Introducing SEO into an enterprise-sized business

The Australian Direct Marketing Association has shared a great starters guide to SEO!

ADMA have created a Starters Guide for implementing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) into Small Medium Enterprises (SME).

As they state in the introduction;

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is now an
integral and critical aspect of how products
and services are marketed. And while
positioning a brand so it has the greatest
visibility in the search engine sphere is a key
outcome, that isn’t where the SEO story
ends.

Effective interpretation of how search
engines function and what people search for
must seamlessly integrate with other
important aspects, to contribute to an
effective SEO outcome.
This white paper details the SEO process,
and highlights key areas for consideration to
drive successful results.

This document we think is a good start to give you a traditional view of the digital landscape.

Importantly, they give clear guides as to what you should look to plan and how to build out targets and measures.

We think this is a great approach. That is why we are sharing this and even better why they wrote it we are sure!

The more education about what SEO can be and is critically important, rather than the spurious ‘Guru’ services, which other sites espouse with dubious long-term results.

The ADMA guide is well worth the read.

Heard of ADMA?

You may know of the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA) if you have not, then you may wish to learn more about them here.

ADMA, are focused on;

Since our foundation in 1966, ADMA’s mission has been to create an environment for the advancement of responsible, effective and enlightened marketing.

ADMA bring together experience in below the line marketing (BTL) from the top business all over Australia. BLT Marketing is effectively anything that is not mass communication like Radio, Newspapers, TV and magazines for instance.

So, these guys are specialists in understanding what it means to deliver targeted, relevant communications to prospective and existing customers through direct marketing techniques. And one of the most important direct marketing channels is the Internet which is a Direct Marketing channel.

ADMA have a load of resources and they espouse a methodology which is eminently measurable which walks hand-in-hand with what integrated marketing should be, accountable!

Well as integrated marketing practitioners we think so anyway at Integrati Marketing.

Let us know what you think

We would like to know what you think about the guide and we would be happy to talk with you about your site and business.

Read the ADMA SEO Guide here

ADMA – SEO Guide 2010-09-01 – Final

Why your business should be Tagging or Tracking you online and offline advertising with Google Analytics

When you spend your money or your companies money on advertising to create demand by changing Consumer or Businesses Buyer behaviour you want to know what half of your marketing is working.

As John Wanamaker said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Well this is not necessarily the case any longer.  Marketing and Advertising used to be the realm of big business, big budgets, big brands and simple communications channels. Creating and maintaining brand awareness through high frequency advertising was the Holy Grail and having the biggest brand was supposed to equate to the biggest sales.

That is no longer the case branding is now quite simply a marketing hygiene factor these days. Reason being, brands can be created with good designers and the concept is now business 101. Fulfilling a brand promise though is another story which advertising creates an expectation but the business must deliver.

Which brings me to my next point. We are now in The Age of the Customer (TAC) and relationships driven by understanding and knowing the customer.

And the way we get to know the customer is by using one of the most important direct marketing and advertising tools ever invented. The Internet.

With the advent of the Internet in the late 1990′s and the World Wide Web (WWW) a lot had been promised with new business models, disintermediation and tracking all your advertising digitally. All interactions would be synchronised with single customer

We have seen new business Models like Google for anything involving search and cataloguing massive data sets, we have also seem impressive failures like pets.com. Disintermediation has and is still happening when look at the Record Labels and the music industry for instance.

But the one that Marketing and Advertising people should care about the most is the scientific website analytics which allows for any correctly ‘tagged’ link to be tracked either online or offline.

Science that sounds serious!

Wow, analytics, gee that sounds like you will need to be a statistician to understand all of this stuff.

Well it would certainly help but with simple tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster we can now make decisions based on simple measures that most importantly let us act!

Why is changing our Advertising behaviour and measurement important?

“If we don’t know we don’t know.”

As much as I do not like that quote from Donald Rumsfeld  I think it does tie in nicely with John Wanamaker’s point.

If we know which bits of our advertising are not working we will spend them somewhere else or even better save that revenue!

So how do you start to measure the effectiveness of your offline and online advertising.

Simple we track all of our Paid and Un-Paid marketing activities Off and Online

With the Internet, billions of PC’s with web browsers and millions of ‘unique people’ using the Internet we can now measure these interactions through files that store information on your PC, Laptop, iPad, Mobile etc. files known as cookies. Google analytics and other web analytics software tools use these to track information about ‘clicks and click streams’.

A bit about cookies and web analytics

Cookies store small lines of code that are capture from your ‘click stream’ in a site or within tracked sites by a web analytics package.

This helps the site owners and marketing consultants to understand the following;

1.    Where you came from
2.    Did you stay and what your did
3.    Have you been here before etc.

This is interesting stuff and even these 3 basic points gives you insight about your businesses website that you may not have considered before.

The one we are really interested in is “Where you came from?” which is readily answerable in your analytics now or in Google Analytics.

In Google Analytics we can see different types of traffic to your site like Direct Traffic, Search Engine Traffic, Referral Traffic and Campaign Traffic (Other) and more.

We can now be using simple online tools set up campaigns for our Advertising that enable tracking of offline and online ads (test ads, banner ads, paid content etc.) to our site.

How do we make this happen, we will go through the steps of how to track an online campaign in Google Analytics with Google URL Builder and also we will be sharing with you an industry expert site in Australia for Google Analytics which has just launched.

Have a question about marketing campaign tracking ask us here.

The Event-Driven Marketing Handbook

A few months back now I caught up with an ex-colleague of mine from Procter and Gamble when I was working in FMCG marketing in Europe.

I was keen to hear what Ed had been doing the last couple of years and was pleased to hear that he had continued to improve his skills as a very successful CRM Consultant and Direct Marketer. In fact, Ed had been very busy indeed with a new venture Failsafe and had also recently completed an epic task of writing what we think will be a key marketing text for direct marketers for the next decade.

Ed Sander has teamed up with Egbert Jan Van Bel and Alan Weber to deliver a great discourse about the evolving world of one to one marketing through to CRM and now the holy grail of Event Driven Marketing. The book came as no surprise to myself after working with Ed at Procter & Gamble. Ed was instrumental in creating a direct marketing program that was years ahead of its time and delivered incredible results.

We’re Inspired by Follow That Customer!

We’re still happily reading the handbook on Event-Driven Marketing or Follow That Customer! but what we have read to date is inspiring. Reason being, is that the structure of the text further demonstrates a rational approach to understanding customer engagement and through good process and practiced marketing experience and nous.

What is commonly forgotten in the modern world is the idea that ‘we’ are rational all the time (Marketers and Customers). Humans, we think are both rational and irrational, particularly when it comes to marketing. As marketing practitioners we have to ensure that we create frame works that create continuity and leverage technology to remove some of our irrational moments and mistakes that can happen.

With Follow That Customer! the text lays out a logical and practical way to structure Event Driven Marketing best practice and some sound advice and case studies.

Permeable Segments and the right moment

What we really like is the idea of ‘permeable segments’ (Ch. 1 pp. 11-12) and in fact the idea that as your Event Driven Marketing matures that segmentation becomes less relevant and that it is all about “the right moment in time”. Indeed these ideas are important as we move into a more dynamic web and Social Media which is instantaneous allows for great customer understanding and engagement. Being able to ‘know’ the right moment will become all the more attainable with the right Event Driven Marketing strategy.

The upcoming interview

We are well on our way to finishing the book and we will be interviewing Ed Sander with some questions about the book and what he sees as important for direct marketing in the next ten years. We would also like to wish Ed all the best for his year away from the Netherlands as he heads off to Xi’an China to work with the VSO (an NGO) to help them with of course their marketing as a Marketing Advisor!

We will have the post in a few weeks with the interview from Ed and the team.

You can have a look at some of the reviews for the book here and also the homepage for the book is here as well so you can Follow That Customer!

By the way… we’re also hoping to obtain a copy or two to give away to a readers here and we have been told by Ed that there may be a download of the 1st Chapter available soon.

We will up-date you with the next post about Follow That Customer.

Guest post: Adam Ramshaw at Genroe: Net Promoter Score – how to do it?

Net Promoter Scoring was introduced to the world in a December 2003 Harvard Business review research article.  This article, “The One Number You Need to Grow“, reported on research that had been performed by Frederick Reichheld from Bain Consulting in concert with a company called Satmetrix.

For the last 50 years companies have been trying to find a survey question that measured customer loyalty in order to better understand how and what drives customer loyalty.  Until recently “customer satisfaction” had been used as a proxy for this information.  Reichheld and Satmetrix set out to find if customer satisfaction was the best question once and for all.

It turned out that customer satisfaction was not the best question and the result was Net Promoter Score.  By analysing the results from the question “On a scale 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”, they obtained a metric that was well correlated with customer loyalty.

Actually performing Net Promoter scoring is reasonably straight forward.  Survey your customers, ask the “Would recommend” question and then apply the scoring formula. However, what many organisations have found is that uncovering the score is important but not enough.

To be successful in using Net Promoter Score, organisations must put together an internal response processes to use the information and make changes in the business.  Only then will customer loyalty increase.

Net promoter scoring can be used in both business to business and business to consumer companies.

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

Guest post from Adam Ramshaw at Genroe

Thank you Adam for your guest post on our blog. As always, the team at genroe have delivered highly insightful and ‘on the money’ insight for a single question which has created many-many years of Marketing debate.

I think this is a great introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Your can learn more about Genroe at their website and Blog.

The new threat to directory service incumbents, local social media search.

It is indeed interesting times to be a small and medium business in Australia. We have a very large revolution underway and it is all about prospect and customer engagement, locally!

Get Social, Get Local, Be Found™.

Social Media allows for some great applications and many opportunities to waste time playing games, loading pictures from your latest escapades and importantly sharing them and staying in touch with your ‘friends’.

What social media applications like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, allow is access to your local niche of friends and associates.

The really important thing about these applications is that they are easy to use and available on many different platforms like the iPad, Laptops, PCs and most importantly Mobile devices like your flashy new iPhone 4!

So, the old story of “letting your fingers do the walking” is even more true today than ever.

The thing is that you can now ‘do the walking’ on your mobile tocuh screen, which means real time search.

The really really cool thing for people with these social media applications is if they have turned them on there mobile and allow for locational tracking.

That is with the mobile phone now acting as a GPS your phone knows exactly where you are in the world.

This is a great advantage for Local Advertising as it means that you can have really effective local ads to people are are around and searching for a solution or a product.

That is why Social Media advertising in 2009 accounted for over 3.2 Billion in the USA. But the really interesting factoid in this data was that 20% of the searches were local.

Yes local small to medium business using GPS ‘sniper’ like targeted to ads.

I say ‘sniper’ like as delivering this type of local advertising is highly accurate and extremely targeted.

It is a taste of things to come, so the idea of carrying a 3kg bundle of Blue and Yellow Directory books or even the local paper seems well so redundant.

Particularly when you can have instant access via your phone.

This must be a great concern to the old media newspapers and directory businesses, even those directory businesses which are already solely online.

Reason being, newspapers and directories have always relied on their big brands and MASS appeal.

These guys historically have gotten the ‘eyeballs’ of massive number of ‘users’ using their printed directories.

Now you have new media players like Facebook with 400 Million users, if it was a country it would be the worlds 4th largest.

So, the battle for the eyeballs is clearly being won by new media. But not only does new media sites like Facebook and Foursquare have mass appeal they can also be very very Local.

Think about this when your thinking about how to get your business found, as marketing consultants we think you need to act by; Get Social, Get Local, Get Found™.

Or you could just rely on traditional directories and your website alone!