The 5HITS

Are you Committed

Some of you may have heard the saying: Are you the pig or the chicken. When it comes to eating a breakfast of egg & bacon, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. When it comes to your online search campaigns, are you the chicken or the pig? Should the type of business you are in help decide whether in fact you should be a chicken or a pig?

We all agree ROI is important. We all agree that any marketing or business activity should have some form of ROI. How do we best manage the link between SEO and ROI, especially when there are very different players, angles, business models all trying to rank for the same keywords?

Consider the graph below and how the various players might interact or see SEO in their business model.
The Large Consumer Bank would have a large dependency on their website for operations i.e. Internet banking, applications and so on, however when it comes to sales they would have multiple, multiple sales channels from account managers to television spots to in branch activities, all driving people to convert either online or offline. Operations would be driven by complex systems integrating to the front end behind the scenes. May take a couple of touch points to convert a customer. While the need for SEO might be considered small, being found online for all the campaigns, slogans is not. SEO is integral, most of them just realize how integral.

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Business online, Internet, Paid Search, Search Marketing SEO Committment

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.

Flowers v Roses Search Volume Graphs

Business online, Internet, Search Marketing valentines day

Valentines Day is the most important occasion of the year. Don’t believe me, check out the graph below:

Business online, Internet, Search Marketing valentines day

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…

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Business online, Internet, Online marketing, Search Marketing Advertising, Digital Strategy, Marketing, Media, Online

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.

Business online, Internet, Online marketing, Paid Search, Search Marketing Advertising

Having recently undertaken this process of moving after many years from PC to MAC, here are the things nobody tells you but you should know before you buy and when you’ve bought. I recently moved from my Dell XPS 12″ running XP and Office 2008 to a Mac Book Pro, 15″ 2.8GHz.

Some considerations before buying a MAC

1. Everyone keeps on saying the Mac will run Windows. Yes, and in so many ways. This can be done using Bootcamp, i.e.. when you boot the machine it will boot straight into Windows, VMWare Fusion or Parallels. Both of the last 2 seem much of a muchness and the same price from reading up and talking to sales people no one could point to a clear advantage in either, other than VMWare was written later and thus could have better coding?. Price is around $120.00 and they allow you to run Windows virtually.. Remember when you buy a Mac the OS is built for the machine, so running Windows loses all those little tweaks, you are running standard software on a standard laptop not built for it. Also Windows will cost you. To get XP which most seemed to be recommended by most required buying Vista Business (The cheapest) at around $420.00 and then requesting a downgrade to get back to XP, ridiculous!
2. While the VMWare is neat and works well, it does crash every now and then and seems to affect the performance of the overall machine if not shut down properly.
3. Small thing. The power adaptor is white. This will get dirty and look untidy quickly
4. Accessories, while of high quality are expensive, and there are not as many options as you would find for PC, obviously
5. Its going to take you awhile to learn you way around the Mac OS. The logic is different but not impossible. After you a few days you realize it is actually a lot easier and better and makes Windows, dare I say it look a bit clunky.
6. Entourage and Office for Mac are not industrial grade. If you are used to large spreadsheets and documents and heavy Outlook usage then Office for Mac and Entourage will seem a little basic. The Apple guys will tell you it will do everything except Macros which is sort of true. I have found large Excel, Powerpoint and Word files with complex formulas or other inclusions will crash or open as Read Only. Also take a long time to open, even on a more powerful machine. If you are used to Office 2008 and rely on it, you may be disappointed with Office for Mac and Entourage. There are also little bits of functionality, that are either well hidden of not easy to find, like dragging margins when printing, requesting read/ receipts for email and so on. Read more…

Business online Mac, Mac Book pro, PC, Windows

The global financial crisis means the economy will flow down. While things look bad there are opportunities out there, just not where you maybe looking. If you sell things that people really don’t need, then this may not be for you.

• While hair dressers might be doing it tough, sellers of hair treatments and dye are doing very well as more people do their hair at home to save money
• While weekend getaway hotels might be doing it tough, flower deliveries are up as people choose cheaper options to treat their loved ones
• While air travel is down, regional hotels are getting the business as people stay closer to home
• People are moving away from media advertising to search marketing due to the ROI and from paid toward more SEO based approaches. Social marketing is big, why do you think?

In every industry there is a flow down economy. Are you tapping into yours?

How is your GFC?

I meet a number of business owners, corporate managers and CEO’s and the first question usually how is business? In other words, we seem to be doing OK, are you guys doing OK? With all the bad news around, we are not sure if things are good or bad. On average I would sum up responses and the feeling toward the economy as such:

• So far we seem to be tracking OK, given the bad economic news
• We are not rushing out to hire and have not replaced certain people
• Revenues are in a range of 10%  up to 10% down on prior year

Keep in mind these companies are generally still profitable and thus engaging my services or about to. I accept sometimes people are frugal with the truth. So if you are reading this and doing it tough I accept there are real issues out there in certain industries. If you look at the Classifind job index, that also tells part of the story.

Consider your business model?

1. Marketing & sales

• Have you reconsidered who your customer is, your customer profile?
• Have you considered whether your customer needs have changed? They may still be buying but for different reasons.
• Have you considered new customer markets on a needs basis, and how to reach these people?
• Are you still paying to market to the wrong target customers?
• Where is the current spend and are you tapping into it?

2. Customer service

• Where is your customer service dollar being spent, still on the upper end? Are you servicing customers who are no longer buying? Read more…

Business online, Online marketing Economy

Reading George F Colony’s Blogcalled the Counterintuitive CEO on how what CEOs will face next with respect to the recession and how it will act a s a gateway connecting 2 different era’s got me thinking on the top things CEOs should be considering to get them through this gateway or portal with business intact.

1. There is always opportunity. It just looks different, maybe now it is less abundant, but it is there. Opportunity + Planning = success. Testing ideas online is cheap.
2. There is no such thing as an unprofitable business. Just unprofitable business models.
3. Stay clean, squeaky clean. The digital trail never dies. Manage your life and your associated online reputation carefully.
4. Invest in your digital properties and digital footprint. Proactively managing your online customer and future customer base is key. Make sure your selection processes for vendors and software are sound.
5. Educate yourself on all things digital. Take a course. Invest some time. Understand search engine marketing (SEM) and especially search engine optimisation (SEO) and how it applies to your business. Read more…

Business online, Internet CEO

Competition minister Craig Emerson it appears has decided that competition is not such a great thing and out an end to the new Choice Grocery website, which was due to go live next week. Read the full article on News and The Australian, or maybe there is more to it and we the citizens are not considered sophisticated enough to understand why anything that will help manage duopolies and potentially keep prices down should be a good thing.

This was a well funded website, with good resources involved. The first effort is reported to have cost around $6m before being canned and the Choice Grocery, to date reported at $7m of the $13m. With 1 week to go before the site goes live, why would you cancel such project? The only possible reasons maybe:

• The supermarket lobbyists are a lot more convincing than we might think
• The supermarkets can bring a lot more pressure to Government that we might think
• Some powerful people out there really do not want any sort of spot light brought onto grocery prices
• The site was really really bad, $7m how bad can it be?

According to Livenews, they just come out and say it. Pressure from the big supermarkets is believed to have caused the Government to abandon their election promises and admit the site is not feasible. Seven million dollars later…

Choice was not told direct and Mr Emerson communicated the news after meeting with Grocery retailers. Hang on a second. if this is correct, he decided this was not feasible with the very people it is meant to manage and potentially cause to reduce their prices and profits. So the players decided the aims of the site which is being developed by an independent part, being the trusted consumer brand Choice, were not feasible. There just has to be something wrong with that picture, I cannot put my finger on it right now though.

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Business online, Internet Consumers

So what does all this mean?

 There is no time for complacency and innovation is essential. And you can get a powerful message across with an innovative approach, good design and Youtube.

Business online, Internet Innovation