Interview with Nina Hale of Nina Hale Consulting, Inc.

I’m pleased to bring you an interview with Nina Hale of Nina Hale Consulting, Inc. Her agency for strategic internet marketing is located in Minneapolis and she has done work for many fine organizations including Hazelden Foundation, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, and Stratasys / RedEye RPM. Thank you Nina for sharing your time and expertise.

I had been working steadily towards the goal of starting my own internet marketing agency for a number of years. As you move up the ladder, you become more removed from the work you love and more into employee management, or if you’re in an agency, you get pushed into sales. I like hands-on marketing and that’s my lifetime work.

I love working with clients, and learning their marketing and product challenges. I absolutely love it when I can come in and change some behaviors that have an immediate impact in revenue or cost reduction (who wouldn’t?!). The most challenging part is working with the constant issues of time restraints, which often is harder to overcome than the financial constraints. Everyone is so overloaded these days, it’s always hard for clients to be able to have the time to focus on everything they need/want to do.

I love long-term client relationships, but my goal is always to get to a point of proving enough of an ROI and growth in the business for the client to hire internally. People get a surprise when I say my goal is for them to fire me.

You have to get to the real metrics of which online channels are delivering revenue, not traffic. It can be very discomfiting to pull away from a channel that outwardly seems to be a great source of leads. But you have to follow it all the way down to final revenue and make your decisions based upon that, and that’s often hard to track.

I also find that one of the most common issues is determining which tactics are right for a client. Marketing is not a cookie-cutter business, and everyone’s business is unique, even within industries. While some tactics, like search or email are in almost all plans, there are also times when you want to exhaust all other channels before turning to SEO or PPC. For example, products with latent demand – customers would love it, but don’t search for it directly, so if you do use search, you have to develop it around the category, not the product.

The most rewarding part is when we develop a tight strategy and stick to it. When you do that, then you can be very rigorous on qualifying new tactics and staying focused.

This is a fascinating idea, and I’m studying it seriously for some clients. This is another great form of disintermediation that Google is getting into, but also supports their goal of building their user base by providing successful web experiences, because they will rank good converters higher.

Aggregators like Lending Tree, Search for Colleges, etc., have made enormous amounts of money in this space and I love the idea of putting some of that power back into client’s hands. Of course, the aggregators will also love it! I think it will be most successful overall in fragmented industries.

I have a few clients where SMO is a big part of our brand and loyalty efforts, and it supports the popular idea of having your audience build the brand for you. SMO isn’t right for everyone, but can be very powerful for some. Like many online strategies, you have to see it as a split objective – many started it to build link strength for SEO, but all SEO efforts should be based upon spreading your brand to the right audience and providing a good web experience for people.

Generally I feel you have to answer the big issues first – is your site converting visitors? Do you have a strong relationship email program? Can people find you on a search engine? But certainly there are pockets who don’t use email anymore, and we know that people often trust unknown individual’s recommendations above marketing efforts.

Never underestimate the power of having some quiet time with your numbers in an excel file; most of my ‘ah-ha’ moments have come from quality time with excel.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project is a great free resource. There are a huge amount of free or inexpensive webinars out there. I actively subscribe to ClickZ, eMarketer, Marketing Profs, Marketing Sherpa, and a host of others I read less frequently. Google Analytics is an amazing free analytics program that can take you a good way before you invest in more advanced analytics. Unless you have someone who can dedicate a lot of time to analytics, you should seriously consider whether to spend the money on expensive tools.

My biggest recommendation is always to try to think like the customer – who is she, what does she want, how does she communicate, and what matters to her?

MiMA is a fantastic networking group, and brings in great speakers. It is vital for anyone who is serious about internet marketing in the Twin Cities to belong to MiMA. Their summit last year was brilliant and cost a fraction of huge and sometimes wretched conferences.

My husband, Dylan Hicks, is a former musician and a professional music critic and writer. My new employee, Keith Patterson, is a professional musician and well-known mod encyclopedia. Music is a big part of my life. At work, I often listen to international music so the lyrics don’t distract me, right now I’m on an African music kick. I am also on the board of the Minnesota Planetarium and Space Discovery Center.

I am an avid reader, don’t watch TV, and have a serous interest in obscenely expensive shoes. I ride a clunky old cruiser bicycle, a gorgeous Ducati motorcycle and will be getting a gorgeous Royal Enfield motorcycle next month. But the best thing in the world is playing board games with my 6-year old son and husband. People sometimes don’t believe it when I say I am a shy workaholic nerd, but that’s the real me.

Thanks Nina!

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This entry was posted by Chris Dohman on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Interactive Marketing, MIMA Members, Interview.
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