Miryah Scott Discusses Digital Marketing at the Samurai Speaker Series

I’d like to tell you a little bit about the history of our company.

From 2005 to 2009, our focus was strictly on market research with a speciality in User Experience. Our job was to ensure that the ads, website and billboards that a company created resonated with their target market. We would test it in focus groups and surveys and provide our clients with feedback on how they could improve conversion. That is, how our clients could inspire their audience to see a marketing piece and make a purchase, how they could remain at the top of their consumers’ minds and/or evangelize the brand. See, with every piece of marketing collateral, a sale is made. Either you sell the customer on why they should choose your brand or they sell you on why they shouldn’t.

We were the little guy, doing big things and big companies such as WestJet, CBC and Smart Technologies were turning to us for our expertise.

Like every other small business startup, we faced our challenges. Clients paying on 90 days, supplier terms at 30, payroll in 15, rent on the 1st. I’m sure ALL OF YOU CAN RELATE.

Another big obstacle was getting on a client’s radar. Big brands want to work with big names. UNLESS....you were able to differentiate yourself. Unless a client saw something unique about your business that they couldn’t get from the big machine. This was our challenge. Organically becoming visible to our target market without outbound ‘bulldozing’ like cold calling, mail-outs or any other invasive, traditional tactics.

And that when the concept of Samurai was born.

To us, Samurai is not just the name of our technology. It also reflects the way we do marketing. Here is how we utilized Samurai to quadruple the size of our company, build a massive list of clients and achieve over 80% growth in both 2009 and the present economic downturns. These are the tactics you can utilize RIGHT NOW.

First, we extensively researched website user experience and built a framework validated by user experience testing and in-depth interviews utilizing eye tracking. Here were the results:
 

1. You have 15 seconds from the time someone renders your site on their browser to convince them that you are a good fit for them. Therefore, how you present your organization above the fold (what is immediatley available without scrolling) needs to provide redundant contact information, compelling imagery, a related brand promise and an immediate call to action. A few things to remember:
2. 80% of your website visitors only want contact information
3. Our eye tracking studies show that eye movement above the fold is in a Zed movement. So ensure that there are contact points all along the axis of the visitor’s eye movement trajectory.
4. Your site must be responsive. Your conversation with your customer starts with a Google search, a business card, a presentation like this one. It continues with a visit to your site from a mobile phone and an informed decision is usually made in desktop view. Ensure your site presents well on all device types ranging from cellphones and tablets to laptops and big screens.

Take your site visitor on a journey by:

• Engaging them above the fold
• Humanizing your brand with an about section
• Stating your expertise with a service preview
• Proving your expertise with insightful blogs
• Offering social proof with testimonials
• Giving a hard close with a contact form

​Following these few steps will ensure that once someone gets to your site, the probability of establishing a relationship with them is maximized. In fact, our research shows that this set of rules increases that probability by over 50%.

Secondly, we understood and refined the implementation of search engine optimization. Consider this:

Google is not a search engine. They are the biggest advertising agency in the world. Google makes tens of millions of dollars A DAY by serving ads to you on google. They are freakishly good at this because they utilize organic search rankings as a carrot to mould web and content standards so that they can accurately deliver applicable ad words to every query. The good and bad news is: Google forces us to raise the level of our game because ranking well yields better inbound leads and higher conversions. In Canada, 83% of all searches are conducted on Google. This is where your customers are.

By building a great website using the tips above and following the optimization tips I’ll provide below, Google will serve up the leads and your site will convert them.

Here are a few things you should do right now so that Google starts indexing you and improves your ranking:

1. Create a Google Plus page. Search NAP signals Canada and post listings with an identical name, address and phone number on the top 100 sites. REMEMBER, if the listings are identical, it will activate a signal in Google which can improve your rankings by up to 16%.
2. Ensure your H1, H2, Alt Tags, Title Tags, Keyword Density and Meta Data are richly populated with keywords but still coherent to people and not just crawlers.
3. Write blogs weekly. Sprinkle keywords throughout your blogs but ensure that the content is engaging, coherent and the keywords are integrated organically. The content has to make sense.

This is a good starting point. There are other pieces to this puzzle like e-mail marketing, collaborative events, social media and online advertising that contribute to inbound marketing success, but iteratively, the addition of each component will compound your revenue growth.

Presently, we are lucky enough to be generating great sales with the web design and marketing that we optimize for our research side. Google Calgary Market Research, Calgary Focus Groups, Calgary Focus Group Facilities, and you’ll find us in every category. This is because Google uses something called latent semantic indexing to optimize keywords in associated clumps or Silo’s. For our research business, this is all the marketing we do and we are in business all year round.

These are not conjectures. Clients that follow our formula have achieved ludicrous results including 2-3 thousand dollars worth of sales per day. One of our clients has generated up to $550,000 in sales on its site in one month. It’s real.

I encourage you to utilize these tactics and I assure you that, properly implemented, you will see long term increases in your sales. Although we are navigating a downturn which has hopefully bottomed out, people are still searching. They are still buying. Ranked well, they will buy from you. The investment is consistency, hard work and strategic implementation that you can do yourself or can source out to a competent digital shop.

I want to emphasize - this is a long game. However, the work you put in will be an investment into an asset that has high proven residuals.

Thanks for your time and let me know if we can help you in any way.
miryah@stylelabs.ca