Make Digital Marketing Work

The first commercial use of the internet was by business looking to expand their marketplace.  It stands to reason that a local company looking to expand their business into national and global markets could find a fantastic medium online.  Anyone who could ship their products to the customer had a wealth of opportunity open to them and this is how eCommerce was born.

On the other hand, a traditional bricks and mortar local business that relies on local custom, can find the internet to be a baffling place. Dentists, hair salons, doctors, guitar teachers, mechanics and a whole host of other business types all fall into this bracket where their location is an important part of their appeal. Similarly their customers often make decisions based on location in tandem with their reputation and perceived value.  Location therefore becomes a hugely important factor.  Correlating this to an environment where time and place do not matter was a perplexing problem for a very long time.

I’ve heard advice given to local hairdressers to get involved in eCommerce operations which effectively meant they should abandon a business they knew for one they had no idea about.  That kind of advice is thankfully consigned to history now but some very big companies served up that kind of rubbish for a very long time.

The problem is that nobody is going to drive the length of the country to visit a dentist regularly, and the concept of the visiting dentist to London that comes to you from the Outer Hebrides didn’t catch on as far as I am aware.

For business such as these the online marketing strategy should include Google Local Search.  Other search engines also offer local search inclusion but Google is by far and away the simplest to set up in my view. By adding your details to the mapping anyone that uses location as a search term will see your information. There is still the need for it to be entered correctly and a marketer who is experienced in these things will be able to help you.  The results can be significantly better (and the costs significantly lower) using this method rather than trying to get to the top of Google’s rankings for the term “dentist”.  When you think about it, that is a pretty pointless goal to begin with.

All local businesses should be looking at Local Search as a promotional tactic.

The year was 19 days old when the digital marketing industry reported what we think is the first properly significant story of the new decade.

YouTube (owned by Google) has apparently won the rights to stream live cricket matches from the Indian Premier League.  This marks a significant stepping up of Youtube’s activities in an area which has become dominated by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Broadcasting channels.

Given the amount of bad feeling and mudslinging that has been going on between the two companies, this is unlikely to extract a pleasant response from Sky.

The tail end of last year was dominated on the one hand by Murdoch claiming that Google was a parasite and on the other by Google saying that if Murdoch’s organisations didn’t know how to make money out of the traffic they receive from Google then it wasn’t their fault.  I think many could be forgiven for thinking that Google is teaching a lesson with Youtube on how to make money in a new media world and that the intended recipient of learning is indeed Mr Murdoch.

If Google is therefore interested in broadcast media and has ideas of how to make money, is there anything to stop it from deciding to do the same thing with news media?  Their entire argument is that money can be made, it’s simply that News Corporation doesn’t know how to do it, and whilst Murdoch’s empire has its friends and supporters in high places it is a brave person indeed who could stand up to the weight of Google’s coffers, it’s global reach and it’s board’s unashamed intellectual prowess.

If battle lines are being drawn and warning shots sent across boughs then this going to be a year to watch in earnest  and one that at the end of which media will be unrecognisable from how it is today.

There was a lot of talk this week concerning the Pay Per Click Campaign that iCrossing ran for Ann Summers with apparent strong feeling on both sides.  The BA air strike is an emotive issue but I don’t want to linger on the morals of using it as a marketing technique (others have done that already), I am more interested in the technique itself.

The campaign revolved around the British Airways strike by cabin staff, and was executed so that anyone looking for keywords about the strike was greeted with a Google ad that.  The PPC campaign made statements such as “Your plane may be grounded but you can still take off with our toys”.  According to the picture below showing the google results it performed quite well and was rewarded with a top position.

I would be interested to learn exactly how this performed in a case study.  The power of PPC is that it gives you an ad for what you want at the time you are looking for it.  So is the rationale here, “I am interested in finding out about the British airways strike, Oh look I nearly forgot I need to buy a dildo, some anal beads and a tube of lube?”  Did the ad produce significant click through or was the intention to use a direct response media for brand building purposes and not expect to produce click through? How do you measure that?  Was it measured?

It’s certainly a cheeky and inventive creative idea but is it one that we can simply look at and say it was cheeky and inventive or did it actually work and produce sales for the client?  Anyone care to comment?  My feeling is that unless you take that traffic and do something with it then it is wasted traffic

Its the season for top tens and predictions for next year.  Never to be one for missing out on a trend we include our predictions for 2010 below:

1)      Digital marketing will come of age and stop focusing on tactical disciplines.  Leading on from this the value of strategic marketing will become better understood by digital marketers and welcomed by clients

2)      Publishing will experience an extremely turbulent year and many publications could potentially be put up for sale discontinued or merged together

3)      Google will stop being viewed as the enemy of publishers and acknowledged as a valued partner

4)      Online broadcast of TV content will become a huge issue for TV companies and lead to similar scenes as we have seen this year for news publishers

5)      The concept of a mobile wallet will become a common thing for consumers

6)      The world wide web and mobile web will converge as mobile browsers become as common as laptops

7)      Wifi in the city streets for everyone

8)      Display advertising will enjoy a short renaissance followed by a larger debate about banner ads use and effectiveness

9)      Offline and integrated marketers will face a huge task as they move from a broadcast media model to one that is customer led.  Not everyone will be able to adapt.

10)   A pure digital agency will secure lead agency status by a times 100 company

Oh and one more for luck

Arsenal will win the FA cup!

What are your predictions and what do you think of ours?

There is a lot in the press at the moment regaling the story that is gradually unfolding regarding Print news media and Online Search.  It has even reached prime coverage on BBC Newsnight.

On the one hand Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp states that Search engines index their content and make it available free and on the other hand Google states that they deliver many millions of reader s every day to News Corp websites and if they cant figure out how to make money from that audience then it isn’t their fault.

If the scenario continues to play out as it has been then it is completely conceivable that News Corp and other print media owners will remove their content from Google’s index.

Search engines rank their content based on a series of criteria and one of those criteria concerns backlinks.  The goal for any site owner is to get relevant backlinks from sites which have e high authority, and the highest authority has often been from journalist sites such as the ones that News Corp and the other print media owners.

If News Corp actually manages this and (along with otter print media news owners) removes their content completely then a lot of index listings are suddenly going to have the corresponding backlinks removed.  This could have some serious repercussions for Google.  Their calculations will not have the print titles to count links from and so a new ranking will be produced.  Will it look anything like the old one?  It could also mean that social media backlinks from Blogs and social bookmarkeing sites could take on even higher importance than they currently do.

Can we expect Google to make significant changes to the way that it indexes sites if this all comes to light?

Our SEO techniques use social media a lot and these techniques could become very important if thing play out as they have been.  Google has implemented the 5 clicks for free rule but is that going to convince the media owners to stay with Google and keep their backlinks available?  I am not sure, but am absolutely fascinated to see how this is going to play out.

One of the big announcements last year was that Google had expanded it’s search robot’s capabilities to take account of Adobe Macromedia Flash files.

Back when I started building websites in the mid 90s I was lucky enough to work with some of the best young designers in the business at that time, many of whom now head up departments and whose every murmur is greeted with hushed reverence.  At the time we were making things up as we went along because there wasn’t anyone who had yet defined specific rules of how to do things or demonstrated effectiveness as a standard.  Most of the time we discovered new and interesting things because everyone I worked with was incredibly bright.  One of the things that we embraced completely was Flash, and created some absolutely beautiful sites.   Here are some lessons that we learned with pre release and early versions of the software

Flash wasn’t easily updateable.  In fact every time you needed to make a change to a seemingly innocuous piece of text, you had to spend ages working on it, and present the client with a rather large bill that they didn’t appreciate.  That problem got sorted when Flash started to talk to external data sources.

People get carried away with Flash.  These were the days of the flash introduction and people seemed to think that having an advertising like introduction (similar to TV channel introduction animations was a good thing).  Usability taught us that users didn’t stick around to watch them.  Later a ‘skip this’ button was added to the animation and then it was (mostly) dropped completely as analytics showed us that users preferred to get straight into the meat and veg of a site’s serving and ignore any little tasty treat that stopped them getting to the content.  The important thing we learned was that the web was not a broadcast medium and that lesson has stood me in extremely good stead over the years. It was about that time that I started using the phrase that a website is workhorse not a work of art.  The key is to understand that the site is for the users not for the organisation producing it.

Flash couldn’t be seen by Google.  This was the killer to the large flash sites as your content didn’t exist in Google and so neither did you.  All but the clueless abandoned flash only sites in development, and the clients who insisted upon it pretty soon were having crisis meetings about how to get any meaningful figures on usage, whilst they looked at a pretty short report showing how many times the homepage had been viewed and not a lot else.   Google’s announcement at being able to crawl and index Flash changed the rules of web design again.

Flash did find a place amongst Hybrid sites that presented information in HTML and also provided Flash animations.  It meant that users could choose to view rich animations that delivered information as well as standard text and graphics.  Sites that have persisted in this and not undergone redesign since the announcement in 2008 have run the risk of having their content duplicated in Google’s index and whilst I haven’t heard of specific examples of this particular scenario, Google did treat general cases of duplicate content with extreme prejudice.  At any rate the writing has been on the wall for a company with a hybrid site to redesign it as matter of urgency.

Flash couldn’t be seen by every browser.  In many ways this is still as much of a problem as it has always been.  Computer browsers don’t treat Flash with the same disdain that they used to but a myriad of mobile and alternative device browsers have been added and the vast majority of sites do not account for them.

That brings me full circle.  There was a belief in the beginning that Flash sites were brand building and I sat in meetings back then making claims about ‘brand and content coming together to provide a total experience’.  I am less convinced of that argument now and have seen examples of content tests setting Flash based animations against standard HTML and graphics in comparison tests.  The inconvenient truth that I have witnessed is that user tests seem to conclusively show that users prefer HTML.

My instinct tells me that Flash isn’t inherently bad, it is just used badly which gives it a bad reputation, but I also think that designers need to ask themselves very carefully why they elect to use Flash.  In the end I come back to my two maxims.  At any rate, I do hope that the all inclusive single Flash movie that people used to create and parade as a site will be a thing of the past.  Users didn’t spend that much time on them.

The site is for the users to use and we should make it as intuitive and informing as possible.

And

A website is a workhorse not a work of art.

What do you think?

I try to stay up to date on all aspects of marketing, and have for many years followed a group of people who run seminars and webinars and conferences and all manner of events where you pay to hear them present.

The sales pitch goes like this.

You are a startup and you have created something amazing in your shed that all the world needs but you haven’t got a clue how to bring it to market.  You therefore look at Google and put in something like Internet Marketing or How to market products, and there suddenly is an ad asking you if you are happy with your marketing.

This is the amazing way that Google works, it gives you an ad for what you are looking for at exactly the time you are looking for it.  Of course you are going to click on it.  You then go thorugh to a website and you give them your email address in return for a document that promises you the secrets of all marketing.  Sounds good so far doesn’t it?  Now the kicker, couple of times a week you get invited to an event or webinar which is actually a pitch to you so that you will spend thousands on learning all about marketing.  The challenge they lay down to you is if you do not do this then you are not taking your business seriously.  If you do pay up you will be a member of the elite that will very soon be driving around in an Aston Martin and dating supermodels (ok some people like Porsches and would rather have Brad Pitt but you get the idea).

Now those are pretty strong and emotive words so its natural that a lot of people will cough up the cash.  Now before I go any further I will say that I have never coughed up the cash to go to one of these but I know the routine.  I was originally an actor and trained professionally so I know how to command a room and whip up emotion in an audience, I therefore know the gig and I have sat at the back whilst some of these people went to work.

It is important to get as many people as possible in the room and so hotel conference facilities are perfect.  You keep it informal, you move around a lot and you keep the energy up as you promise this and that and make sure that you associate yourself with their success.  It can be very effective and its a tactic that is used by Politicians and cult leaders.  In fact Adolf Hitler was extremely good at this technique.  That gave you food for thought didn’t it?

The thing is that they then turn things around and say to you that you don’t really want to be in the business you are in.  What you really want to do is the same thing as them.  They tell you that you don’t actually need to be an expert to give presentations like this, all you need is to say that you are.  I’ve heard one example given of a chap who gives presentations about running restaurants to new restauranters, but who has never run a restaurant in his life.  This is explained to you as if its a good tihng.

Ok stop.  Back the truck up.  There is a guy here who is telling you that he is an expert in things and that you should be in this business as well, and it doesn’t matter if you actually have experience in the industry or not, all you have to do is say you are and people will give you money.  Have you spotted the contradiction in the argument yet?

They will tell you about how they know more about Google advertising than anyone else in the world.  What you mean more than the guys at Google, or agencies that are managing multi millions on behalf of clients and have whole teams to devote to it?  Its interesting that as the recession has bit harder so the claims coming from these people has got more and more outrageous.  I expect them to pretty soon announce that they are the reincarnation of Christ, Adam Smith and David Ogilvy all wrapped into one black turtle necked jersey package.

Now the spoiler.  Everything they say can be read in a book, and it is a book that wasn’t written by them.  I would argue that their information is also out of date because they are not at the leading edge of marketing innovation but for most businesses that shouldn’t matter too much.  The books will cost you somewhere between £5 and £25, and you can then go online to discuss them.  There are genuine thinkers in the world and they are very happy to share their knowledge with you, but these guys on the stage are not them.  They are telling you the same thing, don’t update their pitches often enough and are charging you a premium for hearing something that you can get in a store in your town, or order for next day delivery from Amazon.

Our Booklist should get you started quite nicely, and there is also the British Library that is there to help you for free too.  If your money is tight and you don’t know how to market yourself these books will give you absolutely everything you need to know to get started, and after that when you have built a business, an agency will be able to help you with some creative ideas to get you on to the next level.  People in agencies have been doing this for many years and will take responsibility for the work they do.  They won’t simply tell you how to do it and pick up a fee.

Please don’t be fooled by the charlatans.

Bing has finally launched in a full version in the UK today.  We started taking a look at it when it became available as a Beta and obviously did as much as we could to understand how it aggregates its searches so that we were able to make whatever changes were necessary without harming our Google optimisation.  It has enabled us to some high listings for a number of our key search terms which has obviously pleased us.  Our take on this so far is that Bing is a perfectly respectable search engine that does what it says on the tin.  That’s the problem really, it is absolutely fine but there is nothing there to make us immediately drop everything Google and switch to Bing.  We first saw traffic coming through to interactive-mix.com on une 11^th with terms such as “Interactive Marketing Agency” and variations of our company name featuring most regularly but since then Bing has produced 7.89% of our natural search traffic whilst Google has produced 89.47% of it.  There is a massive gap between these two and Yahoo which has produced 1.32% and Ask barely registers at all with less than 1%

Even if we skew the date range to take the best advantage of Bing, Google’s dominance is barely dented and Bing achieved 8.26% of our total natural search traffic.

We are not claiming that this is representative across the entire web or even for our industry but the message to us seems to be clear that Google is still the dominant force in Search by a very long way and whilst Bing is the second most important search engine it still produces only a fraction of the traffic for us that Google does.  This seems to show quite comprehensively that visitors to our site haven’t found a reason to switch their search to Bing.  Obviously we are going to keep an eye on this and it is only the first official day for the new search engine, so we will keep people informed of how we see things shaping up.

I have been finishing off my blog post about Magazine publishing and its proving to be too lengthy to post in one go but a couple of things appearing in the Guardian also caught my eye recently which ask some pretty important questions of the publishing industry in general.  The first one is the move by Murdoch to remove News Internationals content from Google once the paywalls have been implemented.

This is a bold move and in some of the discussions I have seen appearing on the web the following comment seemed to sum up a view that whilst harsh may have some truth in it if things continue to play out as they have been.

“ Everything he’s doing is looking increasingly petulant and misguided.  He’s a relic of a bygone age, lashing with what monetary clout he still has against his increasing irrelevance”.

As a self confessed intellectual snob I certainly won’t miss content from the tabloid arm of News International and removing it from the world’s search results to me is a bit like cleaning up the distorted noise on a 1940s swing recording, but that is not all that we are talking about here.  The full list of News International titles includes The Times, The Sunday Times.  Whilst these are absolute bastions of British journalism, it would be rare for a truly news worthy story to appear uniquely in these titles.  As I pointed out in my blog post about newspaper publishing on the one hand you have the BBC content and on the other you have a multitude of bloggers and citizen journalists who are all capable of writing their own story and gathering opinion from around the world that will all then be available across the web in seconds.

News International are never backward about coming forwards with their criticism of the BBC and the younger Mr Murdoch’s recent tirade against public funded news coverage demonstrates his beliefs very clearly.   Rupert Murdoch has pledged his support for the Conservative party at the next election and the Conservative Party has made a pledge to look at the BBC’s charter.  Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt whilst speaking to the Financial Times was quoted as saying “We are looking into whether it would be appropriate to rip up the charter in the middle of it, or whether one should wait”.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see what the master plan is.  Newspaper publishing is fighting for very big stakes at the moment and the BBC offers a free alternative to those plans.

This leaves citizen journalism though and we are yet to see how this thorn is addressed by the fourth estate.

Also in the Guardian was another article Foreign media count cost of UK libel laws in which it announced that titles form overseas are considering whether to continue to publish in the UK.  This content is protected by laws of Freedom of Speech abroad does n not enjoy the same protection here and as such title owners are considering whether to block access to their sites and withdraw the foreign titles from circulation in the UK due to the threat of libel.

These all seem to me to be a classic case of an old world meeting new technology with new conflicts seemingly appearing every other day.  The Internet is very good at asking questions of an industry, it did it first for software and is currently asking questions of the music industry. The rule of thumb the Internet has proved time and time again is that the advance of new technology is as unstoppable as a tidal wave.  It is up to industry to adapt to technology or become obsolete.

Personally I don’t think that removing your content from Google is a great move, because the alternatives will not stop the story appearing.  It will only stop your point of view appearing, and I think being included in the conversation is better than not being included in the conversation.

Whether it is business models or the diversity of domestic law pertaining to an industry, the Internet is causing a dramatic rethink and more than likely a few sleepless nights for existing media owners.  If they do not accept that the broadcast model as we knew it is morphing into something new then they will be the ones who will increasingly marginalise themselves and therefore become increasingly irrelevant to the conversation.

I wrote yesterday about book publishing and predicted that the book was not dead and would continue with its admittedly minority but niche audience.

Newspaper publishing is less clear.  Over crowded tubes and the increasing switch of commuters to pedal power has made a noticeable difference on the number of Times and Telegraphs left behind on the 7:43 to Liverpool Street in the mornings.  Murdoch correctly predicted that news would be delivered digitally.  What he failed to predict was the way that the value of news was commoditised and made freely available.  On the one hand, the BBC has its mighty news service which breaks stories of interest throughout the day and on the other hand citizen journalism is providing some excellent news coverage that is trusted by more and more people.  Then there is Google that aggregates it all together and makes it available at the type of a search string.

As a child I remember watching the movies of the thirties which many would say was the golden era of newspaper publishing.  Reporters took on heroic levels of importance with a dogged determination to find the story and rush it to the editor’s office for inclusion in the morning episode.  Even Superman was a journalist at the daily Planet and everyone knows that Spiderman took the pictures that mattered for the Daily Bugle.

Today however both Superman and Spiderman would have problems.  Whilst they were holding the train one handed to stop it plunging into the river,  everyone down below would be pointing their camera phones whilst a blogger sat in Starbucks and published the story as it happened.  Superman could fly faster than a speeding bullet but could he conceivably fly faster than a wireless connection with broadband?  I suspect not.  Krypton’s last son would get scooped every time.

Please excuse me for vanishing into my childhood for a second but I think the analogy highlights the problem perfectly.  Daily newspapers were all about the scoop and the strength of commentary.  Even with super powers it is difficult for the news agencies these days to replace the person on the ground equipped with modern communication methods, so what hope does a mere mortal with a press pass have?  Similarly an army of young boys in short trousers can never  build a distribution network as efficiently as Google with its ability to help people “read all about it”

One of my favourite movies when I was growing up was All the Presidents Men, which is probably also journalism and newspaper publishing’s finest hour.  The complex story showed two dedicated professionals use every ounce of their experience and professionalism (as well as a few little strokes) to get the story that ultimately removed a president from office.  Never before, never since was the ethic of journalism so well highlighted.

I found myself wondering how it would go down if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein found the story today.  Would they have waited to publish in the Washington Post or would they have released it piece by piece in an anonymous blog to gather information in the form of other anonymous comments which would then be tweeted and linked across the world.  One can imagine deepthroat.wordpress.com becoming one of the most read blogs in the world if it did play out like that and all the Presidents men wouldn’t have been able to stop it.  The recent story of Trafigura which was first reported in WikiLeaks shows that the Internet is understood by everyone at the top of a story as a way to circumvent even legal attempts to stop the story being told.  No need for Superman in that little episode.  All you need is the power of the Internet.

Newspapers are hurting there is no doubt about it.  Times and Sunday Times bulk bundles ceased to be given out to airlines and hotel chains this week and joins the same move by the guardian and Observer a few weeks ago.  So what can publishers do to stop them taking their place amongst the ranks of the Dodo?