considered non-promotional as it endorsed a speaker at a conference without any direct relation to Company X. Two of the posts had comments, and the COO responded to both.
There were 210 total likes (just under an average of 6 a post) and zero shares.
The focus of LinkedIn is more on the personal profiles of the employees rather than the company pages. Three of the four company founders have their own personal profile.
The CEO has 211 connections but has zero publicly-listed activity. The COO has more than 500 connections and, in addition to liking the posts of others (mainly around start-up matters), promotes the posts of Company X. The Chief Designer has 136 connections and in addition to liking the posts of others (around start-up matters and research matters) likes the posts of Company X.
To measure the effectiveness of Company X’s SEO, the researcher (lacking access to in- ternal metrics) had to use two methods which were open to the public: The first is a man- ual search rank based on two sets of keywords (in incognito mode to reduce the effects of localization and personalization), and the second is a Moz Domain Authority score (refer- enced earlier.) Though not overly detailed, both of these scores together give a good overview of how a company is performing with SEO.
The results for Company X are mixed. For the phrase ‘active magnetic bearing’, Com- pany X showed up respectably at position 23 (page three); For the word ‘drivetrains’ Com- pany X did not show up at all, and the search stopped after 240 entries. It should be noted that these are the keywords the researcher identified as the most important. It is very possible that the external service provider identified more relevant target keywords.
The Moz Domain Authority score for Company X is 17. This is a below-average score and indicates, among other things, that Company X has to start producing compelling content that will generate high-quality backlinks to its site.
According to the CEO, Company X does actively use metrics. It uses Hubspot as a CRM tool and uses metrics from Google Analytics as well. The company uses the metrics to
“follow what kind of activity there is in our web page. Basically, we try to somehow engage also those who are using our web page.” The CEO thinks the COO uses the statistics on LinkedIn, but he wasn’t entirely sure.
SMEs face when carrying out digital marketing and implementing digital marketing based on the tools and methods used in the updated Kierzkowski et al. framework. This process model was the base for investigating Company X’s digital marketing (and will serve as the base for developing it as well). When combined with the semi-structured interview with the CEO and an analysis of its current digital marketing efforts, it allowed for some robust findings.
Overall, Company X’s digital marketing matches nicely to what you would expect from an- other SME. In short, that they grasp the importance of digital marketing, but are making the minimum effort to utilize the opportunity. Two areas in which Company X does differ from other SMEs are discussed below.
Regarding the basic elements of their digital marketing efforts, Company X hasn’t set down the important prerequisites (goals, buyer personas, a central branding concept and keywords) which are needed to give their organic digital marketing some focus and direc- tion. Nor do they at this point agree on how much energy they should expend in this area.
That said, they seem to be going in a forward direction with their thinking. For instance, unlike most SMEs, their main goal is to establish partnerships. They also understand the customers they want to target so establishing buyer persona should not be that difficult.
Branding seems to be the most difficult challenge, but the CEO recognizes that the com- pany’s high level of expertise, combined with the high-tech, eco-friendly product, could serve a good base for the brand. They have also outsourced SEO, with slight success.
Concerning the second part of the data findings, Company X suffers from many of the same factors that most SMEs suffer from: They are strapped for time, the owners do not consider digital marketing a priority and they lack the employees to effectively utilize digi- tal marketing. They are also a product of their digital and competitive environments in both a positive way (they have a high-quality website) and a negative way (like their com- petitors they don’t have content-driven digital marketing). The two areas where Company X differs from most other SMEs is that lack-of-money is not a major obstacle and that they are confident in their IT and digital marketing skillset. They are also comfortable in pro- ducing content in English.
Finally, with regards to the methods of digital marketing, SMEs usually fall far short of opti- mal and Company X fits into this category. It does not have a content marketing or email marketing campaign at all; the only social media platform it (and, more importantly here, its employees) regularly uses is LinkedIn, and there it is almost entirely promotional; and though the SEO situation could be worse, Company X has a long way to go before it gains
any real value from it. This is a shame as the potential dividends for the company are great.
6 Conclusions
This final section mainly consists of developing Company X’s organic digital marketing. It then moves on to discuss the reliability and validity of the study followed by the learning outcomes. The section ends by discussing the limitations of the research as well as rec- ommendations for further study.