Current Issues in Marketing Strategy

Facebook Event Ads - Advertising Gold

2011-11-10T00:32:00.000-08:00

The Facebook Events application is one of the most powerful advertising tool available and is provided at no cost to the user. It allows you the flexibility to advertise events to both your existing Facebook fan base, whilst also advertising externally and attracting new users to ‘attend’ your event and ‘fan’ you page.

Why is it so powerful?

The events application spreads events virally. When a users clicks the ‘attending’ button, this message is syndicated through their news feeds to their friends and colleges. As social groups are generally homogenous the ‘pickup rate’ is extremely high and we often find that the money spent attracting one attendee actually leads to 2 or 3 friends joining them. The viral aspect continues to perpetuate as those friends that also click ‘attending’ further the event through their news feeds and so the ball keeps rolling.

A perfect illustration of this was RMIT Alumni who advertised a cocktail event in London through Facebook events. In previous years they had advertised in traditional placements and received a handful of people joining them. This year they received over 50 old Alumni join them for a quiet drink, a number that is sure to grow in years to come.

A few tips for effective event pages

Setting up an event page is easy, but making it an attractive event that people wish to attend requires strategy. Be sure to choose a really catchy title, subtitle and photo. These three fields are the only ones seen in “Requests” when you invite your friends (and they invite their friends). The small greeting you can include goes out in the email notification, so that’s important too.

Congruent with this, writing 100 – 200 words of copy explaining the event is about the optimal amount of text. Don’t get weighed down trying to explain everything, leave links through to supporting parts of your website, they’ll read on if they are interested.

Advertising units to promote the site

To promote the events to people outside of your existing fan base, run of network advertising units are cheap and effective. These advertising units allow you to target specific consumers in your target geographic and demographic areas on a cost per click basis. Ad units, as shown below, including an ‘RSVP’ button with which users can choose to ‘attend’ events immediately. These ad units are extremely effective in promoting events at low cost.

What to notice

The ad is clear, to the point and allows the user to ‘RSVP’ at their will.

Costs only apply if users choose to click or interact with the advertising unit, all branding exposures without clicks are free.

2011-09-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

There are heaps of great SEO link building tips out there, one my favorites uses the old school Ven diagram to analyse what your competitors are doing and copy them. Incoming links are extremely important in improving your websites ranking across the major search engines. They acts as a vote of confidence that you are a reputable website and encourages Google to give you a high rank for any given search term. It's a simple concept, but how do you go about achieving a great SEO link building strategy to outrank your competitors?

This trick / tool is called competitor trolling and I use a website called Venny. Simply go to open site explorer and type in your URL, along with your competitors (separately). You should be looking for the 'linking domains' tab for the websites that you providing incoming links. Download these and open in excel, extracting the actual URL's., you need do is plonk them into Venny.

Venny competitor link output

Venny is super easy to use. Name each company and copy+paste the respective URL's into the box below. The system automatically shows the link cross over across all competition in a simple Ven diagram. From here you can click on the areas of the diagram you want to explore and this will generate a list of URL's that you should chase to link to your website.

Why go after competitor links?

Link building is tough work, so why not copy what others are doing as well as adding your own flare to it. This is the quickest, most efficient way to generate a thorough link profile, and comes with the added knowledge that it's working for them, so it must work for you.

This is my favorite SEO link building tip, if you need help e-mail me josh.straw84@gmail.com

The value of Yahoo & Bing in Search Marketing

2011-07-26T07:02:00.001-07:00

Australians are Google-centric, 86% of use Google exclusively, so much so it has transcended into the English language as ‘the way to search the Internet’. Based on this it’s not surprising that Google dominates the average digital media plan with little consideration given to alternative channels. To those who resist the urge to place all the urge to place all their eggs in one basket, this represents a very real opportunity in the form of Yahoo & Bing.

In Australia Yahoo and Bing are the same network and represent around 10 – 14% of the search market (depending on who you believe). It may seem like a small slice of the search market, but from a population base of 23 Million, 14% is not bad, especially when you consider the cost per click is usually 30 – 50% cheaper than it’s more popular sibling Google.

So why is Yahoo/Bing cheaper? Well pricing is dictated by the number of advertisers choosing to ‘bid’ for any given keyword or phrase and because of this Google-centrism and the low amount of publicity that Yahoo search receives, there are considerably less bidders applying bid pressure.

An argument against Yahoo & Bing I regularly hear is that traffic from this network will not convert as well as Google. If yo8u truly believe that someone is going to buy or not buy because of the search engine they choose to use, you are kidding yourself. Even if this was the case, the conversion rate would need to be less than half that of Google to be classed as ineffective and that’s just not likely.

So my advice to you is give Yahoo a go and introduce it into your marketing mix. Make sure you learn about how their quality score algorithm works and how to attach UTM source code so it tracks through your analytics program. Other than that it’s dead simple, you can even clone your existing Adwords account in their search marketing conversion tool to make it real quick and easy.

Good luck!

Retargeting & Social Media

2011-06-24T21:52:00.001-07:00

Continuing this series about the power of retargeting, today we are looking at another much under-utilised retargeting strategy, social retargeting. Ask most marketers and they will tell you that retargeting is used to bring people back to the website, or publicise a deal to your users who have previously been exposed to your brand and whilst this is right, there is so much more you can do. Social retargeting refers to the art of using your retargeting cookies to bring people into your social media network, continuing to converse with them through a multitude of channels.

The strategy behind social retargeting is simple, speak to those users who are engaged with your brand and leveraging the display network, serve up banner ads that incentivize users to join your Facebook, twitter or any other social media channels. You might achieve this through a competition, a discount, or simply by tell them they can. By directing users through to your social media page you are giving them the option to join and thereafter you can communicate to them on a more personal level.

Who do we target?

This is the argument of social retargeting; Do we target everyone who has visited the website, or just those that have completed a conversion or sale? Well there is no one answer fits all, but I would recommend that you start by targeting everyone and see what results it produces, test different retargeting segments and adjudicate.

Josh Strawczynski's Opinion

Retargeting is extremely powerful, but don't limit yourself to one or two strategies, keep pushing the boundaries and try new things, even consider cookie pool swapping or a range of other new up and coming ideas, there sky is the limit.

Google Retargeting Product Strategy

2011-05-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

Google retargeting (they call it remarketing) is an extremely powerful tool, continuing a conversation with consumers that have previously visited your website, either reminding them to complete an action, or using it for burst marketing opportunities. The structure of how you apply retarketing tags on-site dictates the strategic options you can utilise to generate positive marketing outcomes.

Retarketing tags can be applied to either a common footer of a website, meaning that you tag everyone that has accessed the page and send them generic marketing banners to keep the brand top of mind, and/or you can choose specific pages within the site and take a more disaggregated approach. For an e-commerce website I would recommend applying a huge range of tags to the various product pages by category. For example all the pages about office chairs would have a common tag, whereas office desks would use a different tag. The flexibility this provides is to provide more relevant advertising to the user based on their browsing history.

I'll admit, it's a bit of work to set this product tagging structure up, but think about it from the consumer perspective. You've been researching office chairs, visited a number of websites, but haven't made a purchase yet. As you take a break and read up about you local football team on an independent website, you become aware of a banner ad about office chairs, as you visit other websites the same banner promoting the 'chair sale' keep reminding you about the brand and to go back to visit the website. The advertising is both relevant and timely, capturing your interest and driving a result.

This doesn't mean you can't blanket tag as well. Setting up multiple tags provides you with options of how you want to advertise at any given time, burst advertising tactics are very powerful, particularly if you banner design is well done. Clearance sales or specific item promotions generate a huge amount of business.

Google Retargeting strategy utilises the display network, so the key element of success is a mixture of your banner design and your landing page strategy. I can't recommend highly enough having the same person/company working across both of these, or at the very least get the various parties (often your own IT guys) in the same room to discuss it. Without coordinated synergy, you WILL NOT generate positive results.

Retargeting is new and exciting, there are heaps of ways to use it. Do the setup well and you will have ultimate freedom in your marketing strategy, do it quickly and you will be punching with your hands tied behind your back.

For personal advice give me a call on 0402 844 409 or drop me an e-mail.

The role of click through rate in a digital world

2011-05-22T17:42:00.002-07:00

Click through rate is a strange metric, most conducive to generating large profits for the advertising networks than anything else. I’m sure everyone reading this has had to explain ‘what is a good click through rate’ only to see the clients eye’s glaze over almost disbelievingly. Whilst CTR is a very soft measure of anything, one thing is for sure, a higher click through rate means cheaper click costs.

It’s something I have spent a lot of time testing across a number of networks, and generally ‘quality ads’ are classified as having the highest propensity to generate a reaction from a viewer. To start with let me explain the obvious. An effective ad is one that generates an outcome for the advertiser, not the network. I remember a ski chalet in New Zealand that I represented. We use to put the price in the ads to stop people clicking on the ads unless they were serious about purchase. What this meant was a very low CTR, but an enormous conversion rate. Needless to say this was the very opposite of what the networks believe in.

This being said, for most clients, click through rate is quite important, particularly against larger budgets where a $0.05 saving per click can mean tens of thousands of extra users brought through to the site. So as an advertiser we should always be planning tactics for generating higher attraction rate, a problem the Go Daddy marketing team have never been faced with.

What can drive up the CTR?
I’m sure most reading this will skip right down to this section, the strategy of CTR, and I’ll apologize in advance, there are no one solution fits all answers. The three pieces of advice I would give you are:

1.) Make sure your ads are different to the competition
2.) Run bonus offers to improve the value offer
3.) Create time urgency “Enrolment closes in 3 days”

Josh Strawczynski’s Opinion
Click through rate is an unusual measurement of advertising efficiency, particularly when you look at Google and the fact that they track CTR against blind historical benchmarks. The simple solution is try to be different, stand out from the crowd and don’t let your client engage a creative agency to do your job for you.

Tracking how many phone calls your online advertising generates

2011-05-08T20:17:00.000-07:00

Tracking phone calls generated from your website advertising has long been the missing link in the online advertisers tracking metrics and with consumers so drawn to picking up the phone many advertisers simply don't know how to account for it other than a vague feeling of more or less calls on any given day. Today I wanted to discuss a little trick of mine that has helped both small and large clients to track their online conversion rates by advertising channel and measure exactly how many phone calls an given advertising channel has generated.

Dynamic phone number tracking has been generated by a number of telco's, but one that my company is directly related to have surpassed all others by integrating their results with Google analytics. In fact so effective have they been that Google Australia uses them to display how to track incoming calls to their clientele. The best part of the deal is that it won't cost you a cent more than a traditional 1300 number and for small business we are talking about less than $100 a month including phone call costs. So what is the advantage?

The advantage is quite simple, at the end of any given month you can tell exactly how many phone calls your Adwords generated, how many came from Facebook, and eDM or any other advertising channel you have used. You can then work backwards to integrate these results with your online metrics to unearth the exact cost per acquisition for each advertising channel and better optimise your spend accordingly. The data is so sophisticated you can even see what a user typed into Google prior to making the phone call.

For those technically minded people, the way it works is actually pretty simple. There is a little bit of java script that sits around the phone number on your website, this reads the source of any given user (Adwords, Facebook, Yahoo) and chooses which 1300 number to display, so you have a unique phone number displayed for each entrance source the user could have come from and therefore you know which channel has generated calls. This is integrated into your Google analytics and can even be set to record the phone call.

It is a terrific system and I highly recommend you include it into your online and offline advertising to effectively track phone calls from every advertising medium, filtering the results back into your strategic marketing plan and overall marketing mix.

If you are interested in knowing more please contact me and I will be happy to take you through dynamic phone number tracking and set you up with an account free of charge. Just call Josh on 0402 844 409

Website Design - The Foundation For Success

2011-05-03T03:14:00.000-07:00

The role of the website is often the most underappreciated aspect of digital marketing strategy. I can’t tell you how many poorly designed / thought out websites I have been asked to strategies for. These companies have been willing to throw tens of thousands of dollars at attracting users through to the website, yet fail to recognize the importance of their website’s structure and design. So what makes a solid website within the confines of marketing strategy.

Now remove the plaster, paint and fixtures and you are left with a framework that holds it all up. Now ask yourself, is this framework robust enough that I can build on top of the existing structure, or flexible enough that I can easily change or extend various parts of the layout? Your website is no different, you should always be able to expand it to capitalize on change.

I know you are thinking that I’m talking common sense, yet it seems that more often than not when I ask a client to insert tracking code or build an extra layer to the website that they are handcuffed to a proprietary CMS, or simply they can’t see why we can’t spend that money on advertising. It is the real world equivalent of having a shop layout designed and never being able to update the register, displays or floor design, you just wouldn’t allow it.

What I really want to stress is we are not talking about how pretty the website works or even something hugely advanced like changing the programming language, simple we are talking about having the flexibility to make changes that will improve the user experience, capture e-mail addresses and track the sales/enquiry process from start to finish.

I have been working with a current customer whom commissioned me for several months to find alternative advertising tactics that would improve their ROI. After monthly of research and data mining my recommendation was the same as the very first day I met them (albeit now backed with evidence) that they needed to provide a better user experience through their website.

Josh Strawczynski’s Opinion:

You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on developing a website, but you do need to think your way through the strategy and have the site built in a flexible and adaptable way. I highly recommend sitting down with a strategist and talking through how you want to interact with your customers, the various channel they could take to purchase and how you are going to follow up with those that don’t purchase on their first visit. These are the keys effective website marketing .

SEM For Mobile - A Doubters Opinion

2011-04-28T16:36:00.000-07:00

In recent times Google has practically been knocking down my door with 'breaking information about mobile'. If you believe everything they tell you the world has already become mobile dependant, that computers are out and portable phones are in. Whilst this assumption is laced with truth, it is not the cut and dry situation that they would have you believe. For example the Google reps are always trying to convince we to run mobile specific ads for University courses. Again, whilst I recognise that we do gather a lot of clicks, the analytics data shows these clicks to be low involvement, low outcome. So what place does mobile have in SEM?

Don't get me wrong, mobile is the way of the future, I use mine everyday for Internet searches, Google Maps & Social Media. This being said, I would never do any hardcore research on my iPhone, who would? It's a tiny screen not suited to reading large chunks of text. Going back to the University example, I would most certainly look up directions and timetable on my mobile, but actually reading up on the courses or considering my future educational preferences is a big job, it needs time, processing power and a big screen. So why spend money on mobile SEM?

There are lots of practical reasons to create mobile specific SEM campaigns, if nothing else so that you can differentiate traffic sources and track more effectively the return on ROI. However my position on mobile advertising is this; in the marketing world there is no such thing as one glove fits all & whilst mobile is exploding, use your head, don't just do it because Google said so, think strategically, does this actually help our consumers?

Josh's tip - Google will release a whole suite of new mobile products in the coming months, learn these and learn how to design the most effective advertising campaigns through them without blindly throwing money at something you don't understand.

SEO Comparison Site Scams

2011-04-26T21:23:00.000-07:00

I am constantly consulting to business on what makes a good digital advertising agency and the problem is that with all the smoke and mirrors around the agency world, discerning this is very difficult. In many 'specialist' business areas the Internet has made the disparity between expert and novice much smaller, yet Internet strategy seems to remain unaffected and so many poor agencies are making huge profits delivering terrible service. One of the key enablers of this growing trend is so called 'comparison sites', whilst holding themselves out as unbiased judged they are anything but.

Top SEO and many other SEO comparison websites work off of a 'pay for listing' system that makes them just another advertising channel and not a reliable source of insight into how effective any given SEO company is. I can only comment on companies I have worked with before, but having looked at even the basic information they listed about us, they were miles off the mark. Ok, I can hear you screaming for examples, so here they are: Turnover, they said we did $5M+, I can assure you that is not even close to true; Number of employees was also wrong, more than tripling the number of people that work within our company including the cleaners. These small things are easy to check, they are clearly listed on the website for god sake, case in point, they are nothing more than a scam.

The best advice I can give you when looking at digital strategy is to talk to a full service agency that talks about holistic measures of success. A good agency should review not only your rankings, but how this translates into improved business and profitability, looking at sales funnels and support advertising tactics. The Internet industry is full of snake oil salesmen, be careful and don't trust an SEO comparison site.

2011-04-20T23:18:00.003-07:00

Dog Food Online - The Value of a Robust E-Commerce Website

2011-03-31T22:45:00.001-07:00

Pookinuk dog food online company is one of my favourite small business's in Australia, an old client of mine in a former life, they have recently overhauled their website for a more robust system that provides them the ability to up-sell, cross promote and offer better features to their members. They are a perfect example of why future proofing is so important for an e-commerce store. Lets explain their dog food online strategy and why they needed to invest.

As a dog food online company, Pookinuk have a brilliant value offer, they provide premium known brands of dog food, delivered to your door for a mere $5 flat fee. As with many online business's, their value is in convenience and price savings, but competition is strong and they always have to be thinking one step ahead. When I originally managed their SEM campaign there were relatively few wholesalers in the market using that channel, but over time more got into the dog food online market and the margins got thinner. This is great for the customer, but tough for small business, so what's the next step?

Firstly Pookinuk analysed their business structure to see where they could offer a better user experience for their customers. What they found was that those that used the service loved it, but only tended to purchase the same items. This raised to questions, could they automate the dog food online ordering process for those loyal but time poor fans and could they cross and upsell to less regular clients? Under their old system the answer was no, but building their website on a more robust site, they could pre-program the product pages to offer cross selling opportunities, in effect improving the user experience and increasing incremental sales.

I'm not going to get into an argument about which platform is best to use, it's too subjective a topic, but what I can recommend is that you do your homework, there are plenty of good free CMS platforms that can do these features, make sure they tie into Google analytics, automate the sales process and allow users to make the purchase cycle simple.

Meanwhile if you have a dog or cat, check out their dog food online at their website www.pookinuk.com.au

A leadership perspective on social media

2011-03-19T19:58:00.000-07:00

Leadership is the key to social media as we know it, but seldom do marketers ever consider the most important factor of what makes a leader influential? Is it as simple as daring to be different? or perhaps more accurately, is it the followers that develop his ideas into a movement? Lets look at the strategy of user influence and leadership in social media.

Read any social media strategy report and you will see entire sections dedicated to identifying influential individuals and how best to make them brand ambassadors. But what makes them influential and how do you pick an up and coming social media champion? The answer to these questions are not cut and dry, but we can examine some key elements to point us in the right direction. Today I want to specifically look at the followers themselves.

A vastly overlooked aspect of social media is the propensity of an influences social network to follow. This may seem strange given what we accept as best practice in social media, but a movement is not created by one person, it requires a number of influencers to encourage others to follow. This is where we examine the interactivity of a social media champion and his followers. A good marketer will not only examine how popular someone is, but also what their expertise is in and how readily their constituency responds to their thoughts and opinions.

Josh Strawczynski's Opinon: The most obvious application of the above topic is for social media driven competitions. There is an abundance of small and large companies trying to use social media to improve their brand, but how many of them actually take time to select the right brand ambassadors, not many.

My advice, take your time, test them and test their social network, the best outcomes come from identifying the leader and the social followers.

Good SEM structure is like building a house

2011-02-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

The most common mistake I see in Adwords is poor structure and from amateur operators, they often understand the marketing principles that govern it, but can’t see the logic behind a structured approach to SEM. In truth, good SEM structure is like building a solid base for a new home. A solid cement base and good framework allows you to build a multistoried mansion, where as poor quality workmanship and you will be destined to live on the ground floor forever. Good SEM structure produces a disaggregated advertising approach, with unique ads, relevant to each consumer query and a deep understanding of you target markets browsing behavior.

Nowadays with Google releasing endless ‘features’ for Adwords; site extensions, product extensions, click to call… we see amateur operators propping up their ads with ‘gimicks’ (the aesthetics of SEM) and furthermore the art of good structure is being lost. Again with the home building example, imagine if you builder was focusing on what the handrail looked like on a thatched hut. These bells and whistles do add value, but you can only capitalize on them if the basics are done right.

What does good SEM structure look like?

Whilst every account is different, a good SEM structure should start with a flow diagram on paper. If your agency can’t explain to you on paper how each keyword has a relevant ad associated with it (meaning each ad uses the keyword in it), then they don’t understand it well enough.

Understanding the match types and search query reports are equally important. Most ‘experts’ still don’t understand the concept of ‘broad matching’, don’t know how to run a search query report and hence can’t explain to you why your ad for a Sony Bravia is coming up when a consumer searches ‘cheap televisions’ (real example).

SEM Structure is only half the battle

Importantly, SEM structure is not the only component of effectiveness. As the business owner you have to take responsibility for the website and actively work with your SEM agency to provide relevant landing pages for the key terms that are generating traffic. For example, if consumers are searching for a specific product on your site, you need a specific landing page that gives them information on that product. Likewise, even generic keywords should have landing pages that use that language on them. A consumer is much more likely to absorb information that is written in their language, than yours.

Josh Strawczynski’s Conclusion

Having worked in the industry for some time now, the same basic mistakes come up over and over again. I have audited SEM campaigns from enormous agencies and the fail rate never ceases to amaze me. I guess it’s because when digital is profitable we can record it to the nearest dollar, but as time progresses agencies will no long erbe able to get away with mediocrity and the gap between poor and excellent will grow like a lorenze curve.

If you need any help with your SEM, or just want to keep you agency on their toes, please feel free to e-mail me at josh.straw84@gmail.com

Organ Donation Strategy - The call to action

2011-02-17T17:52:00.001-08:00

A case study of organ donation page on Medicare.com.au

Today I was inspired by Triple M's hot breakfast to sign up to become an organ donor. They revealed that only 14 out of every 1000 Australians are registered donors and as such I set myself a challenge of convincing 14 of my friends and family to register today. Within 3 hours I had singed up 3 friends + myself, but the overwhelming feedback from others who wanted to register but had given up was that it was too difficult to navigate the website. For a company as large and considered as Medicare that should not be so. So today we will discuss the strategy of landing page call to actions.

Online Consumer Behaviour

My friend Emily Fulton once described online consumers as 'goldfish with thumbs'. What she was trying to convey was that our online behaviour is driven around instantaneous consumption. We want to solve our urge now, and if distracted we simply give up. Think about your own Google experience. How ofter do you go past the first page of search results? Almost never, and organ donation is no different.

The Medicare website

The homepage alone is an extremely complicated beast and deservedly so, they offer a huge range of services and need to display everything they can. Understanding online consumers, we can assume that most will look above the fold (won't scroll down the page) and hence the most likely button for them to click is located just below the hero image in the middle of the screen, it is called "Australian Organ Donor Register". This takes you through to another confusing page.

The Organ Donor Register Page

This page is filled with information, an FAQ section and enough links to button every shirt cuff in Australia, but nowhere is it clearly evident where you click to register.

After trolling through loads of text (which most people won't) it is revealed the link is hidden in-between great walls of text. What was wrong with the top of the page and an obvious button? A large flashy button provides you with 100% of selling opportunities, not the 5 - 10% that will bother to scroll through all the text and links spanning the enormous page. This is a fundamental mistake and will be resulting in only a small percentage of those looking to sign up actually completing the process.

Unique URL's

Syndication from motivated people like myself can be very simple, we can cut out all the fluff and send users directly through to the form.... if you use unique sub URLS, for example www.medicare.com.au/organ-donor-form. Unfortunately again Medicare use a static URL, so there is no simple way to shortcut the process.

The overall outcome

Overall their system is failing, when motivated individuals find it too hard to register online something is gravely wrong. I wish I was referring to highly technical strategies or cutting edge innovation, but I'm not, this is the fundamentals that a high school student would have picked up in a heart beat.

If you have registered to donate your organs, please let me know by either leaving a comment or e-mailing me privately.

SEM: Most important metrics for E-commerce business

2011-01-11T15:01:00.000-08:00

The most important business metric to consider is ROI, using UTM source code we can track each an every keyword, adgroup and campaign through Google analytics, but on top of this, we should in 2011 also be looking at tracking consumer engagement. This metric means how long are users that searched 'dermalogica online' actually staying on the website and what can we do to improve their user experience. There is no doubt that there is a portion of the market that is solely price focused, but there is also an equally valuable segment that are solely seeking a quick resolution to their need. The engagement data can be found in Google analytics and I highly recommend working to maximise that user experience.

Spend should be dictated by ROI driven performance, for example if you are spending $1 and making $10 then there is no reason to limit the overall spend, on top of this you must consider the lifetime value of a client, where even an ad that breaks even should actually be generating ongoing pipeline of sales. E-mail marketing and even Google retargeting can be used to continue the conversation with these clients and generate additional sales.

Click through rate is a very very soft metric, Google uses it to distinguish between low and high performing ads which forms a major component of quality score, however as I have discussed with them at an executive level before, this is fairly rudimentary and doesn't reward e-commerce sites as much as others. In e-commerce we are trying to provide a disaggregated marketing experience with prices listed for specific products to pre-filter those not willing to pay that much. This drives the CTR down, but massively increased out ROI as we pay per click. As we are split testing in each ad group, it is more beneficially to focus on ROI of each ad, distinguishing which cal to actions and supporting strat lines are giving consumers enough confidence / time pressure to make a purchase.

The Brilliant Unprintable .WWF file format

2010-12-05T16:32:00.000-08:00

Why would anyone be interested in an unprintable .pdf style file format? You could argue the 'save the planet' line, but that doesn't have any legs. A better argument is control. It may not be relevant often, but I can assure you that this flexibility can and will be strategically handy to your business. Most importantly it's free, so why no give it a try!

So what is the unprintable .WWF file format?

Designed as a way to save the world's forests, the WWF format is everything that a .pdf is, but it has no option to be printed. This theoretically saves trees, but more to the point protects your work from being stollen and reprinted. A good example of this is ebook's which are easily printed and resold, this adds another safe guard making that process a touch harder. On top of this, I have written many proposals that I am happy for the client to read on their computer, but would prefer they can't print and hand out to others. You could argue that digital or hard copy are the same thing, but I personally like the flexibility of WWF file format.

Who is behind the unprintable .WWF file format

Released by WWF Germany, advertising agency Jung von Matt and Dederichs Reinecke &Partner, is currently available from www.saveaswwf.com for recent Mac operating systems, with a Windows version following soon.

Where can I get the unprintable .WWF file format?

The file format is 100% free from www.saveaswwf.com

Is running search marketing on Yahoo & Bing worthwhile?

2010-11-24T23:07:00.000-08:00

A common myth I hear a lot is that there is no point advertising on Yahoo or Bing because they don’t have a large enough market share of internet users. In fairness, if we operated in a traditional ‘above the line’ environment you would be absolutely right, in the same way that a billboard in a small country town wouldn’t be of great value to a business in metro Melbourne. However when we talk about search marketing on yahoo & bing, we are referring to a performance advertising, or pay per click as we know it. Therefore the Yahoo & Bing search-marketing network is highly efficient, as there is no wastage, be it on 1 person searching or 1 million.

Yahoo & Bing’s market share sits around 14% in Australia (depending on who you believe), with Google being the dominant player. So to put this another way, about 3 million Australian’s use Yahoo or Bing regularly. Further to my argument, there are few marketers amoungst us that would complain about advertising to such group, partiuarly if there is less competition.

Competition levels are the key to the whole argument. In my experience, Yahoo search marketing has regularly returned higher ROI figures that Google, as there are less advertisers willing to compete for each key term. This means the average cost per click is lower and the advertising expense per sale significantly less than that of the Google network. This is not to say Yahoo is better than Google, as Google has the sheer bulk of users, but it is an important part of a full search strategy.

How to choose the best Internet Agency?

2010-11-10T13:41:00.000-08:00

When choosing an agency of Internet geeks, the market tends to stagnate, not sure if they should choose the larger pillar company like Melbourne IT, or a smaller boutique agency that cares specifically about them. The real answer, is choose the company that will make you the most money. The agency that ticks this box will be the one that actively considers your business, your strategy and is not afraid to tell you where you have gone astray thus far.

My experience working and consulting for larger companies was a real shock.They tend to lean towards scalable outcomes; this means one-solution suites all. They rarely tell a client that their business is going to fail and happily suck up every cent until that company goes bust. This is not to say all large companies are like this, but it is a trend to look out for.

Smaller agencies have a habit of being good at only one element of Internet advertising, outsourcing the other parts to similar small companies, but failing to share the strategy along the way and with limited understanding of what they are outsourcing, the quality control is often limited.Here is what you should be looking for from an agency:

Questions to help choose an Internet Agency

Are they willing to criticise my current plan / model?
How often will they meet with me to discuss next steps?
Will they proactively develop your online strategy?
Do they outsource any part of their operational business?

For each of them, I would ask for examples and if you ever see a template pricing model…. run.SEO advertising is the worst for this, where low quality agencies will charge for 10 – 20 keywords and then a retainer to maintain them, view here for more information on Choosing an SEO agency.

If you have any further questions e-mail me.

How to Change Your Business Location on Google Maps

2010-10-24T03:32:00.000-07:00

I am regularly asked for simple technical advice like how to change your business location marker on Google Maps and is it a marketing strategy worth donating time to?

Google maps is dominating the online maps segment, a statistic that is backed up by business's utilising the free Google service, with 95.45% of websites choosing Google over other map companies (usage stats Oct 2010). The reason for this is simple, Google Business Maps is both powerful and free, there really is no down side. On top of this, you only need set it up once, then rarely, if ever, update it.

Assuming you have claimed your business listing, moving the marker to the correct position is simple, just follow these steps:

After you search for a place, click your business maps marker. The info window will appear, Click Edit.
Click Move marker and drag the marker to the correct location.
Click Save.

Important notes:

If you move the business location map marker more than 200 meters it will be manually reviewed before updating. This can take up to a week to be processed, although Google are very quick.

I recommend placing the business location marker at the property entrance, as this helps the user experience.

Single Landing Page Design Strategy

2010-09-22T22:07:00.001-07:00

A single 'landing page' strategy is both the most powerful and most difficult website feature to design. In order to achieve the maximum results, you need to convey the value offer quickly and succinctly (within 5 seconds of reading) and get the user to fill in a form within the following 3 seconds. If the entire process cannot be completed in under a total of 8 seconds, you are losing the vast majority of users, particularly the younger demographic.

Use of pictures or diagrams within your landing page is recommended, as visual mediums can quickly convey a message that would usually take a paragraph to articulate. Take the become beauty banner ads for instance (below). These have proved to be far more effective in conveying meaning that the similar text ads, whilst also providing the user with confidence in the product.

I strongly believe the credit card providers are experts in the landing page strategy field and below are three examples of excellent landing pages. The final link (every day money card) is the pick of the bunch, for it’s simplicity and usability.

Quality Landing Page Examples

Finally, with regards to the landing page signup form, it is extremely important to keep the fields to an absolute minimum. Internet users are particularly wary of handing over their personal information. Try to minimise the fields you ask for and ease them through the process. The most successful landing pages only collect a 5 – 7 fields of information, so ask yourself, “Do we need this information immediately or can we collect it latter on?”.

Viral Marketing - A waste of time?

2010-09-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

Viral marketing strategy is the modern day word of mouth. In the same way that it has always been, offers of high value (monetary or otherwise) are passed person to person, friend to friend, resulting in a large cross section of the community being informed. In recent times, YouTube and Facebook have been the modern vehicles used to expedite this process, with the ability to instantly communicated to large groups of people and be shared again within a click of the mouse. Despite the potential, for ever campaign that goes viral 1,000 do not. So should we waste our time on Viral Marketing strategy? To successfully answer this, lets at the components.

What dictates success?

The exchange of value is an academic construct that makes logical sense, but in reality is extremely difficult to measure. Take 'beached as' with its' 6 Million views to date, is there a clearly defined social currency behind it? I would argue there are plenty of funnier videos on YouTube that have never received 6 views, let alone 6 Million. Industry experts I have argued the viral marketing strategy point and while many submit, a quality commercial succeeds because Facebook and YouTube allow for free syndication (which is correct), it is the vehicle aspect of these networks that facilitate the 'pass along', not the networks themselves. So to summarise this point, it is very difficult to pick a winner, nobody knows what will go viral or not.

How should I use YouTube?

Viral marketing strategy doesn't always have to be creative. Some of the best examples of video driving growth are found in the instructional video's that litter the Internet. Leveraging the medium of video, users can find everything from how to tie a bow-tie to how to roll illicit drugs. This is powerful as it provides a channel to subtly plug products or brands to people reliant on the video resource.

What's the best use of viral video marketing strategy?

Blendtec is without doubt the best use of viral video marketing strategy I've seen. It is a rare month when a Facebook friend doesn't post a Blendtec video. Hosted by Tom Dickson the company founder, 'will it blend' is their regular segment where they use their blender to destroy various objects including; iPhone, rake, iPad, glow sticks, lighter, Wii Remote.

This viral video has become a very popular segment, with user tuning in to see the next crazy blending experiment. More to the point, this provides the company with a chance to show off the robust design of their product. In the same way as TV presenters use to cut through leather shoes with a fancy knife set, Blendtec is taking it to the next level and using Facebook and YouTube to syndicate their antics.

Josh Strawczynski's Opinion:

Viral media marketing strategy is fantastic, powerful and effective, but more attempts will flop than succeed. I recommend focusing on the basics before you endeavour to create viral content. I suggest that you focus on delivering value in your offer before you worry about going viral.

Custom Facebook Page Design

2010-08-11T00:03:00.000-07:00

Custom Facebook design has the potential to transform simple, standard pages into a dynamic vibrant information portal. Strategically, custom Facebook pages provide marketers with the ability to customise the look and feel of their social media portal communicating messages more clearly and provocatively. It allows companies to differentiate, and use their Facebook in a similar fashion to their website homepage, improving functionality and design.

Strategically, Australian companies can harness first movers advantage and cultivate a follower-ship more easily by using custom Facebook pages as a differentiation tool. There are a number of examples already in the marketing including Harley Davidson, 1800 Flowers and Starbucks that saw their followers shoot up through the free press and increased consumer engagement they received after installation. In Australia custom Facebook pages are not in vogue yet, so I see a lot of potential to gain that viral Facebook follower-ship.

Facebook is continuing to take over the world with most consumers having an account and many now using multiple accounts for varying purposes. If an organisation is going to play in this space, it is not good enough to set up a static page and hope people join, they have to build a strategy around what purpose it serves and why. I particularly like Hawthorn Football clubs and the integration between Facebook news proliferation, it is now my number one source of information that is happening around the club and in the news. A custom Facebook page design is not a solution, but part of the Facebook marketing mix and should be considered only as a differentiation tool, not a full blown strategic marketing solution.

Finding a designer to create a custom Facebook template is quite difficult at present, however as the practice becomes more mainstream, more and more developers will move into the area. In the mean time, feel free to drop me an e-mail and I'll put you in touch with a few of our trusted custom Facebook providers.

3rd Party eDM Strategy

2010-08-03T04:32:00.000-07:00

Direct marketing gets a lot of bad press, purchasing e-mail lists has a very low ROI and hence most marketers, don't even consider 3rd party eDM's for the marketing mix... and I couldn't be happier!!

Electronic direct mail (eDM) is an extremely powerful channel for generating demand in a product or service by offering a specific value offer to a chosen audience. The role of the third party provider is to deliver a highly targeted audience for that direct e-mail message. This is different to simply buying a list from one of the many 'shonky' data providers, but lets marketers strategically poll the audience and segments them into homogeneous groupings.

Third party eDM companies such as Reward Central incentivise their audience to answer surveys, giving personal information about themselves in return for points, vouchers or cash. Many advertisers are cautiously concerned about the effectiveness of incentivised advertising, but if the targeting is right, this is a very powerful vehicle.

A great example of this is the Associates Degree in Business offered by RMIT. This is a completely new course with no external demand or online search by perspective students. Through 3rd party networks, I polled the Reward Central membership base and unearthed a number of young people and parents that admitted someone they know missed out on a business course placement. When the eDM went out we saw a 10% pass along rate meaning those who received the e-mail were acting as brand ambassadors and passing the offer along to those who may be interested.

The result of the e-mail send was to deliver 300% more applications than they required and stimulated a number of online searches for more information. I wonder if this strategy would improve applications for online MBA programs, worth a shot probably. Third party eDM is an ace I carry up my sleeve for almost every client and is certainly worth considering for your strategic marketing mix.

Digital Strategy & The Advertising Contract

2010-07-28T17:59:00.000-07:00

My last article on the marketing contract received a lot of positive feedback, so here is a follow up that answers some of the more prevalent questions I received.

David Ogilvy 'The father of advertising', founded his business on one simple principle, that in order to advertise, we must in exchange, offer value back to the consumer. This very simple concept can be seen everyday on televisions & online video and alike. We as consumers are prepared to watch ads, if in exchange we are also provided with the latest Master Chef program. For most, it is an unwritten rule that we acknowledge, but never actively consider. When ESPN first launched on Foxtel, it was a catastrophic failure because 90% of programming was ads, the value of the programming was not equal or higher than their solicitation demands on our time. So how is this relevant to digital media?

Google remains the unchallenged market leader because they deliver a superior product, delivering exceptional search results with an ever improving algorithm. Consumer search strings have got longer and longer, with up to 7 or 8 words seeking "Melbourne birthday venue that fits 500+ people". So good is their product, that 80% of users don't go past the first page of search results, instead expecting that the top listing will be the most relevant to answer the query. Based on this very logic, SEM (pay per click advertising or sponsored links) have also been readily accepted by the consumer market, with Google prioritising the most relevant ads and reducing the ability for big companies to 'buy their placements'.

In recent times, developments in the content network, with contextual targeting and Google retargeting have furthered this value offer, by improving the ability for advertisers to target their banner ads to an appropriate audience. Congruent to this, consumer have received more appropriate advertisements and across the board we have seen ad click through rates increase. This means more ad revenue and better user experience, a win win for the digital community.

As digital marketers, we must keep the advertising contract in mind. Blanket marketing is a thing of the past, the desegregated approach (1 to 1) is the new black, the new consumer expectation. This is also relevant on an agency level, with every advertising dollar held accountable, we must be able to justify our spend using better logic that the traditional "it's exposing people to the brand" rhetoric of yesteryear.

Josh Strawczynski's Opinion:

There has never been more sophisticated advertising tools at our disposal, but along with great results comes great expectations. John Wanamaker's famous line "half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" is no longer acceptable in the modern climate. This means that bar has been raised and lazy blanket advertising will no longer be tolerated. That is not to say that there is no place for outdoor or print advertising, but each placement should be questioned, what value is it generating for the consumer???