SEMbyotic’s 2018 Summed Up, Oscar-Style

• January 4, 2019
• Carla Fisher
• no comments

Unless you’re a film buff, you might not be aware that it’s awards season. Or maybe you are, but in the midst of the holiday hoopla, you never got to look that far ahead. That’s OK, because ’tis the season to look back, and at SEMbyotic, we enjoy contemplating the best performances of 2018. In fact, we’ve been busy contemplating some of our own!

Yes, a lot happened at SEMbyotic in 2018, not the least of which was adding several full-service digital marketing customers and consulting them on pay-per-click advertising (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO) and social media advertising.

If you’re not sure what SEMbyotic might be able to do for your bottom line, we thought it might be helpful to see all we’ve achieved for other businesses like yours. So we invite you to make like a movie mogul and pour yourself a glass of bubbly and indulge our Oscar metaphor long enough to look back on some of our best performances of 2018:

Best Leading Performance: Pay-Per-Click Advertising

2018 was a phenomenal year for our pay-per-click (PPC) customers. We produced over 5,400 leads for our B2B customers, leading to outstanding sales growth and sales opportunities within their pipelines. For customers specifically focused on lead generation, we helped them drive up conversion rates while dropping their cost per conversion over time. In short, that meant more leads for the money invested.

SEMbyotic has completely transformed our Google Ads/retargeting campaigns,” said a Senior Director at an enterprise whose core business focus is in-memory data grids. “Working with them on both strategy and execution has resulted in the best results our company has seen from these digital marketing efforts.”

One of the first things we do when beginning to manage a PPC account is a thorough audit of the customer’s data integrity and tracking. We work with the client to ensure the numbers we’re reporting as conversions align with actual contacts within their lead databases. What’s more, we continually work with the customer to gauge the quality of the leads, in order to make continual improvements to their campaigns — resulting in positive ROI for their business.

For customers focused on building awareness and digital branding, we leveraged a hybrid approach of paid search and display ads, awareness-focused social ads, and retargeting for both search and display ads in order to keep their brands top of mind. Our goals for these clients were to drive up clicks and impressions while driving down CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost-per-1,000 impressions).

For the medical technology company HeartFlow, our PPC strategy involved leveraging LinkedIn to track and home in on our Google Ads for better offers, better content, better performance, and better conversion.

Another shining example was a client that provides an enterprise solution for DNS security and management. In November 2018, they achieved the most leads ever produced in a month, and 2018 as a whole brought them the most leads ever produced in a year. We presented them with our complete digital marketing strategy and execution plan for FY 2019, and early results are trending toward another record-setting year!

Best Ensemble Performance: Web Design, Development, and Management

We couldn’t ask for a more hardworking trio in digital marketing than Web design, website development, and website management. When a company is firing on all cylinders with these three aspects of online presence, it exponentially increases the chance of being found online and converting site visitors into customers. In fact, there are no small parts when it comes to website performance — it’s always a group effort.

SEMbyotic excels at all three of these aspects, and for one client, V-Silicon, we created a fully operational website with a lightning-fast turnaround. Thinh Tran, CEO at Sigma Designs, became CEO at V-Silicon and wanted a corporate Web presence for the new company so investors, customers, and other critical audiences could find and verify them online. So our team quickly went to work, without sacrificing quality. From concept to launch of the WordPress site, the V-Silicon website was completed and published within a matter of days.

SEMbyotic quickly designed and developed the V-Silicon website to hit an extremely aggressive timeline.

Other website projects in 2018 included an evolutionary redesign of the global lighting solutions company Lumileds, website work for the semiconductor company Ambarella, Web development and updates for the lighting firm Xicato and landing page design for several full-service digital marketing customers.

Best Featured Performance: Mobile App Development

When it comes to mobile app development, we believe in total performance. After all, what good is a shiny new app if it’s not built out to integrate the client’s web content management system? SEMbyotic believes in building apps thoroughly from the start because integration saves time for marketing managers. Who wouldn’t want to update content in only one location in order to disseminate it to both the app and the Web?

We’re happy to report that in 2018, we completed the redevelopment of the Lumileds mobile app, which is receiving excellent reviews on iTunes. Now Lumileds marketing managers can update certain information within their web content management platform and those changes are automatically pushed to the app. No more need for duplicate effort!

We’ve also completed some updates and maintenance, and have more app development on the horizon for 2019.

SEMbyotic redesigned and redeveloped the Lumileds mobile app. Now available on iTunes and Google Play.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Search Engine Optimization and Digital Strategy

A common attribute of nearly all of our customers — and typical of many Silicon Valley-style B2B tech firms — is long, complex sales cycles. The SEMbyotic team is tireless about identifying user personas across the spectrum to craft campaigns that speak to the specific needs and wants of those personas.

As SEMbyotic President Adam Koontz attests, a company’s entire website and marketing activities are typically on display during the decision-making process.

“Business decision-makers want to see the value your offerings bring to their business, technical evaluators want assurance your offering will do the job and fit within their technology stack, and financial decision-makers want to understand your viability before any long-term commitments are signed,” he said.

Whether our clients are in enterprise software, security, semiconductor or manufacturing, this 10,000-foot view of the marketing landscape is often very similar. The challenge is understanding the details of the client’s market and technology. We’re pretty good at that.

SEO is one of our star performers at SEMbyotic. We gave SEO a Lifetime Achievement Award because we know how integral SEO is to a digital marketing strategy, and if you do it right, it can be the most effective tool for the lifetime of your organization.

2018 was a milestone year for every one of our SEO customers: Not only did these firms achieve sustained organic search growth, but every one of our SEO customers reached the most organic search traffic in their respective company histories!

What was it that spelled the difference for each of these customers? Fancy bells and whistles? Cookie-cutter search terms that work across the board? Not at all. The factor that helped these customers most happens to be the one thing you can do for your business that will undoubtedly increase your search traffic — shifting your mindset from stocking up on keywords to being a better provider of meaningful content on the Web.

More than anything, meaningful content is what leads to conversions. You publish content that adds value, your site visitors take notice, and soon they become sales leads.

Let’s take the example of one SEMbyotic customer in particular who made huge gains by implementing our recommendation to create a technical glossary on their website to explain vocabulary that’s important to their industry. Think of that company’s competitors who may never have thought of this. Who do you think marketing managers in that industry will appreciate more, and eventually do business with? Why, those who make complex concepts easy to understand, of course!

After implementing this strategy, our customer saw and continues to see, extraordinary growth in organic search traffic (see the chart below). In fact, we’re happy to report that organic sessions are up by more than 42 percent from where they started at the beginning of the year! This spectacular performance is enough to make us shout, “Bravo!”

Our organic SEO strategy led one customer towards achieving new high marks in organic search traffic.

Best Story: Content Strategy and Development

Makeup artists worth their salt will advise you to always play up your best features. What some SEMbyotic clients might not know is that content development is another area we can offer exceptional value.

For the medical technology company HeartFlow, we recommended maximizing the site’s reach by adding press releases as HTML on the website, instead of hosting them elsewhere. Our strategy also included embedding videos on the website — complete with transcription, in order to optimize the videos for SEO — and recommending they add comparisons of their non-invasive diagnostic solution vs. more traditional methods of testing for cardiovascular disease.

And just as we noted in our Lifetime Achievement category, the glossary of terms that we recommended for one of our secure DNS clients was content development at its best, driving their organic search results up by 42 percent! The glossary content is the #1 contributor to the company’s non-branded organic site traffic, adding over 100K visits to the site that didn’t exist the previous year. Next step, conversion rate optimization (CRO) to turn more of those visitors into leads.

Best Debut Performance: Julee Klein, VP of Client Services

2018 was also the year we brought on Julee Klein as our VP of Client Services. Julee’s background in business development and strategic planning brings added depth to the SEMbyotic team. We are thrilled to have Julee’s expertise and collaboration on all aspects of project management and execution.

And the Winner Is … Girls Who Code

It’s because of clients like you that 2018 was such a banner year. We enjoy sharing the abundance of the season, so we’ve made a contribution to a cause we believe in: Girls Who Code.

While tech jobs are among the fastest-growing in the country, girls are being left behind. Girls Who Code is working to close the gender gap in the computer science and tech industries and SEMbyotic is thrilled to have partnered with this national organization.

SEMbyotic is a proud partner of Girls Who Code, an organization focused on bringing gender diversity into computer science and technology.

Learn more about Girls Who Code and join the movement!

Yes, the milestones SEMbyotic has reached in the past 12 months by our team and our clients are true win-wins. Though we couldn’t list every achievement in this blog post, just know that we celebrate each one of our customers’ successes, and we’re grateful for all of you.

We wish you and yours a Happy New Year and we’re looking forward to all that 2019 has in store.