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1,293 viewsAmanda is a seasoned B-to-B marketer with over 12 years experience on both client and agency sides. Her areas of expertise include marketing tech, demand generation, content marketing, and SEO/SEM. She currently heads up the marketing department at Balihoo, a software company specializing in advertising technologies for enterprise brands with multiple locations.
Please introduce yourself and where you work.
My name is Amanda Cash-Crowley, and I’m the Director of Marketing for Balihoo, a SAAS platform for enterprise location-based advertising.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
It’s much more specialized and complex, and this why you see so many companies building SEO teams. 10 years ago, nobody had an SEO specialist on staff, let alone a team. Some of this increase in priority comes from an exponential increase in competition in the SERP, but much of it is simply to keep up with the changing world of SEO and to stay on top of best practices.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
In 2005, after graduating college, I began working for a SAAS company and was asked to create and implement the company’s first SEO strategy. At that point, it was all about meta tags and page titles, but I don’t remember having any of the fancy analysis and measurement tools we have now.
What are the services you provide to your clients?
Balihoo, as a platform, allows big brands with hundreds or thousands of locations to launch localized digital advertising at scale – across social, search, and display. On top of our SAAS platform, our staff serves clients with unique optimization, reporting, or integration needs. We primarily serve clients in Retail, Food & Bev, Insurance, and Manufacturing industries.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2017 for SEO?
For our clients, it’s all about getting in that local pack. Best-practice semantic landing pages for each location, with unique content, is critical. It’s also very important to have a GMB (Google My Business) strategy for driving foot traffic and local sales. For Balihoo, we rely heavily on industry-leading content that takes into account search trends. This strategy has driven qualified search traffic that can be nurtured to a conversion, and we’ll continue down this path in 2017/2018.
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
Marketing is an incredible career choice if you get bored easily since it’s continuously changing. It’s exciting to think that in 20 years, I’ll be doing completely different work than I am now, with an entirely new vernacular and technologies. But, I think the best marketers have an innate curiosity and intuition about human behavior at their core, and that will never change. My advice would be to start as a jack-of-all-trades and volunteer to work in all disciplines of digital marketing if you have the opportunity. Don’t specialize early in your career – this way, you can learn how the various channels influence each other, which is so critical. This also allows you to take on more business-critical responsibilities as your career grows.
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