What Makes an Effective Provider of Digital SEO/Marketing in Minnesota

The world of digital marketing has grown into today’s complex, nuanced technical system. To successfully market your brand online, there are many required actions, like generating URLs and having a well-made website. However, there are also many optional things you can also do to boost your marketing performance and grow your audience, such as using SEO (search engine optimization) tools and maintaining social media platforms. Because of the many tools, features, and possibilities that are all a part of digital marketing, it’s no wonder that it can be a daunting process for small businesses and brands to manage their own digital marketing operations effectively. Fortunately, there are many agencies that provide highly affordable outside marketing services at varying levels. If you are looking for a digital marketing company to meet your needs for creative, smart SEO/marketing in Minnesota or anywhere in the US, MLT Group LLC has the skills and tools to get the job done. We provide comprehensive marketing services including SEO, social media, web design, graphic design, video production, and more.

Determining the Right SEO

Experience, current knowledge, levels of services, and costs are all factors that can vary widely when looking at agency services. To choose the right digital marketing provider, you first need to determine your digital marketing goals. Some brands need an entire restructuring and rewriting of their website, including text and media content, design, URLs, and SEO tools. Some companies only need the extra SEO support of a regularly scheduled informational blog or news release. Others might benefit best from an aggressive link and citation building campaign.

Digital Marketing

From full web design to writing and optimizing effective blog content, MLT Group’s team can provide whatever marketing and brand building strategy you need. If you’ve determined your goals, we can consult with you to pinpoint what SEO, social media, or other digital marketing steps we should take to help you reach those goals. We provide competitive pricing for our creative solutions and our communication is always straightforward and jargon-free.

When searching for an effective digital marketing agency, there are several factors to consider. Some of the major concerns you should look for include a quality website, strong team, toolbox, industry expertise, trustworthiness, and testimonials or reviews.

Quality Website

If a company is going to design your website or provide other content creation, you should always look at their own site for red flags like slow loading times, poor design qualities, lack of fresh content, low resolution, and a bad user experience. A well-designed site should have consistent aesthetics, clear navigation, high SEO ranking, a method of routinely releasing fresh information, calls to action, load times of two seconds or faster, and a positive user experience. The MLT website, for example, maintains an active newsfeed, features our personal design aesthetics on every page, has clear calls to action, provides easy navigation, utilizes SEO keywords and geo-locations, and more. If a digital marketing company has a quality website, it’s the first sign that they will lend that quality to their work with your brand as well.

Strong Team

As a small company, our team of talented staff members share the values of all the small businesses we work with. Even the larger companies we work with, like MultiSource Manufacturing and several ServiceMaster branches, have the same foundational values for providing quality, reliable, and trustworthy services. We support companies that in turn support their industries positively, care for their staff and customers, and overall do everything they can to give to their communities. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency that will fit into your company culture, you should check out the expertise and diversity of their team members. MLT’s staff is composed of talented web development specialists, designers, marketing experts, writers, and many other great people we are honored to have on our team.

Tools

Any effective marketing provider will have the right tools and equipment in their purview. This includes project management solutions, methods of measuring website performance, social media analytics, email marketing systems, CRM (customer relationship management) technology, CRO (conversion rate optimization) measurements, graphic design software, video production capabilities, ways to calculate ROI (return on investment), and more. Marketing campaigns require the right analytics and communication tools to measure performance and make alterations when needed. Not only do we have all of these tools and more, we outsource work to skilled freelancers whenever necessary so your campaign schedule is always running on time.

Industry Expertise

When selecting the right marketing agency for your brand, considering their experience and expertise in the industry is also a key indicator of their quality and effectiveness. If a company doesn’t provide a portfolio of their past work clearly on their website, that is likely a warning sign that they are inexperienced or have a history of performing low quality work. MLT Group has industry expertise and experience working with a broad range of different companies and online brands. We provide comprehensive digital marketing and web design services for companies like contract manufacturers, bankruptcy firms, disaster restoration providers, veterans and US troops, university programs, health providers, engineers, property managers, auto parts sellers, welding suppliers, dentists, tree care and landscapers, warehouse storage, bus and trucking companies, and many others. Our SEO/marketing services are versatile, well researched, and effective for a broad range of websites and industries.

Trustworthiness

With so many marketing agencies in the industry today, it’s important to customers that the agency they choose be trustworthy, open, and clearly communicate services and expectations. At MLT Group  we want to be clear about what we can help our customers achieve in their campaigns and why things cost what they cost. We don’t use industry jargon or hide behind the many acronyms that come with the digital marketing world. We also routinely publish informational blogs that cover topics about digital marketing, including how-tos, SEO basics, explanations of terminology, and much more. MLT Group is committed to supporting ADA compliance for our site, and we encourage our customers to do the same. Our website is fully customizable for persons with visual or hearing impairments, cognitive disabilities, ADHD, and more. The tools that allow users to adjust our site can be used to alter color, contrast, font size and readability, letter spacing, alignment, line height, magnification, sounds, images, animation, and focus. Our goal as a company is to continue expanding our accessibility for greater inclusion of users and user trust.

Social Proof

When  large percentage of a population are in agreement about a topic, item, product, or practice, this is called social proof. If something has social proof, it’s generally considered to be of good quality. When you’re deciding what digital marketing agency to use for your brand, you can usually choose one that will give you a good experience as a customer and good services that advance your marketing campaign if you can determine their social proof. Positive reviews and testimonials are the most common formats for social proof of any business, including marketing agencies. A company can spout its worth to you all day long, but the proof of that can only be found in the telling of other customers’ experiences. Check out our testimonials for just a few stories from our current and previous clients.

MLT Group is a boutique marketing firm that provides complete, effective services for SEO/marketing in Minnesota and the surrounding regions. We listen to your needs and work with you to develop marketing strategies that will yield quality results. To learn more about our services contact us at (507) 281-3490 or sales@mltgroup.com

Features of an Effective Marketing Firm for Quality Web Development in Minneapolis, MN

Whether you own a company serving local customers or a brand recognized internationally, having a website with user friendly tools, in depth information about your brand or business, and a unique design aesthetic are all key factors in digital marketing success. There are many ways to build a quality website yourself, even with minimal development knowledge, including with the many web building services available today. However, these web builders can cause design issues, create functionality roadblocks, and may lack in search engine optimization (SEO) tools. The mid to high cost for web builder services at top tiers may not be worth it to many brands. Small marketing firms in your area often compete with web builder costs while providing a better range of services, flexibility, creativity, and overall greater level of care. MLT Group LLC offers comprehensive services for web development in Minneapolis, MN and the Upper Midwest, including digital marketing, SEO services, social media marketing, graphic design, video production, and web design.

Effective Web Development

There are many properties of effective web development, and while many technical aspects of web design may shift with time (such as Google and other search engine algorithms), there are several core values that remain largely constant. Even with more and more cookie cutter web builders coming onto the market, there are still many reasons to work with an independent marketing agency.

Cookie Cutter vs. Custom

Web builders rely on templates that make it easier for anyone using their services to build nice looking websites quickly. However, these templates tend to become cookie cutter examples of excessive website conformity. The first problem with template or cookie cutter websites is that they are not unique. Many other brands, including your competitors, may use the same web builder services and templates. If your website starts to look the same as others, the creative and innovative aspects of your company may be overshadowed by the conformity of your site design.

Website Functionality

Another issue with cookie cutter websites is their functionality. Templates provided through web builder services may not include unique tools for media incorporation, ecommerce, and other custom needs. Additionally they often don’t give you options to accurately manage your SEO performance. Cookie cutter sites often offer some SEO tools, but without the ability to fully tailor to your specific brand’s SEO requirements. Some brands need ecommerce SEO emphasis, while others might need SEO that increases readership of fresh content.

Templates

The templates offered through web builder services may be easy to use to a point, but if you don’t have any web design expertise, you’ll struggle in the confines of your selected template. By outsourcing your online development process to an affordable marketing firm, you’ll be able to expand far beyond the limitations of templates. The goal of a marketing firm is to customize your website and marketing campaign every step of the way, giving you ownership over your brand and web presence that a cookie cutter website cannot accomplish.

Small Firm Effect

There are several ideas behind the concept of Small Firm Effect. Firstly, small businesses exist for a reason. They are serving a purpose that larger companies are not able to provide, and their continued success is evidence of this fulfillment. Secondly, small market capitalization has a tendency to outperform large market players, partly because they offer more boutique, quality services. Small companies are able to thrive with a quality over quantity approach to business, much the opposite of large corporations’ usual inability to provide the level of service quality that small firms can. Because they can’t provide a boutique level of quality, larger companies rely on quantity over quality.

Smaller firms can offer better quality services because they are more flexible and nimble to changes in projects or markets, their smaller staff is more attentive to customer needs, and with fewer projects on the schedule, they can spend more time and energy on precision and tailoring. Small companies can also focus on locally targeted content and become a part of online or physical communities.

SEO Marketing

Effective SEO tools will place your website in higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERP). Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use crawling bots that scan the content, data, security, and other aspects of your website pages. They will then index that information and rank sites based on how positively and accurately they answer a search query according to the search engine algorithm. Algorithms change over time, but many core SEO practices stay relevant for long term use. One example is backlinking. Backlinks have survived as a potent ranking factor despite the banning of many backlink related spam techniques. An example of an outdated SEO practice is keyword stuffing or overloading the use of keywords in your text content. A change that is coming in SEO marketing practices is Google’s launch of their Page Experience signal system. These new SEO guidelines are geared to favor websites with strong user experience metrics, including fast load times, interactivity, and balanced visuals.

Pay Per Click

SEM marketing techniques like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and Google Ads can be effective, but nothing beats SEO practices for positive results and cost effectiveness. The strategic use of keywords and multimedia, installation of metadata, URL building, continued release of fresh content, and increased accessibility for a broader range of users will all play a significant role in improving your SEO. Our team of SEO experts, freelance writers, graphic designers, and video production staff combine forces to make our customers’ websites soar to higher ranks on SERPs.

Social Media Marketing

Another aspect of effective web marketing is the use of social media platforms to promote your brand and grow your audience. Having multiple social media outlets for your company might seem like a lot of tedious work in order to build hashtags, create well designed visual content, and write strong captions, but there are ways to streamline the process. The best social media presences will have a team dedicated to running on mainstream platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Social media marketing campaigns can see even further audience growth by creating video content for platforms that are expanding the internet in unique ways, such as TikTok and Snapchat. If you can’t afford your own social media marketing team you can still get a whole team working for you by contracting with an agency like MLT Group.

Improving Social Media

To get started improving your social media marketing presence, there are a few basic steps you can take. Or have experienced digital marketing pros help you with these steps.

  1. Establish your ideal customer and target audience. This can include demographics like age, location, income, social media presences, job titles, and aesthetics.
  2. Examine your current presence before determining the next steps forward. Pinpoint which platforms and networks you are the most important to your target audiences and optimize your presence on those accounts with clear photos, descriptions, bios, and URLs.
  3. Make a messaging that is a constant across all your social media platforms and your website. This messaging should explain to your audiences the values of your brand and help build trust with potential and existing users.
  4. Calculate your key performance indicators (KPI). Social media analytics often provide metrics that work as KPIs, such as likes, shares, conversion rates, brand shout outs, sentimental feedback, time spent on each platform, and post reach.
  5. Create fresh and engaging content on a regular basis. Social media is a great space to humanize your brand, show what’s going on “behind the scenes,” and overall build a fun and interesting environment beyond the professional aspects of your website. You can also use your platforms to curate other brands; content and outreach to build relationships with like-minded companies.
  6. Track your data, analyze results, and use this feedback to continually optimize your social media marketing practices. Social media platforms are the best spaces for trial and error because of their low cost and ease of content production.

If you also utilize ecommerce as a primary part of company operations, pairing those online sales tools with SEO, social media, custom site design, and the support of a boutique firm will help your brand grow and build a dedicated audience with strong user relationships.

To learn more about our services for web development in Minneapolis, MN and across the country, contact MLT Group at (507) 281-3490 or at sales@mltgroup.com.