Storytellers Should Lead Next Generation Search Engine Optimisation

Business owners perpetually believe that the route to web glory can be found at the top of a page of search results in Google.  In many cases they are right; search engines can be a vital tactic in a digital marketing strategy.  But why are business owners only interested in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to deliver qualified traffic to their websites?

Google Analytics illustrates three principle types of traffic sources:
1.    Search
2.    Referral traffic
3.    Direct traffic

Referral traffic is an inbound link from an external website that a reader follows to get to your website while direct traffic is a freshly typed in URL or bookmarked web link.

In many cases referral traffic produces much better qualified leads than search. In this example a regional tourism authority receives traffic from the country tourism authorities as well as Wikipedia.  Those readers directed to the tourism website spend substantially more time and visit more pages on the website than those that arrived by search and a much higher percentage of referral traffic ‘converted’ on the site and completed more goals than search traffic.

Traditional methods of SEO involves buying links to cheat Google into thinking you’re website is more popular than it actually is. Google’s approach to buying links to your website as a method of achieving a higher page rank have changed recently.  Google as warned over 700,000 websites this year already that they face a ban for “artificial or unnatural linking”.  

So what is Google asking website owners to do?  Google wants to reward those with authentic inbound links generated because the business did something interesting that created a story that made real people want to link to it.  They want to reward the trustworthy stories and demote the synthetic links.  

So if search is changing to reward those that create the best stories that cause real people to link to them, do you employ technology driven techniques or do you employ story tellers, skilled copywriters, capable of getting inbound links from authentic peer review publications and social media?  The answer is somewhere in the middle – you need a tech savvy company that adores good story telling.  A great story with an effective inbound link drives both qualified referred traffic as well as helping massively with SEO.  

In my opinion, the story you write – the words you use – the links you create – the peer review publications you get placed in – the tweets a great story produces and the content on your landing page are the route to becoming #1 in Google and gaining qualified sales leads. Those that are best to create such stories are those trained in the art of story telling –  that is tech savvy PR firms and qualified journalists like those employed at iON.  

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The Customer Isn’t Always Right

Rumor has it that Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.

In recent times, many web projects are starting with a customer survey, asking customers what they would like to see on a website.  Not a bad idea you would think especially in large Council websites or  government authority projects.  There is a problem however.  The customer doesn’t tell the truth!

Run a survey asking 250 active passionate citizens what matters to them, what they would really like to see promoted on the home page of their Council website and they’ll typically tell you, “libraries, urban regeneration and bin collection”.

When implemented however where does all the web traffic go?  To sports facilities, dog licensing, finding a Councilor and also bin collection.  The disparity in the results is because the survey reveals what the socially conscious citizen feels they should be concerned about.  The web analytics reveals that what the citizen actually wants to do online.

Having looked at several sets of UK Councils web stats, the poor old library doesn’t even make the top 10 list of web interest to the citizen.  Number 1 is usually leisure centre opening times.  How many councils make finding this information prominent on their website? Not many.

Keep your customers close and the data they produce closer.

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Trappings vs. Substance in Digital Marketing

In 1970, the Harvard Business Review published a whitepaper entitled Trappings vs. Substance in Industrial Marketing by B. Charles Ames. Ames is now 85 and has had a long and illustrious career as a top Board Director in many American firms. At the time of writing his paper, Ames was a Director of McKinsey & Company Inc.

The key observations in the paper are no less valid today than they were 42 years ago when they were written. The simple driving principle of the paper is that in the absence of strategic planning marketers default to playing with ‘trappings’; come 2012 the trappings would be considered as digital marketing tools.

Many government bodies and small enterprises over simplify digital marketing, calling it an ICT function as they focus on word ‘Digital’ relegating the importance of the profession of ‘Marketing’. Never before have we seen such a focus on ‘doing more stuff’ poorly, due to the mis-sold concept that because digital tools are virtually free and everyone is doing it, that you too can easily become a effective digital marketer.

This isn’t a new phenomena. I’m old enough to remember everyone becoming a designer when desktop publishing was all the rage.

Ames experiences in the late 60s made him claim that failed marketing in most businesses was due to the fact that most senior management believed marketing is simply promotion, a task to be carried out without Board involvement; a silo of activity disconnected from the other actions of the business and not infused with the originations thinking.

In his ten questions “Marketing Oriented Checklist” the first question Ames asks the reader to ponder is:

Can you describe at least three feasible strategic focuses that have been evaluated and seriously considered for each of your product/market businesses?

In my experience, companies that create a successful marketing strategy find it simple to select which digital tools to use and which to ignore. In fact once a strategy is prepared, it becomes so obvious there is rarely debate if Facebook is suitable tatic or not.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of ‘give it a go’ marketing but a great high performance digital marketing strategy requires an academic understanding of your business objectives, customer demands and market conditions.

At iON we help you create a high performance digital marketing strategy. We have invented and published peer-reviewed digital marketing modeling techniques that are simple to understand and help senior management engage in digital marketing, empowering them to grasp and enhance their digital ambitions.

Take 10 minutes out of your day and give us a call on +44 2890 455911 for a no-commitment chat and tell us your digital marketing story.

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Blame the Web, not Rates on Retail Decline

Retailers aren’t getting it.  They blame rates, rent or wage costs for their business woes. The web is consuming their market and many standby pointing the finger at static overheads or “the recession” for their business’ contracting profits.

A wedding dress supply shop is complaining to their local elected Councillor that their rates are too high and they might have to shut-up-shop.  The rates have only increased 2% in 3 years (less than inflation).  Over the past year potential customers have been coming in to their shop and proclaiming that they had 4 months until their wedding and asking what dresses they could choose from.  The dress supplier shrugs her shoulders and says “It’s a six month wait from measurement and order until delivery, sorry I can’t help”.  The potential customer walks out the door.

Meanwhile on-line, an astute entrepreneur has discovered that this trend toward ‘late’ dress ordering has become reasonably commonplace presenting a new business opportunity.  She has sourced a range of wedding dresses, sub £1000, that are easily adjusted to fit most brides.  They can adjust and ship most dresses within a week.  If the dress isn’t just right, they can take it and get final adjustments at a local dress menders or send it back.

The entrepreneur isn’t blaming anyone for market conditions, they realise that the web has caused a new trend and the the old model of restricted stock and long wait times, is dying.  They understand that for now, the market space is in the sub £1000 bracket but that this convenience shopping and quick delivery of stunning garments could grow when the wave of success reaches the ears of more discerning purchasers.

Web shopping is unlikely to be the chosen experience of most brides.  It is however a growing, thriving marketplace with the customer making new demands from online stores that traditional retailers can’t fulfil.  The traditional shopping experience, replicated on-line is not a viable web strategy as customers have very different demands.  The traditional retailer wants to simply post their stock on-line and replicate their old business model.  That old model won’t work, that’s not want customers want and there is tons of competition in this area.

iON helps businesses create high performance web strategies that are tested before launch, adjusted using evidence and perfected to maximise conversion.  We’re fanatical about analysing web data so you can get fanatical engaging with your new customers.

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Why Some Irish Tech Businesses Grow and Others Don’t

There is no shortage of cool ideas, passion and government support when it comes to the Irish technology sector.  There is however a massive difference in approach to business undertaken by successful, high growth technology innovators and those that struggle to get out of the blocks.

So why do many Irish tech businesses flourish yet some of the best technology ideas, enter the slow lane and have poor growth curves?  When it comes to technology or web firms those that struggle to grow all have the same defining property.  They love to talk about technology, not customers, not market conditions, not business ambition.  The CEO is always in love with Innovation.

I can spot slow start businesses within three minutes of engaging with them.  The executive board talk about the cool the stuff they are developing.  They talk with great passion about how they plan to change the world and when asked; “So where do you see yourself in three years time?”, the CEO usually takes a sheet of paper, sketches a few boxes and links the boxes with lines indicating technology advances. There is never a mention of mission, objectives, customer types or sales volumes.

We have been drugged into thinking that innovation alone is all a business needs to become successful.  It isn’t true.  Whether by accident or design, all successful businesses that I have encountered have moved beyond talking about innovation.  They know it’s important and it’s ingrained in the company DNA.  What they have grasped is that a go-to-market plan is as important than the innovation itself.

The CEO of a fast grower has spent several weeks defining and articulating to staff the answers to three top level questions:

1.  Who Are We?
What’s our values?
What is our vision?
What is our mission?
What objectives help us achieve this mission?
What tactics help achieve the objectives?… and many more sub-questions

2.  Who is the Customer?
Why do they want what we have?…and many more sub-questions

3.  Where Do We Fit in the Marketplace?
Who are the competitors?
Cost/performance – where do we sit?
What is the buyer propensity to substitute? …and many more sub-questions

Answering these type of questions massively affects the web strategy, online engagement, web design, tactical deployment and resources required.

The CEO of the slow grower thinks digital marketing is all about website design, social media and search.  They give little acknowledgement to business and marketing theory.  They think that because the word “digital” appears in the term “digital marketing” that they can do it in-house, and tactically they can, but the tactics are the last 25% of executing a high performance digital marketing strategy.

Slow growers quote Mark Zuckerberg as the shining example of how innovation changed the world.  The reality is that Facebook is low-tech and easily copied. The success of Facebook can be attributed fully to the founder knowing what he wanted to achieve, who the customer was and knowing where his business fitted in the marketplace as there were many social networks before his. Zuckerberg’s route to global domination is described in many marketing theory books that pre-date Facebook.  He didn’t innovate as much as he embraced marketing strategy.

Fast growing tech businesses focus on their strategy long before they develop new products, choose digital marketing tactics or design a new website.  At iON we help you create a high performance digital strategy, choose the right people, tactics, wireframes and key performance indicators.  We ask the right probing questions and challenge your thinking.  Above all else we make sure your digital strategy makes your company a fast grower.

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Why Do Small Businesses Make Big YouTube Videos?

Predictive analytics is a pretty cool idea.  If a German engineer Googles “Sheet Plastic Braces” (only in German) then they land on your website, it could show them pictures of German factories using sheet plastic braces, priced in Euro and with a description in the searchers native language.

The super cool integrated CRM system coupled with the new whizzy bang web Content Management System is just perfect for creating this ideal customer journey. Or is it?

This technology is only viable if the assumption that German engineers search for sheet plastic braces.  It turns out, in fact they don’t Google such devices. It’s just too low-tech to be something that concerns them.  The moral of the story is that masses of time, technology and ultimately cash has been wasted creating a web strategy around assumptions that don’t bare out in the real world and building a digital strategy upon evidence would have highlighted this misconception early.

The same fault applies to small businesses, encouraged to use YouTube to sell their wares.  They create a series of interviews, product reviews or advice videos.  They add them to YouTube and then embed them in their websites.

After 3 months they have had 240 views yet the website has has 6000 visitors.  The evidence says that the average time of a visitor on their website is 1 minute 22 seconds yet the videos made are each 4 minutes long! The embedded page for the video is showing an average visitor time on page of 45 seconds, but still the small business persists with adding more 4 minute monologues.

Building an evidence driven digital marketing strategy requires more than just poking around with Google Analytics.  It requires experience and insight into what causes a good plan to become a high performance digital plan.  At iON we have the experience and breadth of insight to help you enhance your digital marketing decisions and get real return on your digital investment.

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Top 5 Reasons Why We Fail to Use Analytics Wisely

Gartner produce a technology hype cycle.  It maps out “OMG! this is going to change the world” technology and how it moves to become “That was so last week”, finally plateauing on “I use it every day without thinking”.

Social Analytics is currently over hyped whereas Predictive Analytics has reached the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ according to Gartner.  In business, predictive models exploit patterns found in historical and transactional data to identify risks and opportunities.  While Gartner claims that Predictive Analytics has gone all mainstream.  I profess It hasn’t.

Here are my top 5 reasons why we fail to use analytics wisely.

1. We fail to appreciate that the data must link with our business strategy before it can make any sense.  Looking at the data without the using the lens of the company business strategy renders the data useless.

2. Our expectations are that the data will jump out and tell us what to do next. That’s not how the game is played.

3. We don’t yet comprehend the power of using web evidence to make informed decisions in our businesses. In response we spend more time ‘doing’ more digital marketing rather than ‘thinking’ more about what it all could mean.

4. Senior Managers assume the interpretation of digital data is a role for Marketing.  Marketers assume the role for business strategy is that of Senior Management.  Both sets of people are technically correct and in the end, the massively valuable digital data serves neither Senior Managers or Marketers. The data usually finds its home with IT where they keep it safe and warm and unused.

5. Every button clicked, comment made, PDF downloaded or widget bought leaves an audit trail. Interpreting what it means requires experience in order that comparison can be drawn from other experiences of good or bad performances.  No-one within the business carries enough ‘interpreting’ experience in the early days of analysis to make informed judgement calls.

At iON we interpret hundreds of sets of social media, email marketing, e-commerce and website analytics every year.  We give our customers informed feedback that help mould their thinking and make better business decisions. We partner with Senior Managers and Marketers to help bridge the gap between strategy, tactical action and interpreting success from the data the action produces.

If you want to have a chat about your digital strategy.  Call Yolanda or Niall on 028 9045 5911

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You’re Sitting on a Goldmine of Sales Leads

Imagine that you provide catering equipment to the Education sector.

An unexpected sales opportunity turns up in your Google Analytics.  It shows that Castlereagh Collage has spent 8 minutes 41 seconds on your website and viewed nearly four times more web pages than the average visitor.  Now that’s a hot lead.

So what do you do?  You could call them but the problem is that they were looking at this three weeks ago.  The opportunity while hot then may now have passed.

Next imagine you have a spike in traffic onto your business-to-business website.  What caused it?

Turns out that due to some good off-line trade PR you got nearly double the website traffic, all from new potential customers (as opposed to returning existing clients).  It didn’t translate into new sales leads.  Why?  Because the PR piece talked about a new innovation in catering equipment, your website home page talked about when you were established.  The customer hadn’t the time to go looking through your website navigation and the internal site search box you have at the top of your website, that returned out of date PDFs.

So what happens next is that Sales people usually look upon the Marketing department as ineffective.  Marketing, feeling the pressure from Sales then decide that the fix should be to build another campaign microsite or redevelop their website.

What is needed is a strategic plan to attract new opportunities using online and offline marketing methods, to understand what opportunities look like and formulate a business process to maximise the opportunity.  This requires business leadership and process creation.  This is the job of senior management.

At iON we help bridge the technology/marketing understanding gap for senior management.  We work to establish a digital strategy that produces sales opportunities through business process.  We know the importance of return on investment and how to achieve it.  The wonderful thing is, these new opportunities might already be sitting under your nose just waiting for you to discover them.

Call Yolanda or Niall on +4428 9045 5911 to make an appointment

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