Archive for the ‘General Marketing’ Category
The media has been full of news about our European neighbours pulling out of the recession with a positive quarter of growth. It’s great news for the world, even if Britain’s lagging a little while behind.
Although lots have people have advocated investing in marketing during the downturn it’s not always that easy when your budget is being sliced. But if we are indeed heading out of the recession, when’s the best time to put the pedal back on the accelerator?
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You’d be hard-pressed to have missed Paramount’s new ‘Monsters versus Aliens’ movie advert. It contains a suggested search keyword instead of a website address, advising viewers to “search for mva” to find more information on the new film about a girl who is hit by a meteorite, turns into a big monster, gets captured by the government and acquainted with a gang of monsters, and inevitably ends up saving the world from aliens.
Anyway, as Adam on One Idea pointed out, upon searching Google for ‘mva’, the film’s website is completely absent from the top natural search results. There is a pay-per-click ad at the top of the search results, with a messy url and ‘mva’ in the link text. Read on
As Google are keen to attract greater spend on their PPC network Adwords, they have over the years introduced a number of free tools to help advertisers greater understand the return on investment they are getting from their PPC spend. They hope with these tools they can gain a greater share of companies multi-channel advertising budgets.
The most commonly used of these tools is Google Analytics which monitors the traffic your website receives however a more recent introduction is Google Website Optimizer which in simple terms allows you to test different website designs or copy variations and monitor which perform the best.
This functionality is hugely powerful as many judgements made about web design are purely aesthetic and can unwittingly have a huge impact on the performance of a site.
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I don’t like getting the tube in London, being a born and bred Brightonian I find it confusing. The one upside however is tube advertising is in my opinion some of the most innovative in the world. This Orange ad caught my attention this week for its attempted use of offline/ search marketing integration.
photo credit: markhillary
Anyway, waiting at embankment I came across the latest Orange brand campaign 30 foot wide in front of me. I’d seen the TV ad and already though this was a pretty stupid campaign. The premise is Orange are somehow sponsoring a chap called Mark Beaumont who is apparently cycling around the world. (It actually turns out he’s lied- he’s cycling around different parts of the world in 7 stages and I presume getting planes between continents, also he’s taken over 6 months to do it so I presume he’s stopped for food and sleep which for me defeats the point entirely!!!)
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The last couple of days the SEO blogosphere has gone a bit Blogrush crazy, while some people seem to be getting real results from the blog widget, which promises you traffic if you share traffic, others have decried it as a obvious Pyramid scheme.
Now that gives me an idea – via flickr
I disagree with both; it’s actually a Ponzi scheme, which while quite similar is actually a bit different.
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After the recent Brighton SEO meet up arranged by the guys and LondonSEO.org, I was really impressed by the number of people that turned up. What was more surprising was the sheer number of different agencies and firms that everyone came from, some of whom I’d never even heard of before.
Working late at the office love – via flickr
While we’ve always had some friendly competition with a few local [tag]Brighton SEO[/tag] firms; I came away from that evening with even more blogs to read and email newsletters to sign up to in order to get my fix of competitive nosey-ness.
I’ve had a bit of a look around and some of the other cities in the UK since and a few have clutches of Search marketing firms, but few can compete with [tag]Brighton[/tag] for the title of [tag]Search Engine Marketing Capital of the UK[/tag].
But why is it such a hot bed for search?
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Recently there’s been a boom in free online classified advertising sector, it’s been estimated that Craigslist is the world most popular job website and even smaller competitors like Gumtree & Kijiji (both owned by eBay) have plenty of reach.
Craigslist HQ, pretty homely – via flickr
However despite these websites huge audience; [tag]online marketers seem[/tag] to be ignoring the huge potential these sites offer to promote their business. The links from these sites carry no weight in the eyes of Google. But despite having no real search engine marketing value, they can still have an important part to play in balanced [tag]online marketing strategy[/tag].
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In Steve Covey style I thought I’d write a post on the “7 habits of highly effective SEOs.”
1 – Big picture thinking
By ‘Big Picture Thinking’ I mean having the ability to understand the wider role that [tag]Search Engine Marketing[/tag] has to play in helping a business achieve its goals and objectives.
2 – Goal focused
Leading on nicely from habit 1, we move onto the second habit of being goal oriented as opposed to ranking focused. Again a Search Engine Optimiser’s job involves a whole lot more than achieving rankings. Would you expect a direct mail expert to just produce a mailing piece? Of course not, you’d expect them to help you achieve some pre-defined marketing goal. Why should Search be any different?
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The big offline [tag]publishers[/tag] should be raking it in from the net, they have the infrastructure and talent in place to produce high quality content that web users love. And while a number of newspapers and magazines have great websites, even the most web savvy publishers aren’t taking full advantage of their portfolio of products online.
place your bets gentlemen – via flickr
The web has opened up opportunities for small companies and solo writers create [tag]niche websites[/tag] which can produce reliable revenue streams in sectors where offline publishers should be flourishing.
But some publishers just don’t get it.
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Last weekend, Kelvin and I represented SiteVisiblity when we attended a fun and friendly socialising party organised by Propellernet on the Brighton seafront. Everyone had a good chance to discuss their career moves, their views on how things were changing, and I met quite a few people who did not come from Internet backgrounds but instead decided to throw themselves at the deep end of a medium they did not know much about (but thought they did). Also, it seems that nowadays 1/20 people will have a website, and 1/5 of these will operate Google AdSense.
In other words, it seems there is a greater amount of people transfering their traditional marketing skills to the internet than the other way round. Is that simply due to the rapid expansion of the medium and an inability to cope with the worforce demand? and are there any marketers out there who wish to return to old fashioned marketing and Kotler’s 4 Ps ?
Is my technique really outdated? via flickr
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