Agencies need to focus just as much attention on their own marketing as their clients. Learn how Laura Hampton and her team do just that.
There’s a reason Impression ranks number one in search. Watch and learn as Laura, Head of Marketing, explains how she and her team marketed their brand to nab the top SERP spot and became one of the most renowned agencies in the UK.
Video Transcription
Hi, my name is Laura Hampton, I’m the Head of Marketing and PR at Impression.
My topic today for the STAT City Crawl here in Manchester is all about how we have digitally marketed our digital marketing agency. Impression started in 2012 and there were just two guys running the business from their back bedroom.
Today, we are a national brand, working with some huge clients. We have over 30 different experts working for us, we’ve won awards, we’re number one for “SEO agency” and “PPC agency” and things are going really, really well.
What I’m going to share today is that journey that we’ve taken from the very early days right through to where we are today and a few insights into our future plans as well.
Using topical silos to keep organized and searchable
Topical silos are something that a lot of people in our industry have been talking about recently, and it’s becoming more and more popular, but essentially what we’re saying here is taxonomy — which has always been an essential part of successful SEO strategies.
For us at Impression, we use the taxonomy of our website to really showcase what we are experts in. If you have a look, our marketing services are in our marketing folder, our web services are in our web folder and so on. That’s been really important in developing our authority in those spaces as well as our rankings.
Flexing marketing muscles
Spending time marketing for themselves gives Laura’s team a chance to flex all the disciplines they also offer to their clients.
In terms of the way that we use it with our clients, we’ve also started to segment our targeting by the point in the conversion funnel that the customer might be at. Whether it’s their first awareness point through to interest in the product, desire to purchase, conversion — we kind of try to split things out and have that mirrored in the taxonomy of the website as well. I think it’s something that’s evolving all the time and it will continue to be really important in SEO strategies moving forward.
STAT has been a really important part of this process for us. As an agency, we very much believe in the value of data and of using that data to inform your strategic decisions.
“STAT gives us a huge amount of data — a massive depth of data that we can manipulate, that we can export, that we could do things with to guide those strategies. I would say that I’m not really sure how we’d be able to do what we do without it these days.” — Laura Hampton
Some of the obstacles that agencies might encounter when applying my tips from today’s session would be, I would say, probably around time. Quite often we find that our time is taken up by client work and it can be difficult or challenging to find the time to put to your own marketing. But what I would say is that, if you can set aside even a few hours a week across a few members of the team to do these things, you’ll see huge rewards as a result.
Liked what you saw and want more?
Laura doesn’t believe in keeping secrets — especially from competitors. Learn more about why she gave away her marketing secrets, or see what she had to say about her time at Manchester City Crawl here.
