Andy Donaldson on Omnichannel, SEO Process, and Digital PR

Good to meet you, Hashit, and thanks for having us on the show.

Well, I found my way into the world of search almost by accident, really. I always liked computers generally. I went to university to do an information technology degree which covered web publishing. During that module, I realized that actually that’s the future at the time. This was about 20 years ago now, maybe a little bit more. I realized that; that’s where things were going. I got myself into that space. At the time, it was when the likes of Yahoo, which was called Overture at the time, and later Google started up. It was a bit of a chance, really. I just got into that web publishing space at the time when search engines were really taking off. I got a job in a search agency and went from there.

Well, just picking up where I left off that story. So, I got a job straight from university in what was a startup company at the time. It was called Corporate Global. It then changed its name about two or three years later into Latitude, which became the largest search agency in the UK at the time. And they were pretty much just focusing on organic and paid search then. So I learned from a company that scaled very quickly from five employees. I think I was the fifth employee, and I think when I left, it was about 90 employees or something like that. I learned quite a lot during that period of time. And from that agency, I went to set up the search department in an Aegis owned company in Manchester that was called Feather BrooksBank, then became Carra Manchester. I had enough knowledge to set this function up in another large agency. I realized that if I could do that for a large agency, I could probably do that for myself. In 2007, myself and a business partner of mine, Andy Redford, set up a Hit Search with the vision to bring the knowledge and experience from large agencies into a smaller agency environment.
And that’s where we started.

It is a big part of the tactic. I think it has to do with partly the way that outreach and building connections today within SEO works. You can see if we’re talking about link building methods like guest posting, huge inflation on this market. Every single day, probably most of us receive spam about that. It gives you an idea that this is now already being overused to a large extent. So it’s difficult to create long term qualitative relations with other people in your same industry. And that means also that you need to add value to the market. Pr is one such strategy. But also when you talk about our core business, email marketing, market automation, which is the core of our software, it comes down to numbers a lot. We are producing software for other marketeers, and marketeers are persistent about data. So I think telling a captivating story today, getting mentions, maybe somebody will link to you or discuss your brand online. You need to offer something beyond a statement, subjective opinions. You need to have some facts. That’s where digital PR comes in. Creating a story based on data. We sit on a lot of it and producing stories based on that data can generate visibility.
It is important.

Well, the three main areas of our business have always been the same. We’ve just got pretty experts at them over the years, and they are SEO, so organic search, paid search, which includes shopping in our terminology of that, and then paid social as well. So they’re the three core pillars of our business. We also do many other areas. Programmatic display is a big thing that we’re seeing some great results for at the minute, as well as email and affiliates and some other channels that complete the mix. But they’re the three core disciplines that we offer.

In terms of the clients that are ideal fits for us, it’s largely retailers or fashion retailers that we work with, primarily. Only around three million turnover and above are looking to scale their online revenue pretty quickly. And that’s whether it’s UK revenue or international revenue or both. We’ve got a lot of experience at launching retailers into new territories. So, that’s the ideal client that we tend to work with.

Yeah! It’s quite exciting, really. About two years ago, we had a bit of a session at board level within the agency to work out what really makes us different from other agencies. Do we have anything unique that other agencies don’t have? And like quite a lot of agencies, we focus on our clients 99.9 % of the time and spend very little time thinking about us. So, we went through a period of actually, let’s think about us and see what makes us different. And so we came up with this system called Hit Smart. And Hit Smart is a collection of two things that we do very differently than other agencies. One of which is we’ve got what we call a Data Lab. That Data Lab is essentially a collection of the last 15, 16 years worth of retail data covering everything that you can see within Google Analytics. So, we can build trends from that in terms of different audience profiles and how profitable they are for clients. We can look at which channels work for different types of audience and different types of clients. We’ve got data that ranges from people that are selling an average order value of £10 right away to £2,000 or £3,000.
So, it gives clients that work with us an advantage because we almost have a blueprint for growth already based on that data that’s within the data lab. And the other really cool thing is about four or five years ago now, we invested in some biometric equipment which allows us to connect that equipment. Sounds painful, but it’s not. Connect that equipment to actual physical people and it tracks all sorts of stuff from heart rates, pulse, to brain signals. We have a scanner that we can put on people’s heads, which sounds again, really weird, but it’s not. It measures different signals. What it allows us to do is to give the customers some basic instructions, buy a product, buy some blue jeans, buy a pair of shoes in size 12, and we can follow how they react physiologically to a client’s website. And what that allows us to do is then build much more detailed strategies going back to, for example, keyword selection. So, we can actually look at which keywords will resonate better with certain audience demographics based on what we see in the data and also channels as well. We can ask them various questions about how they tend to find brands, and it gives us a real honest approach to where their heads are at, if you pardon the pun.
So, those two things together, we have these blueprints, then we cross reference them with the Neuromarketing stuff that we do, which is using the biometric equipment, gives us a really powerful difference to other agencies, and that’s why we get the results that we get for our clients.

Really good question. The first one is really simple. We have to pay them. It’s as simple as that. We tend to offer, in conjunction with the client that we’re working on, a discount voucher to the products, or we give them early bird access to new season sales. So, essentially, we pay them for their time. Most of the time, they’re really happy to accept.

Yeah! There has to be. There is a selection process. There’s basically a questionnaire, and this ties into your second question which is do we use doctors or anything else? It’s a really good point because these tests have to be based in science, because if they’re not based in science, the data that they produce is questionable. We partnered with the psychology department in the Liverpool University here and they guided us on the testing process. How to make sure we’re recruiting the right people, but also how do we conduct these tests from a scientific perspective and then how do we analyze the data also from a scientific perspective. They audit us on a regular basis to make sure that we’re doing things correctly because otherwise you’re just making assumptions from the data. So, yeah, it’s a good question and we leave that to the psychologists.

It varies massively and it depends on the client. So, sometimes between five and 10 people is enough to get some solid data. But if you’ve got international retailers, for example, retailers that buy a product from America are very different from buying it from the UK and the rest of the world. So, we’d have to do a sample size from each of those areas to make it a fair trial. So, it can get quite big testing. But for a retailer in the UK, somewhere around five gives some pretty solid data to work with.

Generally speaking, the onboarding process starts off with two key areas, one of which is the audience research. I think sometimes agencies fall down a little bit if they start with the channel. So, they think, right. We need to do some SEO, but we need to do some paid search. Right? How do we use paid search to target that customer? We turn that around a little bit and start with the audience because ultimately it’s the audience that’s going to be buying your products. We do some audience research and then we build our personas. Within the audience personas, we can look for, using our data, a lot of things like profitability. We then move from that point to then looking at the overall channel strategy. Is that audience searching through organic search? Are they mainly through search or are they more towards social? Or would they prefer buying through affiliates? Are they price sensitive? That audience research leads us into the channel. Then once we have got a number of channels or a collection of channels, we can then look at what the keyword strategy is. For example, if we’re looking at SEO and what type of ads to produce, which is another interesting point that we get from the Neuro stuff that we do.
The biometric tests, one of the tests that we do, present different imagery. And based on how the brain signals react, we can get a better idea of which imagery is best to use in, for example, social ads or across the client’s website. So, we can cheat a little bit with the newer marketing that we do, and it gives us a good insight into what’s going to work and what’s not even before we spend any client’s budget.

We use a CMS system called HubSpot, which is a fairly globally recognized platform. And within that, there are different communication options. So, there is a support ticketing system that we can use through HubSpot. The results of all emails are recorded through that system as well automatically. So, if there’s any handover from one person to the next internally, there’s a whole stream of comms by client and by client contact. Any documents that we need to upload are all in there. So, it’s all like a depository of one main place, really. Outside of that, the good old Slack, we have some client channels that we use through Slack. They’re the main two areas, main two bodies of tools that we use.

I think the main benefit is reducing waste of budget. Bear in mind, the whole concept of it is to analyze the audience and make sure that we are targeting the right audience from day one without having to test. That’s really where the savings comes from. The theory being that when we target conversion rates through all channels or higher, the experience that they have on the website is tailored towards the people that we’re targeting. So, conversion rates across the website, of course, are higher as well for everything, not just the channels that we’re operating. So, it’s basically saving budget, which has an impact on the return on the ad spend, essentially.

I think so we offer essentially all of the spectrum of digital services from the paid search, organic search, social that I mentioned before, right the way through to affiliates, email, display. The key thing that we adopt is an attributed way to bring those channels together. I think where brands and agencies fall down a little bit is they look at each individual channel as a silo, as a standalone thing, when in reality, for example, we know from our research that paid social, if you look at that as a return, as a direct return, so spend the pound get X back, it will never, ever paint itself in a good light because social generally, whether it’s paid or organic social, is top of the funnel activity. It moves people into the top of the funnel. It doesn’t necessarily convert people at the base of the funnel. But if you look at attributed revenue, ie, traffic that is paid for, that arrives on the site through social media, that might not buy there and then, but does come back at a later stage through direct, for example, or through another area, then you will see the value of it. And if you do simple trials such as pausing social and pausing paid search, you will notice an overall revenue drop.
So, that’s just a really crude way of looking at it. But essentially, looking at these services as a collection, not individuals is how to look at things.

It’s difficult to give a general view on that because it’s very different for each individual client. But generally speaking, the starting point has to be looking at the attribution side of things because you can’t really become truly omnichannel unless you have a vision across everything, both channels and also what you do internally as well. So, my advice would be to start with that and work back from that point, really. But it’s very specific to each brand, so it’s difficult to give general advice apart from that.

I think working with the client to understand aligning the key pain points in their business with what you’re going to achieve for them. So, the first thing we ask, we have a lot of financial conversations with clients before we start any strategizing. So, we would say things like, What are you struggling with most? Where do you get your revenue from at the minute? Where do you want to get it? What margin do you need it to be at for it to be successful? What does poor performance look like? What does medium performance look like? What does good performance look like? And then we take that away and then work out what is going to achieve what they’re looking for. Because if you are reporting on single channels and not really looking at the bigger picture of what you’re trying to achieve with that and with the client’s budget, it’s never going to work. So, we bring it together, first of all, by aligning everything, each channel, to the pain points and goal of the client. Revenue is normally the thing that they’re interested in. Revenue and profit are the main two things. And international expansion, they’re the main two or three things that clients are most interested in. And then we create KPIs for all of the channels together. So, an attributed KPI, normally return on ad spend or return on investment. So, it might be we’ve spoken to the client and they’ve said their margin is X. So, we know as long as we produce one in four, so spend a pound and get four back, we know that they’re going to be in profit, or one in three, or one in 10, whatever that may be.
So, we have an attributed return pot and then we break that down into individual channels and how they all contribute. For example, I mentioned that social is more of a contributor to the top of the funnel. We’d have a lower return on ad spend target for social. But for example, for organic search and keyword positions, we’d want to be a little bit higher in that so that the overall balance is out at one and four is the best way to scale growth.

Again, very similar to overall research of the audience first and then building up the persona. Because as I mentioned at the start, when we start to look at audience personas, we realize very quickly that they will engage or type in a different keyword based on their affluence, for example. They use different language if they are higher up the social spectrum than lower down, or if they’re looking for a certain type of product, you can normally tell whether that is an urgency search, so I need it now, or whether it’s a research search, which is that normally that happens with higher value products where there is more of a string of keywords together, which your ranking tool is important to look at because you can start to see how these keywords are linked together. But we can’t get to that keyword strategy bit until we know what the audience is. Then we get to the keyword strategy bit and then we can produce an overall SEO strategy. But the audience will give us where the profitable part of that audience space is, and that’s where the keyword strategy needs to align to. That’s the process for that.

Probably no more. We call it onboarding month and there’s normally about four weeks. Within that is the keyword research and the audience analysis and the conversations about margin and profit and all of that happens in that first four weeks to make sure that we’re aligned with the client’s goals and that we can go into the right research. Then month two onwards is when we start rolling out the strategy, roughly speaking. Sometimes if there’s multiple territories, that onboarding can be one, two, three months maximum because sometimes there’s quite a lot of audience research. If nothing has been done before, it’s quite a big task to do. But generally between four and 12 weeks is the worst case scenario, but most often between four or five weeks is the period of time.

PR is another one like social, it’s top of the funnel and it’s really important for that. I often talk to retailers in terms of the overall strategy is that you need a balance between branding and awareness tactics and acquisition tactics. Branding and awareness meaning that you need to constantly maintain and build your audience in order to scale revenue. I get a lot of retailers that come to us and say, I’ve got X budget, I don’t want to grow from three million to six million within 12 months, but they don’t want to spend anything on branding. Well, it doesn’t work that way because if you’re trying to sell to the same pot all the time or a shrinking pot, your revenue is going to drop unless you’re getting really good at selling. But at some stage, you’re going to be annoying the same people too often. There needs to be some activity like paid social, organic social, like PR. All of those things that build the awareness at top of the funnel are vital to scale growth. There’s no way you can do that without doing that. PR plays a good role in that. The other thing that we, as agencies, have shied away from talking about over the last five, six years is link building, because PR is a really good way and a search engine friendly way of building links back into the site because it’s tied to really good quality content that builds authority and trust and all the other things that are important for search engines.
PR is important for those two things. It’s actually a link builder, if you do it correctly and accurately, but it’s filling the top of the funnel, so overall revenue grows because of it.

It’s got to follow certain guidelines, really, which is that whole EAT thing, experience, authority and trust. You’ve got to really use content and the links that are attached to it, whether it’s PR or just general content that’s seeded over the internet as it were, to tick those three boxes. As long as Google can see that you are doing it for a purpose that is useful to your audience that’s on your website and it is relevant to your audience, then that’s the best strategy. That’s the best way to do it. When you start to move away from that and start to move down a volume route, so if an agency is saying, we are going to build you five links per month guaranteed, what happens is it puts them under pressure then to move away from quality, and that’s where the danger area is really. If you stick to using good content and there’s a real purpose for that, Google can see that you’re spreading your experience, helping your audience. That builds trust for you and therefore those links will be valuable.

That would be giving our secrets away, Harshit. I can’t give you all of those secrets away. But I think the mantra to stick to is what I’ve just suggested really is that if you’re doing any outreach from a link point of view, whether you’re going down influencer routes or whether you’re going down content propagation routes, anything like that, you have to ask yourself the question, is this useful to my audience? If I was to put my audience in front of this piece of content or in front of this influencer or in front of this social post, would they appreciate what’s being said? Would they get it? Is it written for them rather than the algorithms? And if it is, that’s a good tactic to follow.

A really easy way to measure success is through PR, which is a bit more difficult, but is looking at each article and the revenue that it produces. So, if you use UTM codes on the URL, for example, you can use analytics to give you an idea of the revenue that it’s either influenced or the revenue that it’s brought in directly. So, that’s one way and we do that for all of our clients. But actually bearing in mind that it’s top of the funnel. So yes, you can track revenue, but actually it’s probably more important to track visibility and what it’s doing to your impressions or clicks. And then following those clicks through to metrics, things like how long they spend on site, page views, things like that, because that gives you a good idea as to whether or not the position that you put that PR or that link are actually the right type of people. Because if they’re not, then you will get really high bounce rates and low engagement rates across the site. So, they’re the things that we’d be mainly looking at. So tracking revenue, but then looking at what they do when they arrive on the site and recalibrating our efforts accordingly.

Yeah! So, there’s a lot of them because every client that we work with experiences growth because that’s what we do. We’re a performance marketing agency and our remit is generally to get clients from a particular point in revenue and profit to the next level. So, pretty much all clients have done that. One that’s worth mentioning is the clients of our school, perfect moment, who are a high end ski wear brand that are moving into other areas. And last year, we took them from 6 million to 10 million in 12 months. I’m particularly proud of that because its revenue wasn’t just from the UK, it was from the US and the rest of Europe. And moving into new territories really tests your processes. And those processes relate to the audience targeting, the research that goes into it, and how essentially much cash you can save at clients and marketing budget by not needing to test thousands of different audiences, being very targeted and specific. And that’s important this year when the cost of living is causing some challenges. A lot of CEOs that I’m talking to are looking at profit growth strategies as opposed to just revenue growth strategies, which can be more of a land grab rather than a focus on profit.
So, things like that really make a difference. That’s why we’re so proud of that one, particularly in addition to others.

I don’t think there’s necessarily any mishaps or any funny stories. But certainly, one of the things that I’ve learned over the last 20 years in this space, but particularly the last 15 years inside Hit Search is that the focus on the audience is the golden ticket. If you can fully understand who you’re talking to and solve the pain points, your marketing will turbocharge. It will really do well. Where agencies struggle is they spend too little time trying to think about their audience and actually finding where they are, where they hang out, the languages that they use, the things they like to see, the way they like to integrate with brands, and they spend more time trying to spend, spend, spend to try and find revenue, where if you just stop and go back to that start and say, who are we actually talking to? And why do they want to hear from us? And why is our client’s product going to solve the problem for them or make them feel better? And then the last thing I’ve learned is that with the work we’ve done with the Liverpool University on the psychology team, they came up with a figure that stated that about 5 % of people buy because they need something, whereas 95 % of people buy because of how that product makes them feel or look, or it solves a problem for them, which helps them reduce stress, or there’s an emotional element to the purchase.
And most clients that we deal with are only targeting that 5 %. I want a pair of shoes now. There’s my advert coming by from our website, and that is a very cluttered space. There’s millions of brands that are trying to compete for that 5 %. The ones that truly experience scale are the ones that are targeting the 95 %. And that’s where ads create some emotion or connection, or they advertise, I’m going to save you some time, make you do this quicker, make you do this differently, or just make somebody feel good in a product and show how this product is going to make you feel. That’s the golden ticket for revenue growth.

I’m not sure. Let’s try.

Not particularly interesting. It was just a pair of trainers.

Google Sheets.

My last pass is much more secure. Well, it’s on the secure server and it’s all locked down, but yeah.

Seeing our clients succeed, definitely. Going from where they are to where they get to, not just because of the revenue stuff, but actually what it does to their lifestyles. It changes the people that they are and I think that’s the most interesting thing.

Well, I’m going to Florida in four weeks’ time. That’s probably about the only new thing that’s happened. But in work, we’re really pushing on the Neuro stuff because that’s really given us an advantage. We’re bringing new technology all the time, different biometric equipment that we can use, and just bringing new ways to use and transfer the data to the client’s learning. That gets me up in the morning definitely as well.

Last Google search was for a client actually working on at the moment, a new client we just brought on board and they manufacture sandals. So, we were looking at shipping them. So, it was related to trying to find the cheapest possible ways to get products from one country to the next. Not particularly exciting.

Focus on two things for clients, either getting something more from the same or getting more from more. So, showing a client a way that you can produce more revenue from the same or less spend. Ultimately, that’s what everyone’s after, really. And if you can find ways to do that, then that puts you in a small percentage of agencies that can achieve that.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.