Quietly Suffering: Why Aren’t More Founders Talking About Mental Health?

In this post:

• What is search marketing and why does it matter?
• What is search engine optimization?
• What is search engine marketing?
• SEO and SEM: which works best?

What Is Search Marketing and Why Should You Care?

Search marketing refers to getting your website, social media pages, or other web pages to rank well with search engines like Google and Bing via paid and unpaid methods.

Try saying that five times fast! If it seems like a mouthful, that’s because it kind of is.

Ranking well with search engines is essential to getting your web pages noticed by potential customers. Even the best-written pages will be ineffective if they languish on page six, ten, or 100 (the horror!) of search results.

According to Forbes, as many as 92 percent of web users look no further than the first page of search results. With around1.2 billion websites active today, the competition for those top spots is fierce.

The best search marketing efforts combine both paid and unpaid methods of increasing search engine ranking. Organic (unpaid) growth can be more cost-effective, but it usually takes longer to realize even small movements in ranking using unpaid methods. The good news is that once you've gained ground using organic growth, the results tend to stay awhile.

Conversely, the effects of paid advertising on search engine results (and website traffic!) are more immediate but vanish immediately when you end your paid campaign.

Search marketing is a big space in the digital advertising world, so buckle up as we dive right in.

What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization, usually referred to simply as SEO, is the art and science of making your web pages rank highly with search engines using organic methods (aka unpaid traffic).

Entire books have been written about what makes up good SEO techniques. In a nutshell, it involves creating content that is useful and beneficial to your readers and letting the search engines easily detect what your pages are about. The algorithms know best, in this case.

There are three types of SEO: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO, as the name implies, involves what you write on your web and social media pages. Good on-page SEO technique includes publishing good, interesting, and useful content, using a few, carefully chosen keyword phrases to let search engines know what your page is about. A popular planning strategy for good on-page SEO is using the topic cluster model of content development.

You’ll want to make sure you’re using those keywords and phrases in the right places on the page (e.g. in the first paragraph, in at least one "H2" heading, in the page title, in your image caption) so the Google machine doesn’t get confused. (The Google machine is very particular.)

Of these on-page elements, having good content is by far the most important. Google, in particular, seeks out websites with what it deems to be good content. Google uses a sophisticated machine-learning algorithm to evaluate content.

While the exact algorithm is a well-kept secret, it's safe to say that it works by matching your content to that of a known authority in your field (like a university site or a non-profit). It also looks at how long readers stay on your pages, using the theory that good content encourages readers to stay longer to read it. It looks at things like images—which might be optional for an opinion site—but necessary for a food, gardening, or craft site.

Without good content, none of the rest of the information and tips on this page are likely to make any difference in your page ranking.

Technical SEO is the "page-office" stuff. This includes crafting a good META title and META description, making sure that you site loads quickly, having the necessary security measure in place, making your site adaptable to a variety of screen sizes and mobile-friendly, and organizing your website logically.

Off-page SEO has to do with your relationships with other well-regarded websites. Who is linking to your site? Are they sites that increase your image of authority in the eyes of search engines...or are they cheapening your brand? A good way to get good backlinks is to offer to write a guest post for websites that complement your site. (Oh by the way, have you read this blog post from Sellerly about us? ← See what we did there?)  

👍 SEO in action: This client engaged us for SEO help and reached #1 on Google!

What Is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is using paid advertising to help your web pages show up on search results pages. We like to call this a rent-to-own approach to marketing. Basically, you’re taking up prime space with paid ads until you can reach that same prime space without paid ads.

By using Google AdWords (or the similar Microsoft Advertising platform through Bing), you can bid for and purchase keywords and phrases that best represent your business. If your business focuses on local traffic, you can add the city, with a keyword like "Atlanta hair salons" or "Boston pet food stores".

When someone searches for something similar to your keyword or phrase, your ad will be in the running for ones that they'll see at the top of the page (without having to scroll down...this is key). If someone clicks through to your website from one of those ads, Google (or Bing) will charge your account. Your ad will stop running when you've hit your agreed-upon monthly maximum marketing budget.

So...why should you pay for a good search engine ranking when you can (at least theoretically) get the same results for free, using good SEO practices? Using paid search advertising helps put your listing at the "front of the line" and increases the likelihood that you'll show up at the top of Google (at least in the short run), outsmarting your competitors who are using exclusively organic methods.

However, it's wise to keep in mind that there is a subset of consumers who bypass the paid ads in search results on general principle. By using paid search methods exclusively, you'd miss out on that segment of the web buying public.

👍 SEM in action: This client employed PPC ads to drastically increase product sales.

SEO vs. SEM: Which Method Is Best?

SEO vs. SEM, paid vs. unpaid...which one is better?

The answer is that it depends.

It depends on your industry, your goals for your digital marketing, your budget, and how much time you have to devote to your SEO or SEM efforts. It's our view that everything "depends" in marketing.

SEO is best for those companies that have more time than money. If you have a lot of time to devote to crafting stellar content, approaching other websites about guest posts and writing them, and manually updating your pages and links so that everything is constantly fresh, then SEO will save you money and, done well, will yield long-lasting results.

SEM helps to speed up the process and yields results even if you have limited time to devote to search marketing. If it is done well, SEM can get your site placed above the organic sites. SEM is also a good choice for a promotion that has specific parameters, such as Red Lobster's "Lobster Fest" month. The downside to SEM is that when you stop paying for ads, your visibility (and traffic) will decrease abruptly.

Our opinion is that the best digital marketing plan uses a combination of SEO and SEM.

Both SEO and SEM will help your web pages stay visible to consumers and drive a more targeted base of readers to your web pages. SEM can get you instant web traffic while you build your content and the depth of your site enough to attract readers organically.

Back to the "rent-to-own" approach...When you combine SEO and SEM you're getting the best of both worls. You pay first for results, and you end up "owning" your good ranking by virtue of your well-built, well-organized website and its stellar content.

To learn more about how to increase your search engine ranking using SEO and SEM techniques, book a call with one of our growth experts!

Marketing for Growth With Smart Testing

We’ve said it hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and we’ll say it again: always be testing.

Testing—especially smart, methodical testing—is the key to building a sustainable marketing strategy. The hot new thing (for good reason) is viewing digital marketing as a tool for growth marketing.

Growth marketers apply the scientific method to marketing to create strategies that are as data-driven as they are idea-driven. That’s essentially the basis of what EmberTribe does: ideate, test, iterate.

🌱 We're growth scientists, and you can be too!

Growth marketing relies on structured, repeatable processes to develop hypotheses, discover results, come up with conclusions, and iterate on findings. This is smart testing.

How Smart Ad Testing Achieved Big Wins

Anyone can run paid traffic, but just running paid traffic won’t always get the results you want. You have to use that big brain of yours to engage in serious testing to find the wins you're looking for.

We’ve been able to prove time and time again that if you test your assumptions and follow the data, your ads will begin to meet and even exceed your goals. In this post we’ve gathered 5 case studies that illustrate how testing brought insights to light, that we were able to leverage into profitable campaigns.

1. Testing ads before a new collection launch leads to sales exceeding launch goals.

For this gift and accessories brand, we started out by seeking strategies to expand cold audience reach. By launching multiple campaign ads that spanned a variety of messaging angles, we discovered what messages resonated with this client’s audiences.

With this data in hand, we then rapid-tested ads for a new collection launch to identify winning creative among them. Our method resulted in their second highest sales day ever, just behind Black Friday sales.  

2. We tested our way to discovering a hard-to-pinpoint core audience.

This sports coaching subscription service couldn’t seem to find enough audiences on Facebook to validate their strategy. We began running traffic to test which got the best engagement and build their Pixel data.

We ran more lead generation campaigns offering valuable content (ebook) and nailed down our audiences further. By continuing to optimize ads for audience, urgency, and cost, we achieved 8.77x ROAS.

3. Moving from traction to revenue by testing factors in a buyer’s purchasing decision.

This children’s clothing boutique had a great product, but at a higher price point than competitors in the children’s wear market. We set out to find the right audience for this store.

We extensively tested creative formats for cold audiences based on interests, behaviors, and lookalikes. By restructuring the strategy from broad reach to testing and refining highly targeted smaller audiences, as well as consistently retargeting all engaged people, we achieved 2.71x ROAS.

4. Using market research and testing to scale user acquisition via Facebook traffic.

EmberTribe researched the client’s target audience, it’s competitor’s advertising campaigns, and it’s competitor’s content before beginning to conduct tests.

Armed with a substantial amount of market research to go along with a series of targeted audiences, EmberTribe created and tested hundreds of ad variations and made adjustments and iterations as certain ads proved to be successful. This resulted in scaling up to 400k unique user sign ups per month.

5. Finding new opportunities to leverage Facebook ads to scale revenue.

Knowing fit was crucial for this high-end lingerie brand, we focused on showing the fit through videos of models moving in the bras, and including testimonials, social proof/awards, and short copy hitting on the discomfort many women associate with bras.

Our team also tested and iterated extensively with optimizations and creative including dynamic broad reach targeting, single images, videos, carousels and Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs). Our testing resulted in a 300% lift in revenue compared to the previous period.

Always Be Testing

Just say no 🙅‍♀️ to a “set it and forget it” mindset! We cannot say this enough. Testing, when done well, will create the foundation you need to iterate on successes and collect data to help you make educated decisions for your campaigns.

Entrepreneurship has become a fantasy for many young men and women.

You don’t have to look far to find millions of posts that circulate every week, hashtagged with #entrepreneur #startup #girlboss.

But despite this pop-culture dressing, a dark truth lurks in the shadows: startup founders are disproportionately impacted by mental health challenges.

According to a recent study conducted by UC Berkeley, 72% of entrepreneurs surveyed report mental health concerns.

By comparison, only 32% of adults in the United States report having been diagnosed with some form of mental illness.

At EmberTribe, we work firsthand with founders across tech, eCommerce, and the service sector. We’ve observed the frenetic pace at which they work towards milestones, whether they be sales figures, fundraising goals or product development.

We’ve also experienced what it’s like to take risks with our family’s well being. We know what it’s like to live in a state of uncertainty, while being accountable to payroll and a team that trusts you with their financial future.

All of these challenges come with the territory, but the debilitating (and potentially life-threatening) impact of depression and anxiety doesn’t have to be a new normal for entrepreneurs and their teams.

Mental health isn’t our area of expertise and we don’t claim to have the answers to this looming crisis.

But one thing we do know...

Isolation is the enemy of wellness.

My co-founder, T.J., and I brainstormed ways that we could be a better ally to startup founders and their teams. Something that goes beyond our normal scope of service.

Here is an email we shared with our current clients last week:

Dear Client,

At EmberTribe, we've worked with hundreds of founders and their teams.

We know through direct experience that entrepreneurship can be a lonely and brutal sport.

Pop-culture idolizes fearless founders, who with steely determination, overcome any obstacle in their way with superhuman, stoic resolve.

But do you know what hasn't made enough headlines?

The mental health struggles that are plaguing the startup ecosystem.

The University of California concluded that 72% of entrepreneurs surveyed report mental health concerns.

That's a lot.

The truth is, many of our peers are quietly suffering from depression and anxiety. And not enough people are talking about it.

My co-founder, T.J. and I have both personally been impacted by this during the course of our careers.

Today, we want to take action and play a small role in bringing more health and balance to the startup ecosystem.

We've chosen to partner with Talkspace, a platform that facilitates discreet, online therapy.

Here's how it works: If you or someone close to you on your team is looking for help in any way, we're sponsoring 100% of a month's worth of sessions on Talkspace.

You can privately request this support by emailing: ****@embertribe.com. We'll simply reply with a code that you can use to redeem for the month's sessions. No questions asked.

We're grateful for your partnership and excited for your growth.

With gratitude,

Josh & T.J., Co-founders, EmberTribe

There’s nothing grand about this gesture. It’s just a simple offer to encourage those quietly suffering alone to step out from isolation.

The startup ecosystem includes a diverse group of men and women across different backgrounds and ethnicities.  We are a community with shared values of innovation and growth. We hold a unique vision of what the world could be like.

The challenge is, will we support one another when it really counts? Will we listen when it’s uncomfortable or potentially awkward? Will we openly embrace the dark moments of anxiety and depression alongside epic idealism and optimism?

It takes buy-in from founders, investors, strategic partners, consultants, family and friends

Because pursuing growth at all costs is too expensive.

Let’s get to work.

It was dark. Really dark. The kind of darkness that makes you question your sanity.

The only thing louder than my pulse was the slow drip of a faucet that bounced off the concrete walls.

Cold metal handcuffs pressed firmly against my wrists. I could move, but only as far as the heavy chain would allow.

Only minutes had passed since we were blindfolded. But every second would count.

The countdown for survival was on...

Not every company subjects its crew to extreme escape scenarios, but when you’re a distributed team like EmberTribe, you have to make the most of the (face) time!

At our most recent meetup, some of our team took on the challenge of escaping from a “Breakout” room.

The team building concept is catching on quickly with dozens of franchises sprouting up across the nation. Our experience unfolded at the Greensboro, NC location.

The objective is simple: work as a team to escape! Think of it as a life-sized puzzle. Without going into specifics (you’ll have to experience that yourself!), you have to crack codes, look for clues, and use logic to escape. Each riddle you solve leads one step closer to victory.

The catch? You only have 60 minutes to do it.

The scenario we chose was called “The Kidnapping”, in which a crazed serial killer (somewhat altruistically) gives you 60 minutes to escape before...well, you know. Here’s the trailer.

The Breakout Games company records data from thousands of these escapes and monitors each one through video surveillance. The odds they gave us to escape? A mere 20% success rate.

This post isn’t so much about the destination as it was the journey, so I’ll let the cat out of the bag: we made it!

Beating the odds confirmed what I already knew: I work with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

But there’s a lot more that I learned about teamwork and how we’re wired.

1. We all process information differently.

Our team is divided evenly between folks who process internally and the loudmouths like me, who are verbal processors. This also correlates somewhat to personality.

In the breakout room, some of our quieter folks would wait, listen, think and then nail a solution that seemingly came out of thin air.

The learning here is that quiet ≠ disengaged. It’s important to remember this during brainstorming meetings and really any group context.

On the other hand, loud ≠ domineering. Verbal processors need the same space to talk through a solution.

Empathy and patience are key.

2. Don’t jump to a solution too quickly, collect the facts first.

One reason why we were successful in the breakout room is that we leveraged the power of observation.

Put another way: we would state the obvious first, then figure out what that meant for next steps.

Observe. Process. Solve.

When you jump to a solution too quickly, you work on faulty assumptions. I made this mistake at one point in the breakout room. I found a puzzle piece and started working under the assumption it was meant to fit on the floor. In fact, the piece only made sense when it was held up to the wall.

This principle has a direct application to our work as an agency. We let data drive solutions for our clients. When we’re measuring performance for an ad campaign or a landing page, we carefully observe and then think about architecting a solution.

Let the facts sink in, challenge your assumptions, then think through a solution. Definitely something I want to continue to build into our culture here at Ember.

3. Efficient teams work together but separately.

In the breakout room we all focused on a common goal. When we unlocked a new box we would huddle and observe. But then we would disperse a bit while working on the next obstacle.

Some people took notes on a whiteboard, others tinkered with puzzle pieces. Others reviewed past clues.

There was an efficient form of communication unfolding in the room where we shared information without hyper-focus on one part of the problem.

4. When something isn’t working, change your perspective.

Some challenges can’t be solved until you change your perspective. In the breakout room, different clues are revealed with the lights on and others only when the lights are off.

Changing perspectives in a breakout room is easy: just walk to the other side of the room and look at the riddle differently. In the real world, it takes an intentional effort to change perspective.

One way that our team and processes can improve is to schedule time for different team members to audit our client’s accounts.

We do this already when we hit a roadblock: conversion rate is stalling, ad campaign growing tired, etc. But a big win for us will be to pre-emptively get a fresh “outside” look to make sure we aren’t missing anything in our plan of attack.

5. Limits inspire progress.

One of my favorite aspects of the escape room is the countdown. In my post-game analysis I wondered: would have we escaped after 55 minutes if there was no countdown? I’m positive that we still would have escaped, but am certain it would have taken MUCH longer.

As I continue to reflect on this experience, I wonder, where should we be self-imposing limits on ourselves as a team to generate more creativity and clever solutions?

For example, our client may have a $10M advertising budget, but what could we accomplish with $1k? Having too much of a resource (money or time) can make you lazy and potentially miss a  game changing creative solution.

Not to get too philosophical, but I think highly effective people learn to dream without limits and act within constraints.

Our team’s experience with the breakout room was really fun and a big win for morale. But I’m even more grateful for the lessons we’re taking with us...beyond the reach of a hypothetical serial killer.

The team here at EmberTribe is happy to introduce J.P. VanderLinden as our first Director of Digital Marketing. From day one, EmberTribe has been committed to providing every client with exceptional service from knowledgeable industry experts. By hiring one of digital marketing's brightest young minds, we are reaffirming our commitment to excellence.

As Director of Digital Marketing, VanderLinden will lead our paid acquisition team as we continue to provide our clients with real marketing results quickly and efficiently. He will also work cross-functionally with our Head of Analytics and UX to amplify campaign results and provide clients with complete visibility into those results.

We built EmberTribe based on the idea that companies should see results from their marketing agency in weeks, not months. By rapidly testing, iterating, and scaling our campaigns we have been able to expand and create new lead generation channels for many of our clients in just a few weeks. This agile style of marketing is what initially drew VanderLinden to EmberTribe. “From our first conversation, it was clear that our brand of agile marketing is what gets this guy out of bed every morning.” says our Co-Founder Josh Sturgeon. “J.P.’s commitment to providing clients with rapid results is why the decision to bring him onboard was such a no brainer.”

We built EmberTribe based on the idea that companies should see results from their marketing agency in weeks, not months.

VanderLinden’s seven years of digital marketing experience has allowed him to work with dozens of clients across multiple industries in areas such as social media, SEO, email marketing, analytics, and copywriting. However, VanderLinden sees his future, and the future of digital marketing, in paid acquisition and analytics.

“Facebook, Twitter, Google, and all of these other networks are the future of digital marketing,” says VanderLinden “As a marketer, my job is to figure out how I can best leverage these networks to reach the right audience with the right message. By merging paid acquisition with analytics, we can quickly tap into these networks to provide our clients with results that will move the needle for them in weeks, not months.”

VanderLinden won’t need to adjust to our remote working culture since his previous company is distributed as well. “Some people love being surrounded by an office environment. However, I love the freedom of working remotely. I can reserve all of my water cooler talk for Slack!”

VanderLinden is already providing results to some of EmberTribe’s premier clients. If you’d like to reach out to talk paid acquisition, analytics, or would just like to catch-up, feel free to drop him a message at jp [at] embertribe [dot] com.

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