Digital Marketer Eagan Heath Shares How His Company Helps Small Businesses Find New Customers

Eagan Heath explains analytics insights with client.

I met Eagan Heath at my daughter's wedding several years ago. He performed Dylan's Love Minus Zero/No Limit as I walked my daughter down the "aisle" at an outdoor wedding in Morris, Minnesota. This week we re-connected to discuss marketing matters, including the manner in which Facebook and Google use A.I. and how much the marketing playing field has shifted. This interview was a consequence of that discussion.

EN: What is your title and what is Get Found Madison?

Eagan Heath: I just say I'm the owner and founder of a digital marketing agency based in Madison, Wisconsin. We started out serving local businesses by helping them rank on Google with SEO and Google Ads, and we've since branched out into serving eCommerce and B2B companies with paid social media ads, email automation and WordPress websites.

EN: When did you found Get Found Madison and what were you doing up till then?

EH: I started the company in June 2016 after working at Epic as a hospital software project manager.

EN: Where did the idea for your company come from?

EH: I was itching to work for myself and I heard on a podcast that offering SEO services was a great way to start doing that. I did some free consulting for some local businesses while I still worked my corporate job, and after I got them from page 2 to the top of page 1 of Google, I knew I had something valuable to offer.

EN: You have some great testimonials. When you started you had no track record. How did you establish your credibility initially?

EH: SEO is different than most service businesses because people can tell immediately whether you're good at what you do. I focused on ranking for phrases like "SEO Madison WI" or "SEO company in Madison, WI" so people could see I knew my stuff. Prospects often comment that they found me through good and that I seem to know what I'm doing.

For the first clients, referrals were huge, so I developed relationships with local website companies who referred me to their clients and transferred a lot of trust thereby.

EN: A lot of people fallaciously think that “if you build it they will come” when it comes to putting up a website. Would you care to comment on this?

EH: Great question. I think too many small businesses think of their website as a brochure when what they really want is a lead generation machine.

What you actually need to do is plan out how you'll get the right people to your site so they'll contact you or buy from you.

Luckily, there is a pretty short list of places most people go on their devices, and we can reach them at every one:
• Search engine
• Social Media
• Email
• Browsing a website like news, sports, a blog, etc.

EN: I think one of the most fascinating features of data analytics is learning at what point potential customers fall out of the sales funnel. How does Get Found Madison help in that?

EH: Agreed. I've gotten concise about pitching the value of online marketing to skeptical small business owners over the years, and it comes down to:
• The targeting is better
• People's attention has shifted online, so that's where they are
• You can more easily measure the results
• You can test faster and with a smaller initial budget
• As a result, you can acquire customers cheaper online than offline

For a local business, the funnel looks something like this:
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Contact form submissions
• Sales

We measure the results and provide our clients with the data on the first three, and help them to track that last one in their CRM.

For an eCommerce business, it might look something like:
• Impression
• Click
• Email list sign up
• Email open rate
• Email click rate
• Purchase

"Checkmate."

EN: You have a small team but a wide array of skills and services. What are the services that your Madison customers have found most useful and compelling?

EH: We are about to launch a new brand called Caravan Digital (freshly named this week) that will market to and focus on eCommerce marketing. The reason we're doing this is because we can cleanly report on dollars out vs. dollars in on ad spend and because eCommerce is the present and the future.

While I'll always have a place in my heart and mind for SEO, the reality has been that we can drive stronger results faster and with better reporting with Facebook Ads for eCommerce companies. We have a client right now who has spent $23,000 on Facebook ads and made $467,000 in sales as a result. It's hard to get 2,000% returns like that anywhere else.


Related Links
GetFoundMadison
Data Analytics: The Three Most Important People in the Room
Can Local Retailers Compete Against Amazon?

Pinterest Trivia and Other Data for Social Media Marketers

This past week I've been puttering around with my Pinterest Boards and got to wondering how many people have staked a claim on the Pinterest terrain. I'd read that Pinterest can be a useful marketing tool, though I'd never used it in that way before. I used it more like a scrapbook that you show friends. Recently, though, I noticed that people place links in their pins and in this manner can begin a relationship that -- if this is your aim -- leads to a sale or customer relationship.

All this to say I became curious how many Pinners there were and other such numbers. Here's a current set of ballpark numbers from the Omnicore Agency. Once I started collecting numbers I went ahead and checked into analytics for other types of social media. Omnicore has way more than you need here to get a sense of Pinterest's scale. A link at the end of this blog has more data to digest.

Pinterest Stats of Note

Pinterest was founded in 2010 and currently has 75 million monthly users in the U.S., 175 million worldwide.
Total Number of Pinterest Pins: 50 billion
Number of Pinterest Boards: 1 billion+
Men account for 7% of all Pins, 19% of all users.
There are over 17 billion recipe Pins here.

Noteworthy Numbers for Marketers
87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest.
Over 5% of referral traffic to websites comes from Pinterest.
80% of Pinterest's users access the site through mobile devices.
FWIW, you can find data for Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Periscope at Omnicore as well.

Social Media Statistics: SEO
Better content can drive traffic to a blog by up to 2,000%.
Google is responsible for 96% of all smartphone search traffic, and 94% of total organic traffic.
Search engines drive 93% of all website traffic.
About ½ of all searches are four words or more.
Two seconds is all companies get when it comes to website load time. Anything longer increases bounce rates by 50%.
82% of searchers will use their phone to help them make a decision about an in-store purchase.
42% of all men use their phone to call their wives and ask what it is they were supposed to get.*
Google claims it has an average of 63,000 searches every single second of the day.
#1 social media platform for teens is Snapchat. (What kid wants to hang out where his or her parents are?)
40% of all mobile users are searching for a local business or interest.
16% are looking for a parking spot.*
Location-specific ad campaigns are 20 times more effective than traditional banner ads.

Content Marketing Stats of Note
Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising.
Content creation leads to 434% more indexed pages than websites without updated content.
38% of marketers are publishing content at least once a week.
60% of B2B marketers say they have a difficult time coming up with content that will engage their audience.***

Noteworthy Blogging Stats**

Featuring a blog as a key part of your website will give you a 434% better chance of being ranked highly on search engines.
Using images in your blog posts gets them 94% more views.
Companies that published 16 or more blog posts per month got 4.5X the leads than companies that published 4 or less monthly posts.
EdNote: The matter of how often to post is something I will address in a separate post. I post daily but at least one blogger says posting daily is "silly." 
B2C companies that blogged 11 times or more got more than 4X as many leads than those that publish only 4-5 posts per month.
Blogs that post daily get 5X more traffic compared to those that don’t.
58% of marketers voted for “original written content” as the most important type of content, outdoing images, videos, and infographics.
EdNote: This stat seems to affirm how I feel about video content. I don't watch videos online, or hardly ever. I like skimming written content for the nuggets I am looking for. The info on this blog post comes from cutting and pasting words, which would be far more time-consuming if delivered via video.

* * * * 

When you start looking for stats, you'll find more than you ever dreamed possible. The ones that jump out for me pertain to content marketing, SEO and blogging. But I'll save my remarks for another post because there's more to say than time allows right now.

Till next!

* Fake Stats
**More Blogging Stats   
*** Need help? Talk to me.