Kevin Gibbons is founder and CEO of Re:signal – a strategy-driven SEO and content marketing agency in London.
Winner of 15x UK/EU Search Awards, he was named search personality of the year at the UK Search Awards (2018) and listed in BIMA’s top 100 people shaping the digital industry (CEO and leaders category) in 2019.
He has helped to grow Re:signal into a fast growth digital marketing agency, as recognised by Deloitte Fast 50 UK & EMEA (2017) and the FT 1000 fastest growing companies in Europe (2018). Working with clients including Expedia, Auto Trader, Pottery Barn and Deloitte.
Kevin has spoken at over 100 events internationally over the last 10 years, including; Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Pubcon, ClickZ / SES, BrightonSEO, SAScon, State of Search, Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference (RIMC), Content Marketing Association (CMA), Performance Marketing Insights, SEMCamp and many more…
Columnist writer at Econsultancy, Search Engine Watch, The Drum, Fast Company and Search Engine Land. Judge at US / MENA Search Awards, The Drum Content Awards and DADI Awards.
“Kev, how can you still consider yourself an MARKETER?
When was the last time you actually did any MARKETING for your own agency?”
I get questions like this a lot…and they bother me each time.
And here’s the rub…
I’m the one asking them…of myself.
You see, I’ve run digital marketing agencies since 2006. I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting, hacking, growing, learning (and everything in between). I’ve writtenhundredsof blog posts, givenmedia interviews and presentedatatonofconferences. To be honest, I (pretty much) loved every minute of it…and the ends always justified the means.
“Organic” marketing has always been my main way of generating new business, with prospects coming purely via referral, reputation, search or our own content. I loved spending most of my time in “the trenches” and this allowed us to keep growing and working with some leading companies in the world.
(Here I am speaking at an SES London event from a couple of years ago)
Actually, let me clarify that a bit…GREAT content marketing is hard!
One of the biggest reasons why it’s so hard nowadays is that there are just SO many choices. Every single day, I see blog posts, columns, tweets and updates telling me the million different things that I HAVE TO BE DOING…
I recently spent a long weekend in Rome. While I was there, I was surrounded by art, by masterpieces. Creativity was everywhere.
From the painters I walked by in the promenade, to the Sistine Chapel and Coliseum, to the artful way dishes are put together. You could tell everything was created with such passion, precision, and focus.
We don’t have time anymore to produce work of that quality.
We live in such a fast-paced world of meetings, emails, notifications and various other tasks that we simply can’t find the time to sit down and really focus. All these tools designed to help us work, actually do everything but.
On top of this, there’s other day-to-day pressures. You’re below targets, your boss is unhappy, they wanted results yesterday, and so on, and so on…
At least that’s the perception. What we say as an excuse.
But those painters in the promenade, they sit in a crowded area and are able to focus on nothing but their work. No people watching, no phone checking, no incoming emails.
It’s still possible to create a masterpiece. It just requires patience and focus a lot of us don’t want to deal with.
Optimising your app for the app store? Re:signal’ Anna-Lena Müllerexplains the building blocks of app store optimisation (ASO) components and the differences between the Apple and Google Play Store.
App store optimisation (ASO) is a subset of app marketing which has long been underestimated and disregarded. Quite rightly, today it’s growing in popularity because it’s all about improving product visibility within app stores and stimulating users to actually download an app.
Two stats about apps that make ASO important:
there are more than two million mobile apps in the large app stores
about 63% of apps are discovered and downloaded while browsing through the app stores
These blogger outreach approaches and handy tools will help you:
save time at work
establish valuable industry connections
get your placements on high-profile websites
I landed my job at Re:signal thanks to outreach. I was an outreacher and I didn’t even know it. I always wanted to work for the company, but back then they weren’t advertising any open positions. But I really wanted to work for them. Really really.
A quick swizz of the Re:signal site and I found a fairly generic ‘hello@’ email address and an online form. A quick scan of the About Us page gave me some LinkedIn details for my very lovely colleagues, but I kind of knew that wouldn’t be enough. So I used outreach tactics to get my foot in the door.
I won’t tell you which tool I used (hint though: I’ve listed it below), but with a bit of imaginative thinking and a really useful piece of kit, I got myself a direct line to the people at the top. The rest is history, says modest me. And it took me about the same time it’s just taken me to make a cup of tea as I sit and write this blog.
Nowadays I use similar outreach tactics every day –
I find the challenge with local search marketing is that you need to put yourself into the shoes of the local business in order to really focus on what is best for their business.
You have to consider any issues and constraints of a small business, the importance of measuring around real world goals and making suggestions as actionable as possible so that changes can make an impact in the short-to-medium term, not just long-term.
Here’s what I would do if I ran a local company in Putney!
Last week, Re:signal and BlueGlass Zurich spent an exciting weekend together in Switzerland for the BlueGlass Winter Summit 2015.
We had a brilliant time walking around Zurich, eating delicious food, enjoying the local wine/beer, spending time together and trying to not cause any avalanches on the slopes!
This post was written for the BrightonSEO magazine to support the presentation I did on The Secrets of Newsworthy Content.
PR has always been a tricky one to attribute direct value to. Aside from the increase in rank that PR lead companies tend to be awarded, understanding what measurable impacts putting your brand in front of users in their day-to-day lives has, takes some work and an analytical mind. But a large part of the reason this can be quite a daunting task is that the Google Analytics is not configured properly to analyse how your users are behaving.
So in this post, I want to look at a few simple things that you can do in Google Analytics to help you to show direct value to your PR and content activity. This will become vital when measuring the business value of content campaigns, which extends beyond likes &
The concept of newsworthy content is one that every brand should be chasing. The phrase “great content” is a widely used one but by its nature it’s extremely difficult to actually qualify as it’s rather subjective and extremely broad!
