Search Results

Oct 7, 2020 Recently, leading industry publication AdWeek named our parent company, Traffic Builders, as the second-fastest growing digital marketing agency in the world! What’s even more impressive?  We advanced from number twenty-one to number two within the span of a year.   First and foremost, we couldn’t have made this possible without immense support from our team and partners. We want to thank everyone who helped us reach such a mindblowing milestone!  This growth was supercharged by Conduit’s ability to elevate agencies’ white label marketing capabilities at unrivaled scale. Thanks to our global partners that have helped us grow, Conduit has grown from an idea to a full-on white label marketing laboratory engineered to produce on-time, on-budget deliverables that don’t compromise on quality.  Because Conduit is the agency for your agency, though, we want to share with you what it took to become one of the fastest growing digital marketing agency groups in the world. We hope that you can take some insight from our playbook and apply it to your own business.  We Became the Second Fastest Growing Digital Marketing Agency by Committing to Quality  If you’re unfamiliar with how white label marketing works, we serve as an extension of your in-house team. You can sell our products to your clients under your own brand and we fulfill the deliverables.  Adding our services to your portfolio allows you to grow your agency at scale without taking on overhead associated with adding new members to your internal team. For example, if you wanted to add programmatic video services to your arsenal of solutions, but you don’t want to hire someone to handle it, we can fulfill those requirements for your client on your behalf.  How White Label Digital Marketing Works with Conduit  White label services are at the forefront of digital innovation. Because of this, there are many players trying to get in on the trend – and fast.  Many basic white label providers claim to be a true extension of your in-house team. In reality, they flip your projects to large overseas conglomerates. This affects your turnaround time, the quality of the finished product, and impacts your and your clients’ bottom lines.  Rather than act as a middleman reseller, Conduit Digital handles all operations from our innovative headquarters in New Jersey. Each member of our 30+ person team is an established professional with a rich history of client success and manually vetted by our leadership.  Building a team of true industry rockstars allows us to deliver a better product with a quicker turnaround time. This enables us to deliver true enterprise-level white label services for client projects of all sizes and scope. In the end, you and your client see a tangible difference. Maintaining a high standard for quality is essential. We built our business on it, and you should, too.  Offering Services Agencies Want…But Struggle to Incorporate No two agencies are alike. One may specialize in social media marketing , for example, but the  other has gained a reputation for PPC .  Expanding an agency’s scope of services can be a daunting task. If you have invested so much into social and have limited SEO experience, you may be hesitant to hire an SEO specialist if you do not have the expertise to properly oversee these projects.  That’s where Conduit Digital comes in.  The truth is that leaving gaps in your service inventory can leave you vulnerable to losing potential clients. If you do not offer SEO and that is the client’s primary need, they may instead opt to contract with another organization to solve their problems.  Conduit was founded to bridge these exact sort of gaps for our agency partners. We allow you to extend your services in an instant through a premium turnkey solution. This way, our team can begin serving you immediately without you having to worry about learning a new skill and/or hiring and onboarding another in-house employee.  Staying Ahead of the Curve  We invest countless hours manually vetting apps and staying on top of the latest marketing trends. Safe to say, do a great deal of reading and app testing at Conduit HQ.  Conduit became one of the fastest growing digital marketing agencies due to our obsession with forecasting trends and adopting them early. For example, we were one of the first white label providers to master and offer OTT advertising .  To many, the OTT revolution happened gradually…and then suddenly. That wasn’t the case for us. While this new trend was gaining steam, the Conduit team was already knee-deep in testing OTT platforms, vetting each one’s advertising potential.  Staying ahead and on top of emerging digital trends allows us to provide the most premium scalable service possible to our agency partners. Our goal is to always say “absolutely” when asked if we can provide digital services you need.  Do You Want to Become One of the Fastest Growing Digital Marketing Agencies Too? Let’s Get Working!  Simply put: the fastest way to grow your agency is partnering with a white label provider. Conduit Digital gives you the means to accelerate your growth in convenient turnkey fashion.  Want to learn more about how we can help you meet your business goals? Schedule an Agency Growth Call anytime and we’ll be happy to show you.

Dec 8, 2021 SEO ROI Goes Well Beyond Pure Traffic Numbers Search engine optimization encompasses a broad range of tactics to increase organic visitor traffic to your client’s website. By implementing a two-pronged strategy of great content and technical optimization, you can improve the quality of your website, which contributes to greater SEO ROI. How SEO ROI Differs from Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) No Ad Expenditure Unlike digital advertising solutions like paid search and paid social , SEO does not require an active ad expenditure as part of the campaign. Instead of looking at ad spend versus results, determining SEO ROI involves considering a number of different factors that go beyond a money-in, money-out perspective. Greater Focus on Your Client’s Website Digital advertising campaigns are designed to point back to a specific landing page on your client’s website. Unlike this strategy, SEO focuses on the entire website from its technical health to its front-facing user value. Long-Form Content is King Advertising campaigns leverage brief, effective copy to quickly point target audiences to a landing page. SEO content strategies often involve pieces of content with word counts above 500 per deliverable. The more desirable the keywords you’re competing for, the longer the content will likely have to be. Intended for Steady Growth Over Time Advertising campaigns are often designed with specific time windows in mind. For example, a holiday shopping campaign usually starts in late October or early November and ends around December 26. Conversely, SEO strategies are intended to improve your client’s website over a longer period of time on an ongoing basis. These campaigns tend to start generating more noticeable improvements in organic traffic after the first 3-6 months, depending on the initial health of the website. What’s Hurting Your Client’s SEO ROI Search engine algorithms like Google crawl through your client’s website and analyze a variety of features to determine the value of the user experience you’re providing. If these bots detect certain technical red flags, they will penalize your client’s site with lower organic rankings. Some common pain points often found on websites include: Slow Load Times Search engines pride themselves on providing their uses with quick answers to their questions. When a website takes too long to load, this does not contribute to the quickness that a person, and therefore the search engine algorithm, expects. Thin Content The less content on a page, the less information your client is providing about a product, service, or topic related to their industry. If a competitor has longer content about their similar offerings, they will usually receive a higher search position than your client. When a search algorithm sees thin content on a page, it figures that it offers little to no helpful information. Depending on the amount of code on the page, algorithms can also flag it for not having a proportional amount of text. Toxic Backlinks Search engines account for the links that your client’s website accumulates. If there are too many coming from spammy websites, these are considered low-authority. When too many toxic sites are linking back to your client’s pages, this can generate a penalty in organic rankings and, by extension, harm visibility and traffic potential. Inefficient Website Design Website design plays an important role in a client’s SEO performance potential. For those that implement a highly visual aesthetic on their site, this can often result in a large amount of third-party code. This increases the network payload, slows load times, and can cause your content to appear thinner by default. When a search engine algorithm looks at your client’s website, it doesn’t view it as a human does. We see eye-catching images, sleek branding, and products or services that we might consider purchasing. Artificial intelligence views these as the code that is used to display them and factors this into ranking decisions. Missing Important Technical Elements Pages that are missing technical elements like one H1 heading per page and meta descriptions are depriving themselves of organic performance opportunities. As with keywords, these elements help “clue in” an algorithm as to what your page is about. Keyword Mistakes You cannot have a conversation about SEO without discussing keywords and keyword strategies. Keywords are the driving force behind any successful SEO service. While keywords tell search engines what your content is about, they can be misused. This will also contribute to less-than-desirable organic rankings. Some common ways that an improper keyword strategy can hurt your SEO ROI include: Keyword stuffing (overusing) Focusing on the same keyword across multiple pages Not using keyword at all Using keywords that don’t match target audience members’ search intent Lack of Directory Listings Listing your client’s website across industry-relevant online directories helps build their presence across other authoritative websites. These play an instrumental role in driving higher amounts of organic referral traffic. For example, if your client is a local restaurant, they should be on Yelp. Similarly, a counseling practice should list its practitioners on Psychology Today. When an audience member is looking to move from consideration to decision, these listings can play a major role in influencing their actions. The 7 Pillars of SEO ROI An All-Encompassing Audit Every successful SEO campaign should start with an exhaustive audit of the client’s website and cover all aspects from content to granular technical and UX details. This provides the SEO analysts servicing their campaign with a holistic “lay of the land” to create a strategy that addresses specific pain points. Technical Health is SEO Wealth As an SEO campaign proceeds, analysts should perform optimizations on the client’s website to reduce the number of technical errors. Over time, this reduces major roadblocks toward achieving higher organic rankings. When your client asks how their SEO campaign is performing, you can look at the report and tell them that specific technical pain points have been addressed and eliminated. Building Better Backlinks Disavowing spammy backlinks and replacing them with new, high-authority ones will increase search algorithms’ perception of your client’s website. As you accumulate a better link portfolio, you can identify this as a key return on investment. Content Quality is King SEO content is the vehicle that drives multiple aspects of your SEO strategy. From integrating keywords to providing rich copy and lengthening text on a page, these tactics all help expand your client’s reach. Beyond this, also focusing on the quality and context of the content will further increase its relevance to your target user base and the search engines that are providing them with the information they’re seeking. The Right Keyword Opportunities Matching relevant, high-volume keywords with the right search intent will better position the content on your website in front of those that are looking for it. Determining the best keywords for your client’s website, and then performing actions to optimize for them should start with the audit phase and continue steadily over time. Desirable Directory Listings As we mentioned above, a great portfolio of desired directory listings is a major funnel for referral traffic. When you optimize your client’s presence across the right directories, you can point to a likely increase in organic referral traffic as a significant return. Holistic, Transparent Reporting Transparent reports of your SEO campaign compile your efforts into a single resource to demonstrate ROI. These reports should be transparent, offer human insights to add context to the data and touch on specific actions that moved the needle forward for your client’s website performance. Drive Better SEO ROI With a White Label Partnership At Conduit, we partner with successful agencies to provide premium white label fulfillment solutions for their clients, including SEO. Our in-house team of certified expert analysts, 24/7 Live Reports, and competitive content strategies allow you to say “yes” to better opportunities for current and future clients. To start scaling your agency higher and generate a better SEO ROI for your clients, contact us today to learn more about white label partnership.

May 29, 2020 Conduit Digital has consistently created incredible results for our clients and their campaigns. Communicating effectively with your clients, as well as internally, is a key factor in creating a successful client experience. Do you want to know the secrets to effective communication? It may be easier than you think! Our Director of Client Experience Tim C. Burke, Director of Products Rob Burke, Senior Manager of Client Experience Jessica Applegate, and Social Advertising Manager John Smithson sat down to discuss how effective communication has enabled us to become one of the fastest-growing agencies in the world. How To Communicate Effectively There are many different ways to communicate effectively with your clients. In fact, here are some of the top ways our Senior Manager of Client Experience Jessica Applegate communicates with clients: Be Positive Coming off in a positive way opens the door for positive communication. Approaching a problem positively is how your clients will listen and be engaged. Many times when you are communicating, especially through a message, what you are trying to say may be misinterpreted. Remember The Client’s Goals The intent behind every decision always comes back to their initial goals . Remembering their goals will give you insight into what the client is trying to say, and the message they are trying to get across. When you offer a full suite of products, it can be hard to remember the client’s overall goals as well as their goals for each product. Keeping these goals in mind when communicating with the client will help you to execute those results better, as well as provide optimizations and insights that better align with those goals. Anticipate Your Client’s Needs When you understand the client’s goals, it becomes easier to anticipate their needs and wants. Understand the intent behind the client’s message and anticipate what their follow up message will be. Doing this helps prepare your agency for what the client will say next. Simply responding to the client’s questions is ok communication. Anticipating what they are going to say next and being prepared for that will greatly increase the client’s trust in you. “Good Communication Is Like Dancing” They say that it takes two to tango. Communication is a lot like that. You need to know where your client is going to go next. This will help you to save time not only in your communication with the client, but internally as well. You will be able to address multiple concerns in one message, saving you a headache down the road. Communication can go in so many different ways, especially with all the ways we can communicate today. Once goals are established, it comes down to actionable next steps. One way to do this is to always iterate back to the client what they asked for in the first place. This helps frame the conversation around a topic that is familiar to the client and helps to get all parties on the same page. By reiterating the client’s concerns, your agency can avoid miscommunication issues later on. It also makes it easier to ensure that any actionable next steps are actually getting done. Don’t let your next steps remain in limbo because the client didn’t understand the communication. Internal Communications Having effective internal communication is key when it comes to properly executing campaigns. From the Ad-Ops side, having a defined and repeatable process is super important. Often times, analysts have to explain technical things in laymen’s terms. This means the analyst has to be well-versed in the data, be able to pull out notable insights, and be able to effectively relay these insights to the client experience team. This all starts with a process. Some of the most successful companies in the world such as McDonald’s or Ford were built on processes that helped them to be more efficient than their competitors. The same is true for modern digital agencies. At Conduit Digital, we take advantage of internal communication platforms such as Teamwork and Slack. The Customer Experience Team maximizes every ounce of the Teamwork Platform to make sure we’re the Leaders of Proactive Communication! In fact, we use this revolutionary platform for: Client Communication Creative Asset Library Form Storage Client Milestones And everything else regarding your client’s campaign! Transparency Is Key Just as it is increasingly important to be transparent about your clients’ performance and data, being able to effectively communicate these results with your clients will help you to gain far more credibility than your competitors. It is important to ensure your outbound and internal communications are not only effective, but actually help you to gain. When it comes to client communication, transparency is one of, if not the biggest, factor. However, it is not just data transparency, but also transparency in deadlines, results, and deliverables. Having a dedicated client experience team has enabled us here at Conduit Digital to bridge the gap between client expectations and agency performance. Our in-house team enables us to effectively and accurately lay out exactly what kind of deliverables they are paying for, how our services affect client ROI, and what campaign performance results to expect. One of the ways we remain transparent and open with our clients and their end-clients is through our revolutionary Live Reporting. Our completely transparent Live Report is updated 24/7 with the essential data and KPIs your clients need to see. We do this so that our Agency Partners and their clients are always clear on goals, expectations, and performance. We even write a campaign narrative to explain the insights from our analysts! By offering a similar live data report, you can be sure that you are always on the same page and are built for success . Live Report Example What Not To Do Gone are the days of unclear deliverables and weeks going by without client engagement. If your agency is not putting a priority on client communication, you will fall behind your competitors. Only by creating clear internal processes and prioritizing internal communication will you be able to communicate effectively with your clients. Develop a repeatable process and you will be able to scale your agency. Conclusion Closing the disconnect between client expectation and performance will be a key factor for any successful agency in 2020. It is more important now than ever to ensure you have the team and infrastructure in place to properly execute effective communication not only with your clients, but within your company as well. Conduit Digital works with thousands of clients every single month and we know from trial and error and experience that having a client communication process that works is one of the keys to successful client communication.

Apr 16, 2020 BigQuery is Google’s serverless, highly scalable, enterprise data warehouse. This large-scaled data bank was designed to make a data analyst’s job more productive with unmatched price-performances. Simply put, BigQuery is where Google gives analysts a place to store and manage petabytes of data without the hassle of managing the infrastructure. In today’s age managing an onsite data warehouse is very challenging, expensive, and time-consuming. Google saw the impending issue of big data and how it would impact businesses and the way they use data for analytics and insights. Thanks to Google this has cut time and my personal stress in half. Instead of buying multimillion-dollar servers that would need to be upgraded as demands, Google increased by scaling out and buying a lot of cheaper servers. This now would be Google’s mission of figuring out a way to make them work together to meet demands. One would say Google scaled out and not up. And when it came time to scale more, the company bought a few more machines, instead of having to upgrade the multimillion-dollar server. This helped Google create a high-performance, cost-effective, data warehouse for pretty much anyone that has and more importantly needs to analyze data. How It Works Google BigQuery is a cloud- based , fully managed, serverless enterprise data warehouse that supports analytics over petabyte-scale data. It delivers high-speed analysis of large datasets without requiring investments in onsite infrastructure or database administrators. The most impressive and unique feature BigQuery has is its ability to scale up and down depending on the need of each query, it will add and remove computing power as well as storage resources as required. This is how BigQuery can run queries on terabytes of data in seconds. Let us take a step back and define what a query exactly is. A query is simply a question. When one types a search term or terms into Google they are running a “search query” the keywords are sent to the search engine and are processed using an algorithm that retrieves related results from the search index. The results of the query appear on a search engine results page. When it comes to BigQuery one would run a database query, the database stores data in a structured format. When one runs their query they are essentially doing the same as when they type in search terms in Google, the query runs scouring the structured data finding what is needed and returning it in the form of pictorials, graphs or complex data manipulations. Google BigQuery is a part of the Google Cloud Platform and works in harmony, but both are not required for the other. BigQuery is designed to help expedite the analysis of big data. While ultimately eliminating storage as well as overhead costs. This then also eliminates the complex nature of maintaining onsite hardware and administrative resources. Below is a list of some of the advantages BigQuery has to offer according to Enterprise Strategy Group. Time To Value Users can get their data warehouse environment online quickly and easily, without requiring expert-level system and database administration skills by eliminating the infrastructure and reducing the management (known as “No-Ops” or “Zero-Ops”). Simplicity Complete all major tasks related to data warehouse analytics through an intuitive interface without the hassle of managing the infrastructure. Scalability Scale up to petabytes or down to kilobytes depending on your size, performance, and cost requirements. Speed Ingest, query, and export PB-sized datasets with impressive speeds using the Google Cloud Platform as the underlying cloud infrastructure. Reliability Ensure always-on availability and constant uptime running on the Google Cloud Platform with geo-replication across Google data centers. Security Protect and control access to encrypted projects and datasets through Google’s cloud-wide identity and access management (IAM). Cost Optimization Predict costs with transparent flat rate and/or pay-as-you-go pricing, and contain costs through the use of project and user resource quotas. Bigquery is Self-Scaling Google BigQuery is self-scaling, which means it identifies the resources required for each query to finish quickly and efficiently and provides those resources to meet the demand. Once the demand has been met and the workload completed, it will reallocate the resources that were required to finish the task quickly and efficiently to other projects and other users who need it at that moment. This is how BigQuery successfully runs queries on massive amounts of data. Both in transferring data in and in processing that data for results, BigQuery is capable of delivering immense speeds even at petabyte scales. For enhanced data durability, BigQuery provides high availability and reliability through geographic replication that is completely transparent to its users, and without the requirement to obtain the physical resources and space to house it all. Google BigQuery enables organizations to combat the cost and complexity challenges that come with building and maintaining a fast, scalable, and reliable big data infrastructure. By utilizing Google BigQuery’s cloud-based approach, the time and cost traditionally dedicated to protecting data and guaranteeing the time needed for computing is drastically reduced. Best Practices For Controlling Costs Now, Google’s BigQuery gives not one, but all the necessary tools to make it what they need. Only pay for the storage and compute resources used, thanks to BigQuery’s serverless architecture. BigQuery’s separation of storage and computing makes it easy to scale independently and endlessly on demand, resulting in low-cost, economical storage. BigQuery can lower the total cost of ownership by 56%–88%. One can analyze up to 1 TB of data and store 10 GB of data for free each month. But if someone is not paying close attention to the way they are running their queries they could incur costs not expected. This is because of BigQuery charges based on the size of the queries one runs. If one needs to run a query that only needs to pull from, let us say, 10 columns or rows, and they run a full query on all the columns or rows, they will be incurring the costs of running a full query on all of their data in that table. If one has terabytes of data this query could cost them a pretty penny. This is when setting up tables based on queries frequently run will save money in the long run. This is where we put the time and effort into creating tables with fewer columns for queries we run frequently for reporting. By doing so, every time we are reporting we are only using the exact number of columns (data) we need to complete the job. What Google Recommends Not pulling in any excess columns causing increased costs. Going off only querying the columns of data one needs, Google recommends to not use the SELECT * option when running their queries. Using SELECT * is the most expensive way to query data. When one uses SELECT *, BigQuery does a full scan of every column in the table. Now one can still use the SELECT * option when running a query, Google recommends using SELECT * EXCEPT to exclude one or more columns from the results. This will allow the analyst to select only the columns they need to query helping control costs. Personally, we would not recommend using the SELECT * option when running queries in the event one mistakenly misses columns they wanted to exclude from the query. For this reason as previously mentioned, we have taken the time out to create destination tables which we can sort by date ranges to only query the data we absolutely need to. In addition to the ability to create destination tables to control costs, BigQuery has an awesome feature that allows analysts to price their queries before running them. According to Google, queries are billed according to the number of bytes read. To estimate costs before running a query: View the query validator in the Cloud Console or the classic web UI Use the Google Cloud Platform Pricing Calculator Perform a dry run by using the: –dry_run flag in the CL dryRun parameter when submitting a query job using the API BigQuery also has the ability to use the maximum bytes billed setting to limit query costs. This can limit the number of bytes billed for a query using. One can accomplish this by using the maximum bytes billed setting. When setting maximum bytes billed, if the query will read bytes beyond the limit, the query fails without incurring a charge. If a query fails because of the maximum bytes billed setting, an error like the following is returned: Error: Query exceeded limit for bytes billed: 1000000. 10485760 or higher required. How Bigquery Has Helped Conduit Here at Conduit, we were faced with a similar issue Google was when they set out on their journey to create BigQuery. We hit a point where we needed our reports to be smoother and faster, and find a solution that could handle all our data from our 1,500 monthly clients. This was not an easy feat, we needed a solution that was simplistic, reliable, affordable and not limited in its scaling and speed capabilities. After months of researching, we narrowed our search down to BigQuery. For us, BigQuery had time to value ratio we could not match with other applications, let alone when we compared it to our previous process. At one point in time, we were pulling our client data into reports via Google and Excel sheets. This did not just pose an issue for us in its scaling capabilities when we hit a certain amount of data, it was as slow as molasses. BigQuery solved that issue for us, with its pretty much limitless scaling capabilities as well as its ability to process petabytes of data in seconds! Simplicity Simplicity was another factor we valued heavily. We needed something we could get a grasp on and manage in house, helping us control costs and manipulate our data in a way we wanted. BigQuery provides us with the infrastructure to not only store our data but transform it utilizing queries so that we can connect our data sources in as lightweight of a way as possible. Helping us control costs in the long run. Scalability Touching back on our need for scalability, with 1,500 clients monthly and most clients running multiple campaigns with us we were in need of an application that could scale with our tremendous growth. BigQuery was designed with that in mind, having virtually no limitations on scalability with the combination of its low costs is a great price point for analytics data. Speed We were not just looking for a solution that was simple and had massive potential for scalability it also needed to be blazing fast to give us the ability to have real time reporting. BigQuery’s serverless infrastructure provides us with the speeds we need to accomplish all of our reporting needs. The infrastructure provided by BigQuery would be unreachable for most companies. Access to that type of computing power is not common and would cost companies an unfathomable amount of money to accomplish (a bit of an exaggeration but you get the point). With BigQuery’s capability to run a 4.06TB query in roughly 24 seconds, our search for a solution that had the speed capabilities we required ended there. Reliability Reliability also played a massive role in our search. The need for a reliable infrastructure to eliminate the need for our own was top of mind. BigQuery provided us with exactly that. According to Google, this is exactly how they accomplish their unmatched reliability, “BigQuery has a geographically diverse team of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) who monitor the service 24/7 for outages, performance degradation, latency, and failures. SREs track the service against internal SLOs, which are often much stricter than public SLAs. We are also able to help customers research not-so-obvious SQL issues. The BigQuery team works behind the scenes to help ensure that you get the most current software stack running on fantastic infrastructure. To that end, we may seamlessly migrate your queries to a different data center (while of course respecting the dataset location constraints you’ve set, e.g., if you’ve asked that it remains in Europe). This means that your BigQuery queries may run in one data center in your region in the morning, and in another data center in the afternoon, as we roll out a new version of Dremel, upgrade networking or hardware or implement a new compression algorithm.” Protection Simplicity, speed, and reliability were not all we were looking for; we needed security above all. With over 1,500 clients and all the data that comes with that volume, we needed to make sure our clients were protected. BigQuery makes this possible by encrypting projects and datasets through Google’s cloud-wide identity and access management (IAM). Conclusion When it boils down to it all, cost is the overall deciding factor. Not only saving you money but also time. BigQuerys transparent pricing allows us to easily calculate and forecast costs based on the number of reports we create and the queries we run. On top of that, BigQuery allows 1 TB of data and store 10 GB of data for free each month. Making the switch was a no brainer. With all of this, we hope to have brought some light to your current and stressful process. If you are looking for a White-Label Digital Solution to help you lighten the load and make your current process more streamlined and stress-free, contact Conduit Digital. We have the tools, knowledge, and expertise to bring your clients’ digital campaigns to the next level. See how Partnership with Conduit can help grow your agency to the moon.

Apr 17, 2020 It can take you 3 months to land a client. And only 1 email to lose them. Our CEO Tim S. Burke , Director of Ad Ops Rob Burke , Director of Client Experience Tim C. Burke , and Senior Manager of Search and Social Kwasi Asare-Darko sat down to discuss reducing agency churn by demonstrating value. Check out some of the awesome tips and tricks on how your agency can reduce churn and keep your business growing in 2020. What Is Churn Rate? Before we get into the ways your agency can reduce churn rate, first we should discuss what churn rate even is. Churn rate, in a very broad sense, is the measure of the number of people or items that are moving out over a certain period of time. Having a low churn rate essentially means the number of clients who leave your agency are out weighed by the number who stay or sign on. As an agency owner, or anyone in the business market, you want to reduce the number of clients leaving your business so your profit continues to grow. How Do you Calculate Churn Rate? In order to calculate churn rate, you need to take the number of clients your agency lost last quarter and then divide it by the number of client’s you started with. This will give you your churn rate. For example, if your agency had 100 clients and lost 20 over the course of the quarter, your churn rate is 20%. What is A “Good” Churn Rate? If your churn rate is 10% or higher, it may indicate that your customer management may need to be relooked at and altered. Having a high churn rate can be an indicator that something in the way you conduct business needs to change and lucky for you, we have a few tips that can help with that. Why Decreasing Churn Is So Important The issue of agency client churn is an issue that is near and dear to our hearts. In a lot of ways, we have made it our mission to decrease client churn as much as possible. Why? When you work so hard to land a client, then optimize and strategize on a campaign to bring them great results, only for them to leave, it is a lot like running in place. You want your agency to be in a place where you are constantly growing and moving forward. When a client leaves you, they’re not saying good things about you and that’s number one. The other thing is the activity around that is that it’s just bad optics internally when people leave so it leaves you running in place. We want our agency friends to run forward. Why Do Clients Churn Sometimes you can run a campaign to perfection and create incredible results for your clients. Yet for some reason, they still want to leave. So what are the biggest reasons that agencies experience client churn? Expectations One of the biggest reasons agencies churn clients are improper expectations. For example, we’ve seen as we’re executing OTT campaigns, people might not be saying that they are expecting to see their ads on Hulu coming in. As an agency, you know the budget that you are utilizing is maximized at a lower entry point. So while their ads may be served on Pluto, which is a rock star in the OTT industry, they might not have heard of it. They were expecting to see their ads on Hulu, or even Netflix and Disney+ platforms that don’t deliver ads. Making sure to fully communicate goals and expectations to the client will help them understand what they bought. Although it may seem obvious to us, guiding them through your process is a better way to ensure they won’t leave. We believe transparency is key. Try showing prospective clients an example report before they have even signed on to build that trust and expectation. Expectations also have another level. Before a client starts working with an agency they have to have reasons why they’re working with that agency. A lot of times we talk about all of the campaign goals but we don’t talk about how did you find us, where did you find us, why do you want to work with us and discuss what’s right for them. One of the things that a lot of digital agencies do in particular is lead with data that’s the wrong data. Agencies push metrics like CPC and the number of impressions that are much less significant to a business owner than how many people walked in and purchased or purchased online. Ultimately you know we say all the time around here it’s CPC and it’s SEO but it’s really ROI. Leading With ROI ROI has to be really part of the upfront discussion of, what do you want to happen at your business. If you’re gonna spend $5,000 on a campaign, whether it’s traditional or digital, what do you want to have happen in your business for you to continue to want to do that. Focusing on ROI first is so important, but usually in the first few weeks of any campaign, we’re really gathering data, we’re testing, we’re trying to produce results. However, the data is always going to dictate how to go about it. It is important that a baseline is established of how this is working at the bottom of the funnel, driving conversions and leads, and how that’s impacting your client’s business. It is not necessarily a great thing to show impressions or show clicks right off the bat because that data doesn’t become important until it’s established that this many impressions on percentage basis leads to this many clicks, which on a percentage basis leads to this many conversions, which on the percentage at least this much real return on ad spend. It Starts With The Sales Process In the sales process, if you’re just going to rush in to close the deal and then just throw it over the fence, it’s a recipe for churn right away. If you’re just rushing through and not really truly understanding the needs of the client, you’re setting yourself up for failure. People buy advertising for a reason, and it’s not always the same reason. Get to the bottom of what it is they’re really looking to have happen at their business and then having your solution be able to drive that end result. It comes down to establishing that upfront, and then all the data that you’ve gathered can support that direction. A lot of clients are looking for a checkmark. For example, they hear that PPC is a solution for them so they just expect to see a PPC campaign. However, it’s the job of the agency to push a little bit to find out what exactly they want to do and why they want to do that. Have honest conversations with the client when they’re telling you I know what’s right. Be able to show them or just have a blunt conversation with them that you’re not right. No one wants to be told they’re not right but the fact of the matter is, as an agency you can’t be held accountable for producing results any other than your way. If you were going to write a prescription, you would want to know what’s in that medicine. What it really comes down to is the ability to say listen I heard you loud and clear what you want to have happen at this business. Here are the steps that we’re going to take to get there. It’s All About Helping The Client Grow Our job as agencies is to help clients grow. To get there, you need to have benchmarks supported by return on investment. Ultimately it’s got to be done in a way that allows you to achieve not only the clients win, but the collective win results from the way your agency created those results. If you’re going to just do it to please your clients, then start the clock because that client is going to churn. You weren’t hired for them to give the direction if you’re telling. If you have to, tell them that they’re wrong off the bat. Stop, Collaborate, and Listen Your client knows their business better than you know their business. So the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. If the client is looking for a direction that might not work, just remember they’re still bringing that up for a reason. Be willing to test for your client or be willing to say you know what this just won’t work but here’s something that will. When you have to have the conversation about why something didn’t work, have it with data. Numbers don’t lie numbers don’t lie. Otherwise, you’re just saying no and it’s based on your opinion. That’s when it becomes a combative relationship. Compromise with your client and work together to make intelligent decisions based on data. If the client’s only goal is to see their OTT ad, then absolutely we can make that happen. But the data will always support the direction. You can spend a client’s budget on some impressions if that’s truly all they want, but it is far better to let the data lead the path to results. As the agency, it is your responsibility to discuss through and educate the client whilst using their business goals as the platform. Trust and Credibility We talk a lot here about trust and credibility. They are really the things that have to be sold on a regular basis to any client. If they don’t trust you it’s gonna be a hard relationship to manage if you don’t have the credibility. Guide them to their goals or they’re not going to pay attention. In every sale that we’ve gotten, the first things we have to do to maintain this relationship are trust and credibility, and those things can’t be broken. Listen to your client but ultimately the client tells you what it is that they want. In the ad space, it’s us assisting them and how to do it the right way. Trust and credibility can be proven through transparency as well. In the last edition of the Conduit Connections Pain Point Series, we talked about effective communication, proactive communication, and owning mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. How you handle those mistakes is the mark of true transparency. Conclusion Decreasing churn is a major problem for any agency. Closing the disconnect between client expectation and performance will be a key factor for any successful agency in 2020. It is more important now than ever to ensure you have an honest and open dialogue with your clients, set realistic expectations, and dive deep into their ultimate goals. In a world of SEO, PPC, and KPIs, always remember that the most important metric is ROI. Conduit Digital works with thousands of clients every single month and we know from trial and error and experience how to decrease churn by proving results. Partnering with an agency like Conduit Digital that understands your needs and can help achieve to your client’s expectations is a sure way to decrease overall customer churn.

May 23, 2022 Beyond performance and communication, digital marketing is a deliverables-driven industry. Your client invests all or some of their marketing budget in your team’s services and they expect something tangible in return. However, without a strategy in place for producing deliverables on a consistent basis, these tangible assets can fall to the wayside in the midst of any marketing campaign. This can impact your ability to scale and show your client the incredible work that you have done for them. Instead of an ad-hoc deliverable process, committing to a production schedule will ensure that your agency is able to regularly provide your clients with something concrete that proves your performance. In this guide, we are going to cover exactly how you can do this. How Consistent Deliverables Benefit Your Agency While each digital marketing agency will have its own pulse, there are a few universal benefits of consistent deliverables for any business in the industry. These include: Managed Expectations With a strong deliverable infrastructure, both your team and client know what to expect and when to expect it. This helps create more transparent internal and external communication and provides an objective foundation for the client’s campaign. Better Revenue Management When priced accurately, consistent deliverables can impact your agency’s revenue in multiple ways, such as: You’ll know how much time is spent on them (labor costs) You’ll know how much a client is paying for each deliverable each month You’ll know how many deliverables are sent to clients each month (total revenue) You’ll know how to better price your services at the start of a new campaign Providing a client with tangible deliverables on a month-in, month-out basis will allow you to better forecast your agency’s revenue on both a line item level and a holistic level. This will also equip you with greater financial insight to make more informed decisions for your agency as a business. A More Efficient Work Environment When you tie your agency’s deliverables to a recurring schedule, your team knows exactly what is expected of them for client work each month. They can better plan for months and weeks in advance and prioritize the most important services for your client with greater clarity. A full view of deliverable expectations also opens up more transparent communication. If you need to address certain roadblocks in your processes that impact performance, you can identify these issues, discuss them, and correct them in collaboration with your team. Manage Capacity More Effectively Lastly, but certainly not least important, a transparent view of your expected deliverables can help visualize your internal capacity. Is your team at their maximum? Is it time to hire someone new or find a partner to help you manage overflow? Common Types of Digital Marketing Deliverables Have you ever itemized the individual types of deliverables that you offer to your clients? Here are some general and product or service-specific examples that you might fulfill on a regular basis: SEO or organic social content audits Paid media campaign reports Creative assets (graphics, videos, etc.) Content marketing assets Strategy blueprints Price quotes for new campaigns Monthly performance recaps There are certainly many more possible deliverables than the ones listed above that your agency could produce for your clients. However, these are some of the most commonly used in the industry and are relatively seamless to implement into a consistent strategy. 4: Tips for Creating a Scalable Deliverables System for Your Agency 1: Create a Standardized Universal List of Deliverables What are the core deliverables that you offer a client when they onboard with your agency? This can be decided on a holistic or product-specific level. For example, you may include a monthly report that offers an overview of each of their individual campaigns’ performance metrics. At the product level, you may have more specific deliverables that pertain directly to that service. Many search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns often include some form of content marketing deliverables like blog posts or on-page content optimizations. You may also benefit from creating a tiered system so that you can standardize your deliverables more efficiently. For instance, you can offer SEO blog posts to your client by approximate word count and price them uniquely based on the scope. 2: Tie These Deliverables to Time Spent As the ancient sages of business wisdom have said for eternity, time is money. Spending too much time on creating a deliverable can cut against your profits and affect your agency’s scalability. When creating new deliverables, time tracking is essential. A 750-word article should take less time to produce than one that exceeds 1000. As you produce deliverables for your agency’s clients, make sure your team is tracking the time spent on creating them so that you can gauge the average turnaround for each. This does not mean that you have to be the chief of the time police as an agency leader. As an inescapable factor of agency life, you will encounter some outlier deliverables that take longer to complete than others for one reason or another. One client may be more detail-oriented and desire more granular information in their report than another. If you notice that this becomes a consistent obstacle for your team, initiate the conversation to see how you can help them reduce the excess time needed to complete their deliverable. 3: Create a Reasonable Calendar for Turnarounds Deadlines drive consistency. When deliverables are expected on a recurring basis by a certain date, your team has the necessary advance notice so that they can start working. However, a deadline calendar should never be decided in a silo. Meet with your team and ask them how many days they need on average to produce specific deliverables for your clients. They may need five business days to develop a blog post and ten to finish a paid social campaign report. You can also set objective calendar dates for specific deliverables. For example, you could create a policy that all reports from the previous month are due to the clients by the 15th of the current month. This creates universal expectations that become easier to track agency-wide from the managers to the analysts. A deliverables calendar does not have to remain set in stone. As you implement one at your agency, monitor how it impacts your team’s performance for better or worse. If you need to improve in some key areas, have open conversations with your team and ask them where they are encountering friction and how you can collaborate to make it more effective. 4: Join Forces with a White Label Partner As your agency scales and volume increases, you do not have to shoulder the burden of the added pressure alone. Instead, combine your efforts with a trusted white label digital marketing partner that can assist you in stabilizing your capacity, managing your expenses, and assisting you in consistent deliverable production. You can leave your client’s campaigns in the trusted hands of certified experts in their product areas so that you can continue focusing more on your business’s core competencies without deliverables falling to the wayside. Unlike a highly transactional and unpredictable white label platform or vendor, a partner is fully invested in your agency as a true extension of your in-house team. With a full suite of products, agile communication, and comprehensive reporting, partnership positions your agency to scale as new and better opportunities present themselves. Start Your Journey Toward Partnership Today Conduit Digital partners with successful agencies to elevate your ability to scale profitably by outfitting your team with the necessary communication and performance infrastructure to confidently say “yes” to any incredible new opportunity that presents itself. Working with us, your agency will experience the following: 100% U.S.-produced campaign deliverables Access to certified in-house product experts 24/7 live reports Monthly recaps for client campaigns Personalized SEO and Social Content audits Campaign launch blueprints Client-specific monthly deliverables Margin-friendly rate cards Though we’re immensely proud of our work, we understand if your agency wants to keep its branding consistent. That’s why all of our deliverables can also be custom-branded under your agency or client. Are you ready for partnership ? To learn more about scaling your digital marketing deliverable capabilities higher than previously possible, schedule a call today.

Feb 2, 2022 What You Need to Know About Google Topics In a blog post last year , we discussed how Google was replacing support for third-party cookies with a new first-party methodology: Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). Fast forward to January 2022, and the search engine giant has replaced FLoC with the Google Topics API. Whenever a major industry platform announces a paradigm shift that can affect your client’s campaigns, it could be an understandable reaction to hit the panic button. However, when these changes happen, it’s better to get ahead of them than play catch-up weeks or months after the fact. Today, we are going to cover everything we know so far about the new Google Topics to help you prepare your agency for this new digital frontier. Prepare Your Agency to Scale with Google Topics How is Google Topics Different from FLoC? When FLoC Was introduced, it was touted as a promising alternative to third-party cookies. Instead of relying on external tracking systems, FLoC aimed to provide targeting data through lookalike audiences created by Google’s own machine learning capabilities. These lookalike audiences were compiled based on users’ similar search behaviors and grouped together (“cohorts”). Topics introduced a new paradigm shift that no longer relies on lookalike audiences as its primary tracking method. Rather, Topics prioritizes protecting the privacy of Google users while continuing to serve relevant ads. Targeting while now be based primarily on personal interests by separating personal information from personal interests without sharing specific sites you visit across the entirety of the web. With this new approach, Google categorizes your browsing history into one of its 300 initial topics for three weeks at a time (though this number is expected to grow in the future). Users will be able to edit their topics, remove certain ones, or opt-out altogether. Google will not be categorizing search behavior into topics like one’s race, gender, or any sensitive medical condition. Instead, they emphasize user interests like music, sports, and automobiles. For example, if you are visiting a participating website that features information about your favorite NBA team, Google will categorize you under the “Sports” topic. This will then influence the ads that you receive in the future while maintaining privacy over your personal data. After three weeks have passed, if you have not further consumed this type of content, you will be removed from that Topic category. How Will Topics Affect Client Campaigns? Digital marketing products like Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), YouTube, and Display Advertising are projected to be most impacted by this new development, as they are directly within Google’s sphere of influence. However, just because these products involve heavy interaction with Google, that does not mean that agencies should hit the panic button. Topics’ Effect on Google’s Sphere of Influence In anticipation of Google Topics’ rollout, we spoke to some of our certified product analysts at Conduit to get their opinions on these changes. SEO Though Topics will primarily impact paid advertising campaigns, we can also assume that this new development will affect organic search efforts to an extent. Categories will provide Google’s algorithm with a high-level generalization of what the content on a website is about. For SEO campaigns, identifying highly relevant keywords with strong search volume and low-to-intermediate difficulty scores will remain a priority. Beyond this, these keywords should be integrated into clear, well-written, and easily understood content that can aid Google in providing better organic search results to users and ensure a more accurate topic categorization. It will be tough to predict how Topics will affect long-term SEO relevancy until the changes are implemented and the data has enough time to populate. Google often refrains from releasing specific details surrounding the changes to protect its IP, but the actual data will tell a more complete story when it has a chance to generate in real-time. Paid Search The Topics API is expected to generalize users into less-granular audiences than advertisers were previously able to target. As a result, competition will increase for broader pools of users that could vary in relevance. Additionally, depending on the path to conversion for the product or service your client is promoting, audience sizes could fluctuate due to the 3-week time frame as users enter and leave topics via search behavior. However, this shouldn’t be seen as a red alert in all cases. The new time frame may lead to the ability to target users who have intent at that moment, which could prove useful for commercially and transactionally focused campaigns. As a result, timely campaigns will become more important than ever. Strategies should continue to be refined and updated to maintain as much relevancy to the customer moment as possible. Programmatic Advertising (YouTube & Display) While Google Topics may improve on the concepts introduced with FLoC, this recent change will require some time to measure its full impact on programmatic campaigns. Predictably, remarketing efforts and third-party audience targeting in terms of reach and measurement will be affected by Topics. This change will continue to emphasize the importance of leveraging first-party platform data for advertising campaigns, as we saw with the introduction of FLoC. Like we discussed with Paid Search above, programmatic campaigns will also experience a significant emphasis on timeliness. Audience sizes will fluctuate in a similar fashion, so having a strategy in place to meet the context of the moment will be essential for maintaining relevance. Key Takeaways Strong Keyword Strategies Will Matter More than Ever for Search Since Google’s earliest days as a simple search engine, keywords have played an instrumental role in briefing algorithms on the subject matter of a page on your client’s website. Though best practices for keywords have evolved over the decades, they remain as relevant as ever. This applies to both paid and organic search campaigns. Identifying high-opportunity keywords with desirable search volume and low competition will give clients a unique edge to reach their desired users. Holistic Strategies are a Must, Not a Luxury As online privacy trends continue toward first-party data, holistic campaigns will also become an absolute requirement for driving elite performance for clients. To ensure you are reaching the right audience across the full digital marketing spectrum, a strategy that combines organic and paid media, as well as implementation across all platforms, will become essential. Relevant Content Will Continue to Remain King Connected, contextual, and strategic content will continue to play an instrumental role in your client’s strategy. From landing pages to informational pages on their website, blog posts, and digital media, messaging will supercharge the engine that drives the campaign. Build a content strategy that integrates the following elements: High-opportunity keywords Unique need-feature-benefit messaging Multiple mediums (text, video, images, etc.) Brand-faithful tone Appropriate word counts for the digital channel Ad Experience and Messaging Will Matter More than Ever With more diverse audiences resulting from Topics, creating ad experiences that speak to moe individuals will be an essential component of an elite campaign. Simply put: You’re going to be reaching more types of people more often! Leaning on traditional marketing wisdom, maintaining a focus on the customer’s need, the features of your product/service, and the benefit it provides them will continue to prove highly effective for client campaigns. Use clear, easily understandable language that will allow your client’s unique value to shine through. Update Your Campaigns Frequently to Keep them Relevant With Topics’ timely nature, campaign strategies should be updated regularly to capitalize on trends and events that are relevant to your client’s business. For example, if your client is an HVAC service provider, you may want to update your messaging every three weeks to change with their target audience’s seasonal needs or with evolving weather activity in their local area. How to Prepare Your Agency for Google Topics Communicate These Changes (Positively) to Your Clients Demonstrate your agency’s authority in the industry and reach out to your clients to offer a briefing on Google Topics. Address anticipated questions like: What does this mean for my campaign(s)? How will this affect the targeting strategy already in place? What will your agency be doing to adapt to the change? Taking a proactive and transparent approach by offering these kinds of insights to the client will help establish greater trust in the account relationship. Additionally, this will increase your credibility to the businesses that you work with and position your agency as a true expert they can rely on. Familiarize Your In-House Team with Google Topics Take the time to research Google Topics and provide these resources to your in-house team. Even if they are not hands-on with your ad operations processes, having this knowledge will increase the quality of client communication and equip everyone with the means to answer their questions effectively. Seek Out a Partner that Can Help You Navigate These Updates The number-one concern for many agencies in light of Google Topics: How will I continue to drive elite campaigns for my clients with another new targeting framework? By combining efforts with a white label digital marketing partner, you can access an entire team of certified ad operations experts with the necessary tools and expertise to provide that elite performance. Without the additional overhead of hiring and/or training an in-house team for a Google Topics world, you can onboard new campaigns with an established partner that has prepared for these new targeting parameters. This positions your client’s campaigns for optimal performance potential while allowing your agency to remain profitable and competitive in your market. Elevate Your Agency’s Performance on Google with a White Label Partnership At Conduit, we partner with successful agencies to extend their in-house team with a full suite of digital products designed for scaling profitably. Whether you are looking to manage capacity and bandwidth, offer a more competitive suite of services, or you just want to maximize performance, our ad operations team helps you achieve these goals without ever offshoring or outsourcing. To learn more about how we can align with your agency to help you say “yes” to more opportunities, visit our Agency Partnership page today or schedule a 20-minute discovery call below:

Mar 10, 2021 Last year, Google announced it would be going cookieless. The leading search platform will  soon cease supporting third-party cookies on Chrome. Beyond that, they also did not provide a plan for alternatives that advertisers could use to target third-party data and measure performance.  Fast forward to about a week ago, Google stated they will not only stop tracking third-party cookies, but they are also not going to build alternative tracking solutions either. Advertisers that relied on this behavioral data are now left to navigate a new, cookieless frontier.  Industry insiders and advertisers have anticipated this announcement for some time. Discussions surrounding data privacy like GDPR, CCPA, and iOS 14 updates have all pointed toward further restricted access to third-party user data. This announcement from Google is just the latest addition to the trend that emphasizes protecting user privacy and bolstering their privacy-first web initiative.  An official blog to announce this was released on the 3rd of March 2021was accompanied with CTV ads targeted at reassuring users of Google’s desire to protect their privacy. For an advertiser or agency, this is a big deal, but there is no need to panic just yet. Here’s what you need to know about how this move will affect you.  How It Affects Search Ads (Including Shopping Ads) Before the cookieless panic sets in, remember: We are still about a year or more away from these third-party cookie policies being implemented. While we cannot say definitively, you should note that paid search campaigns rely almost entirely on targeting keywords and not user behavior.  When running search campaigns, you are trying to match keywords with user intent using your Google Ads account. A click on the ad directs the user to your website where they will explore your site or perform an intended action.  The data collected from these behaviors, as long as the site remains GDPR-compliant, is tracked using the Urchin Tracking Model (UTM) and no personally identifiable information (PII) is revealed! There exists a similar process for shopping ads where there is little-to-no dependence on PII to run a standard campaign.  So, what does this all mean? Put simply: Google’s latest move will almost certainly not impact search or shopping ads in any way. It should not affect traffic or the ability to drive users to your website.  How It Affects Display Ads Most advertisers are concerned primarily about the third-party cookie announcement’s impact on display ads. Google’s new technology, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC) creates a lookalike audience that protects user privacy by leveraging machine learning (ML) to process the behavior of web users on their devices.  Google assures advertisers that this will allow for targeting with nearly the same accuracy as third-party cookies within 95% similarity. Instead of having the exact user data to work with, campaign managers will now be referencing near-exact information based on the lookalike audience model.  Early FloC testing appears promising and it does not look like the minimal data loss will impact marketers and advertisers in a significant way. In fact, Google asserts that one does not need to individually identify users to target them.  With all of this said, measurement and analytics will be affected in some ways, although this still remains unclear until these changes are implemented. Google has discussed providing a click-through attribution tool to advertisers once the change has been rolled out, which should further ease any potential perceived new burdens. Prepare for Your Next Campaign without Third Party Cookies These new changes surrounding third-party cookies will likely cause a great deal of concern for many advertisers and marketers in our industry. Thankfully, it appears that Google will be offering a solution that will allow most campaigns to function at similar performance levels.  This announcement from Google will change the way that advertisers have managed campaigns for years. Prepare for this paradigm shift now so that you can stay ahead of the curve when the time comes.  To learn more about advertising best practices as we prepare for this major industry shift, check out our 105 Tips to Crush a Google Ads Campaign and our Ultimate Guide to Programmatic Display Advertising .

Feb 9, 2022 Say “Yes” to Better Opportunities with the Gift of Partnership Everyone appreciates a loving gesture during Valentine’s Day, even agencies. While your business may not blush at a heartfelt letter, smile at the sight of fresh flowers, or admire your brave attempt to battle for the last box of chocolates at the grocery store, there are plenty of other ways to show it the love it deserves. Give Your Agency the Love it Deserves In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, here are some ideas to give your agency something to love this year with the power of a white label partnership. First, What is a “White Label Partner”? As demand for agency services increases, leaders and decision-makers are seeking innovative solutions for scaling beyond their internal capacity and capabilities. White label digital marketing partnerships allow you to extend your in-house team with another team of certified experts while maintaining profitable markups and brand continuity.  However, there are multiple types of white label providers. Chiefly, they are categorized as a platform, vendor, or partner. Here’s how you can tell the difference: Platform: Largely software-based, little support from the provider, requires existing expertise for specific digital marketing services Vendor: Limited scope of products and highly transactional, fee-for-service model, and difficult to gauge the quality of deliverables Partner: Fully integrated into your agency operations, ongoing communication, holistic product suite, and hands-on campaign management by certified product experts At Conduit Digital, we strive to be the elite performance partner for successful digital marketing agencies worldwide. Arming your business with a holistic product suite, single-point-of-contact communication, 100% US-based certified analysts, 24/7 live reporting, and a full library of sales support materials we enable you to say “yes” to those can’t-miss opportunities. 5 Ways to Leverage a White Label Partnership and Show Your Agency Love this Year 1. Equip it With a Holistic Product Suite A holistic product suite allows your agency to proactively identify and meet clients’ needs as they evolve. Your services are helping their businesses grow, and it should be expected that strategies will need to expand, adapt, and pivot over the duration of the account relationship. When your agency is equipped with a full range of services, this gives you the ability to confidently say “yes, we can” to opportunities to expand your accounts. It can also enable you to also quickly onboard new client campaigns at a high level from the onset. With a white label partner, you can instantly onboard new campaigns for digital products beyond your internal scope, such as SEO , Paid Social , and OTT Advertising . All deliverables and reports can be fully rebranded to your agency or client to ensure that you maintain continuity with the rest of your services.  2. Grow Your Team with Expert Analysts In our hundreds of conversations with agency leaders, one topic remains at the top of mind for many: 2022 is all-systems-go. As more businesses across the globe enlist agencies for their digital marketing expertise, this places an additional need to extend in-house teams. As labor shortages continue to impact nearly every industry, stabilizing internal capacity without reducing performance quality is critical. Unlike a vendor or platform, a high-performing partner can supplement your team with a team of their own certified analysts. Look for a partner that offers single-origin campaign management without additional offshoring or outsourcing to ensure higher-quality deliverables and performance. 3. Enhance Your Performance and Reporting You want the best for your agency, and that translates to every aspect of the business. From campaign performance to reporting, you should not feel forced to compromise the high standards you set for yourself and your team. A white label partner is designed to align with driven agencies that value and emphasize performance. From maintaining an internal team of highly qualified product experts to in-depth live reporting, you can enjoy the peace of mind that your client’s campaigns are designed inline with industry best practices while you concentrate more of your bandwidth on sales and your in-house core competencies. 4. Unify Your Campaign Communication At Conduit, we built our white label solution on two foundational pillars: communication and performance. If you’ve read the sections above this one, then you know how much we invest in delivering elite performance for your clients. Now, let’s talk about communication. Communicating in siloes and juggling hundreds of email threads with 20+ contacts Cc’d on every message does not contribute toward your mission to scale your agency. To deliver a better client experience, we house all of our communications on a single project management platform and provide your agency with a Client Experience Specialist who serves as your single point of contact for all of your digital campaigns. This enables you to receive timely, agile responses in the moment where important decisions need to be made. 5. Sell More Effectively and Retain Profitability Beyond communication and performance, a white label partner should also provide you with the sales support materials you need to land and expand new accounts across all products. At minimum, these resources should include: Product playbooks to enhance your knowledge of the new services you offer A guide to help you leverage your new agency partnership effectively A detailed rate card to allow you to create profitable markups for your agency Case studies to show a proven track record of high-level performance The onboarding infrastructure to allow you to press “play” on new campaigns as soon as possible Give Your Agency a True Partner this Year At Conduit, we believe that agencies struggle most when isolated and that community always stands a greater chance to thrive over competition. Your agency team works hard to deliver elite performance for your clients. Show them the love they deserve with a true white label partner. To learn more about how you can show your agency love this year, visit our Agency Partnership page for more information or schedule a brief 20-minute discovery call below.

Apr 24, 2020 On November 26, 2019 Conduit Digital had the unique pleasure of hosting social media influencer and entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk. Also known as “Gary Vee,” he is a well-known figure throughout the digital marketing industry who constantly provides incredible insights into the industry and how to build agency success. Gary Vee came to Conduit to deliver an exclusive agency keynote address on the State of Digital Marketing in 2020. This awesome keynote address was also featured on Gary Vee’s Podcast, “The GaryVee Audio Experience.” Here are the most important things that we learned from Gary’s visit to Conduit. Who is Gary Vee? Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as “Gary Vee,” is one of the leading influencers in the digital marketing industry. Gary Vee got his start over 13 years ago after starting a web series called Wine Library TV. After slowly building a following and an audience, Gary Vee started VaynerMedia, a full-service advertising agency that has grown to work with some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Today, Gary continues to be an influential figure in the marketing and entrepreneurial spaces. He is a highly sought after public speaker, a 5-time New York Times bestselling author, as well as a prolific early angel investor in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and more. Gary Vee visited Conduit for an exclusive event where he discussed the direction of the digital marketing industry, his tips for success, and more. About Conduit Digital Conduit Digital, a division of Traffic Builders , ranked the #21st fastest growing agency in the world by Ad Week, offers the most cost-effective white-label solutions to help you reduce agency overhead and expenses while growing revenue. We provide a complete digital marketing solution with proven results that you can see in real-time with our unique and customizable Live Report. Our client agencies’ success is the Conduit team’s mission. We are not a low-end white label provider and we don’t work with just any agency, we are market exclusive and we are a true competitive advantage. The day you partner with Conduit Digital is the day you become the best digital marketing agency in your market. We invited Gary Vaynerchuk to come to Conduit’s headquarters to talk about the State of Digital Marketing in 2020. Find out what he had to say! What Gary Vee Had To Say During The Keynote Address Gary has so much knowledge of the industry that he could have talked for days! We may have only had 30 minutes with him but the insights he was able to provide during that time will help us here at Conduit plan and execute our 2020 strategies. We want to share this amazing information with you! Here are our biggest takeaways from Gary Vee’s rare agency keynote address. Reconciling Client Expectations VS Agency Values What do you do as a B2B company when so much of what you do relies on what a client sees as success? What do you do when it doesn’t match your company’s point of view of what is happening on the consumer level? Often times there is a disconnect between agencies and their clients on how success is measured. It is becoming increasingly important to bridge the gap between what the end-client expects to see results-wise vs what agencies value in their results for their clients. By learning about a client’s goals and expectations, you will stand a stronger chance at demonstrating the value your results receive. This in turn will help eliminate client churn within your agency. The Current State Of The Internet Despite growing one of the largest and fastest-growing ad agencies in the world, Gary Vee says that VaynerMedia has almost never sold exactly what the market wants at that moment. In 2009, Vayner was selling social media management when some companies he talked to didn’t even know what Facebook and Twitter were. It is hard for some people to understand or remember how new the medium was back then. Today, social media is the current state of the internet. In the mid-90s, search engines and browsers were the state of the internet. After that, it was email. Then search ads, followed by blogging. Finally, Youtube came along, followed by social media, which is where we stand now. It is more important than ever before to live in the current state of the internet and leverage your brand on social media. Know Where You Are Vulnerable As an agency, it is important to understand your strengths and weaknesses. If you consider your expertise in an area that is considered more vulnerable, you have to be careful. Gary tells the story of his first speaking engagement in New Jersey, at a local chamber of commerce meeting. While people were making fun of him at the time for his interest in the internet, many of the people there laughed at him and considered the internet to be a fad. Gary has had the benefit of being relevant to the consumer is doing at that moment. The number one thing that agency owners can focus on is actually having your firm prepared for 2020. Preparing Your Agency For 2020 Having your firm prepared for 2020 is at the top of nearly every digital marketer’s mind right now. One of the biggest factors in preparing for 2020 is understanding the current social media landscape. Tik Tok is one of the biggest emerging platforms while LinkedIn only continues to grow and be an excellent B2B connector. Creating content for these platforms will be key to any agency’s success in 2020 and in the future. What this means for the digital marketing landscape is that influencers matter. Anyone who believes that influencers are just a trend will be sorely mistaken. Being a deep practitioner at cultivating contextual creative at a large scale will be the most important thing for building your brand. In order to achieve success, you must be able to understand all of the ad units in the marketplace today and how they work together to create success for your clients. For example, understanding the difference between Instagram Feed and Instagram Swipe Up. Understanding that GRP and Impressions are the most vulnerable metrics as the industry moves to a results-based KPI model will allow you to be ahead of the curve in preparing your agency and your clients for a more success-driven marketplace. Since many agencies are building their own direct-to-consumer capabilities, results-driven digital marketing will be more important than ever before. The Industry is About To Get a Lot Smarter The digital marketing industry has long been a lot like the Wild West. Agencies and less than ethical marketers have been able to get away will black hat strategies that hurt the reputation of the industry as a whole. Thankfully, as the industry gets smarter more and more scrutiny is being put on some of these practices. Even if agencies are unaware of what they are doing is the wrong approach, an overall dive into the key metrics and deliverables across the industry will force agencies to be smarter about how they do business. What that means is that some agencies will have to ask themselves these questions: Do you believe your advertising is actually helping your clients’ business? Many people do not realize or believe in what they are doing. Whereas you know that someone exclusively in traditional marketing does not believe their advertising is truly helping, digital is in a different position. Because digital is based on math and real statistics and analytics, people have a tendency to be tricked by the math. For example, if you are a one-dimensional PPC seller, but then the market shifts away from PPC, causing the cost to go up and put you in a decline, you are now stuck as a one-dimensional seller. The question becomes, how protected are you? HR is Still King Most agencies fail if they lost 5-10% of their best employees. That is why it is still so important to ensure your culture is a productive and exciting place to work. Investing heavily in HR to make sure that they are there for your employees’ concerns is key to any successful culture. Getting to really know and understand your employees will allow you to become more personal with them and ensure long-term employee retention. Ultimately, everyone is in the people business. Having the right people at your agency, and making sure that you retain them, will be key moving forward in 2020 and beyond. What Gary Vee Had To Say During The Livestream Q&A In addition to Gary Vee’s amazing keynote address, he took the time to answer the questions that agency owners just like you had for him. Here are some of the great questions we received and what Gary Vee had to say about them. How Do You Ensure Transparency? “At Vayner, we let everyone have full access to everything. No black boxes. Everyone has full access to their platforms and data. I’m not looking to make money on people’s data, while most of my competitors are. But ultimately the best thing is to do you. Run your business. It has been really fun for us to actually be transparent. Media and creative should be broken up. I look at organic reach vs paid reach. I look at underpriced reach. Being able to run cheap Youtube ads based on Google searches allows you to create a cohesive and memorable brand. While organic feed content is less intrusive than a pre-roll ad, pre-roll is completely grounded in your own behavior and searched terms. No one should be a digital agency without having media and creative in the same room. Agencies will be held more accountable by being both creative and media buyers.” How Do You Deal With Process? “We are so much more advanced on culture than process. I barely look at process and every time I do, I look at it poorly. I believe that human beings are disproportionately obsessed with process over the actual output. The second you start putting the process above the output, you lose. I would rather the process be murky and breakable than put on a pedestal. It is a tricky one, but if you listen to what I just said, you’ll understand that it comes down to people. And with a great culture, your people will thrive. Too much process puts too much influence on inter-office politics and not enough on creative problem-solving.” How Do Data Privacy Regulations Affect The Industry? “There is a much bigger conversation about data privacy that is not being had. I actually don’t think that people care about the privacy. I think that as time goes on, people will actually go the other way and prefer to have machines know nearly everything about you. This notion of privacy does not exist. What privacy are we actually talking about? What websites I went on? What my credit card number is? You give out that information freely almost every day. There is a fun narrative right now to demonize technology. But ultimately, that is going to be bad and not good.” How Do You Measure The Success Of Your Content? “My measurement on content success is far more qualitative than quantitative. I know something is working based on reading the comments. And for me, it is more about the quality of the comments than how many. I am building brand at scale.” Do You Envision Facebook Ever Becoming A Viable Search Option? “I used to think that they might be. However, just like I knew Google+ would fail because it is not in the company’s DNA, at this point I can’t ever see Facebook becoming a viable search option to compete with Google or Bing. Search isn’t inherently apart of their DNA. I’m shocked that they aren’t given the scale that they have and the data opportunity. But anything could change. If they hire one great search executive from Google then everything could change. There is a lot of fantastic information I would love to search on Facebook’s platforms but again, some things are just inherently apart of a company’s DNA.” What Will Be The Biggest Impact 5G Has On The Industry? “I’m not really sure. The one thing I really know about 5G, I think it is funny about how people think about 5G. Most people think, ‘Cool, my phone will be faster.’ Meanwhile, this is a transcending technology. 5G will be the reason autonomous cars become real because lag time will be zero. 5G is the reason a surgeon could be woken up in Brazil tonight to perform surgery remotely across the world. So the speed in which information moves is so incredible. This is not like from 4 to 5 but it’s like from 4 to 400. So I think it is profound and I think the ability of information to move with no lag is really going to be profound. Think about a world where our pavement is smart and because of 5G it can talk with your car so that it slightly moves so you can avoid the puddle while driving on the highway and your car doesn’t drive off the road. That’s what I’m looking for when it comes to 5G.” What Gary Vee Had To Say During Our Private Q&A Before giving his rare agency keynote address, Gary Vee took the time to engage with Conduit Digital’s team of experts. We had the opportunity to ask Gary our most burning questions on how he achieved his success, where he envisions the future of digital marketing, and more. Now, we are sharing this awesome information with you! Here are our biggest takeaways from this exclusive Q&A with one of the key figures in the industry: Don't Sell Things You Don't Believe in Any marketer, whether you are a digital marketer or a traditional marketer, needs to be consumer-centric. There are so many things that marketers do that hit the metrics that the client wants to see, yet completely lacks the common sense to bring any value to the client’s end-consumer. “Don’t sell things you don’t believe in.” At VaynerMedia, Gary Vee’s globally recognized advertising agency, they do not do things that may be expected of them if they do not believe that it brings value to the client or the end-customer. As successful as VaynerMedia is, they could be three times as big if they sold things that the company, and Gary, didn’t believe in. However, because they don’t believe it brings value to the consumer, they sacrifice potential revenue for added value. Most agencies and marketers are in a bubble that is B2B centric. The ultimate driver of success is consumers, and if agencies focused on selling what they believe in to the end-consumer, rather than trying to fit the client’s metrics, they will be less vulnerable and see more success. Influencer Marketing is Here To Stay From the times of John Wayne selling cigarettes on the cover of magazines, influencer marketing has long been a great way to market and sell products. The influencer marketing that we have now appears different because content creators have long-tail platforms and reach with their audiences. In reality, it is the same principles as the days of John Wayne. However, not everyone can be an influencer. It is important to stay within your company’s DNA. If your DNA is tech, build a platform that can connect you to your audience. If your DNA is management, then you have the most value by managing your 100 or so clients exclusively. If your DNA is agnostic, you have to always be ready for the best deal that presents itself whether that is blocking, tackling, and DMing, or the platforms themselves that influencers live on. “I live in a world where I day trade attention.” Influencers are both grossly overpriced and underpriced. They may think that their 100,000 followers on Instagram make them worth $5,000 per post even though it is probably worth $18. On the flip side, an influencer with 40,000 followers on Tik Tok may be happy to make a post for as little as a spare sock. “I love inefficient marketplaces. It is what I thrive on. And human beings are the most inefficient marketplace.” How To Keep Culture Alive Many people think it is difficult to keep the company culture alive while the company grows. However, it is actually pretty simple to ensure culture stays alive and well within your company. Spend time getting to know the company and the employees. Really dive deep to ensure you are seeing more than just what upper management tells you. VaynerX, Gary’s investment division of his company portfolio, recently reached 1,000 total employees. As Gary Vee said about maintaining culture: “It is very easy, yet extremely difficult.” Gary Vee explained how, if he bought an agency tomorrow and spent a year truly getting to know the company, he would simply fire the people at the company who didn’t match the vision for the culture, regardless of their position. Many companies are hesitant to fire a troublesome employee if they bring in perceived value such as a salesman or a member of the leadership team. Culture will never be what you want it to be unless you are willing to take those leaps. A big issue when it comes to culture is employee empowerment. If an employee has great ideas that are being suppressed by a bad manager, it creates a bad culture. If good ideas are being suppressed by a bad boss, employees will feel empowered if their boss gets in trouble instead of them. Holding leadership accountable is key. As employees rise through the ranks, they eventually settle into their spot. A lot of people would be pumped to work for a great company, get paid a good salary, and have a great work/life balance. The problem is that this causes them to go on the defensive in order to protect their “spot.” This may cause them to subconsciously or unintentionally suppress good ideas. Being thoughtful about that truth and giving room for your employees to grow and breathe creates a great culture. “I spend an ungodly amount of time with HR.” Making sure HR is working for your employees rather than for the company is key to building trust and internal culture. Taking 5 or 10 minutes to respond to an email or listen to an employees concerns or thoughts goes a long way in building trust and credibility with your employees and throughout your company culture. Work/Life Balance is Important While maintaining a good work/life balance is great, it tends to ebb and flow. People actually see things funny when it comes to work/life balance. Between having off on weekends plus a few weeks of vacation over the year, you are already only working around 225 of the 365 days in the year. “As someone who enjoys work, having time off is foreign to me.” Many people see work/life balance in terms of seconds or hours instead of years or a life’s worth. Everyone has a different balance that works for them. There can be too much pressure and too much judgment from external forces when it comes to work/life balance. In reality, an employee should only ask, “Does this balance work for me?” Where Advertising is Going in 5-10 Years When asked where he sees advertising in 5-10 years, Gary Vee said, “I have no idea.” It can be difficult to know where advertising is going because it is difficult to know where consumer behavior is going. What we DO know is that when it comes to technology, voice search will be a major player. “Voice search’s impact will be as large as the mobile device, when at scale.” Gary Vee gets a lot of credit for the way he has invested in certain technologies and platforms. However, as he tells it, he doesn’t invest in technologies that aren’t here yet. When he got on board with Tik Tok, it already had over 1.5 billion global downloads, yet he still gets credit for “discovering” the platform. “People love to say ‘no’ about today, let alone about the future.” Gary says not to worry about AR, VR, blockchain, or other technological advancements until they are used at scale. While all of these technologies are coming and are worth monitoring, they are not yet used by consumers at scale. No one uses VR platforms for even an hour a day, yet they use their mobile devices for at least 7 hours a day. People love to jump the gun on technological advancements ahead of consumer behavior. Before you worry about your AR capabilities, maximize what you can do today on platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, or Tik Tok. If you are willing to invest in future technologies in a practical way, understand that they will make you less money in the short term. However, this does not mean they are not worth watching or investing in. “When my CFO told me he wanted to shut down the voice department, I said, ‘You might as well shut down the whole company.” The reason Gary is able to invest in these technologies is that he is willing to make the long-term investment before profitability. If you can live with those parameters, you can be successful in future technological investment. You have to have speed in adjusting to what the consumer has done. If you can be quick in executing today, it has a higher value than worrying about bridging the gap tomorrow. Brand Over Everything Having a known, recognizable, and trustworthy brand is the most important factor for a business’s success. With the brand that he has built, Gary knows that he can put out a call to hire analysts and he will receive over 5000 applications. That is the power of a brand. Building a brand allows you to act very quickly in how you operate and execute on day-to-day behaviors. It is about the speed in which you can execute today vs the value of being right about tomorrow. Leveraging your brand allows you to become a leader in the space. Content Quality VS Quantity When it comes to content, Gary Vee is king. He understands better than anyone how to build a successful content strategy. “Quantity is not debatable.” Quality is a debate because quality is fundamentally subjective. While every creative would like to think that quality is not debatable, that is more due to pride and ego than a magical ability to always create content people love. Gary Vee’s strategy is to create as much quantity as possible and let the audience decide quality. He considers that level of humility to be the underlying pinning of his success yet people are always trying to create frameworks of what content could and should be. Do not worry about content being “on-brand” when someone you have not met will get to decide if your content is right for them. We all have different opinions on what is funny or what works. When we spend hours in meetings talking about shades of the color blue or debating what adjective to use, it is the biggest farce in the industry. It is the subjective nature of human opinion in strategy and creative yet also the greatest variable to success. Create at scale and find “right” instead of pretending that you are right. “When you create volume, you have a much higher chance of creating relevance to many different people.” Context is everything. Creating more content gives you the ability to create more relevance. This whole industry is built on potential reach. The majority of brands are losing market share because they are not relevant. Consumer trends are changing and brands are being left behind. Conclusion As one of the leaders in the industry, Conduit was so excited to gain these incredible insights from Gary Vee. Let’s take a look back on what we learned during this exclusive Q&A. We learned that you should never sell things you don’t believe in. We learned that influencer marketing is here to stay. Conduit discovered how to keep are already successful culture alive as we continue to grow (if you haven’t heard, Conduit is a division of Traffic Builders, the #21 fastest-growing agency in the world according to Adweek). We discussed the growing importance of work/life balance and what that means to different people. Gary Vee took a deep dive with us into the future of digital marketing. Finally, we discussed content strategy and how brand, quality, and quantity work together to create a successful content strategy. We are going to be implementing these strategies and more in our 2020 content and marketing plan. To find out how we can help you use these insights to not only survive but thrive in 2020, check out Conduit Partnership .

Aug 16, 2023 At Conduit Digital, we abide by a list of values that we call the 5P’s: People: Our team drives our engine, and our Agency Partners matter to us. That’s why we don’t just work with anyone and everyone who says that they own an ad agency. Performance: We hold ourselves to a high standard to ensure our product is worthy of our Agency Partners’ investment in our expertise. Product: We want to offer a product that matters to our Agency Partners and their clients. Partnership: We strive to be a true partner for our agencies, acting as a seamless integration to their in-house ad operations. Isn’t that only 4? We’re saving the fifth one for last because it underpins the other four: Process. The marketing process involves the series of steps that we take to make sure that our people can perform at a high level within their areas of product expertise so that we can be a true partner for our agencies. Without process, none of the above can be possible. From the series of tasks that need to be completed, the order they need to be completed, and how long each one takes requires a process that drives the engine forward. If you’re running an agency and it feels like any of the above is plateauing at your business, the first place to start looking for opportunities for improvement has to be the processes. If you do not have a process in place for something that’s stalled, now is an excellent time to create one. Does this sound relevant to your day-to-day at your agency? If so, this guide is for you. Today, we’re going to cover how you can construct a marketing process that supports your people, their performance, the quality of your products, and ultimately, sets you up for more profitability. While we cannot guarantee success for you, we can give you a framework that you can consider applying to your own agency. Let’s start with the first P: people. Marketing Processes Need the Right People Hiring is subjective, and it’s often mysterious to some degree. When you hire someone to join your agency team, you’re doing so based on their background and your interactions with them during the interview process. Once they’re actually on the team and starting to work for your clients, that is when you see the actual fruits of their labor and expertise. A good marketing process needs the right people because the success of marketing isn’t solely dependent on strategies, tools, or technologies but on the individuals who design and execute those strategies. The right people possess the necessary skills, creativity, and understanding of both the market and the customers' needs. Beyond this, they can also navigate the complex landscape of modern marketing, embracing both analytical and empathetic thinking. Their ability to analyze data helps in making informed decisions, while their creativity allows them to craft compelling messages that resonate with the target audience. Beyond their skills and abilities, communication is another critical aspect of hiring the right people. Effective collaboration and communication among members of a team ensures that various aspects of the marketing process are well-coordinated and aligned with the client’s goals. Having the right people in place fosters a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, which is crucial for staying ahead in a constantly evolving profession. Process Supports Performance Performance is the actual result of a well-executed strategy. It’s the fulfillment of the promises that you have made to your clients. Ultimately, it’s the lifeblood of any agency alongside communication. What is performance, though? That term could apply to a number of different aspects of the services you provide. Let’s try to create a more objective understanding of what it means. First up, we have accuracy: Understanding the market and the client's specific needs is key. A well-structured marketing process starts with some serious digging into what customers want and what the competition is doing. At the end of the day, does the strategy you create align with the client’s industry and business goals? Next, we have the implementation of the strategy. It's not just about throwing a bunch of ads out there. It's a coordinated effort to align campaign tactics, optimizations, and internal collaboration to continuously drive the client’s marketing efforts toward accomplishing their stated business goals. Finally, it doesn't end with just launching the campaign. A marketing process includes constant monitoring and optimization. It's about learning from what's working (and what's not) and making on-the-fly adjustments. Imagine steering a ship; small changes to the course can make a massive difference in where you end up. At the end of the campaign, or at various touchpoints throughout, the performance is justified in reporting. Did your work match the expectations that you’ve set with your client? Are there other factors that came into play that could have enhanced, maintained, or lessened expectations? With a process in place that enables your team to perform at a high level, you can more accurately craft the right strategy, set realistic expectations, and create a comprehensive reporting system that accurately communicates this information to your clients in context. Without that infrastructure, campaign implementation and subsequent reporting can often feel like your agency is constantly shooting from the hip. This Results in a Superior Product to Offer to Your Clients Every agency has a set of core competencies that they emphasize. One of the main motivating factors for our Agency Partners to join the Conduit Agency Network is that they want to expand beyond what they do well in-house and add another expert team into the mix. For example, if you’re great at paid social ads and PPC , you may want to explore white label SEO and OTT campaigns because you do not have the personnel to meet those needs for your clients. With the right process in place, one that allows you to maximize the potential of the platforms you work on, you can offer a superior result to your clients for the services that you excel at. This not only enhances your reputation, but your credibility within the ideal niches you seek to serve. For services you may not offer or struggle with in-house, there are other solutions to compensate and continue to maintain a high standard of performance. Whether it’s white label digital marketing partnership or building a process system that enables you to cover for any performance gaps in certain channels, there are means to deliver for your clients even when you do not have all the tools in the toolbox on your own. Process is the Key for Any Partnership When we talk to the hundreds of agency leaders that we do each year, a common question that we answer revolves around some variant of “What are your processes like?”. This is no small question. If you are looking for the right white label solution, you need to make sure that their processes fit with your own. As you’re considering a holistic white label partner (not a single-channel vendor or platform), don’t be afraid to ask a potential partner about their processes. This will give you a clearer idea of what to expect for your clients, when to expect it, and what you can guarantee to your current accounts and leads when selling new solutions. Think of asking questions like: What is your pre-live process like for (campaign channel)? When should I expect reports for my clients’ campaigns? What is needed from me for your process to work as intended? What can I expect from ongoing monthly work performed by your team? These are fair, objective, and momentum-driving questions as you prepare to scale. Predictability is key to partnership, and the right process supports that. You will be able to have a solid idea of the work being performed for your clients, communicate this to them effectively, and more easily manage expectations across the board. Learn More: 5 Signs Your Agency is Ready for Partnership The 6th P: Process is Profitability Do you track how much each aspect of your agency operations costs? It goes beyond payroll and platform expenses. When you’re running a fast-paced business like a local ad agency, time literally is money, because that is the majority of what your client is paying for: your expert time spent on their marketing and advertising campaigns. With a solid process in place, you can determine how long something takes to do, how much that costs when specific team members are doing it, and whether or not it is profitable for your business. By continuously analyzing and modifying your process toward achieving profitability, you can protect yourself from overserving specific accounts and potentially losing massive revenue as a result. Not tying specific tasks to expected turnaround times also muddies your view of bandwidth and capacity. When you have metrics set for specific tasks and channels, you can more accurately gauge other needs for your agency such as: Making a better-informed decision to hire more people as bandwidth dictates Setting a definitive workload for existing team members Knowing exactly how long something should take and how much it costs Knowing when a team member definitely has or does not have time for extra work or special projects What the full campaign cycle looks like, how much you will spend on it, and how much you will also make on it by the end Process infrastructure does more than just make agency life easier from a work standpoint. It also drives your ability to scale, land and expand accounts, and to know when it’s time to go to another level. 5 Key Takeaways We’ve covered quite a bit of detail about the importance of process. It really cannot be overstated in agency life. Let’s bring it all back together before we wrap up with five of the most important takeaways here: Process enables your best people to be the best and will reveal team members that are not the right fit for what you want to accomplish at your agency. Process directly ties into performance, giving the foundation for your team to deliver for your clients. Process also allows you to offer a superior end-product to your clients, giving them the confidence that they are working with a credible agency with the expertise to help them. Process is inextricably linked to profitability. Without knowing how long something takes to do and how much it costs, you can risk leaving your agency exposed to missed opportunities to gain more revenue and grow further. If you do decide to expand beyond your in-house scope, such as joining forces with a white label partner, make sure they have the right processes in place to support your operations effectively. Process and Performance-Driven White Label Partnership for Your Agency At Conduit, we’re proud to be the elite white label digital marketing agency partner for established and successful local ad agencies throughout North America. We’ve invested countless hours into building the right processes to provide your agency with the necessary communication and performance infrastructure to scale higher, land and expand your accounts, and ultimately, drive greater profitability. To learn more about what a white label partnership could look like for your agency, let’s talk.

Jun 11, 2020 Conduit Digital has consistently created incredible results for our clients and their campaigns. Do you want to know the secrets to growing your agency’s revenue? It may be easier than you think! At Conduit, we believe in the Land and Expand method. Using this method has enabled us to grow accounts from $200,000 to $4.8million in monthly billing! Our Director of Client Experience Tim C. Burke, Director of Products Rob Burke, PPC Manager Mike Gibson, and Programmatic Team Lead John Smithson sat down to discuss the Land and Expand method and how it has enabled us to become one of the fastest-growing agencies in the world. What is Land and Expand? Land and Expand is a concept that we live by at Conduit Digital. When you successfully Land and Expand a client, you are “landing” on the deliverables of their campaign and then “expanding” their campaigns into multi-product campaigns. There are 3 key elements into how we make Land and Expand work for our clients. 1. Data-Driven Results When we get an account in, through data-driven results, we grow it to the moon. We provide our clients with unique, critical data that they may have not had access to. Whether it be competitor data, market data; any data that we can deploy a digital campaign around. It is about creating a baseline for growth. 2. Provide Account ROI Over the course of our relationship with our partners and clients, we continuously provide account ROI . If we can prove that what they’re doing with us is working and the ad spend is working, that sets the baseline of trust and credibility. This sets a nice foundation for us to really expand that account and grow that account. Because they know that we’re already proving results, they can trust us to continue to improve those results. 3. Paint a Vision For The Future Since we know that we are driving results at a particular level in a market, as the client looks to expand to different facilities and different markets we can utilize that baseline of data-driven results of the entirety of the account to take it to the next level. We are able to forecast and show that forward-thinking data-driven results will be able to drive results in the future. Time and time again we have proven the Land and Expand method. In fact, here are some real-life examples of how we took this approach, applied it to our clients’ campaigns, and saw incredible success for us and the client. Regional Cancer Center We started with the Cancer Center in early 2017. They told us the number of leads they were hoping to reach with their campaign. From there, we worked backward to help them reach their goal. The first step before landing and expanding is to build the foundations to grow an account. Don't Be Afraid To Start Small Our most successful land and expand accounts have started with a $2,000-$3,000 monthly spend. To many agencies, that may not seem like a lot of money. But at Conduit, we believe that every dollar matters for every single client. Conduit Digital analysts take the approach to take that monthly spend as if it were their own. As an agency, when you take on that responsibility and apply that to your accounts, that builds trust and credibility. That is what allows you to take that smaller account to the moon. Land and Expand is not about putting your hand in your client’s pocket and taking money out. It is about helping your clients realize the opportunity they have. Whether that opportunity is on one platform or several platforms and helping them reach that opportunity. Growing To The Moon When we started with this regional cancer center, it started out as a single-market, $3,000 per month programmatic client. After studying the data, we saw the opportunity for them to succeed with paid search. This success led us to take over the entire digital marketing operations of one of their locations, bringing their monthly spend from $3,000 per month to $30,000. After seeing the success that these multi-product campaigns were bringing this location, we applied the same strategies to expand into the client’s other locations. Over the 3 years we have worked with them, they have now grown to a $90,000 per month monthly spend. It's Not About Spending More Money The win with this client is not that we were able to get them to increase their monthly spend, the win is that they were driving better results. They offer a great service. We were able to educate the market, drive results, and create success for both themselves and us as an agency. When we expanded into new markets, it requires adjusting concepts and messaging to the specific market using data we have gathered through working with other clients in similar verticals and markets. It is all about helping our clients’ team go from lead to filling beds in their facilities. We can bring as many people to the door as possible, but what is happening on the sales process side? Having that conversation and being an extension of their team has allowed us to leverage that back-end sales data with our marketing data. And that is what it is all about. Not just the marketing aspect, but growth for the entirety of the account. Start With Tangible Results It always comes back to return on ad spend. You’re never going to grow a client from $3,000 to $90,000 because of click-through-rate. While CTR is a good performance barometer early on for their campaign when it comes to long-term success you have to link it to tangible results. It’s about proving that when your clients spend money with you, you are really moving the needle for their business. It makes it real. Take it from theory to real return for your clients. Global Beverage Distributor Another great example of how we Land and Expand our clients is the work we have done with a global beverage distributor. This client was looking to increase the amount of qualified applicants for their distribution side. The way that we approached this was to develop a complete marketing plan around these frontline jobs, whether it be a merchandiser, a warehouse worker, or a CDL driver. When we started, the client had no data on the potential applicants they were looking for. That is why we set up a Data Beta. Data Beta When your clients have little to no data on what their digital goals are, it is important to set up a data beta to gauge the market and determine best practices for a successful campaign. For this global beverage distributor, we set up a data beta in 10 of the potential markets they wanted to advertise in. By maximizing the customer data, we started finding certain insights that would prove useful in the client’s campaign execution. If your client has first party data of their target audience, utilize that! It’s one of the easiest ways to increase the ROI for your client. We discovered the best way was to take a proactive and reactive approach. In terms of proactivity, you want to go out and get qualified leads. They may not necessarily be looking for a job, they may even be working for a competitor. However, the goal of the data beta is to discover who out of that target demographic is most likely to be interested in joining our client’s team instead. This targeted audience may not actively be looking for a job, but thanks to our targeted campaigns, they now know they have the option. Think Strategically and Creatively When approaching a campaign in the data aggregation phase, creativity and strategy are so important. With automation becoming more prevalent to fill campaigns, people are coming to agencies for more than just fulfillment. They are looking for advice and strategy. For example, around the time we started this campaign Toys R Us was going out of business. So we had the idea to geo-fence all relevant Toys R Us locations with targeted ads to let the warehouse workers, who would soon be out of a job, know that our client was hiring. The impact that we saw from that was pretty significant. More Than Just Marketing Campaigns We are doing so much more than just running product marketing campaigns. We aren’t just running a PPC campaign and reporting on it. Nor are we just running a programmatic campaign and reporting on it. It’s all about the overarching strategy behind it. It’s about building a relationship, developing the strategy, and then bringing the team together to be singularly focused toward executing that strategy. Now that a client sees the hard work that has been put into their campaigns, and the results that have been generated, they are more likely to put more money and more resources in their market. Have an Engaged Client Big name, multi-location clients are a huge opportunity. Ultimately, having an engaged client is key. When you have a marketing manager or an account executive who wants to crush it but just doesn’t really know the digital side of it, that is where we can really have success. By having effective communication , you will not only have a happy client but will also set a foundation for trust. They know that they can come to us for strategic guidance, whether that means expanding to other products or increasing their spend, they trust that we will work with them to develop a strategy that sees the best results. Conclusion Whether your client has a monthly spend of a few hundred dollars or thousands of dollars, treat every dollar as if it were your own. When working with clients, take a Land and Expand approach. Develop strategies based on aggregated data collected through data betas. Discuss expectations and prove results that result in more than just higher CTRs; create real ROI for your clients! By using these approaches, expand your clients into new markets and replicate the success. Using this method has enabled Conduit Digital to grow accounts from a few thousand dollars in monthly spend to over $4.8 million! Want To Implement Land and Expand For Your Clients? Contact Us Today.