Founder of Resignal, Kevin Gibbons Shares his 2019 Plans

Jo Juliana Turnbull

Kevin Gibbons is the owner and founder of Re:signal, they went through a brand redesign last year and they also won a DRUM award, plus Kevin won Search Personality in 2018. It was certainly a busy year for him and the team. SEO JO Blogs speaks to Kevin about his plans for 2019.

What has winning Search Personality of the Year meant for you?

 
“I think it probably means our team now thinks “Huh, maybe he does do some work when he’s outside the office at conferences”! So it was a nice way to trick them into thinking I’m doing something productive 🙂
Seriously though, it was fantastic to receive such great recognition from judges that I hugely respect.
I think I’m only one of 8 winners for this, so it’s an absolute honour to be part of such an exclusive club. It’s a special one for me personally, but I’ve always said this is as much of a team award as any of the others, as they are the ones making me look good – alongside having a strong external network I can turn to when I don’t know the answer to something. Which happens a lot…
 

What do you and the agency have planned for 2019?  Can you top 2018?

Absolutely – we plan to make 2018 look like the warm up!
Of all the external things people in the industry see (awards, presentations, articles), the important ones start internally.
It’s the continuous innovation and improvement which leads to doing better work, achieving stronger results, and building solid client relationships.
Without those learnings there’s no stories to tell, no great case studies / award entries and no growth.
So we’re not short of ambition in our plans for 2019, but we know that we need to focus on what’s really important first and foremost – any external validation is a by-product of that, but not necessarily the aim. 
Dadi awards October 2018

Your presentation is about taking content marketing to the next level. Can you provide some examples of what Re:signal has done with their content in the past year to bring it to the next level?

 
A large part is in the culture and the mindset of the team, it’s always good practice to have strong processes on delivery. But great work comes from learning, iterating and improving.
Some examples will be:
  1. Think content marketing strategy, not campaigns – you’re aiming to contribute significant business value, not just authority links – I talk a lot to our team and clients about why our efforts need to be focused around achieving the bigger picture, which sounds obvious but it’s easy to get distracted by the shiny objects can get in the way.
  2. Remove the fear of failure – with the pressure of requiring everything to be a massive hit in terms of links / coverage, sometimes the opposite can happen and you play too safe – using tried and tested models of the past isn’t always a guarantee of what’s going to work in the future, so being able to try something new and take a couple of calculated risks is where you can often achieve the best results.
  3. Looking back to learn where our best results come from – when you look at a one-off campaign, you always have useful learnings on what can be improved – but the real value comes when looking over trends. Where have the best and worst results come from? Were they topical, did they include data, was the creativity our top standard of work, what format of content was it, what time of year was it ran, etc… etc…
I’ll go into the tactics in more depth at Digital Elite, but it starts with the way you think about approaching content marketing for me.

Did rebranding the agency allow to focus on new aspects of the company, for example, content marketing? 

 
It allowed us to re-think who we are and want to be as an SEO agency of today, moving into the future.
We’ve always focused heavily on SEO strategy driven content marketing, but we wanted to make our proposition clearer around not just what we do, but why we do it and how we’re different.
 Kevin Gibbons

Do you think rebranding the agency has resulted in more exposure and more clients? 

We had some nice initial excitement from clients and the industry for sure.
We’ve probably generated less leads overall, but they’ve been more targeted and focused around what we’re great at. This has helped us to secure more client wins, from less conversations – which as an agency without sales people, was really important for us to make this more focused – so I would say that’s been a strong result so far.
But there’s definitely much more to come!”
Thank you Kevin for the interview. If you want to see Kevin at our Digital Elite conference, get your ticket before they all sell out.

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