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

Guest post by Joel Norton: Why Social Media Doesn’t Matter Anymore!

Joel Norton an expert in Direct Marketing with over 20 years of experience has joined Integrati Marketing this week to talk about Social Media. Joel runs BoostHQ.com.au a great Marketing Agency which provides training about how to benefit from Social Media for Small Medium Business.

The hype about social media continues to echo but the fact is, it really does not matter anymore.

The idea behind the hype, measurement and rush to claim guru status revolved around the tools and the platforms, all of which were new, but none of which were the point.

The reason social media doesn’t matter anymore is that it really doesn’t exist beyond a label. The truth is that ‘social media’ is simply a bunch of tools. What does matter is the ability to increase interaction and to build even deeper relationships with our customers, and the opportunity to build trust with potential prospects. Once we drop the ‘social media’ label, we’re left with 4 key factors that do matter.

Prospect Engagement

If we’ve learned one thing over the last year or two, it’s that prospects are drawn to the ability to interact with the companies, brands and messages that they choose to absorb.

Marketing and sales need to incorporate this ability to ‘interact’ in order to even get an invitation into the prospect’s decision-making world. Any opportunity we have to start a conversation and start the process of building trust should be grabbed with both hands.

Customer Experience

It’s more important than ever to ensure that we deliver exceptional customer service and we keep our existing customers loyal. These new channels provide a great opportunity to keep our customers at the centre of our business and strengthen our relationship.

It also provides increased opportunity for our advocates – our customers who love us – to promote our products and services on our behalf. If being found by prospects is the new form of lead generation awareness, then trust is the new form of lead conversion. Trust happens rapidly when customers have an experience worth talking about, and a remarkable customer experience is the most effective form of lead generation.

Collaboration

The Internet has enabled a world where we can work in conjunction with prospects, customers, suppliers, mentors, advisors and staff to improve our existing products and services, as well as develop new ones.

Community sourcing is a practice that underpins all product, service and business development activities.

Fusion

Another powerful lesson gained over the last few years is that offline activity is enhanced, rather than replaced, by online activity.

The careful fusion of hi-touch business building that’s done face to face, with hi-tech business building that enables more frequent, personalised contact and communication is the secret to delivering the most advanced customer experience.

The tools you use will differ depending on your business and your marketing strategy.

Here are my 5 Top Tips on how to develop effective interaction in marketing using social media tools:

1. Listening is the Best Way to Develop a Strategy

As with all marketing, you should always define your strategy before you dive into tactics and execution, and social media is no different. Developing a ‘Listening Station’ is the best form of market research, and allows you to develop an appropriate social media strategy that you can align with your broader business objectives.

2. Optimise your Brand Assets

Once you’ve developed your strategy, you need to claim your digital real estate by setting up profiles on the appropriate search and social networks. You need to control and optimise your digital assets such as profiles, pages, photos, audio and video to ensure you have a consistent message.

3. Content as Lead Generation

People go to search engines on a daily basis looking for answers. Businesses who publish relevant content frequently via their blog are more likely to be found during these searches. It’s about changing your approach from ‘hunting’ to ‘being found’. The content also demonstrates your expertise, and starts the process of building trust with your prospects.

4. Networking Hasn’t Really Changed

People network to expand their contacts, meet new prospects and potential employees, catch-up with customers and conduct research. Social networks provide the same opportunity just in a slightly different style of engagement, and can greatly enhance your traditional approach to networking.

5. A System is the Solution

Managing your social media assets, online networking and creating a regular stream of content can be daunting. It’s critical that you utilise dashboards, and you integrate and amplify your content on the different platforms and networks. Most importantly, you must develop a system to ‘manage the beast’ effectively.

Let’s stop measuring adoption of social media and go to work on simply measuring effective interaction in marketing.

About Joel Norton:

Joel is Chief Strategy Officer of Boost Marketing, a specialist small business marketing coach. He is an accomplished marketing professional with 22 years experience, and is passionate about delivering strategic, practical marketing solutions that help small business to be more profitable. Joel distributes Weekly Marketing Tips which you can subscribe to at www.BoostHQ.com.au, or you can follow him on Twitter @BoostHQ

Integrati Marketing Consulting works with Joel and BoostHQ with various engagements for Social Media strategy reviews and implementations for businesses looking to improve their customer dialogue programmes.

The National Broadband Network is good for Small Medium Businesses in Australia

The Integrati Marketing Consulting team are passionate believers in the opportunity for Small Medium Business in Australia to benefit from the National Broadband Network (NBN).

Leaving politics aside and taking a moment to have a look at how Australia is bench-marked Worldwide for high speed Internet access we are not even in the top 10. In fact, we are ranked 50th in the world by connection speed according to the Quarter One report 2010 from Akamai “The State of the Internet“. We are soundly beaten in connection speeds by countries like Latvia and Romania who are in the international top 10 for connection speed! (report is available here from Akamai)

Now, anyone who has used a slow Internet connection will understand why speed is important and in Australia the Internet and our so-called broadband is anything but fast.

Why slow Internet speed is a worry for Small Medium Business?

Small and Medium Businesses are starting to use the services available on the Internet to improve their businesses opportunity of being ‘found, contacted and making a sale’ through online channels like, websites, Social Media, Local Mobile Search and many more touch points to come.

What is important about all of these access points is that they rely on high-speed access to send the data whizzing back and forth. The faster the connection the more improved the outcome for the person using or accessing the website etc.

What if?

What if the Australian Internet was so fast that Australian businesses website pages came up in 10th of seconds instead of 4-5 seconds the increased satisfaction for users would be immense. We would see benefits for reduced costs of transactions between parties through reductions in time, real video conferencing without delays – no more tyranny of distance in this great continent of ours.

The benefits for online marketing.

With the faster connection your business would be able to focus your time on what really matters rather than worrying about the hygiene factors of server bandwidth ping times and page load speed. It simply would not be an issue anymore. What is even better SMB’s marketing would benefit from a focus on:

• Faster sites = increased usage and customer satisfaction
• Increased usage of the Internet by Australians
• New opportunities to market to people ‘out and about’ with mobile and interactive devices
• Focus on relevant and engaging content – worrying less about file sizes and interactive limitation due to speed
• Opportunity – we would be able to create integrated campaigns that seamlessly couple across devices and touch points

I know that there is great debate in Australia about the cost of creating this Natural Monopoly with the Wholesale Broadband for the NBNco.

But what we also need to think about, is the waste which would result from the lost productivity, if we do not build the NBN!

This is a point which is often missed in the banter about budget. All great businesses and countries know that if you invest wisely you will reap the rewards. If all Australians were on the fastest Internet access in the World we would be at a competitive advantage and not lingering at the bottom of the broadband connectivity chart. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from Latvia and Romania about high speed Internet as well!

What is Direct Marketing? Why your business should be using Direct Marketing!

Direct Marketing is the process of marketing to your customers without an intermediary between the seller (you) and the buyers or in other words your customers.

Direct Marketing then as a simple definition is sending your marketing message directly to you audience or buyers. This is important because when comparing large brands that use mass media marketing channels like TV, Radio and Newspapers or Magazines can afford to run and sustain marketing campaigns whereas most Small Medium Businesses can not.

Mass Media Marketing works with a high frequency or exposure to the message(s) over a sustained period from a single brand or sub-brand. This is why it is generally to expensive for Small Medium Businesses (SMB) to use mass media. This is why Direct Marketing offers a great opportunity for SMB’s to create great marketing and even better marketing results than some larger organisations may experience without the large expense.

The great thing about Direct Marketing is that there are more benefits to be had with Direct Marketing and a Direct Marketing Plan to identify them than trying to run mass media advertising. With an identified direct marketing plan or even a tactical marketing plan using direct marketing techniques your business can create great marketing communications that drive response and really do increase sales.

Compared to the limited mass media approach of TV, Radio and Newspapers whereas, Direct Marketing offers your business a broad selection of ‘Channels’ or communication methods to deliver your direct marketing message to your customer. Importantly the communication will be direct and there are no intermediaries between your message and your target audience which may be a consumer or a business.

Hence the terms Business to Consumer (B2C) or Business to Business (B2B). So, depending on your audience you can choose a variety of direct marketing communication tools like;

• Direct Mail
• Internet Marketing (Websites, Micro-sites, Search Engine Marketing)
• Email Marketing
• SMS and Mobile Marketing
• Catalogue and leaflet marketing (commonly referred to as junk mail marketing)
• Telemarketing
• Direct Selling (A sales force which can also referred to as Face to Face Sales)
• Fax Marketing campaigns

With a well planned direct marketing campaign you can include a single channel or even combine them. By incorporating different channels such as; an email, website, direct mail and a phone number to call to order or arrange a meeting that campaign has become and integrated marketing campaign.

By linking in several direct channels your not only creating a consistent message to the prospect or customer but allowing for multiple preferred means of contacting the customer and providing easy access for the customer to ‘close the loop’ and get back to you.

Direct Marketing also employs a very important method to get your customers to act, to do something, this is known as a “call to action” in your marketing message you may ask your customer to “call now on 1300 Number” or “redeem this coupon in-store” there are many different ways to create a Response with call to actions.

The key is that Direct Marketing can provide insight and real numbers about how effective the campaign was. This is done by tracking the responses to your email, calls and visits to your website against the number of converted customers into sales. And from here we can calculate the Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI, ROI) for every dollar invested returned an increase of “X” dollars in extra revenue.

One very key area in direct marketing, which was championed by Seth Godin back in the early 2000′s, is the importance of Permission Marketing. Direct Marketing can be a very successful marketing strategy but if it is used to “carpet bomb” existing and potential customers too frequently and they had not requested the communications then this fast becomes ‘Junk Mail’ and that is the last thing a great Business or Marketer wants.

Why is junk mail bad?

Clearly their is an obvious quick answer, if you did not ask for it then it is junk. But a more important answer for business is it is wasted investment and a poor use of marketing capital. If your messages are ending up in the bin then that is your marketing budget and potential the long-term health of your brand which you are also binning.

So, why permission first?

Seth says, that when you have permission to have a conversation with your customers, because they have asked you to send information to them. Then your business has permission to engage and build a rapport with that customer through ongoing communications, as long as they want to receive them! And this is what every good marketer knows, in fact the top of the list response to what Seth asked thousand of marketers is “Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.”

So, direct marketing + relationship can = great marketing outcomes. But you have to manage your customers and take their requests for opting in and out of communications seriously. This is why it is so important to also manage your customer data with a marketing database. And in fact most if not all direct marketing activities require database marketing capability.

So, this should be a pretty good overview of Direct Marketing and some of the tools and communication channels you can use. Integrati Marketing Consulting knows that Direct Marketing works. Direct Marketing Melbourne, think Integrati Marketing, we have marketing consultants and email consultants on hand to help your business with your customer dialogue programmes and integrated marketing services.

Contact Us.

Great marketing today relies on a simple idea, which is great customer data. When we run direct marketing activities, it requires having up-to-date customer information and their interests or current purchase history do our messages are relevant and timely.

Business today has many different ‘pots of customer data’ in their business. In fact, it is all around their business is a wealth of customer information. The problem can be that this data is in all sorts of different formats, from business cards, emails, letters, faxes, to spreadsheets and many more.

And this leads to the question we get a lot from our customers, “We have a great business but we do not have a database for our marketing. Where will we get our data from?” All businesses have databases of customer information, every single one! They just have not loaded it to a central store.

Customers are often baffled when we let them know they do actually have customer databases. They just have not digitised them so their data can be used readily for their marketing and sales activities.

The problem is that these businesses like these, as yet have not actively gathered up this data from the different databases like, business cards, customer invoices, emails, websites etc, and stored this information in a central repository. So, all business do have databases, it is just not all have created a central database which they can store, update and manage customer data on.

Once we have worked through with our customer how to start identifying customer information the process of uploading data starts. This can be as simple as starting a spreadsheet or an access database to using an online database such as; Salesforce.com or highrisehq.com which are hosted in the ‘Cloud’.

Once the process of collecting information in the business has started the sooner the benefits will accrue from the use of the data. Does your business have its data in order?