As marketers we are always looking for the next big idea to move the conversion needle. Testing out new strategies take time, but as agencies we have the advantage of leveraging our testing across multiple clients, making it worth our while. In this spotlight interview, nyche marketing founder Nyssa Cromwell highlights a particular strategy – personalization – as her favorite digital advertising trend to bring to clients of all sizes.
How would you describe your company in less than 150 words?
nyche marketing has been a full service digital marketing firm having helped over 110 local service-based businesses primarily with website design, SEO and content marketing. After having worked across so many different industries, we have finally picked ‘our niche’ and we are currently rebranding and refocusing to work primarily with ecommerce businesses – providing content marketing, marketing automation and personalization funnel packages.
With global ecommerce sales projected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2021, this industry is booming and to differentiate oneself from the goliath Amazon, SMB ecommerce stores can gain the edge by implementing a content marketing strategy, give each user the best personalized experience possible and scale using marketing automation.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business? Please explain how.
Ironically nyche has gotten most of our clients through offline methods such as consistent BNI networking, attending and speaking at meetups and affiliate relationships with powerteam partners.
Most clients do not know how to articulate their business needs into digital marketing parlance, so ranking for industry terms locally is not always the best strategy. I believe in education marketing – so any chance to do a presentation or give a free workshop and educate business owners as to the power of digital marketing is a good one.
What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?
(Staff Meeting) Status report with staff
(Staff Management) Review work done overnight from overseas staff
(Time Management) Review the todos for the day
(Customer Service) Respond to emails
(Business development) Write proposals
(Account Management) In-person or phone client meetings to review progress
(Work) Do work! SEO, content marketing strategy, PPC management, automation campaigns etc
Some days have more of one area than others, but I found batching things like client meetings, proposal writing or actually working – into days of the week or blocks of hours per day – helps me be more productive and stay focused and get things done!
Besides acquiring new customers, what is the biggest challenge in growing your business?
Solopreneurship. I’ve been successful building a small in-house staff and leveraging talented freelancers to help deliver success to our clients. But as the single sales person, decision-maker and manager, as well as juggling day-to-day responsibilities, I can be the bottleneck at times. Finding the right partner with complementary skills has been a challenge for me, but I hold out hope that I’ll find the right fit!
What do you think is the most interesting trend in digital advertising now?
There are so many amazing trends happening now from geo-fenced advertising, augmented reality, video advertising, chatbots, and personalization. I am going to focus on personalization.
Imagine publishing dynamic ads that speak to the prospects’ demographics and ad group segment and when they land on your page, it’s personalized based on ValueTrack parameters; images from their segment and region, ‘slang’ from their industry and region, and any information you have from your marketing automation and CRM tools.
Instead of speaking to ‘everyone’ on your landing page, spend the time to craft messages that speak directly to each of your segments. I would highly recommend checking out a new killer tool called Right Message to do these personalizations.
Do you see any trends specific to PPC reporting?
Attribution modeling – wouldn’t it be great to know that your display ads from last year and the retargeting ads 3 and 6 months later and blog posts on social media led to that person doing an organic branded search, and then to your ecommerce site to buy? A lot of times a PPC campaign is deemed a failure because of no immediate results when it has been a contributing factor to conversions. In this case branded SEO would have received the credit, but really it was PPC that introduced the customer to the brand.
Also, focusing on the right PPC metrics, We all know the North Star metric is sales (ecommerce) or email/phone leads (service businesses) but until you have a conversion funnel that works, you also need to be looking at engagement metrics such as per channel bounce rate, session duration, pages/session & heatmap/click data.
For example, with an ecommerce site, there is no point in sending a lot of traffic that simply bounces, but even if they don’t buy the product on the page they landed on, you want the prospect to peruse your store. Session duration, number of pages per session and of course email opt-ins tells me that even though the person who clicked the ad did not buy right away, I do have the right type of person on my site.
Swydo’s tables and widgets allow for most of the data to be reported, and with Swydo integrating with the Google Suite of tools you can export marketing automation data to allow a full end-to-end campaign traceability into the reports! If Swydo directly integrated with automation tools like Drip or ActiveCampaign – 360 degree reporting could be a game changer!
What are the biggest challenges you face in PPC campaign management?
Doing the actual optimizations: narrowing locations, finding negative keywords, changing scheduling, ad copy etc etc – they are time consuming and human error prone – AI/automated tools could be super helpful here. Needls, optmyzr and opteo are tools I need to look further into. Then you can focus on doing CRO and personalization for your landing pages.
As for reporting, since Swydo allows for report templates, after the overhead of creating the report the first time, it generates gorgeous reports anytime you need to present it to a client!
What are the top 5 tools you use every day?
- SEMRush – keyword research, PPC and display ad research, content marketing research – it really is an all-in-one tool for the digital marketer.
- Teamwork – project management with content writers.
- Basecamp – been using this since 2007 and primarily use it for project deliverables when working with website and graphic designers.
- Swydo – SEM reporting – fun to look at the KPI targets being met know you are on target or see where you need to adjust and optimize.
- 17hats – proposals, workflow, questionnaires
- Of late absolutely loving Airtable and consolidating all of my project management, ideation and Excel type number crunching into it!
What was the worst job you ever had and what did you learn from it?
Working with people who are vague in their expectations and requirements and don’t communicate well – both in the corporate world and in my agency. Lessons:
- Money is not enough.
- Choose your clients, don’t let them just choose you.
- Set and agree on clear expectations of services & success metrics.
- Establish a consistent a way of measuring, documenting & highlighting the results of your services.
What people have influenced your thinking (and why) and might be of interest to others?
There have been so many in the digital marketing industry, but here are some current influencers:
Content Marketers:
Neil Patel of Quicksprout and his own blog – king of content marketing, been doing it right for years. Learned about marketing automation from this killer piece: https://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-marketing-automation/
Brian Dean of Backlinko – codified content marketing into a framework and broke it down with his excellent course: SEO That Works.
Marketing Messages:
Donald Miller of Story Brand – excellent podcast and framework for crafting marketing messages for your business – he also has a course that I would love to take in person one day.
Consultancy:
Brennan Dunn of Double Your Freelancing – I found a tribe of freelancers who transitioned from software development to digital marketing.
And even though I am not a graphic designer at all, I have been following a couple of standouts in that industry:
Lauren Hooker of Elle and Company – graphic designer who has productized her business and Has a waiting list of customers! In an industry where I never thought it was possible, she gives each client a few weeks of focused time and before they buy they know exactly what deliverables they will receive and the process they will be led through. Lauren’s blog is excellent and has really shifted my thinking on what is possible for a creative business.
Chris Do – also in the graphic design / branding field but has a focus on building efficient business, processes and incredible results for clients – gleaning a lot from his YouTube videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheSkoolRocks/featured
What is your favorite quote?
Matthew 6:34 (GNT) So do not worry about tomorrow; it will have enough worries of its own. There is no need to add to the troubles each day brings.
Easier said than done, but worrying about the future just does not help!
Where do you see your company in 3 years?
Providing productized premium consulting, focused on selling content marketing and marketing automation product packages to ecommerce clients from around the globe.
BIO
Nyssa Cromwell is owner of nyche marketing and a content marketing and marketing automation specialist.
Nyssa loves to educate people on the importance of internet marketing because it is the most versatile way of marketing for small businesses.
She is passionate about digital marketing and is always finding new ways to gain an edge. The internet marketing field is constantly changing so in order to keep up she is always doing research and finding out what works and what doesn’t. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.