Current Issues in Marketing Strategy

I'm going to share a little secret weapon I've been using for some time, something I don't even share with the team in my agency.  It's a free little tool that lets me be creative in my keyword research without being a slave to the numbers... quite simply, it's what separates my clients from the field.  Of course nothing comes without hard work, but now let me reveal how http://ubersuggest.org changed my life in digital.

What is ubersuggest.org?
For generating or finding keywords nobody else has thought of, ubersuggest is the king.  It used the alphabet to systematically search for your key words and offer suggestions of high value extensions you  may not have thought of.  Clicking on any of these results drills down even further, allowing you to build up powerful keyword themes in a fraction of the time.  It simply does the creative thinking for you.

The example shows keyword drilling down from party > party dresses > party dresses melbourne



Isn't it impossible to find keywords others are not targeting?
I've heard this one a million times, and any SEO/SEM expert who say that is no expert.  The truely diligent keyword finders (and yes it takes a special type of person), will form tight groups of unique keywords and target them accordingly.

What I love about my secret tool, is that it helps my mind sort ideas into groupings, collects them for me and then allows me to quickly expand my keyword strategy into a complicated, yet robust structure.

How do I make the most of these hard to find keywords?
Ok, so you've got'em, but how do you smoke 'em?  Good question, this really is the million dollar question and it's one that is rarely done well.  So let me explain something I call 'snug theming'

What you want is to target keyword themes, exactly how you would in SEM, but the application for SEO is exactly the same.

1.) Form tight keyword themes, groups of keywords that are very very similar.  Perhaps a group of keywords all around Party dresses Melbourne as seen above in the picture.

2.) Now use all of those keyword extensions you see in the content you create.  Find ways to create content of value that requires you to use those extensions, and don't worry about fitting words in exact phrases, just get them into a nice sized article and make it useful to the consumer

3.) Repeat process #2 for every group of keywords

Results
The content creation will take most of your time, but the results of locating hard to find keywords and building all their extensions into one single page is extreme.  Instead of targeting one single keyword, you are now targeting hundreds, many of which have low competition and are poorly services by the websites that do rank in those positions.

It really is as simple as taking a tool like http://ubersuggest.org, my little secret companion and leveraging it to locate those tough to find keywords, and keyword themes, build content and in no time you will be ranking for hundreds of low to moderately competitive keywords.

The theory of Total Quality Management (TQM) has been floating around in marketing circles for a long time now, and it's really just common sense, but rarely do we see business owner apply it.  Nowhere is this more prevalent than in service recovery, the situation in which you see a customer has had a bad experience with your brand/service and you rectify it.  Over the weekend I had a tremendous experience with a small business here in Melbourne, a burger joint in my area.  I was truely blown away that the owner of this small burger restaurant was more in turn with TQM that many of the large multinational companies I consult to.

To set scene, earlier in the week I had received a menu in the mail from a new burger restaurant called BABU bar burger at 156 Chapel st, South Yarra.  It was a really cool menu with some funny text like "Sides to rest your balls on" and other such witticism, so I decided to order for me and my girlfriend.  After several phone calls and some two hours latter our food arrived, cold and close to inedible.  The company was apologetic and didn't even ask me to pay for it, this I thought was a good start, but probably wouldn't see my business again.  What blew me away was when the owner called me the next day and apologised personally for the service breakdown, offering to feed me for free next time I wanted to try them again... this was incredible and as of right this second, I'm waiting for those succulent burgers to be delivered.

In contrast to this, a little while ago I took my dad to a very well known steak restaurant in South Yarra called Squires Loft.  This place is known for it's incredible food and each year I spend thousands there on various client lunches and dinners.  Unfortunately on this occasion they had a bad cut of meat and the steak my dad ordered tasted terrible, he couldn't eat it.  After telling the waitress and leaving the restaurant still hungry, the manager failed to recover the situation.  She 'discounted' the inedible steak by 50% insisting that they would have been happy to cook him another one, but there was no option to avoid paying for it.

The problem for someone like Squires Loft is the long term impact of this decision.  Since then I haven't been back, I won't hold any client meetings there and I discourage my friends from holding any events there.  The total cost to the business would be in the tens of thousands per annum, all caused by a $30 chunk of meat.

So here's the moral of the story, do everything you can to satisfy your customers.  If they have a bad experience, go out of your way to rectify the situation and stand out from the crowd.  It doesn't matter if you are a big or small business, valuing your customers will always see you come out ahead.

There is a place in the world for every business to be involved in social media, but do you have the marketing allocation to build it into your marketing mix?

Many companies I see and consult to, use social media as a after thought, or simply have it because it's a buzz word right now.

The video below explains my position on social media in todays marketing world.

Cameron Poole is an accomplished international chef, highly skilled in his craft and very dear cousin to myself.  Sitting around the dining room table over Christmas dinner this year, Cam announced his latest venture, a boutique, private catering service in Prahran, serving the local area.  Now his skills and quality of food is undeniable, a discussion about marketing strategy ensured.  Of course he was setting up a website, but how would he compete against a plethora of catering services on Google already?

The answer for Cam and many other localised small business's is a niche marketing strategy, targeting low search volume, high relevance terms such as catering service prahran.  For many budding entrepreneurs this is a hard pill to swallow, particularly for someone already sporting a strong industry reputation, however humbling it may be, they must remember that Google doesn't take this into consideration at all.

So what do I mean a niche strategy?  Well simply put, each page on your website can target one specific search term, and given we want fast results, we want to target areas on Google that are uncompetitive (meaning not many websites compete for these terms).  Another way to look at this is ensuring you have a very good chance of securing business from a small market (terms like catering services in prahran), as opposed to having a very slim chance or making money from a very large market (terms like catering services).

This blog post may or may not serve as a good example, but I am hoping that with the five minutes of effort I've applied to writing it, we will see this post ranking for the term catering service prahran on the front page of Google.




If we look at a screen grab from a search performed before posting this article, you can see that there is only one website specifically catering an answer for this search query (Prahran focused & catering related).  What this means means is that an oportunity exists for someone willing to cater content specifically for these localised terms.

We always here 'content is king', but what does it mean?  Simply answered, it is the basic question 'have i answered the search query specifically?'.  If you write some interesting copy about how well your catering service performs in the local area, you are specifically answering the question.  If you talk generically about catering parties, you are missing the mark and will be outranked by those in the former group.

It's not a hard concept, and of course there are other factors, but look for these gaps, then create a page on your site for each of the local suburbs around you.  You will be amazed what will come of it.

Brilliant - I am so pleased with Google and their new Tag Manager (www.google.com/tagmanager/). 
As a non-technical digital marketer, I've for a long time been relying on my tech team to implement tracking tags, analytics and remarketing codes and much more.  Moreover, my tech team are non-marketers, not understanding why or even how to apply the tags correctly and this has caused many a tough client conversation.

The Google tag manager solves all this, asking only to insert the tag manager code once into the website and then empowering me to add or remove codes as I wish.  It even empowers me to set rules of when the tag fires, meaning all that nasty programming is a thing of the past.

It is a beta product, and there are some bugs, for instance on release it appears to be having a few problems with Drupal, but that will be ironed out shortly.  I've personally implemented it across Wordpress and Blogger.com and had no problems at all, it was quick and easy.

Pro Tip
When you setup a new tag in the tag manger, don't forget to assign a rule to it (required) and publish that rule (top right corner). Other than that, it's all too easy.

Well done Google tag manager team!