Internet Marketing and Digital Strategy Blog
Digital Strategy
Digital Strategy development and implementation
Leveraging your online profile with social media
Jun 5th
While SEO is a great means of driving relevant traffic to your website, social media is screaming at us from all sides. Combine the two and you get a very powerful means of leverage, something we have been working on with numerous clients for awhile now.
Gary Elliott is a an ex colleague from Deloitte Australia and a Business Intelligence specialist working in the UK. Between family and work he also runs a blog at biandw.com. Unrelated to business intelligence, he has written a great detailed post on levering your profile across social platforms in a simple way. Not all will have access to the SAP platform but the rest is good. You can find the post on Social Media Integration here.
Thanks Gary.
Valentines Day Post Mortem
Feb 14th
So Valentines Day is over and we move on. Some interesting stats on Valentines Day. Assuming search engines are a good indication of the peoples intention, and we know that Google has in excess of 90% market share, we can say the following:
- People only start thinking about valentines day 16 days in advance, looking for general gifts
- They start to think roses are the answer 10 days in advance and alternate gift ideas 9 days in advance
- Those who are organised get it done 7 days before and then there are those that panic all the way up to the last minute
- Most people still search on the generic terms flowers and roses rather than including valentines day in the search phrase
Interesting and remember this for next year.
Build your own Media
Jan 20th
Most advertising works as follows in larger organisations, right?
- Identify requirements re target market, product etc.
- Develop campaign to meet requirements
- Pitch to client
- Plan media
- Buy media
- Run campaign through proposed media
- Measure success
- Celebrate
- Ad agency wins award
Traditionally, Media = television, radio, magazines, newspapers and more recently banner advertising, paid search maybe given budgets in certain sectors SEO (Search engine optimisation) or social media such as Facebook or Youtube.
Everything is generally measurable for the campaign, everything is short term, switch on and switched off and budget driven. Run the campaign, get the exposure, drive sales. Unfortunately its not always that simple. Social media requires ongoing genuine conversations to be of value, natural search rankings require changes to the website which may need to be planned and take time, taking longer to get results than the campaign itself. So we have some ongoing or longer term solutions interacting with shorter term, campaign driven ideas.
So, why not build your own media instead of buying it? As a large organisations with advertising and marketing budgets why invest all of this into shorter term campaigns? You no doubt have a website with vast information on your products, their benefits and features? Why not extend this and build your own media, including information, tools, communities? In the past many news organisations have morphed into this area, they have a newspaper, add a baby site, dating site, car site etc etc. Guess what, more media for you to buy.
Theoretical case study in point
Theoretical case study and I labour the point, theoretical. Any relationship to actual events, individuals or organisations are purely coincidental. I promise. But consider this. I am say a CEO of a large food company with numerous brands. One of my brands makes breakfast cereals and snack bars for the health conscious professional females aged 25-35 years old, single or married with no children. I know she generally does the household shopping, goes to gym and cares how she looks, feels and takes care of herself.
My website is all about product, how great they are, low GI, good to eat after exercise, handy for snacking and so on. My site ranks well for product names and the brand which delivers some but not a lot of monthly traffic, my last campaign increased traffic to the site but with a lesser increase in sales.
My issue is that I am in a highly competitive market, competitors are doing deals with supermarkets for better shelf space. Supermarkets are 80% of my channel. When customers come in, they are often overwhelmed, time poor and will make a decision based on brand recollection and association or convenience and perception. Great!
Firstly I decide to get rid of focus groups, they are small, not representative of anything in many cases and the results are often influenced by the questions asked and the facilitator. People are naturally polite, especially when being paid and also generally relate to the what is known rather than what could be.
I get detailed keyword research done, understanding what the masses want and are looking for. I realise there are few searches in search engines for my products and some are on brand but that bounce rate is high, unles I have promotions, free give-aways or competitions. Fickle bunch…
Old Media Agencies
Sep 23rd
Bye Bye those upfront buys
Great video on traditional and online advertising written to Bye Bye Miss American pie. If you are in marketing or advertising and pitch against some of the larger more traditional agencies you may relate to this.
Search is the Destination
Aug 5th
Trusted sites are dead, or are they?
Past behaviour: Find a source that provides good service, good content and is credible. Return there whenever you need more information. You trust that it is the best.
New Behaviour: Loyalty is dead. When I need something I search. I cannot recall the sites visited. When I find what Im looking for I stop, use and move on.
Hypothesis: Your homepage is no longer the doorway to your website, the search engines are. They will deem the most appropriate page in your site to the search engine query and then deliver that page to the user, the user can drop in anywhere. Users don’t necessarily want a user experience they want specific information or knowledge, thus the query. A user process or experience also usually starts from the homepage and works ina logical manner, most users don’t, due to search.
Impact on design: Traditional design focuses on the homepage as the entry point, traditionally a clean splash type page and the usage or words, considered cool
The world has changed: When designing or building your new website consider the following, to

