think about why your followers aren’t friends.

Likely, the root of the problem lies in your target audience.

Maybe it has become stagnant and you have simply outgrown it.

Or maybe you are focusing on the wrong groups of people—some demographics are over-sold to or are just plain wrong for your business.

If you haven’t already, challenge yourself to turn half, or even a quarter of your followers into friends by the end of the year.

We promise the results will amaze you.

 

Checkpoint 2: How well do you know your buyer [persona]?

And if you are really trying to make more “friends,” you’ll want to know something about them.

This is how you can start calibrating your perfect target audiences.

What is your ideal customer doing this weekend?

How will your product help them do it better?

These are the kind of questions that help us get in our customers’ heads and figure out how to make their experience with our company even better.

You can compile the answers to these questions in a customer avatar worksheet, which is your fictional “ideal” customer.

This profile helps you define and back up your target audience.

Your buyer persona (or customer avatar) should be more than a quick sketch of some demographics and how much money they spend on your site.

• When, if ever, is your ideal customer going to be interested in a new hobby?
• What are their plans for reacclimating as the pandemic is ending?
• Where do they spend most of their time online?

Some of these questions relate to marketing more obviously than others, but all of them should affect the way you are engaging with these customers.

If your target audience is single, you need to think about how often your content is portraying couples.

If they are still concerned about the virus, maybe try using masked-up models.

Making in-depth buyer persona profiles can be a great resource for your marketing team, especially if you struggle to present a united front, or have just lost sight of your customers’ complexity.

This reflects back on Checkpoint 1.

If your buyer is really your bestie, you’ll know exactly how to get them to “hang out” with your business.

And after a while, they start thinking of you as a friend too.

 

Checkpoint 3: Are you aiming for the right number of targets?

A criticism of target audiences as a marketing strategy is that they promote exclusivity in your customer base.

Forever focusing on a single demographic can neglect potential customers and ultimately inhibit business growth… it can also give your competitors an edge against you if they are equipped to include the customers you are leaving out in the cold.

In light of this acute criticism, we encourage every brand to keep adding target audiences as they grow.

Note: if you are a small business just getting the hang of things, it may be more appropriate to hone in on one primary demographic.

Just make sure you aren’t building yourself a box you can’t climb out of!

Be careful not to explicitly exclude any demographic if you can help it; that could be a costly regret in the future.

So essentially, there are two extremes you may swing into: too many targets, or not enough.

If you have bitten off more than you can chew, you need to take a close look at the numbers:

• which demographic is bringing you the most clients?
• which demographic is costing you the most to advertise to?
• which demographic hosts the least conversions for your business?

Your analytics will likely make it pretty clear which targets you are hitting and which ones are a waste of darts (and money! and time!).

Or maybe you aren’t targeting enough demographics.

A sure sign that this is the case is if your current market (the same one that has always worked! that you love!) is bottoming out and your returns are down.

This is a cause for celebration!

Your exhausted market probably means your marketing and product were so successful that they covered a whole demographic of people.

Buttttt it also points to a need for expansion.

Here is the story of the NFL’s new target audience to help inspire you.

In 2010, the NFL launched its first-ever women-oriented apparel campaign.

Fast forward to 2021 and there is a section of the website dedicated to women, which has proven extremely successful and lucrative.

The NFL knew that expanding their clothing lines to include women’s styles was a good investment because they spent time collecting data: 41.9 million women tuned in for Super Bowl XLIV and more than 45 million women watched NFL games each weekend.

You can mimic the NFL’s success by observing your followers on social media or your website traffic.

Who is showing up that you aren’t currently advertising to?

These groups make ideal target audiences because you already have evidence that they are interested in your business.

Notice how this checkpoint came after “how well do you know your buyer.”

If the first checkpoint made you realize you need more high-quality “friends”, you know you need to double down on honing your target audience.

And once you give the second checkpoint a big green checkmark, it may be time to consider expansions.

 

Well… how are you feeling?

We hope this article has instilled some confidence in your current target audience or at least given you a good direction to head in.

But if it has raised some questions or left you wondering if you need a marketing MRI, DigitalMarketer has tons of options in our lab platform to help you with your targeting!

Remember: make friends, get to know them, and invest your time in the groups you really love.

The post Your Annual Target Audience Check-Up appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Source: digitalmarketer.com