Digital Marketer Eagan Heath Shares How His Company Helps Small Businesses Find New Customers
By: Ed Newman
Tags: Entrepreneurship, SEO, Digital Marketing, Business Development, Marketing

MARKETING MATTERS

Digital Marketer Eagan Heath Shares How His Company Helps Small Businesses Find New Customers

He began by helping businesses optimize their websites.

Teamwork makes the dream work. Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

I met Eagan Heath at my daughter’s wedding several years ago. He performed Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” as I walked my daughter down the “aisle” at an outdoor wedding in Morris, Minnesota. This week we re-connected to discuss marketing matters, including the manner in which Facebook and Google use A.I. and how much the marketing playing field has shifted. This interview was a consequence of that discussion.

Eagan Heath discusses analytics with new client.

What is your title and what is Get Found Madison?

Eagan Heath: I just say I’m the owner and founder of a digital marketing agency based in Madison, Wisconsin. We started out serving local businesses by helping them rank on Google with SEO and Google Ads, and we’ve since branched out into serving eCommerce and B2B companies with paid social media ads, email automation and WordPress websites.

When did you found Get Found Madison and what were you doing up till then?

EH: I started the company in June 2016 after working at Epic as a hospital software project manager.

Where did the idea for your company come from?

EH: I was itching to work for myself and I heard on a podcast that offering SEO services was a great way to start doing that. I did some free consulting for some local businesses while I still worked my corporate job, and after I got them from page 2 to the top of page 1 of Google, I knew I had something valuable to offer.

You have some great testimonials. When you started you had no track record. How did you establish your credibility initially?

EH: SEO is different than most service businesses because people can tell immediately whether you’re good at what you do. I focused on ranking for phrases like “SEO Madison WI” or “SEO company in Madison, WI” so people could see I knew my stuff. Prospects often comment that they found me through good and that I seem to know what I’m doing.

https://www.datadriveninvestor.com/2019/08/15/marketers-rush-to-rise-on-the-ai-tide/

For the first clients, referrals were huge, so I developed relationships with local website companies who referred me to their clients and transferred a lot of trust thereby.

A lot of people fallaciously think that “if you build it they will come” when it comes to putting up a website. Would you care to comment on this?

EH: Great question. I think too many small businesses think of their website as a brochure when what they really want is a lead generation machine.

What you actually need to do is plan out how you’ll get the right people to your site so they’ll contact you or buy from you.

Luckily, there is a pretty short list of places most people go on their devices, and we can reach them at every one:

* Search engine

* Social Media

* Email

* Browsing a website like news, sports, a blog, etc.

I think one of the most fascinating features of data analytics is learning at what point potential customers fall out of the sales funnel. How does Get Found Madison help in that?

Agreed. I’ve gotten concise about pitching the value of online marketing to skeptical small business owners over the years, and it comes down to:

* The targeting is better

* People’s attention has shifted online, so that’s where they are

* You can more easily measure the results

* You can test faster and with a smaller initial budget

* As a result, you can acquire customers cheaper online than offline

For a local business, the funnel looks something like this:

* Impressions

* Clicks

* Contact form submissions

* Sales

We measure the results and provide our clients with the data on the first three, and help them to track that last one in their CRM.

For an eCommerce business, it might look something like:

* Impression

* Click

* Email list sign up

* Email open rate

* Email click rate

* Purchase

You have a small team but a wide array of skills and services. What are the services that your Madison customers have found most useful and compelling?

EH: We are about to launch a new brand called Caravan Digital (freshly named this week) that will market to and focus on eCommerce marketing. The reason we’re doing this is because we can cleanly report on dollars out vs. dollars in on ad spend and because eCommerce is the present and the future.

While I’ll always have a place in my heart and mind for SEO, the reality has been that we can drive stronger results faster and with better reporting with Facebook Ads for eCommerce companies. We have a client right now who has spent $23,000 on Facebook ads and made $467,000 in sales as a result. It’s hard to get 2,000% returns like that anywhere else.