We met up with Julie T Ewald from Impressa Solutions at Pubcon, Las Vegas, and asked for her top tips in digital marketing. Watch the full interview below.

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Anthony: “For your agency, what’s been the key step that’s driven its success, where so many other agencies have been falling apart?”

Julie: “Well we’re a really small agency and we’ve been around since 2012, and I think for us, our main driver was really just staying on top of education and continual learning and development.

The digital marketing landscape has been changing so quickly from the tools that we’re using to how we interact with people and we really need to stay on top of it. So we’re attending conferences like here at PubCon, or even from taking webinars, taking coursework, sitting on top of certifications – it’s really been helpful, because we’ve been able have an edge where a lot of other folks rest on their laurels and miss out on the current trends.”

Anthony: “What would you say is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in 2017?“

Julie: “I think probably the biggest lesson for me for 2017, at least from an agency side, is really around development – like team development and really looking for people that not only have a high degree of skill, a technical skill, but also a passion for what they’re doing and a desire to learn.  

I think really that an integrated marketing environment instead of a siloed approach has been really helpful. So finding those people who care.”

Anthony: “How do you find content strategies have changed for small to medium businesses over the past few years?“

Julie: “I think one of the main ways, especially for small to medium businesses, content strategy has become actual strategy. A lot of times people are saying, “oh my content strategy is blogging four times a week”. And it’s like, why are you blogging four times? But it was just this add-on so a lot of small to medium businesses are starting to get the idea that this is part of a big picture and it’s this greater marketing ecosystem, that for these content initiatives to work they actually have to do other things and look at that in terms of the other marketing stuff they’re doing as well.”

Anthony: “What are you most passionate about in the digital space at the moment?“

Julie: “Right now I think it’s about strategy and creating and developing integrated strategies that really hold up because a lot of folks again, use that siloed approach. That traditional marketing – you know, before it was marketing in sales, now it’s all these different subsets of marketing. So I’m really passionate about bringing these things together and trying to create something that works, especially for small business. Those medium-sized enterprises – they really need to budget effectively.

And they need to look at the big picture – so trying to create something that brings everything together and to reach objectives. It’s really exciting when that really comes together – it’s a lot of fun. So that’s been my kind of thing really.”

Anthony: “What’s a common mistake you often see clients making?“

Julie: “I think one of the biggest mistakes I see clients making is really that, they’re looking for things that convert but they don’t take the steps to make them convert. So they want to see certain things happening, they’re not using forms, they’re not using CTA’s, they’re not using visual CTA’s, they’re not using the right kind of language – and they’re expecting magic to happen.

So I think it’s really the idea that you know of best practices, and looking at the fact that you know we did one thing right, but you have to do all the things correctly to make it come together, so I think it’s just a kind of that shortsightedness.”

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Tags: content, content marketing, content plan, digital marketing