Cleverly Engaged Marketing

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We started out building websites, and we’ve moved a bit to mobile app development as well.

When we were primarily focused on websites, my biggest role was search engine marketing and I specialized in pay-per-click management.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cleverly Engaged Marketing?

Link-building was one of the biggest challenges we wanted to address. In the purest sense, we were trying to avoid getting spam links and wanted to instead find legitimate ways to get real links and drive targeted traffic.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Honestly, Corey [Digital Marketing Manager] was the biggest help by far. He was extremely thorough in doing research for us, including things like pouring through the data and identifying which sites have been taken off the internet. He helped us a lot with outreach, in terms of reaching out to other sites or blogs to try and build a relationship and potentially help them broaden their content.

How did you come to work with Cleverly Engaged Marketing?

Truthfully, we connected to them through a friend. It was pretty much just word of mouth.

How much have you invested with Cleverly Engaged Marketing?

It was a monthly retainer. The total cost would have come somewhere in the $10,000 - $50,000 range though. We worked together for a couple years.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The one thing I know for sure is that the amount of our total backlinks doubled while working with Cleverly Engaged Marketing, which was really cool. Our domain authority went up by about 15 points, which was huge for us because the site was actually already four years old when Cleverly Engaged Marketing came on board. They about doubled our amount of backlinks, cleaned up our site, and then raised the domain authority by about 15 points.

What did you find most impressive about Cleverly Engaged Marketing?

I’d say Cleverly Engaged Marketing is distinct because they are thorough. Honestly, if I had to use one word to describe Corey, that’s what it would be for sure. He knows a ton and he’s always doing research, going to conferences and staying up to date on the latest trends. He’s really, really good about following up on questions we may have about competitors’ strategies. He’d come back a week later with tons of research and a huge Google sheet with all kinds of information about our different competitors so that we could use the data to make our own best business decisions. That follow-through was one of my favorite things about working with Cleverly Engaged Marketing.

While Corey networked, he would CC me on emails if he felt like it made sense for me to know what was going on, but otherwise he never bothered me with anything. I was worried I would have to be more involved, but Cleverly Engaged Marketing focused on building quality partnerships while also respecting my time.

Are there any areas Cleverly Engaged Marketing could improve?

Honestly, there’s nothing I can think of. The only reason our partnership ended was because I sold the company. If I hadn’t, I would still be working with them now.