Sep 18, 2014 | Uncategorized
First let it be clear that I am neither a “power-user” of the increasing suite of tools supplied by Google, or an SEO expert. What I do is approach strategy from the perspective of the potential consumer of that strategy, wether that be B2B, B2C, or in this case, U2G, User to Google.
SEO has been a hot topic for a decade, some really smart people have made loads of money providing advice and bottles of snake oil SEO solutions, often selling it to people who should know better.
When you think about it, SEO is all about getting your content ranked highly, preferably above the fold on page 1. To do that, the SEO proponents go to considerable lengths to “game” the Google algorithms. Google, like all businesses needs to ensure that the people who pay for its services (advertising) get value, so it is in their interests to remove the opportunity to “game” their system. Therefore it seems logical that they spend lots of resources developing algorithms that eliminate any advantage the “gamers” may be able to find.
Who has more money and expertise, the Gamers or Google?
Who really has the greater motivation to remove the opportunity for gaming, Google or the Gamers?
Googles business model is not to make your website popular, they do not care in the least about your site. Nor will they willingly allow you to make your site “popular” by leveraging their algorithms for free.
Googles objective is to find the popular websites and index and rank them to better serve those searching, and to present the searchers eyeballs to those advertising to reach them.
Trying to “out-Google” Google by staying in front of their algorithm development is a losers game. Much better to ignore them, and set about making your site popular because it deserves to be popular, and let Google find and rank you.
Having said all that, there are a few simple things that you would be negligent not to do on your site:
- Focus each page of your site on a key word or phrase
- Ensure each page has a meta description to make indexing easier
- Keep media files to a minimum size to speed up loading,
- And the most important one, and by far the hardest to do: Create great and relevant content that your target audience is motivated to read, bookmark, comment on, and share.
It is easy to be put off by the techno babble that goes on, a lot of it trying to squeeze out the last few percent of so called performance, when in most cases, particularly for SME’s the cost of the last 5 or even 10% efficiency is not justified by the cost of securing it. A little bit of common sense and focus on the customer and the value you are delivering goes a very long way.
SEO as it is usually practiced measures how often your content gets presented to be seen, not by who sees it, and not what they do with it.
May 8, 2014 | Uncategorized
Apr 13, 2014 | Uncategorized
This post goes back to mid 2012. A conversation yesterday with a colleague brought it to mind, as we were discussing the the opportunities to monetise Intellectual Capital of the sort represented by the 1200 odd StrategyAudit posts. “You know more about category management that almost anyone”, he said, “You almost invented what was then Trade Marketing 30 years ago, there must be a bob here somewhere”.
Perhaps self indulgently, I agree.
Apr 9, 2014 | Uncategorized
Holden, SPC, Alcoa, Caltex oil, and all the other industrial enterprises that are currently going out of business or leaving the country are doing so because they failed to keep up with the evolution of technology and management practice. Whilst labour costs, the $A, oligopoly control of retail supply chains, limited scale of the domestic market, and all the other reasons that are trotted out have played an important role, the underlying presence is a corporate failure to evolve in the face of these changes.
Well, SPC is not out of business, just. Woolworths have sent them a lifeline, but it is motivated by self interest, not benevolence, as they suddenly realised that without SPC, they had no local supply of canned fruit, adding uncertainty, inventory, 3 months lead time, and transaction costs to a supply chain where they had lost all leverage. They have also done a similar deal on supplies of milk, as they recognised, perhaps belatedly that they were killing their own supply chains.
Now the handouts have stopped, we are undergoing the corporate version of Euthanasia in manufacturing.
Painful, but unavoidable commercial evolution if you take the long view.
Governments seem to have made the choice (with some politically expedient exceptions like Cadburys) between retaining by subsidy an industry or enterprise that has no economically sustainable business model, simply to maintain jobs, and letting it die by cutting off the supply of taxpayer cash. This is not to make light of the emotional and financial challenges this places on the displaced families, particularly in regional towns that find their biggest employer closing.
There are many lessons for us all in this current flurry of corporate euthanasia, perhaps even the beginnings of a national strategy? Certainly, the space left will open up opportunities for others, innovative smaller businesses that use technology and agility to add value their larger less agile predecessors could not.
Mar 31, 2014 | Uncategorized
When you have nothing else to offer, price is what people use to make a judgement about which alternative to buy.
Yours or someone else’s alternative?
However, most people also recognise that you get what you pay for, and that what you pay for is not always just more widgets in the box. Sometimes the widgets last longer, fit better, are not the same as everyone else has, are the first seen, the box just looks better, and sometimes it is a bit of all of these, and many more factors that may influence the purchase.
Every person will have a different definition of what constitutes value in any given set of circumstances. Purchase of a box of paper clips has a different set of circumstances driving it than the purchase of a new car, but the process is the same.
Last week I watched a lady in one of those supermarket type office supplies places make a choice of a box of coloured paper clips over the standard ones, paying a substantially higher price for her choice. Same number of clips, same size and shape box, just a more colourful design on the box, and of course, the coloured clips.
Well you say, it may be just a couple of dollars, so it does not matter much, which is true, but when I chatted to her at the checkout and asked why she chose the coloured clips, she did not say they were only a dollar or two more, she said she “just liked them better”
Surely our job as marketers is to find those little things that lead our customers to say those magic words “I just like it better”, and give them what they like.
Price is so often used as an excuse for a lack of imagination that it makes me cry.
Jan 13, 2014 | Uncategorized
Hugh Mackay once told me as a young marketer something I have never forgotten:
“Allen, attitudes follow behavior, so work to change behavior, and attitudes will follow” .
He went on to give several examples to convince me that the advertising I was planning at the time was a waste of money, despite the promises of the ad agency, the determination of the MD of the business I was working for at the time, and my own naïve assessment of what was the right approach.
This pattern has proved true time and time again, and has a brother.
Expectation.
When we expect something, we are very likely to see it, much more likely that we are to see the alternative.
A bottle of Grange, all $600 bucks worth will always taste better than a bottle of its poorer half-sibling, Bin 389, at about $80, (Grange is Shiraz, 389 is Shiraz with a splash of Cabernet) except when you swap the wine in the bottles around. Do that, and by most people, the 389 will be assessed as better than the Grange.
The power of the expectation built by the brand.
So, ask yourself again if the investment you are making in marketing is properly directed? Should you take the easy road, and just discount the price to get the sale today, or the harder, long term road to build a brand that creates expectations that delight customers.
