How to find your keywords, for Free!

How to find your keywords, for Free!

Apr 11, 2016 | Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Pretty much everyone engaged in the ‘content wars’ have some level of focus on keywords.

It makes logical sense to include them in your headlines, and body copy where appropriate, and while ‘keyword stuffing’ now brings the wrath of Google down on you, being sensible still carries weight.

There are a number of paid keyword tools that do a great job, but a pretty good job can be done for free just by applying some thought and a bit of common sense.

Some of the ideas I have used in preparation of this blog are:

Google auto complete. Start typing a query into Google and it gives auto options. These are nothing more than Google scanning the similar terms put into search and returning their most common responses. Ie, a keyword or phrase.

Wikipedia. Thousands of experts collect and curate information on many topics. Any page that deals  with your niche will have links and words that can be used as keywords, curated by experts.

Google related searches. Every first page of the search results give you a number of related searches at the bottom of the page. Often some good ideas are hidden in there.

Amazon. This may not be an obvious choice, but if you have a look inside a book in your niche, you will see the chapter headings. Somebody who presumably has a bit of knowledge in your niche has taken the trouble to write a book, and set out the important stuff in the chapter headings, might be an idea there?

Quora.com. Quora is a Q&A platform, for the uninitiated, so there are discussions on many topics, probably yours, so there are a range of words and phrases used that could give some ideas.

Forums. Type your topic + Forum into the search box and up will come the forums related to your search term. Again, these are discussions on the topic for which you are looking for keywords, so there are likely to be some good ideas floating around.

Google keyword planner. This is a great tool, suffering from success. It gives only specific variations on a word or phrase you type in, there are  no similes or suggestions in there, no variations beyond the specific word or phrase you typed, no imagination or inference is applied. The obvious advantage is that you also get some data which can be very useful. On the flip side, everyone uses it, so finding a word that is different, but still relevant will not happen in this tool.

The paid tools are very good, but for a medium or small business, an expense that they often choose to avoid, as they can be expensive. No amount of keyword magic however can replace a creative and relevant strategy and Value Proposition executed with precision.

8 reasons the opportunity for consumer goods SME’s has never been greater.

8 reasons the opportunity for consumer goods SME’s has never been greater.

Mar 14, 2016 | Change, Management, retail, Strategy

Think about it.

  • Many domestic competitors are gone, sent to the wall by combinations of the high $A, the power of the retail duopoly to call the tune with prices and terms, house brand expansion, and poor management.
  • Coles and Woolies have lost some of their grip as Aldi makes inroads, and some of the independents like Ritchies continue to compete effectively in local markets, and access to food service, ingredient and alternative retail becomes easier.
  • Consumer brand loyalty has been disrupted by the disappearance of some of the favoured brands, offering opportunities to forge new brand loyalties
  • Marketing expenditure can now be highly directed, and its effectiveness measured and continuous improvement be applied.
  • The costs of the tools like the analytics required to do effective category management, a data intensive exercise are  getting cheaper and cheaper, and the skills needed to make sense of the data more available.
  • SME’s are recognising that collaborative actions are not verboten, but are in fact very sensible and cost effective. Making it easier, digital technology has removed one of the greatest barriers to effective collaboration, the inability to communicate.
  • SME management has also recognised that collaboration is strategically and operationally sensible to build comeptitive scale to enable long term prosperity, so there are potential partners around.
  • Export is easier, as trade barriers are dropping, and product niches are often global

None of this of course is of any value unless you have the cash flow, determination, and management capability to make the changes necessary. However, those that have survived the last 10 years are a robust bunch, now the pressure is off a bit, don’t make the mistake of taking a breather, get in there!

 

Three by four marketing equation for success.

Three by four marketing equation for success.

Mar 2, 2016 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

How do you win business in a competitive world?

I know for sure it is not  getting any easier, but the advice on how to do, and stories of how to be rich in 15 minutes a day seem to abound.

Perhaps I don’t take advice well?

It is pretty clear to me, after 40 years of working with this stuff that the more we complicate things, the more difficult seeing the wood for the trees becomes, so here is a really simple tool that you can use today.

To get business, any business, although the context and circumstances vary enormously, the potential customer needs to:

  • Know you
  • Like you
  • Trust that you can solve their problem/add value to their lives.

Pretty simple really.

The other side of the equation of course is the challenge of creating the circumstances where a potential customer has the opportunity to get to know, like and trust you.

Marketers can spend huge amounts of money, much of it wasted, on chasing this outcome, often failing simply because they complicate the hell out of it and confuse themselves.

I like to think of it in human terms. The building of a marketing relationship is no different to any other type of human relationship, it evolves in stages that are pretty simple:

  • You need to be where they are. This is so blindingly obvious it is often missed.
  • You need to get their attention.
  • You need to make a connection
  • You need them to take action.

marketing matrix for successBreak all the complicated cliché ridden & expensive recommendations  you get from those with a pig in the race into this simple matrix and reap the benefits.

Beware though, as Steve Jobs said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” so this stuff is deceptively hard, but now you have a tool to make it easier.

What fly fishing can teach us about lead generation

What fly fishing can teach us about lead generation

Feb 22, 2016 | Marketing, Small business, Strategy

 

When I can, I fish for trout with a dry fly in mountain streams. It can be cold, obviously very wet, frustrating, but oh the joy of the feel of a fighting trout on the end of a 2kg breaking stain line, and a light rod.

Often you sneak up a stream all day and see nothing, but sometimes, occasionally in unexpected places, you get  a rise, with luck and skill hook them, and with more luck and a lot of skill and experience, can bring some of them into the net.

So what has this got to do with lead generation?

Well, a lot actually.

Fish where the fish are.

There are places in a river where the trout are more likely to be, at the tail of runs, behind an exposed rock, under the banks, protected by overhanging trees. You can spend a lot of time fishing every inch of a stream, but if you need a feed for lunch, best spend your time going to where the best odds lie.

Patience

You rarely get lucky quickly, it takes time, perseverance and patience, as well as skill, and better yet, local knowledge.

Use the right bait

Trout are fussy feeders. In the really clear streams, you will sometimes see a trout come up ‘for a look’ and pass on the fly. When that happens, it sometimes pays to give a it a few minutes, and change the fly to an alternative. You know there is a fish there, you know it can be tempted, so trying an alternative fly sometimes pays dividends.

Blend into the ecosystem.

Being obvious ensures failure. Colorful shirts, noise, creating any disturbance in the surroundings puts trout off. They are timid, easily scared, and have very good senses that pick up anomalies. Alarm them even slightly, and you have no hope of tempting them to a fly.

Learn to stalk

When you find an ideal spot, and you know there is a trout there somewhere, spend some time watching, noting the nuances of the stream, observing the sort of food that is around, and how it behaves in the water , and particularly if and when your target comes up for a look or rises to take something. Then you have the knowledge to tempt them onto your fly.

The conditions have to be right

Trout are very sensitive to conditions. They will not rise if there is a storm coming, they feel the pressure differences, so they hunker down. Similarly, they rarely rise in the rain. Surprising really, a bit of extra water should not make a difference, but it does. Best times are early morning, when the sun has been up for an hour or so, and still evenings around dusk.

Luck plays a role.

J.P. Getty was once asked how he became so successful. His response  was ‘rise early, work hard, strike oil’.

Sometimes you just get lucky but if you are not in the river at the right time, with the right fly, and doing all the right things, by definition you cannot be lucky. Luck comes with hard work, engagement and commitment.

None of this is any different with Lead generation, it is remarkably like fly fishing. Every lesson I learnt a my old dads knees, hiking through the bush to find the right spots, wading up steams, learning the knots and skills of the sport is applicable to  commercial ‘sport’, where lead generation is an absolutely essential skill for most businesses, certainly all B2B businesses.

As we fly fishers say ‘tight lines’ .

Australia day report card 2016

Australia day report card 2016

Jan 26, 2016 | Strategy

Today is January 26, 2016, Australia Day.

As in past years , I have reflected in a post on this day what it means to be an Aussie.

The post on January 26 2012, called for a mature debate on the challenges we face as a nation, the real, long term issues, rather than the diet of puffery and bullshit we normally are asked to digest. Quaint idea that, asking for a national debate on real issues.

In 2013, I asked what it was we wanted the place to look like in another generation, and I guess some degree of pessimism came through the words.

In 2014, I focussed on what I thought would be the defining trend that would drive our decision making, individually and for the nation: Data, and the essential truths that data can convey. The observations of what might be coming turned out to be absolutely wrong, about as wrong as anyone can be, and is again a salient lesson to those with a crystal ball hidden somewhere. Last year I think I just had my head in my hands in despair at  the nonsense passing as responsible government, and whilst I am again tempted to head for the bar to sink a few Coopers (the only significant Australian beer left after the foreign invasion) I am going to try and be a bit more responsible and make some serious comment on the state of the nation.

It has to be noted also that as I am now of an age at which those icons of my youth, the Beatles wrote songs, (‘When I’m 64’)it is fair to suspect that my view of the country, and the various carryings on that are happening is tempered by all those years.

  • The cost of housing in Sydney and Melbourne, is it a bubble or not, can I get in for my capital gain before the bust? It is a very common Australian dinner topic. What concerns me is what appears to be a process of parking money in housing, an essentially unproductive asset, and in Australia a moderately tax effective strategy. Those with the money, and it is not just Australians, it seems to be a global phenomenon, protect their money by property investment, to the point where there are more empty residences being built every day that those who need housing cannot afford. Youngsters are either moving to the fringes of cities, or resigning themselves to long term rental. Logic would suggest there should be a move to the country centres with the facilities, but is seems not to be the case. Recently I was in Armidale, a town with many huge  advantages, schools, a university, long term agricultural production and research, proximity to stunning wild Australia, but seemingly devoid of much of the energy that builds long term communities by successful commercial activity.  By contrast, Uralla, 20k’s down the road and only 1/10th the size is buzzing.  Go figure.
  • The internet has changed everything, and there is a generation that was born after the net become widely available  that do not understand what it is  not to have it.  I can remember the first Fax I saw, and recognising that it would change the world, but have not used a fax in 20 years. While the net has completely altered the way we work and live, it has removed the face to face communication human beings have relied on through our evolution, replacing it with digital ‘connectivity’ which is just code for substituting depth of a few relationships for the siren promise of breadth of relationship with many. I am no anthropologist, so cannot speculate on the longer term impacts of this substitution, but the speed with which it has happened, way faster than our evolutionary cycle time, cannot be good for our collective mental health.
  • There is no longer longevity in art. The world of art, in all its forms, is the way we express ourselves and how we relate to our communities. The loss of longevity might be just the next iteration, but I suspect it is more than that, it is a profound change taking us into new territory. Not necessarily a bad thing, change is what art is about, but nevertheless, a source of uncertainty and ambiguity. If Leonardo da Vinci was around today would he spend  4 years painting the roof of the Sistine chapel? No, it would be done with a paint gun in a day and a half, and then we would be wondering why it took so long.     Control of your art is essential, even more than before. In the old days  the record companies got wealthy on the back of bands they promoted managed and screwed, now talent has the opportunity to come through without the friction, but     how do you retain control in a world of streaming and sharing? The exception to this longevity and lack of control seems to be the fixation with tattoos. Showing my age perhaps, but I dislike them and their defacing of young Australians intensely. What will they look like when their carriers are my age? Tattoo removal is about to become a huge boom industry when a viable method is found
  • Our society has a new rat in the foundations, drugs. Not the tobacco of my day, with perhaps a bit of weed and booze added in, but all sorts of stuff that is as available as alcohol, but uncontrolled, very dangerous, and ubiquitous. Even smart kids are killing themselves with shit at concerts, and we have no idea why, or how to change it. They are smart and educated, why would they do it to themselves?.
  • Demographically we are a country in change, rapid and substantial change, but we seem to be able to absorb the change better than elsewhere in the world, but perhaps we are a the limit of absorption, at least in some locations. A long term fiend moved from the home he and his wife built after they were married, as they were now aliens in the suburb they had made home and brought up their kids. Is this a bad thing? I do not know, but it is certainly something that is driving change. It is perhaps ironic that John Howard lost the Liberal party leadership in 1989 largely for comments made about the rate of Asian immigration being too high, thus offending the then widely held view that the more the better, then 12 years later successfully used the Tampa affair to shore up his government. The change in the community over those 12 years represents a complete turnaround in our view of ourselves.  I am unsure of what the next iteration of those changes will be, but perhaps the focus has moved on from Asian migrants to those from the Middle East.
  • We have becomes cynical and disconnected from  the processes that govern us. Membership and activism in political life seems to me to be at an all time low, and the net result is it is being left to those who see it as a road to their own success rather than a service to the rest of the place. Obviously there are exceptions, but there seems little doubt that the politics of the last 10 years have been nothing short of toxic and do our country no good at all. I am just glad that we do not have the full blown circus determining who will be the head clown as they have in the US, ours is just a suburban circus by comparison, so far.
  • On a lighter note, I not only love the Operation Boomerang lamb ads, I also love the fact that the complaints from the usual suspects,  vegans, animal rights, anti-violence advocates (don’t they know it is an ad, a bit of entertainment with a message?) and assorted other anti-funsters got thrown out of court on its tush.

That is enough, for now. The place is changing, quickly, too quickly for many, but along with death and taxes, change is the only constant in life, so we better get used to it.

Happy Australia day.

7 trends driving business in 2016.

7 trends driving business in 2016.

Jan 4, 2016 | Branding, Governance, Management, Marketing, Strategy

Like everyone else who sees themselves as having a useful view of the train coming at us, I have again tried to articulate the things I see as important to businesses, particularly the smaller ones that make up my client base.

Following are the outcomes of my assorted observations and crystal ball scratching.

 

The density of digital content is becoming overwhelming.

Businesses have always generated and distributed ‘content’, but it was called ‘advertising’ or ‘collateral material’. Since we all became publishers, and the marginal  costs of access to markets approached zero, there has been a content explosion, and we are now being overwhelmed. It has become pretty clear that video will take over as the primary vehicle of messaging, and I expect that trend to consolidate over the coming year, and see a bunfight for eyeballs between social media platforms and search tools and platforms. Ad blockers will change the way the so called pay walls work, as well as ensuring that the density of content is replaced by less but better stuff, ‘tailored’ to our habits and preferences.

Ad blockers may become discriminatory, allowing through stuff that the algorithms know you have been searching for. The focus on content will be on the sales funnel and conversion metrics, much more than just pumping the stuff out, which will be a huge improvement on the mish mash currently assaulting our inboxes.

Existing digital platforms will extend themselves competitively. 

Attracting new users will become secondary to increasing the usage and ‘stickiness’ of their platforms. Linkedin’s successful extension of their blogging platform and purchase of Slideshare are one, Facebook is aggressively setting out to attract new users by making themselves attractive to developers and others, with the launch of FB techwire in an attempt to attract the really technically oriented including those writing about tech, Twitter appears to be trying to find ways of monetising their users and will probably apply controls to the currently uncontrolled stream in your feed, but there again, I thought that last year and they did not do it. Also, platforms will recognise the huge potential of the B2B advertising market, and find ways to exploit it. Many B2B businesses are reluctant to use social advertising as they see the platforms as essentially B2C and therefore  not appropriate for their products and services. This is a huge potential market for digital advertising businesses, and the social platforms will be cashing it in.

 

Rate of Technology adoption will continue to increase.

Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 TED talk on the rate of technology adoption is resonating louder now than a decade ago. Some of his observations such as the rate of cost decline of solar technology and battery technology efficiency are coming to pass. However, it is his basic thesis of the logarithmic rate of technology adoption that will engulf us over the coming short term. Think about the confluence of big data and machine learning. When you wipe away all the tech-talk and hyperbole, it comes down to a simple notion: the “friction” of information that has always existed is being removed at logarithmic rates, progressively revealing more stuff to see, and to do with the stuff we have. As we go online, and use technology throughout  the value and marketing chain, technology is reducing costs, speeding cycle time, and opening opportunities for innovation.

 

Evolution of the “marketing technology stack”.

For most small businesses this can be as simple as a good website with a series of resources available to collect email addresses, and an autoresponder series on the back. For large businesses it can be a hugely complicated stack of software running CRM, customer service and scheduling, marketing messages, integration of social channels et al.

Mar

 

 

 

 

 

Big data to little data.

The opportunities presented by big data are mindboggling, but even the big companies are having trouble hooking their data together in meaningful ways let alone introducing the third dimension of big data. Small companies will have to start to use little data better, or die. Data already available to them is becoming easier to use every day, to turn into insights about their niche, local market,  and competitive claims. Simple things like pivot tables in excel will be used, and tools like Tableau which brings a structure to  data from differing sources including big data, will  become more widely recognised by small business for the value they can deliver. Big data will have machine learning applied, and the data revolution will get another shove along. From a non technologists perspective, industrial strength  data systems such as IBM’s “Watson” must drive some sort of further revolution, but my crystal ball is too cloudy for me to have much of an idea of the impact beyond making what we currently see as advanced systems look a bit like a pencil and paper look to us today.

 

Technology hardware explosion becomes over-hyped but undervalued.

The volume and type of hardware that has become available is as overwhelming as the access to and availability of information. Driverless, wearables, AI, 3D, blah, Each of the developments has its place, and may change our lives at some point, but there is just so much of it that we are becoming immune to the hype. Who needs a tweeting washing machine anyway?

So, what is next?

Seems to me that we are on the cusp of an energy disruption driven by the combination of hardware and advanced materials science . The technology surrounding renewables is in the early stages of an explosion that will change the face of everything. Highly regulated and costly infrastructure distributing energy will start to be replaced with decentralised renewable power generation, much the same as when PC’s replaced mainframe computers 30 years ago. The catalyst to this metamorphous will be the combination of governments that are broke and no longer able to fund the institutionalised and regulated energy systems and the development of a reliable “battery” system. Elon Musk has made a huge bet on his “Powerwall” battery system and manufacturing plant currently under construction, and it would be a brave person that bet against him. However, looking well ahead, it seems probable that it is the beginning of the logarithmic adoption curve of renewable power following the path of Ray Kurzweil and Gordon Moore. The politicised and subjective debate about carbon and its impact on  the environment will become irrelevant as science delivers cheaper and more accessible renewable energy. All that will remain are the problems of the carbon clean-up. (I suspect this prediction is due to be a repeating one for some time)

 

Marketing has always been about stories.

However, somehow ‘content’ got in the way of those stories, and marketing became a different beast in the last 10 years. We will go back to marketing, and start to tell stories that resonate with individual targets. Storytelling will become again the core, and we will be looking for storytellers in all mediums, written, pictorial, video, as we all absorb and recount stories in different ways.

All the good journos displaced by the disruption of traditional publishing can find great places in this new world of marketing storytelling, if they are any good. The competition is strong, and the results immediate and transparent so no longer can you get away with rubbish. Organisations will change to accommodate the fact that everyone is in marketing

We will become more aware of the permanent nature of the internet, and the manner in which our brand properties need to be managed.

In a commoditised world, where the transparency of price makes competition really aggressive, the value of a brand is increasingly important, and fragile.

These 5 extraordinarily stupid examples of how not to do it  should be a wake-up to the CEO’s who leave marketing to the junior  marketers, often a transient bunch who have no investment in the business or brand, they are just there for a good time, and usually a short time.

One day I will do a study that compares the realisable value of the tangible assets of businesses compared to their value as calculated by the market. My instinct tells me that in many stock market categories  the biggest item as calculated  by the difference between those two numbers represented as  goodwill and a realistic assessment of the realisable values, will be the biggest item on  the asset side of the balance sheet. In short, the current and future value of their brands and customer relationships expressed in dollars. Managers and boards need to deeply consider the nature of the people that have managing their brands, or risk losing them, often before breakfast, as the speed of disruption and change continues to increase.

 

As we go into 2016, the 3 questions every board and management should be asking themselves are:

  1.  “If  I was starting in this business today, what would I be doing to deliver value?”,
  2. “If a leveraged buyout happened, what would the new management be doing to unlock the value in the business?”
  3. “What do I need to do to implement the answers to the two above, today?”

 

Have a great 2016, and thanks for engaging with me.