My co-founder Holly and I started Purple Patch events group back in 2004. After spending many years working in the marketing and events industry, we felt there could be significant improvements made to the way events were organised and managed. Having established a successful event management business – Presentation Experts also quickly came into existence. In order for clients to deliver their services and products successfully to eager crowds during keynote speeches, they needed more support with the creation of professional presentations.
Presentation Experts specialises in presentation design services for businesses of all sizes. As a Presentation design agency we create content and designs for conferences, sales pitch decks, events and more. Over the course of 2018, our team put together over 200 bespoke presentations, while our sister events agency Purple Patch delivered more than 300 minutes of corporate film and in excess of 250 hours of exclusive events.
A presentation can often make or break the time and money put into building up a service or product. Whether it’s buyers, partners, investors or customers you are speaking to, they need to remain engaged with the concept. That’s where we can help, working closely with the client to understand their objectives to deliver a compelling and powerful presentation.
Our presentation design services extend beyond standard PowerPoint ideas and designs. We also incorporate animation, infographics, screen displays and even film if required. Our background in every aspect of events management – from exhibitors and delegates to buyers and sellers – enables us to see the bigger picture to support our clients in achieving the returns they are aiming for.
Were we missing opportunities?
Despite our initial success as a business, an area we hadn’t paid much attention to was our presence on search engines. SEO had become a ‘tick box’ exercise for us – something we knew we had to have – but never really focused on it.
Interestingly, Holly had just completed the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business course – and a straw poll of her cohort of SME owners regarding their attitude to SEO ranged from – “Its all smoke and mirrors but we do it anyway” through to “My business success is 100% down to our SEO and PPC efforts”. There surely had to be a middle ground.
My experience with our existing SEO agency was simple – we received a handful of calls each Month and a hugely complex incomprehensible report showing how the agency was doing. Despite my protest that the phone wasn’t ringing enough – apparently, we were where we should have been in terms of ranking.
We held the belief that our target audience – comprised mainly of larger companies – would not actively be using search engines to find specialist presentation design services. At the same time, we were still receiving new enquiries and word of mouth referrals from some surprisingly large businesses. We were eager to continue expanding and started to conduct some research to see if any improvements could be made to boost our online presence.
We realised we were not maximising the full potential of our services and should be able to find more of the larger companies we were aiming to work with. Our existing client base already comprised of some substantial businesses already – Sainsbury’s, RBS, Schneider Electric etc. So we knew that we could exploit that heritage.
Our partnership with Brick Digital
Brick Digital, owned and run by Lorenzo Luiso was in its infancy as a digital agency and we were keen to appoint a new provider. Lorenzo was convinced that large organisations were using search engines to source new suppliers like Presentation Experts. We sat down together to map out a plan for 2018 that would concentrate on key areas of our website. The end goal was to find larger companies who were searching for presentation design services both in London and the UK as a whole.
Our challenge to Brick Digital was simple – quadruple our new customer contacts – and alongside that – improve the quality of them. And by the way, can we get a report at the end of each Month that is digestible in a few minutes by a non-SEO expert. No small task.
We understood that significant changes to our rankings was not going to occur overnight and would not alone bring more new business. It required a long-term plan that not only involved changing the existing content but also altering our mindset towards the website. Using it as an online portfolio to showcase existing work had proved very useful but we had not yet realised its full potential. To gain a strong foothold in our industry we needed to demonstrate our experience in a number of ways and with guidance from Brick Digital, we began to expand the content.
This involved publishing content that highlighted our experience and knowledge as a PowerPoint design agency. Through the development of our blog content, our aim was to not only increase our credibility within the events and presentation sectors but also to expand our keyword footprint across the site. Offering guidance about presentations to key decision makers within target businesses has now become a regular part of our online strategy.
In only nine months we had experienced a dramatic turnaround in terms of search traffic and the number of enquiries being received through our website. People searching for presentation design services were able to find us much easier, which led to a 300% increase in organic searches. Warm qualified leads arriving through our website was now four times higher, with a number of extremely large organisations getting in touch after finding us on Google.
We have transformed our new business strategy for Presentation Services with SEO from Brick Digital
Presentation Experts are proof that having a great product and exciting website is a good starting point, but without strong SEO marketing to support it, there will be a limit to what you can achieve.
Some business owners may think it takes too much time and money to get the desired results online. We would agree to a point, however, even with a limited budget and time constraints, B2B businesses can still increase the number of leads and opportunities they receive within their respective industries.
We’ve come a long way in a short amount of time and are now reaping the benefits of implementing a clear SEO plan with Brick Digital that connects us with new clients searching for our services every day of the week. At the start of 2018, we would never have dreamt of adding some very substantial names to our customer base. Deutsche Bank, Last Minute.com, City & Guilds, Grayling PR and Ricoh to name a few.
So what’s next – an even closer relationship with Brick Digital in 2019. We will be working hard to supply them with the content that they need to make our sites a continuing success.
Paul Campbell is the founder and director of Presentation Experts.