Marketing Brekky September 2012

Marketing Brekky

Every month I run the 'Marketing Breakfast Club' which includes a beautiful bunch of very smart marketing professionals brought together by a fine breakfast spread at the Merchant on Beaufort St in Mount Lawley. The breakfast started as a way of bringing together interesting people offering a forum to bounce ideas off each other and discuss the wonderful world of marketing. 

SEPTEMBER 2012
This month we discussed the changes in social media laws, online marketing and online advertising…

Some of the topics discussed:

 

·        How effective are Adwords advertising, banner ads and Facebook ads? There is some research to show that they work better in specific industries such as medical, cosmetic and finance but in most industries the click through rates are low. Nowadays there is too much ad pollution online and most of us do not like to click on ads.

·        Email marketing: how effective promotions run by the likes of Strawberry net, Ticketek etc are in getting people to remain connected and keep purchasing.

·        Online Ecommerce success: Stawberry Net keeps regular and interesting promotions happening, often has free gifts with purchase and has an impressive loyalty program and free shipping. Bookdepository.uk is also a very good example of how to run a successful online store.

·        New social media laws: Twitter handing over account details of those involved in criminal activity to the police, new potential laws governing what Doctors can say on their private Facebook profiles- even though they are private, the prevention of using certain words online such as Botox, new laws on prosecuting cyber bullying and out of control parties, new controls from Facebook about how to market your business page e.g. cannot mention phone numbers and promotions in the cover picture.

·        Knowing how to use social media effectively: you can’t use what works in retail and ecommerce sites on mining and industrial related sites. E.g. sometimes Facebook is not the best medium for a mining company as often their employees, suppliers or clients have Facebook blocked but Linked In can work very well for HR.

·        PR and event promotion; viral marketing can really boost your sales e.g. Fifty Shades of Grey was first heavily promoted online as an E-book but really took off. Amanda Bines work out promoted across Australia.

·        What is SEO? What are some of the techniques used? There are many so called ‘SEO experts’ out there but if they are all doing similar things how are you going to stand out among your competitors. Standard things include: putting keywords in the Meta descriptions, entering in Meta keywords, ensuring a certain % of keywords mentioned in page content and linking to link farms. There are risks in utilising an SEO provider that does not keep up to date with Google as they may do something that jeopardises your rankings e.g. some link farms link to Adult sites. Some of the more sophisticated techniques implemented by Exa include considering everything from the way the website is built- unique patent framework, to the hosting environment and above board linking and SEO strategies- but mainly keeping on top of the changes in Google’s algorithm.

·        How does Google analyse your site? Google bots crawl the web and if you have sophisticated SEO your website will be encouraging Google to keep re-crawling your site and find your site relevant for hundreds of keywords.



Well, that's it for this month and I'm looking forward to the next Marketing Breakfast Club.

If you're interested in coming along, please contact Write On It Marketing.