Facebook used to gain members

I read with interest last week in the SA Advertiser that the SAJC where embroiled in controversy relating to sourcing members via FaceBook. Sourcing the membership through FaceBook is a great social media strategy and one many sporting clubs could and should explore.

The problem with the SAJC delivery of the membership was its reportedly only gave out a free membership after a questionable voting slip was signed in favour of a particular candidate at a pending Board election. Right social media and membership idea but wrong deliverable.

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Online Advertising up 15% and TV ad spend down 5% - no downturn for Search.

Neil Shoebridge’s article in today’s Fin Review reports that ad revenue is going to fall 2.9%. 

According to Starcom Media Annual survey or Marketing and Media executives, above the line media is bearing the brunt of the cutbacks, online and pay TV are the clear winners moving forward.

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Be Brave! Survive the economic downturn by adding Search to your media mix

I recently read an article in the Oct/Nov 2008 issue of inbusiness SA magazine that made me go Yes, Yes, Yes!  It was written by Dr. David Corkindale and was about “Marketing basics in a downturn”. 

I got excited for two reasons. Firstly because is stated what a lot of marketers (and most definitely CFOs) tend to forgot: Do not cut your advertising spend when things are tight. Just don’t do it! It will cost you more in the long run.

The key comments by Dr Corkindale that pushed my buttons were:

“Various studies have shown that firms who increase advertising spend during a recession do slightly better than firms who increase advertising at other times” and,

“Businesses that are in a dominant or strong position at the start of a downturn, and which have strategic emphasis on marketing, are well-managed with an entrepreneurial  orientation and have under-utilised workers and facilities, are well situated to turn an economic slump into an opportunity to strengthen their competitive position”

Many companies turn a large business into a small business by cutting their advertising spends during lean times and consequently lose business. Very soon, without even knowing it, you have started the ball rolling of a self fulfilling prophecy whereby you start to lose clients, revenue and so on, and your situation becomes economically tight -  just as you said it would; when if fact you have quite possibly caused it yourself!

And the second reason I got excited was because it didn’t just recommend maintaining the status quo in a downtown (what I call the easy “head in the sand approach” to marketing), but instead recommended getting more value from your marketing dollar by considering things such as Search Marketing and other e-marketing initiatives.

“Of course some firms may feel compelled to cut advertising and other expenses simply to survive a downturn, survival being much more important that simply doing better or worse than rivals. However, putting something else in its place to continue to do some promotion can pay dividends; using search marketing and other e-marketing can be very cost effective.” 

Search Marketing is a fantastic, cost effective and measurable advertising tool for companies to use; particularly when ROI is of extreme importance in your company’s survival.  The key is to be brave enough to change your media mix to take advantage of the current economic climate.

By allocating a percentage (or larger percentage) of your advertising dollar to Search, not only will you stay within your advertising budget, but you will receive quantitative data that can help you more effectively target your above the line media mix.

Then as the economy recovers (as we know it will) your company will be in a much better position to take advantage of the economic upturn than those companies who have been off the consumer’s radar through lack of advertising.

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e-Channel shares it SEM secrets with industry participants

Sydney’s Darling Harbour Chinese Gardens were the tranquil setting that greeted guests attending e-Channel seminar to industry search VIP’s Wednesday 12 November. What a great setting for a function, a few people who have lived in Sydney all their lives commented they had never been to the CBD gardens and were blown away. Massive gold fish, lizards sunning themselves & waterfalls greeted participants.

Guest speaker Caroline Rowe a Senior Lecturer for University of South Australia and Direct Marketing expert with 20 Years advertising and consulting experience gave away some of the secrets used by e-channel staff to build great SEM campaigns and Ads. The seminar lasted an hour and finished with an actual group Ad design session applying some of the newly learnt skills.

e-Channel spent 2 years constructing its search training methodology, called the 7 Elements of Search. The methodology is now a 65 page training manual that it now shares with its key clients.

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Social Media and Organic Search

Social Media sites provide great branding opportunity for online businesses. Sites such as YouTube, Myspace, FaceBook, Flikr and Twitter are some of the most popular; and are used by a global and national audience.

All internet businesses should incorporate Social Media as part of their overall internet marketing strategy.  However, resourcing these activities can be time consuming for the company and the agency. If Social Media is to be used for the purpose of increasing organic (or non paid) search engine traffic one must carefully consider the limitations of the company’s resources to ensure that maximum ROI is achieved.
You can burn hours of time in YouTube and even if the Movie gets 1,000,000s of visits, it doesn’t necessarily increase your organic traffic. Likewise, 1,000s of Fans in Facebook is great awareness but may not increase your Organic Traffic.
Using Social Media to increase Organic Rankings
Two effective ways to increase rankings is to:

Extend your website content – depending on your audience’s needs this can include but is not limited to:

1. User Reviews
2. Testimonials
3. Blog posts - These can be informative, funny, controversial or anything that the organisation can produce that will appeal to the online community

Be a good Social Media Citizen

1. You need to be active in the community you want to excel in
2. Develop trust, make friends and influence the community

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What do Shoes, customer service and Cooking have to do with SEO

This is more of a customer service story than an SEO story but the link juice, link bait and social medial buzz that resulted from this one act of great customer service resulted in page rank that money simply can’t buy.

Great work Zappo for providing great customer service. For the SEO freaks out there that measure success by the amount of Snot on the Google toolbar lets have a look at what this one remarkable act of service and compassion did for page rank.

First the Story

A lady purchased 7 pairs of shoes for her terminally ill mother from www.zappos.com of which only 2 pairs actually fitted.  Zappo have a free 15 day return policy.  They will pay for the shipping but the only condition is that you have to take the goods to a UPS depot.  The lady intended to take Zappo up on the return policy, however her mother had just been hospitalised and later died. When Zappos heard what happened they sent a UPS vehicle to pick up the shoes at no cost to the lady and the next day sent a bouquet of flowers. 

This lady just happened to be a prominent blogger who was so touched by this heart felt act of kindness that she wrote a blog called “I heart Zappo’s – I really do”

Here is what happened to links

First up – I liked it so much I linked to both Zappo’s and the Blog post.

The Blog Post links to Zappos with the text

“IF YOU BUY SHOES ONLINE, GET THEM FROM ZAPPOS.”

She writes a cooking blog so I am tipping that she is not an SEO expert. Keywords near the link are “buy shoes online”

Zappo ranks number 1 in Google for the keyword “Buy Shoes Online” so this link only helps strengthen their position and reinforce their authority as a place to “buy shoes online”.

The blog post had 196 positive comments and 79 links from other prominent bloggers, news sites, social media analysts and people that just though it was a great story.

Who are the SEO winners here

1. the blog for receiving 79 links gets a page rank boost
2. zappo get the benefit of that page rank boost via the link from the blog but most importantly they get a positive PR story that money just can’t buy

There is a lesson in this for all of us. 

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Fairfax Digital Signs Up For Next Generation of SEM Software from e-Channel

e-Channel, a premium Australian search engine marketing (SEM) company has today announced an agreement with Fairfax Digital to supply its DynamicCreative™ software to manage search engine marketing campaigns across the publishers classified’s websites - Domain, Drive and MyCareer.

The contract follows an extensive trial of the software which saw the publisher’s cost-per-click ratio reduced by 30 per cent in the first 12 months.

DynamicCreative, a search engine marketing platform created by e-Channel, has been designed specifically to meet the criteria established by search engines such as Google and Yahoo! that favours the relevance of ad content above the advertising cost values.

According to Frank Grasso, CEO and founder of e-Channel, while bid management software is still widely used in the market, there have been moves by the dominant search engines to ensure more relevant search results to improve the experience of web users. This has redefined the requirements for successful Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

”Bid management software is quickly becoming old technology that manages the cost per click of a campaign. The reality is that Google does not reward how much an advertiser is willing to pay - they reward relevance. e-Channel’s DynamicCreative software is the first SEM software to market that can assist companies to reach their online audiences in keeping with these requirements.“

As a result of using the DynamicCreative platform, Fairfax Digital has been able to create roughly 300,000 highly customised unique ads and expand their campaign from 20,000 key words to approximately one million keywords.

”Our search engine marketing is now far more effective as a result of significantly expanding our reach. We have crafted highly targeted ads that have resulted in a reduction of our cost per click and cost per acquisition.“ Said Graham Perry, Managing Director - Classifieds for Fairfax Digital.

Version 2 of DynamicCreative launched in early June of 2008 and offers large organisations the ability to efficiently manage their SEM campaigns.

”DynamicCreative is now even more robust and is ideal for clients who have comprehensive or complex websites. Traditionally large, dynamic campaigns have been cumbersome and time consuming to administer and this software automates that process and ensures that they are managed efficiently,“ said Grasso.

The software also includes advanced reporting capabilities to ensure that clients have visibility over all aspects of their campaigns and can regularly update and adjust them to ensure that they are reaping maximum value.

e-Channel has experienced significant growth since its inception in 1999 and has doubled revenues over the last nine months . The agency, currently handling over $15 million in advertising across Google and Yahoo, has grown its sales team by 100 per cent in the same period.

”Our reputation for providing highly effective search engine marketing campaigns and unique software to maximise results for our clients is well known. We have a quality offering, and our expansion reflects this acknowledgment from the market,“ said Grasso.

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Smx Sydney Review – Hats off to Barry Smyth

SMX Sydney was a great success well done Barry.  I went to all the way to San Jose last year to hear what our international comrades think about search and Barry has saved me a trip this year by bringing the best of the best to us here in Australia.

Some of the A list thought leaders that I got to discuss the future of search with were Danny Sullivan, Rand Fiskin, and Gord Hotchkiss.  I couldn’t get within 10 feet of these guys in San  Jose.

It was also very good to see a lot of very familiar Australian faces in the crowd.  My old mate Mark Armstrong from Google and I had a very constructive conversation about AdWord API Fees – I said they were a touch expensive to add and update ads and he accused me of melting down several adwords servers and causing the San Fran power grid to shut down when the adwords api was free. We came to a mutual agreement that the adwords api fee was a good way to make people like me develop smarter software and hopefully he will push my feedback up to the people that set the api quota system and make it cheaper to publish ads.

Apology

I would like to make a public apology to Stuart Bartram from Double Click for calling him a big tool in the middle of my SEM tool kit presentation.  What I meant to say was that there were many big companies in the market that “BUILD” SEM tools - instead I said, “there are many big tools in the market” while pointing to Stuart. – Sorry about that matey, it was a genuine slip.

Thank You

Thanks to Adam Lasnik for being so incredibly generous with his time and sharing so much webmaster tool wisdom.  The legendary Rand Fiskin  - thanks for sharing SMO/M insights.  Of course Danny Sullivan for his views on the future of Bid Management.

Last but by no way least thank you to the very lovely Ani Babaian for sharing the incredible Live Webmaster Center with the Aussies and for draging us to the ice bar.

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Bootcamp Brisbane

I was asked to talk about the major issues to consider when running a search engine marketing campaign on a budget. The theme for the Brisbane bootcamp was travel and travel is of course a competitive category. Of course it is possible to compete but there are no shortcuts.

You can download the presentation here

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What makes a great search engine marketer?

I have battled with this question from the very first day I decided to scale up my business.

When I started e-channel in 1999 I was armed with an entrepreneurial spirit and an associate diploma in mechanical engineering. In the early days search engine marketing was source code and Meta tags, and as odd as my background sounds it suited search engine optimisation (SEO) nicely. When Overture (now YSM) launched paid search - the landscape began to shift. Suddenly my skills were not enough and I knew it. My technical skills were still suited to SEO but I had to learn to deal with ad budgets, copywriting and data analysis. I enrolled in a Masters of Marketing at the University of South Australia and that was the turning point for me and e-channel. I learnt about the science of marketing and was instantly able to apply it to search. When Google came along with AdWords and took Overtures model to a whole new level I was ready to handle the technical and marketing aspects of search. The only problem was that my unique combinations of skill sets were not easy to find - So when I went about employing people I found the task of finding search engine marketing talent quite a challenge. I soon realised that I needed great software engineers and great marketers in my team to deal with the increasingly complex needs of my customers.

I now have a great team of search engine marketers and engineers around me. Here are some of the things I look for when recruiting a new team member.

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Tags: SEO SEM Jobs, SEO SEM skill Shortage
Posted in Search Industry |

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