Targeted Traffic Trumps Volume| Joan Magat from Magnolia

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Add PathMonk to your website in seconds and let the artificial intelligence do all the work. Check us out on pathmonk. com. Welcome to today’s episode of PathMonk Presents, our podcast.

Let’s talk about today’s guest. We’re being joined by Joan Magat, Digital Marketing Manager at Magnolia. How are you, Joan?

Joan Magat: I’m doing good, Pablo. How are you today?

Pablo: I’m all right. Thanks for asking. I just wanted to ask you to describe your company in your own words as an introduction. What is Magnolia all about?

Joan Magat: Yeah. Magnolia is a digital marketing, it’s a B2B marketing communications agency. We specialize in public relations and advertising.
So we’re located in Vancouver, BC, and we’re serving clients globally. We’re 19. So we serve a wide range of industries and segments like payments, fintech, technology, manufacturing, logistics, and SaaS.

Pablo: I see. And, what specific type of scale or industry or focus area do you target? Is there a specific industry or type of business that is more common amongst your solutions?

Joan Magat: Majority of our clients are in the payment sector and in the technology sector. So we do both public relations and digital marketing for them. So it’s an end to end for most of our clients.

Pablo: I see. What would you say is your top client acquisition channel at the moment? Would it be digital marketing in itself or inbound, SEO, outbound.

Joan Magat: That’s a good question. That’s really a good question because we just had our year end review on the most profitable channels for us.
So actually, what one is SEO for us? With SEO though, we don’t have tons of traffic. We don’t have thousands of traffic, but what was working for us is being really targeted with our audience. We have a lot of traffic from where our audience are. For example, the majority of our audience are in Canada and the U.S. So our traffic is focused on Canada and the U.S. Because that’s where our clients are coming from or where the leads are coming from.
In our analysis, we actually got an ROI of 1760 percent on SEO.

Pablo: Okay. Interesting.

Joan Magat: Yeah, I didn’t share that in my LinkedIn—sorry—I didn’t share that in my LinkedIn just to inspire other companies that they don’t need thousands of traffics. We just need targeted traffics.

Pablo: So it’s better to have targeted traffic than having thousands of leads. That’s what you’re… I see.

Now in this context of website traffic and conversions, et cetera, what role or how big of a role would you say your website plays when it comes to client acquisition?

Joan Magat: I think it did, it plays. I think I have the data here for our SEO. It’s 60 percent of our client acquisition comes from us. 15 percent from paid ads and 23 percent from reference.

Pablo: Okay. Are you using any tools at the moment in order to improve lead generation through your site?

Joan Magat: We do use a lot of tools, check if we are actually getting qualified traffic.
So one of the recent was that we, in the past months, that we are using heavily Clearbit. So it gives us intelligence on the type of—cause we pay for traffic, we do paid ads—so we use Clearbit to identify if the audience coming from all of these websites or traffic sources are valid.
By doing that, we’re able to see if the right company, the right decision makers are really coming through our website.

I think it’s similar to PathMonk, to your tool.

Pablo: Yeah, as far as I understand and you’re explaining, I think it’s quite similar. Okay, good to know.

I wanted to switch the gears of the questions a little bit and focus on yourself as a leader. What are the key tasks that you focus on your day to day work as a digital marketing manager?

Joan Magat: Hey, where do I even start? I think as a digital marketing leader, my focus primarily is to bring in more value and to be more innovative for our clients.
My day starts with planning on what can I do for my clients today? How can we improve their campaign? How can we improve their content strategy? How can we improve their SEO?
Because I think majority lies on strategy and my day to day tasks is about strategy—strategizing on how to bring more ROI for our clients and for Magnolia itself.

Pablo: I see. All right. What is the last book you read that related or pertained to your role as a marketing manager?

Joan Magat: I’m currently reading Traction. It’s an EOS, from I think EOS, on how to—it’s for startups. Cause I’m looking into improving more on our—improving the meetings, making them KPIs, then for all the things.
So I’m reading it and implementing it internally, so we can improve our internal meetings and how things are in general, be more KPI.

Pablo: What is the one single thing that Magnolia is focusing on the most at the moment? Earlier, before the podcast, you were mentioning a new website launch. I don’t know if that’s like your main priority at the moment or if there are any other upcoming projects that we should highlight.

Joan Magat: Yeah, we’re focusing on our own website, on our own website launch. So we will be announcing it, but either Friday or Monday, to the world that we have our new brand new website and brand branding along with it.
But, in the company, we’re actually focusing on our group marketing campaign. We’ve started—we’ve launched a growth marketing campaign last month targeting SaaS. We’re currently running LinkedIn campaigns. We brought an ebook on growth marketing. We have a webinar, an on demand webinar on growth marketing. Everyone’s absolutely focused on that.

Pablo: I see. Now this is more a hypothetical question, but let’s say that there were no boundaries in technology. What would be the one thing that you would want to have fixed for your role as a marketer today?

Joan Magat: Probably there are no boundaries. I would like to know more about probably improving more on the intelligence of the visitors coming in, coming to all the campaigns that we’re running in Magnolia or clients.

Pablo: Now, if there was a repetitive task that you could automate, what would it be? It kind of ties into my previous question, but more from an automation point of view.

Joan Magat: I don’t think I have a lot of repetitive tasks because—probably meetings are repetitive for me, but they’re necessity.
But I don’t think I have a repetitive task because I tend—if it is repetitive, I would definitely automate it given my background, because I used to be a programmer prior to switching to marketing. So I’m more into automation. If it is repetitive, I’ll definitely automate it.

Pablo: Fair enough. And now the last question that I have for you is, let’s say that there was one piece of advice that you could give yourself if you were to restart your journey as a marketer today, what would it be?

Joan Magat: I would probably, because my transition to marketing—not the smooth one or a linear one—I would probably invest more on learning because I’m into digital marketing.
But I would probably invest more on traditional, learning the traditional marketing aspects. Because I think traditional and digital, once you combine them, they’re more powerful.

Pablo: And what aspects of traditional marketing do you mean?

Joan Magat: I would probably want to learn more about outside the digital realm of marketing.

Pablo: Ah, I see. Okay. Like the old school principles, I see.

Joan Magat: Yes.

Pablo: Joan, thank you very much for being on with us on the show today. I want to give you the last words. Let’s say that someone forgets everything that we covered in the interview today. What is the one thing that they should remember about your company, about Magnolia?

Joan Magat: I think they—one thing probably—that we work hard to boost our clients’ strategies, their digital marketing campaigns. And we work hard in identifying the challenges and opportunities for them.

Pablo: All right. Fair enough. Once again, thank you for being on the show. We’ll see you soon.

Joan Magat: Thank you so much, Pablo. Bye bye.