Joseph Marinovic & Fabric Digital, kicking against the digital marketing cowboys
When his web design agency saw SEO vendors keeping clients in the dark, Joseph Marinovic saw an opportunity for transparency.
Fabric Digital is an agency that wants to make a big change to the way New Zealand businesses engage with digital marketing providers. Managing Director, Joseph Marinovic, talks about “bringing more transparency to the digital marketing space.”
He says that there have been too many cowboys in the SEO and digital advertising industry for too long. Cowboys who were there long before a new company called Fabric pivoted from offering technical services like Office 365 migrations to designing and developing websites.
“We started around ten years ago. We were door knocking, trying to find smaller clients that were interested in investing in office IT. About a month in, we’d had four or five people ask us for website design. We had been pushing them away but then we decided, let’s just do it. And it was so much fun, creating high quality investments for businesses. So we switched names from Fabric IT to Fabric Digital, and that was the start of the journey,” Joseph says.
“After working on a few websites, we partnered up with another agency to provide the digital marketing piece. But we found, in that agency and others, that there were a lot of dodgy practices. For example, they’d be reporting a certain spend amount on a certain platform , but the actual amount they were spending was completely different, like 30% of what they were contracted to do. They were falsifying numbers and pocketing the difference.”
“We had friends and family members who were going to these agencies and it was unbelievable how much money they were being ripped off. We wanted nothing to do with that, so we started doing Google Ads and SEO as a part of our package for clients.”
There were other industry practices that didn’t sit well with Joseph. Plenty of Fabric Digital’s clients have come from competitors who would never really explain exactly what they were doing, or what they could deliver.
“There's been a bit of a black box where people would pay money for SEO, expecting results but not actually getting anything in return. Some of our clients didn't know that there are better options out there while they were spending money with their old agency,” he says.
All of this added up to the realisation that being direct and open with clients could be Fabric Digital’s key difference.
We contract a fixed amount of time with our clients. So if we’re doing 20 hours a month on your website, we’re transparent about it. You’ll be able to look at what we did for every hour, and see the reporting and everything else. That’s our focus and it’s winning us a lot of business at the moment.
That business can take a number of different forms, depending on what’s already working for Fabric’s clients. In some cases, Joseph and his team are responsible for the website, advertising (through Google and social media), and analytics - full service digital marketing. Other times, there’s more collaboration between Fabric and others.
Joseph says, “Companies might already have an established relationship with their Google Ads provider, for example, and they want someone just to take over the SEO piece. We fit in really well if you want to bolt on one service like that.”
Separate providers can achieve good results, so long as they work well together.
“I don't want to say that the best idea is to lock everything together, or the converse. It can work either way. It’s important to keep Google Ads and SEO as close as possible, at least by having those two agencies talking together. An SEO company doesn't have to build your website, but it's good to have them there when it comes to the structure of the site, how the content is going to be placed, and making sure that things like redirects are done properly. You don't want to lose search rankings, but we've seen that happen so many times when those connections aren’t working well.”
Crafting speedy websites
Whatever services Fabric Digital provides, one fact doesn’t change: the client’s website is always going to be the focus of their marketing efforts.
Joseph says, ”The website is the front of any business. It’s at everyone’s fingertips and people want to do all their information gathering within a couple of screens. Before Covid we were heavily focused on development and design, but we’re building less now. When we do it’s usually in WordPress, Shopify, or Craft CMS. Shopify’s great for getting something done and ready to launch, fast. But we work mostly in Craft.
Related article: Craft isn’t an average CMS, so avoid average hosting
“We only do a few big sites a year, and we're very methodical. We look at hundreds of other websites for their best aspects. We create a draft wireframe, which looks a bit like an old 1990s newsletter, or a ransom note with things pasted together. You see the logo up here, the menu with a call to action there, and then everything else pieced together down the page. We get that signed off by the client, then move on to stripped back UX, starting with a black and white wireframe of the UI.
“All the designing is done before we write a line of code. It means we can make heaps of different changes as we create the prototype to click through. We take it to our customers and go through workshops to make sure they're happy before we start coding.”
No matter how well designed it is, a website can only do its job when people can find it.
Websites are super-important, and that’s why SEO is super-important too. When people are making decisions, they place so much value on the top Google spots. There’s a credibility factor there. They assume that this is where you find the thought-leaders, or the kings of their space.
Joseph says, “They used to say that the best place to hide a dead body was on page two of Google. Maybe that’s why it’s all scrolling and no pages anymore!”
Fabric’s latest evolution has seen them reduce their focus on site creation in favour of SEO services. But to spend less time managing websites you need hosting that you can almost forget about. “That’s where SiteHost comes in,” Joseph says.
“SiteHost gives us a really super-easy solution. We've still got a few legacy clients on other hosting that we're trying to shift away from, because SiteHost’s just far superior. It’s New Zealand-based and everyone's only a phone call away. Super easy to deal with, 24/7. Websites are always up, which is great, and we know that we're in safe hands.”
Fabric Digital uses our Cloud Container platform for all the sites and development environments that they host with us.
“We host a ton of sites. As a business owner, it's so important to know that everything, including our websites, is extremely safe. We get updates if there are security issues, and we get email replies straight away if we've got a problem. As an example, the other day where we were getting spammed through a form on our own website. My junk email was just flying, a new one every few seconds. It was around 8pm, and things were going to hurt if I didn't do something. I called SiteHost at that time of night and the tech said they're coming from a couple of different IP addresses over in Russia. I asked for options, and we blocked them. It was all so quick,” Joseph says.
Being SEO specialists, website speed and performance are non-negotiable requirements for Fabric Digital.
Website performance is hugely important. That’s why having a relationship with SiteHost is crucial. We know it’s a best-in-class hosting solution, specifically for the NZ market. As an example, we recently saw a huge upgrade in a client’s organic rankings, just by transferring their website from WPEngine to SiteHost. We’d faced issues with the performance and speed of the website, but after bringing it to SiteHost we managed to peak its speed and performance, enabling the site to rise through the ranks.
Strategic Expertise Offered
No website can do its job without the right traffic, and both advertising and organic SEO play an important role in bringing the punters in. Fabric’s team is weighted towards the more indispensable side of that equation - SEO.
Joseph says, “There are nine or ten of us now, and we use a couple of contractors around Auckland as well. About half of our Auckland staff are in the SEO sphere or at least assisting with it. All the team are very technical. We’re the propellerheads, rather than ultra-creative snazzy-wazzy types. When clients deal with us they’ll usually talk with the expert in the space, rather than an account manager or sales.”
Those SEO experts are never going to run out of things to do.
“SEO is massive. Businesses expect SEO to be an all-encompassing thing for their website, but I don't think they always realise how all-encompassing it is. Even the way you deal with suppliers can be part of your SEO strategy, with backlinks especially,” Joseph says.
“You can do SEO to any website for every hour of every day, and it would still require more. Especially when you've got competitors trying to get to that top position. As more people realise how important SEO is, that makes it even more important to you!”
When new clients start working with Fabric’s team, there’s a balance to strike between getting early success, and preparing for a project that will take time to pay off.
“You might get a few quick wins, but SEO is definitely a marathon. We always tell clients that you may not see movement in the first or second month. As long as you're building on the website, it's a long-term strategy. You can’t usually do a little bit of stuff to the site and then just bounce up,” Joseph says.
Early success, if it’s possible, depends on the competitive landscape. Joseph says, “Keyword difficulty is rated from 0 to 100. If you're looking at 9s or 10s, or even numbers in the twenties, it can be fairly easy to do a bit of work to those pages and get a bounce, providing that your Domain Authority and another few key components are okay.”
“But it is still a marathon. You might sprint through the pack a bit at the start, then you’ll need to ease off and keep running. A lot of wins that you see six months down the track come from work you did in month one.”
Unlike a real marathon, SEO doesn’t come with a pre-plotted course for you to plod along. “Exactly what works best depends on the industry. It depends on the website. It depends on your competitors. There are so many different factors. You need to be figuring out or analysing what happened in the month before, and then where you need to go for the next month, and then the next. You may have a bit of a plan, but you need room to move,” Joseph says.
How far ahead can an SEO strategy look?
“A plan for year two or year three just can't be done. The longest you could realistically look out is about six months, because you don’t know the layout after that. Take ChatGPT, for instance, and how fast it’s gone from zero to what it is now. That amount of change is just incredible.
“Every company’s SEO strategy is different, even within categories like service-based and product-based businesses. There’s not really a template that you can use because you have to figure out which weaknesses need working on, what your website’s strengths are, all sorts of things. The amount of technical work that you need, for example, depends on the client. Once we know what needs doing, some of the methods that we use would be the same,” Joseph says.
A full digital marketing toolkit - ads, analytics and more
While SEO is where Fabric Digital directs the most effort, it’s far from everything.
When it comes to advertising, Joseph recommends starting with a broad approach. He says, “You've got to try things and then figure out what's working and invest some more time into it. Then for things that aren’t working, put in the time to say why not.”
“Social media, for example, works really, really well for some clients. And not the ones that you would always expect. We look after a very specialised home services company, and in a month we might get them 80 or 100 leads off of social media, with a really tight budget. So we always need to put that as a part of a strategy, especially on the paid side.”
In a similar way, Joseph says that businesses gain from maintaining a range of conversion funnels. “It's interesting because you never know how someone's going to convert. You want all your marketing pointing to one central location, but you need to have multiple ways in. People convert differently in all different industries. We’ve found that chat widgets on websites will tap into one demographic, while others will find the phone number and call.”
That brings in the question of measuring all these different forms of success.
“There are various methods for figuring out what's working. If you use call tracking software you're able to distinguish where that came from. You've got Google Analytics, GA4 now, which is a great tool to use as well. But with Google Tag Manager as well you're able to figure out where those leads are coming from,” Joseph says.
In short, when it comes to improving your website’s ROI, there are many things to consider. In just half an hour talking with Joseph Marinovic we covered everything from the importance of fast servers, to building traffic, to analysing customer behaviour. There is a lot on his mind.
It’s the depth of Fabric Digital’s expertise, as well as the transparent way they operate, that makes them so well-placed to bring positive change to the way digital marketing services operate in New Zealand.
Google product images by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash
Wireframe photo by Visual Design on Unsplash