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Nathanial: My name is Nathanial Bibby. I've been in digital marketing for about 12 years
now. Originally I was in the real estate industry. I've learned the power of what digital marketing
can do by generating leads for that particular industry, and now I'm in a role where I can
basically help businesses of all shapes and sizes with their online marketing. I've worked
for a company called PositionMEonline and another one called Level 91, but both services
... different ends of the market. Also I'm a trainer for the Australian Digital Marketing
Institute. I do some training particularly with LinkedIn, how to use LinkedIn to generate
leads for business and that kind of thing. That's a bit of a background about me. I've
got quite a bit of experience from small to large organizations on how they can use online
marketing to really dominate their niche. Cameron: Thanks for coming everyone. This
is the first [inaudible 00:00:54]. I want to extend a big thanks to Katrina, [Laurie
00:00:58] and Constance for organizing [inaudible 00:00:59]. We've got another group here called
Disruptive Startups. This group [inaudible 00:01:05]. We're actually ... that's a [inaudible
00:01:09] company. We do this because marketing's a big part of what we do for our customers,
and they're all entrepreneurs and people who are starting basically from nothing. We've
had a few really good success stories, guys who went from zero to 4.5 million [inaudible
00:01:23] so it's really an entrepreneurial space. [A lot of 00:01:26] talk about this
is capital-raising but marketing is my true passion, so I might just take a seat.
Do you guys want to hear my background? All this has given you ... we've got one yes?
I'll go with that. Okay so [inaudible 00:01:39]. [Three 00:01:41] minutes later ...
I started out as a programmer and I was developing websites. Problem is you get one client who
will pay you ... I started when I was ... years and years ago about [inaudible 00:01:53] thousand
per week. Then the client disappeared and went from making a whole lot of money to making
no money at all. This really sucked. How do I get more people like that? I tried to figure
it out and it came down to marketing. It was just about ... and even sales, and so to me
sales and marketing is the same thing. It's revenue generation.
I then went on to work for [inaudible 00:02:12] digital agency called ROI.com.au. Learned
a lot from those guys. Before that I worked as a CMO spending 1.4 million per year to
make our revenue targets to 720 million in the financial services industry. A lot of
[inaudible 00:02:28], a lot of Internet marketing. Now I'm the head of marketing here at Appster.
I run a team of five and yeah we're growing pretty, pretty aggressively at the moment.
I can't talk about figures but yeah the company is growing very quickly. I just want to impart
my knowledge that I have. It'll take about five minutes then we'll [get some drinks 00:02:49]
and just share with you guys what I have and also chat about Nathanial's experience, so
let's get to it. The focus I want to take today was small business
and lead generation. You said real estate; maybe let's start with that if that's a good
place to start. Nathanial: Sure. I guess from a real estate
... if you took an agency for example, their primary goal is to generate new listings.
Now we all know that most people who are looking for a real estate agent will jump on RealEstate.com.
The interesting fact is that when you delve into it and you look into the Google AdWords
tool and you see how many people are actually typing in real estate-related keywords, you
find that a lot of traffic there ends up on RealEstate.com. Actually it originates from
Google. If you do use Internet marketing creatively there's no reason why that you can actually
bypass all the noise of what your competitors are doing and get leads directly from the
Google search engine if you know how to use it properly. I think the same practices apply
in most industries. The key to being successful online I believe
is to be as specific as possible. By that I mean if you're a real estate agent in Toorak,
you should be targeting people who live in Toorak very, very specifically, but not Melbourne-wide.
If somebody's searching for a real estate agent in Toorak, there's no reason why you
shouldn't be showing up number one in search results. That would be the quickest way for
you to generate new listings online. Cameron: Okay so from real estate you moved
into PositionMEonline. Maybe you can have a chat about what you're doing there and the
lead generation mechanisms you're using. AdWords ... again AdWords in the promotion page.
Nathanial: Yeah absolutely. There's so many things we can do online we have to prioritize,
particularly with small businesses. It'd be great if we could do the full works and do
AdWords, search engine optimization, remarketing, social media ... which is a whole other ball
game in itself ... and everything else in between, but we're a small business and typically
have a limited budget so we have to prioritize. I think the quickest way for you to get a
return on investment is through Google AdWords. Cameron: Yeah AdWords is pretty powerful.
I was having a chat to their guys the other day via e-mail. Their boss sent me a letter
and it was from a [inaudible 00:05:12] constant e-mails would come through it. It's a pretty
well-known technique these days in terms of content marketing using [inaudible 00:05:20]
to e-mail to sell to people over time. You set up once and it just runs forever, right?
It's just looking at the way that's structured to e-mail and how that went to the conversion
page ... you have the video on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side you'd have the
lead form. Now a lead form is already populated with my boss's details, and I was like, "That's
kind of interesting." I looked at the URL ... the [past 00:05:42] and the parameters,
his name and his last name and his e-mail address ... they had all that stuff.
It was just to sign him up to an event where ... the product is really irrelevant. It's
the sales cycle that was interesting to me. It led me to reply to my guys, to the guys
that I work with at Appster, and look at that format. The Google AdWords driving people
through to an conversion page of pre-qualified customers that put up their hand and call
to buy a product ... you generally put them on a sales person who puts them through the
CRM. Nathanial: Yes.
Cameron: There's a whole lot of things going on there. You got the AdWords generation page,
you got your squeeze page where you want to maximize the amount of people that are inputting
there their phone number and e-mail. Nathanial: That's right.
Cameron: Then you want to connect that through to the CRM so the sales guys can call up.
Nathanial: Yeah. Cameron: That's just one format. There's so
many other ways you can structure a sales funnel to maximize the amount of revenues
you're producing. Nathanial: Yes.
Cameron: AdWords [inaudible 00:06:38] Nathanial: AdWords ... I might actually [inaudible
00:06:43] on the whiteboard just to demonstrate how the return on investment might work because
if ... to the untrained guy it can seem like AdWords is quite expensive but the same [inaudible
00:06:56] paying for qualified people to come through to your website. Let's say for example
that you spend $1,000 on Google AdWords. There'll be a cost-per-click obviously and it ranges
from industry to industry depending on how competitive that industry is. We would assume
... let's say you're spending $2 for every click. Every time somebody clicks on your
ad it costs you two bucks. How many people does that lead to your website, per page?
Five hundred? Okay. Now this is where your conversions come into
it. In my experience I have ... Cameron you might have seen all those stats but I've seen
anywhere between one percent ... so 30 percent's actually the highest I've ever come across.
Have you ever seen higher than that? Cameron: No. Thirty's better than I've seen.
Thirty's [Inaudible 00:07:49] Nathanial: This was for a very, very specific
[inaudible 00:07:53] what I was saying before about being specific. The recruitment agency
that was looking for a certain type of candidate for a certain type of job, therefore it was
very specific. It was actually a legal secretary job that they were trying to fill. The domain
for the landing page was Legal Secretary Jobs Perth and it was all about that particular
job, therefore because it was so specific the conversion rate was really high. Even
if we were to say ... okay let's say it converts to 10 percent which is still pretty good,
you get 15 [inaudible 00:08:22]. When I'm talking to business owners I generally
ask them, "If you had 50 people call you who were interested in your product, how many
do you think would end up doing business with you?" Well most people are pretty confident
in themselves. They with tell you, "We'll close half of them." In reality it's probably
more like 30 percent wouldn't you say? Let's say 15 in sales, and then from there you work
out what each sale is worth to the business, and all of a sudden you've got a return on
investment. If we know that each sale is worth a thousand
bucks then obviously this is the figure that at the bottom here is 15,000, right? If you
put $1,000 into Google and you got 15,000 out the other side, is that a return on investment
you'd be happy with? Yeah? Okay. Cameron: It depends on what industry you [inaudible
00:09:17] really. Nathanial: Yeah.
Cameron: Fifteen extra ... some companies are pretty [good 00:09:20]. It depends on
your product I think. Nathanial: Absolutely yeah. Yeah you're right.
The answer is going to be different for every business. No business is the same, but if
you are happy with these figures there's no reason why next time you can't spend $10,000
to get 150 grand out the other side. All of a sudden with this marketing mechanism your
business is very scalable. This is what we've used to grow PositionMEonline from literally
just four or five staff in Perth to a nationwide company with offices all over the country.
Cameron: The real focus for me is I want to get more advanced and sophisticated with my
marketing because that's ultimately ... everyone's going to be playing the AdWords game eventually.
Remarketing came out in April 2011. We use it in financial services, and we just obliterated
our competition. That CPC ... you had $2. It's a damn good CPC. We were paying $25 per
click for some customers. Today a click $25, 50, 75 ... I'm not kidding, it was 100. I
was spending $900 a day on AdWords. We have one keyword which is 'forex trading
Australia.' I still have access to the account and that keyword is still running. It's $10,000
per month for that one keyword. That's how many people ... or not how many people are
clicking on it. It's how many dollars' worth we were paying for access to those customers.
I'm highly targeting customers who were just being wasted away.
When we brought in remarketing we were able to ... do you guys know what remarketing is?
Worked with it before? [Inaudible 00:10:43] one hand. This is ... I might just explain
this because I think ... Nathanial: Yeah definitely.
Cameron: It's a really useful concept. You pay this ... you pay $2 to get the customer
to the website. The thing is those 500 visitors even at 30 percent you got 70 percent of customers
that are leaving your website, without leaving their details, that you'll never see again.
They've hit the website, they bounced off. We're not going to see them again okay? If
we can advertise to those clients offsite we can potentially increase that number from
whether it be 10 percent, three percent, four percent ... those are still healthy economics.
You've got one percent because people are playing on space.
If we are targeting people with offsite advertising, which is what remarketing is, then we can
put them back into the pipeline because by simple virtue of these people having gone
to your website they're pretty qualified to re-target. If you think about it if the customer
hits your webpage and they type the keyword that relates to the product that you're selling,
they're generally a lot more targeted than Joe walking down the street walking his dog.
They're actually going to your website, they've typed it into a search engine, so you want
to keep sending out messages to that person because you don't know what stopped them from
buying. They might be, "Oh this looks like a dodgy website, I might go back to the other
competitor, my wife doesn't want me to spend that money ... next week's check."
Remarketing allows you to re-target people as time goes on and send out advertisements
to them. It's much more cost-effective that a $2 CPC. Your CPC, which is Cost Per Click,
for the GDN -- Google Display Network -- is much cheaper so the [inaudible 00:12:13] are
generally a lot better. When we started using that in foreign exchange I was able to smash
our competitors, spend about one-fifth of what we were spending and get the same results.
We were spending 1.5 million per year ... sorry 1.4 million per year. That's really big results.
We could spend about 400 to 500K to get the same amount of leads coming to [inaudible
00:12:33] despite that simple change. After that you want to maximize what you're doing
on the sales end of things. The other thing is you've got to be mindful
of your ... is there anything you want to [inaudible 00:12:42] in there?
Nathanial: No. Is everyone clear on what remarketing is?
Mark: I just had one funny thing about remarketing that we do at Appster. It's really funny because
we actually use the Google Content Network for remarketing. That has ... just so you
know ... it basically has Wall Street Journal sales, excess Inventory there. You have Oprah's
site, you have knitting sites ... you have everything. Initially when you do that launch
it's hilarious because people will call you and be like, "Yeah I saw you on the Wall Street
Journal. I saw Appster on Oprah." You have to be kind of careful however you target these
follow-ups too. Cameron: Yeah you have to be careful what
site is going on. Yeah exactly. Mark: Absolutely, but it's pretty funny.
Cameron: That's Mark. He's the co-founder of Appster [inaudible 00:13:22] this building.
Yeah you're going to be advertising on inventory safe ... sorry advertising safe inventory
because if you're going on a *** website this is a legitimate concern to some organizations.
Or if you're going ... if you're advertising sometimes you don't know what inventory you're
buying. You're advertising on too many websites outside of your website you don't know where
your advertisement's going to end up. If you know you got political ... particularly if
you're a large organization and you have political interests in different groups they might say,
"This is really wrong that your advertisement's popping up here." You need to be very careful
where that ... where you're advertising. Now to get really complex ... this is ... I'm
just going to touch on this because I don't want to get too advanced. The other thing
is if you're converting GameBusters just so ... if you're on TechCrunch or Appster because
we're selling mobile apps that's the best demographic you can get. Now these guys know
that that's an incredibly targeted demographic and they're going to convert GameBusters,
so they'll up their price. The other thing is they don't actually want
you to know where you're buying the advertisements through the GDN. This is what happens with
real-time bidding. This is a really ... it gets more complicated the further you go down
the rabbit hole. The interesting thing is the more sophisticated you are as a media
buyer, someone who's buying inventory and if it's an advertising space, the more you
can run circles around your competitors. You can spend less money producing more leads
and convert them better, and the more sophisticated you become the better you'll become at doing
that. To put that in perspective you might be thinking
you're competing against people here in Melbourne. I think we're competing against people globally,
and our products and services at some stage are going to be taken over. We're going to
be competing against people in the interstate or international, and that's a perspective
that we need to have as marketers. I'll throw it back to you because I can [mouth off 00:15:10]
too much sometimes. Nathanial: No sure. I'm a firm believer in
what remarketing could do. In fact we have got ... we've got a client who's also in WA
who does specialist machinery sales. His average sales volume is about half a million bucks.
He's a one-man band who works out of his home in WA. We have built about six websites for
him so far. When somebody comes through that website they tagged with what we call a cookie,
and he gets followed around the Internet by these banners. All of a sudden all the big
boys are taking notice of him because they're starting to see his banners pop up, pop up
on the likes of CarSales.com or Channel 7 or RealEstate.com.
To the untrained eye it appears like this massive organization when the reality is he's
just a one-man band. We've created this illusion that this company is so big, so big in fact
that the big boys who are listed on the ASX are now offering him millions and millions
of dollars to buy his business, just through creating an illusion online that he's this
massive organization. It's largely due to the remarketing that we've done.
Cameron: Yeah. I think that's ... we call it perception management and branding [inaudible
00:16:18]. That's really interesting so I hate talking about brand. I'm all about a
direct response, putting $1,000 in the pipeline and getting 1,500 out. As a small business
owner that's ... and as an entrepreneur you might only have that much sitting in your
... not 10,000. You might only have 1,000 or 2,000 sitting in your bank account before
you haven't got enough money for two-minute noodles, and that's the reality for some guys.
All they need to be able to do is pay for the rent, pay for two-minute noodles and unlimited
phone plan to actually execute on their business plans because ... and that's seriously what
they're looking at. Immediately the return on investment isn't
just about getting 1,500 [inaudible 00:16:58] return on investment. It's the timeframe.
If I can spend that and get it back in 30 days as opposed to 90 days I can re-invest
it three times to get three times the result potentially, if my fulfillment's there. It
depends on what you're selling, okay? If your fulfillment's there and you're working in
a very frictionless environment, it's not just the 15 extra return on investment because
that's just paying for marketing. You have to pay for all your overheads, sales staff
and everything else, as an entrepreneur or a small business person.
If you can actually turn that profit within 15 days, 30 days, reduce that timeframe, you
can take the money you've invested because now it's sitting in your bank account, put
it back through the pipeline and then increase the velocity of your pipeline so to me it's
not about just getting this number. I will trade off 10x, 15x for 9x if it's half the
timeframe because I can re-invest it twice. Now that's smart marketing. People think this
is just about return on investment. It's about the timeframe. The fulfillment's there obviously
and your cost margins are there. I'm just curious -- how many guys are running
businesses? We've got one ... we've got a few, okay. Under 100? A hundred K? Under 200?
Five hundred? Okay so it's really in that small business range. You guys have been probably
by yourself on a very small little group. I think this is stuff that's probably going
to be really relevant to you guys. Yeah what's your thought, mate?
Nathanial: Covered AdWords. I would also not ignore social media. It's an area that's growing
probably the quickest online, wouldn't you agree Cameron?
Cameron: It is. It's an interesting area. We got strong opinions on the social media
gurus of the world. Speaker 1: Yeah, which we probably shouldn't
say on camera. Cameron: [Inaudible 00:18:50]. Yeah, sorry.
All right, go ahead. Nathanial: The analogy that I often use with
social media because it's not really a direct response marketing strategy, I don't believe,
it's a bit like when you go on holiday and you're looking for a good restaurant to eat
you may walk down the main strip where all the cafés and bars are, and if one restaurant's
extremely busy you'd assume that they've probably got good food, right? Whereas these days you
don't actually need to go out of the comfort of your hotel to figure out because you got
the likes of Urbanspoon and TripAdvisor and all these social spheres where you get to
find all that information now. There's no difference in the business world.
In your industry people are doing the same things online, and what people are looking
for is social proof. They hop on to Google, they want to see that other people have endorsed
your business online. You may not see a direct response from the likes of Facebook but in
the background it is actually doing you a lot of help for your overall sales conversion
rate. Does that make sense? Cameron: Yeah absolutely. I've worked quite
a bit with social media, and everyone thinks it's all about best practices in responding
to people. I guess the realest advantage with small business owners like some of you guys
is that you've got a ... you don't have many people who are going to follow you on social
media. Now that doesn't mean you can't make a [inaudible 00:20:12] in what you're doing,
but I've seen a lot of businesses use social media successfully and some people would fail
miserably. The guys that I've seen fail miserably at B2B.
Social media does exceptionally well -- we're talking Twitter, Facebook, those sorts of
platforms. Pick things that people love like Oprah for ... it might be [inaudible 00:20:35]
entertainment and music. It might be celebrities. It might be Ricky Martin, Britney Spears.
When it comes down to an engineering firm you're not going to get that many likes because
that's just not where people spend their time socially. The place where people are going
to spend their time is the things that they like, so B2B I see generally doing pretty
poorly in social media. There are exceptions. That is a generalization, but I find that
people that do exceptionally well are going to be celebrities, musicians, artistes, night
clubs, restaurants. These are things that people like a lot.
Now the interesting thing about social media is that if we look at Facebook you have a
[inaudible 00:21:14]. Let's say it's a night club. I know one of the guys that run [inaudible
00:21:19] entertainment. I know a lot of guys that run [inaudible 00:21:21] entertainment.
That is to me just a list. It's a list of people who liked your page the same as there's
a list of e-mails that you can contact, a list of SMSs. It is just a different channel
to advertise to people. Now the thing that people want to talk about
unlike the real professionals is the right-hand side column of advertising Facebook. That
is an absolute goldmine because you can target people that liked your page. Let's say you've
got 5,000 likes and you want to specifically target people that like what you're doing.
You've got a page of people that like you. You can target specifically those 5,000 people
on right-hand side advertising. That is a highly responsive list. Any advertising [inaudible
00:21:59] will have a high CTR or Click-Through Rate. You can expect anything and this is
very ... interruption marketing, anywhere between one to five percent.
Now Google AdWords gets anywhere between ... what would you say, .5 percent to five or six?
Nathanial: Yeah five. Cameron: That's pretty good. The thing is
people actually type this stuff in to Google AdWords. They're looking for it. If you're
going to get a CTR of two or three percent that's two or three out of 100 people, and
you're interrupting them on the right-hand side that's a damn good CTR. I see people
get .02, .03 -- that's three of every 10,000, which is about the equivalent of accidentally
clicking on something. Nathanial: We also do a lot of promoting posts.
Cameron: Right. Yeah, yeah of course. Nathanial: You can do a similar sort of thing.
It doesn't necessarily have to be targeted towards people that have already liked your
page. You can pretty much [close in 00:22:51] on any demographic you like, even as far as
whether or not they've liked ... We work with a business that sells luxury
pearly jewelry, and their target audience are typically female and they're interested
in high-end products. We targeted females in a certain age bracket that have already
liked brands such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton, American Express, et cetera et cetera, so
they're interested in high-end items. By doing that we can promote the posts of people that
actually haven't already liked the page, and then every time somebody likes or comments
on that post it's then ... all of their friends can see that as well so it does become viral.
Even though you may only have five or six hundred people that have liked your Facebook
page, if you promote posts in the right way there's no reason why they can't get displayed
to say 20,000 people. Cameron: Yeah so that's under the section
in adstock Facebook.com, that is ... sponsored stories. You can do a news feed-sponsored
story or a right-hand side column-sponsored story.
Nathanial: That's right, yeah. Cameron: This is really interesting because
for any product that's affinity-based ... so that might be let's say that you play football.
A lot of guys that play football have a lot of friends that play football, so if it's
a product that's relevant to these guys ... if you doing a sponsored story you will see a
high CTR, Click-Through Rate, and a much more responsive list because their friends are
football players. If it's something that's not affinity-based it generally doesn't do
so well on sponsored stories. A good example of that might be let's say
... engineering's a good example. You might be a client of an engineering firm that responds
to that story, I would suggest there'd be a lower likelihood of their being affinity.
Nathanial: Yeah. Cameron: For instance if someone's a golf
player they might be a salsa dancer or they might be into football ... these are things
that people socialize based on ... they have a strong affinity to, so naturally their network's
on Facebook. If you are advertising to the friends of friends, which is what sponsored
stories are, you get a much higher CTR. Very powerful if you want to use it. I think the
same would apply for what you're dealing with because ...
Nathanial: Yeah. Cameron: They're affluent hanging out with
the affluent, so they all have ... Nathanial: Exactly right.
Cameron: Expensive tastes. Nathanial: Yeah.
Cameron: Their friends are seeing that on Facebook. They're generally going to be of
the same socio-economic group. They are the people to target.
Nathanial: That's right. Our goal with that sort of thing was not necessarily to create
a call to action immediately. I think one of the posts we'd used for this particular
business was, "White pearls are better than blacks because they're classic. Like if you
agree," and all of a sudden all these ... anyone who's interested in pearls is just saying
yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All of their friends are seeing the brand, they're all
liking the page. We grew to about 5,000 likes, I think, in a couple of weeks. All of a sudden
we've got that captive audience to market to in the future again and again and again.
It's a strategy to get people onto the page and then once they've already liked then we
can continue to market to them ongoing. It has gone to the point where this particular
woman who runs this business gets more sales through her Facebook page than she does through
her e-commerce website, which she actually runs Google AdWords to as well.
Cameron: Okay so you got two different lead channels for that, and the conversion pages.
Nathanial: That's right. Cameron: How many products has she got?
Nathanial: Hundreds. It's an e-commerce website. Cameron: E-commerce is just huge, huge and
they're very hard to optimize. [Inaudible 00:26:08] working for a particular agency.
If you're doing e-commerce the minimum you have to spend for a month was about 2K.
Nathanial: Yeah. Cameron: It was because you have to optimize
so many pages. Some guys had thousands of products. We were all very aggressive with
remarketing with some customers. I was dealing with hundreds of customers per month, and
e-commerce was by far the most expensive for that kind of thing.
Nathanial: Yeah absolutely. Cameron: Is there any kind of Internet technology
you guys want to focus on? I just want to throw that out there. Also have a think about
... just to sort of sidetrack for a second ... if there's any questions you want to ask,
please ask later on. Questions that can help other people as well. If it's something that
you think might be relevant to other guys here I'd love to hear it. I really just want
to share knowledge. One question here? Speaker 2: Yeah definitely. We're actually
producing IT products and all that stuff. Our customer base is pretty much IT and the
tech sector ... Cameron: Do you work with Matt?
Speaker 2: No. I don't know who that is. Cameron: You're both IT guys and you're sitting
next to each other. Speaker 2: [Inaudible 00:27:08]
Cameron: [Inaudible 00:27:10] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah [inaudible 00:27:14]
Cameron: What do you think about [apps development 00:27:15]?
Speaker 2: I've looked at it before and I didn't like the website ... I'm just kidding.
[Inaudible 00:27:21]. Basically from an IT perspective all this stuff you're talking
about here [inaudible 00:27:28]. We're actually trained to avoid the effort [inaudible 00:27:32].
We talk about this Click-Through Rates and all these sorts of things. These outrageous
buzzwords but to a different sort of market we're in IT and Appster stuff and all that
sort of stuff, you have to go about it a different way.
[We're only 00:27:45] thinking about it from a social aspect side of things. It's not clicking
on the LinkedIn, not clicking on the Facebook, but how do we use it ... probably more from
the [inaudible 00:27:52] side of things ... how do we use ... doing things like SEO content
and smashing a crowd without heaps of posts. That was something [inaudible 00:27:58] was
saying, right? Plus all these sponsored stories. [Inaudible 00:28:01] and they're not going
to take it to [inaudible 00:28:03] basically trying to avoid it.
What's a good marketing technique or an edgy marketing technique that you might have used
in the past, to take people ... lead people into your site? They aren't actively seeing
an advert but I just need [inaudible 00:28:16] to apply. I don't know if it's blogs ... we're
trying to find ways around doing that. Cameron: I just want to identify the problem.
What's ... can you condense it ... Speaker 2: [Inaudible 00:28:24]
Cameron: Okay yes so ... yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 2: How do you go ...
Cameron: You guys are dealing with IT? Speaker 2: Yeah.
Cameron: Okay. You're using AdWords and SEO? Speaker 2: Yeah. The AdWords, yeah. It isn't
like Google Search [inaudible 00:28:35]. That's why [inaudible 00:28:37]. There's that way
so if you are paying for that you're keeping them outside the square [inaudible 00:28:46]
trying sneakily to get people to my side. Cameron: Interruption marketing ... do you
want to have a chat about this as well? I think this is a different question.
Nathanial: [Inaudible 00:28:55] Cameron: That's great. I'll let you go first
then so I can argue with ... Nathanial: The only thing I will say with
light bulbs and that kind of thing and SEOs is it's a longer term strategy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Nathanial: It's good but it's not going to
generate [inaudible 00:29:09] immediately. I would just go down the hole on social media.
Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, all four of them, and focus on just growing the
viral audience as quickly as possible. Those IT guys are going to be extremely competitive
on Google for starters, but they're on social media all the time aren't they?
Speaker 2: Yeah and especially different cloud space [inaudible 00:29:35]. Everyone's got
the word "cloud" [inaudible 00:28:39]. Nathanial: Yeah.
Cameron: We do try to [inaudible 00:29:41] cloud.
Nathanial: If you could you'd want to be industry-specific like ... aside from paying for advertising
if you hop on LinkedIn you can narrow down a particular job role, a particular industry
very easily. You can go and send them all messages introducing your product.
Speaker 2: Okay. Nathanial: It costs you absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2: Oh really? Nathanial: LinkedIn's absolutely amazing for
lead generation. Cameron: It's a minimum $2 CPC, isn't it?
Nathanial: Sorry? Cameron: Minimum $2 CPC for [inaudible 00:30:08].
Nathanial: For advertising. Speaker 2: Yeah. [Inaudible 00:30:11].
Cameron: LinkedIn's great because you can target a company's size, company industry,
job title. There's not anywhere else I can think of off the top where you can do that,
apart from [inaudible 00:30:22] mail and facts broadcast. If you can target let's say ... it
might be dev ops or it might be head of development. It may be ... who else would there be that
you want to tie with ... head of IT ... say again?
Mark: CTO. Cameron: CTO yeah. Sys admin ... Those guys
are all perfect targets for cloud. Those are the things you can target at LinkedIn. You
want to put those guys through a CPC LinkedIn campaign, squeeze them onto a landing page
... conversion page, maximize your ... the details of people who are putting through,
and then you put them through a remarketing campaign for six months. That's how I target
that. I think if ... the CTOs are going to be quite good. It's still interruption marketing.
That's just the problem that I have. Everyone says, "I don't click on advertisements because
... I just ignore them." Everyone thinks I have this superpower like [inaudible 00:31:11].
The thing is if it's good advertising it's 100 percent relevant to the user, right? This
actually happened to me last night. Advertising is getting better to the point that it's just
going to be like every advertisement is something I want to read about. It's interesting. I'm
really into photography. That's ... one of these is my camera. We both [inaudible 00:31:31]
I don't know which one but I was just watching a video actually on cameras. It popped up
with an advertisement on a [inaudible 00:31:37] slider, a technology I've never seen before.
The photography and videography that you can get from this slider showing [inaudible 00:31:43]
before ... incredible. It just looks amazing. I just was captivated for 30 to 40 minutes
looking through how they took these incredible shots and the actual stuff that they [inaudible
00:31:53] was really high-quality manufacturing. That was incredibly relevant to what I was
doing. You've got each of these job titles within IT, you're targeting these people and
it is interruption marketing on the right-hand side ... that's why Google AdWords is so powerful
... but you're going to get ripped apart by the competitiveness.
The CPC is going to be high and you'll need to spend weeks if not months optimizing to
make sure you hit the right keywords to the converting right, because each keyword represents
a different demographic. I can give you a really good example maybe some other time.
Each keyword does represent a different demographic and you need weeks if not months to spend
... to figure out how to convert it. Make sure you have your conversion code there as
well. LinkedIn is probably a great way to go.
AdWords would be incredibly good if you're using remarketing, but you just have to keep
in mind this is a dollars game and it's a sales game and a conversion game, and after
that it's a margin game. If your margin's high and costs are low, if your conversion's
... a few sales guys are converting higher, your lead generation page is converting higher,
and your CLTV -- customer lifetime value -- is higher, either through retention selling then
you ... if you're selling more upsells than other competitors you're going to smash the
market. Dave Kennedy says, "The best competitive advantage
you can have is to spend more to acquire a customer than anyone else." If you can spend
up to $500 to acquire a customer you can chew up AdWords' [inaudible 00:33:14] data, but
if your profit per customer is 100 to 200 dollars and your retention's less than six
months you could get smashed because you're in a market where you're literally buying
the customer. By that I mean that you spend this huge amount of money to get this tiny
little return on investment for over six to eight weeks. It actually takes you a good
two to three, four, five years for these guys to consume your product because it's a service
industry. I don't know what you do in terms of IT. You're
replacing either routers or you're doing programming app development. It's a long-term relationship.
You have to buy that customer at the onset and ride it out for two or three years and
try to milk for as many referrals that you can. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Cameron: I hope that's helped.
Nathanial: Yeah even though the IT people are quite the savvy and they may not know
... they may know not to click on the ads or whatever ... you're only paying for the
people that do click. At the end of the day if your keywords are targeted enough, whoever's
clicked on it is interested in what you've got to offer, otherwise you don't have to
pay anything right? I want to believe that traffic is there. It's just probably a small
portion of the market. Cameron: Yeah cool. What else do you want
to talk about? We'll save questions to the end ... have a think about something. If you've
got a situation you guys are working on I'd love to hear about it and help you out. What's
next? Why don't you host the show mate? Nathanial: Are there any other questions anyone
has that they'll discuss, or anyone have a business that they want to ...
Speaker 3: A question on devices. [Inaudible 00:34:50]. Now the problem is the next few
years, especially [inaudible 00:34:55] AdWords and mobile forms.
Nathanial: Yeah. Speaker 3: [Inaudible 00:34:59] so users are
using their tablets and using their mobile phones to access Facebook.
Nathanial: Yeah. Speaker 3: The problem with Facebook marketing
in this case is that they don't have the marketing blueprint for [inaudible 00:35:13] and so
you don't see actually the advertisements. How do I address such challenges from your
point of view? Nathanial: I don't know about the ads but
you can see the posts if you promote posts. They're visible on the mobile device.
Cameron: That's a new feed, yeah. Nathanial: Yeah.
Cameron: Facebook will figure out how to make money on mobile. [Inaudible 00:35:33].
Nathanial: Yeah. Cameron: Yeah you can't get ... you can't
see the news feed stuff. Absolutely. Nathanial: He raised a good point though,
because mobile is a huge part of what we're doing at the moment. If a website's not mobile-friendly
it's going to be demoted on Google. The conversion rate's never going to be as good as 10 percent
because it must be around 35 percent now, people that are streaming from mobile devices.
It's a huge part of every strategy that we employ at the moment. If your website's not
mobile-friendly my recommendation would be either to create a mobile version or get it
upgraded to responsive design, which means that it adjusts to any format, tabloid or
mobile phone or whatever. Cameron: Yeah I think you'll see a big increase
in terms of conversions if you're doing that. Google did this interesting thing a little
while ago. As phones decided to become tablets and tablets became laptops, and everyone got
confused, and you've dealt with all these devices like Samsungs that kept changing their
sizes, Google said the lines are blurry between a laptop. Look at the Transformer Prime. It
is a laptop. [Inaudible 00:36:39] you put into a tablet and you put in a [inaudible
00:36:44]. It's like you can have a laptop, tablet or a phone. That's the Asus ... not
the Transformer. It's one of those ... [inaudible 00:36:50]. You got [inaudible 00:36:51] are
firmly plugged in the back of the tabloid then it goes into a keyboard.
Google turned around and said phones and laptops and tablets are pretty much all the same,
so you can't just advertise to desktops anymore. They said you have to advertise across every
single device capable. People before that ... I knew some industries that were ... through
agencies these guys were advertising with mobile-optimized websites. None of their competitors
were. They're spending about 30 cents per clicking, converting like [inaudible 00:37:22]
or GameBusters, because no one else was advertising in that space. Everyone was competing over
desktop and conversion pages. You're optimized for a PC experience.
If I said we're on mobile and tablet we're just slaying it. That's killing it, because
they had a great experience and no one else was advertising [AdWords 00:37:39] for them.
Google changed all that of course and that's why a lot of people ... there's been a bigger
uptake on mobile websites. It's changing in terms of mobile devices. Even the advertising
options you have in mobile devices. There's probably a lot of remarketing for mobile devices.
I need to look back into that because remarketing is such a powerful tool.
Speaker 3: Sure. Nathanial: Yeah. Has anyone noticed that they've
dropped on their Google ratings in the last year or two? They have their websites full
of the Facebook [inaudible 00:38:10] ... at all? It's something that I've ... I don't
know about you Cameron but I've a lot of our clients who have had work usually done ... I
was shocked ... in India, because there's a lot of SEOs probably trying to infiltrate
the Australian market that are from India, have recently fallen off the face of Google.
It's a lot to do with the Google algorithm updates, which can be quite mysterious. A
lot of people don't actually know what the algorithm updates are and whether or not their
website can be penalized or will be penalized. At the end of the day Google was just trying
to give its users a good experience. If you've tried to climb the rankings by fabricating
all these links from all over the shop that aren't really relevant to what you do as a
business, then more often than not eventually your business will get penalized. You can
imagine for a business that relies on its online marketing to generate new customers
who've been sitting on page one of Google for five or six years and all of a sudden
now they're on page 20 ... how it can impact their business.
We've actually had to do a lot of rescue missions for companies that have fallen into this category.
In some instances we have to move them across to a brand new domain name to get rid of all
of the bad history altogether. What's happening is whereas before Google put a lot of preference
on how many inbound links you have from other websites, so we used to focus on generating
thousands and thousands of inbound links. Therefore Google would view you as a more
popular business than your competitors and therefore rank you higher.
That's actually starting to be replaced slowly but surely by social media because it's a
lot more difficult to fabricate how many people are talking about you on Facebook, or interacting
when you're on Facebook. Sure you can have loads of likes but if they're not engaging,
Google's probably not as interested. Your social media strategy is actually now
a part of your SEO strategy as well, because what Google's looking at to determine whether
or not you're a business that the community cares about, and it's disgusting.
Cameron: Yeah I was at an agency when those two changes happened. Google Penguin and Panda
... they were algorithm updates, there's been a few since then ... [inaudible 00:40:17]
about the agency I was dealing with. We had one guy called [inaudible 00:40:24] ... he
wasn't even a customer at the time ... he was selling [inaudible 00:40:27] furniture.
Just an B2B operation. Small, small [inaudible 00:40:31] in Sydney and there's this guy with
a really thick Aussie accent from the outback and he's just a ... he's pretty much a sole
operator with his staff on board. He said, "We've hired this great SEO guy.
He came in and we got number one rankings on Google." I said, "That's great. Why are
you calling us? You don't need to." He said, "Well the guy is gone now, and our rankings
just shot down below before it was ... sorry it just shot down below even what it started
as." I said, "Okay. Well where it was ... how long did it take you to get to number one?"
He said, "About a week," and I said, "That's insane."
We did a [inaudible 00:41:07] report on this guy. I hung up on him. I got this [inaudible
00:41:10] report. He pretty much went from all these back links -- people referencing
his website -- which is basically a reference of how credible you are on back links. If
more people are referencing your website ... it's the same as academia ... then you're considered
a more credible source. These back links went from this to bam! straight up. It's this hockey
stick. It went straight up in the air. He had about 86,000 links to his website,
and I looked at some of the links. I looked through it and it was all Chinese characters.
I kept scrolling down and then there was Hindu characters, and I'm like, "That doesn't look
like a real ... real back links." This guy had been hit with about 86,000 back links
from overseas. They're linking [inaudible 00:41:52]. They set up servers, produce websites,
suddenly going through the kind of websites to boost ... to bolster their rankings.
You have to be really careful. If you run a small business and you're dealing with a
guy that's trying to do black hat SEO either fire him or make sure he's really good, because
if you keep him around he's going to really smash your sales because your website ... if
your website is the big lead generator for you. That guy ... I said to him, "You've got
to purge your back links. You've probably been blacklisted by Google." He says, "Oh
that's fine. Please get rid of the links." I said, "There's ... you know just get rid
of the links. You have to disavow them through Google and let them process that. And even
then there's no guarantee that domain name [inaudible 00:42:30]."
It's kind of like e-mail spam. If you're spamming out through your e-mail account you get blacklisted.
Google blacklisted that website and we had to strip out his website, put on a new domain
name, and then build up the links from there. The guy's sales [inaudible 00:42:44]. He's
looking at opening up a third office and that's held him. He probably had to close one because
his sales had shot like that. If people found you through Google you need to protect that
property online. Nathanial: Yeah I agree. That's a big issue
to be aware of. Cameron: Yeah. Is there anything else that
you guys are battling with? Go for it. Speaker 4: Yeah so I'm building on what you
guys have just explained. How would you go about measuring how much you need to put in
to user-generated content or social media content? Is ... this kind of question ... we
run a small business. We have three employees at the moment. We've kind of struggled to
find the time to put a status on Facebook or write actual blogs or whatever. In AdWords
it's quite easy to measure ROIs because you have numbers, you have figures. Facebook you
might see how many people [inaudible 00:43:44]. It's still kind of hard to measure what ... so
what's the best practice for that? Nathanial: What industry are you doing?
Speaker 4: Right not it's sort of a B2B. Hardware shipping and stuff like that. It's one business
that I'm running and now we're also in startup, targeting the [inaudible 00:44:06]
Nathanial: Well I get a ... two different [inaudible 00:44:09]. Two different ... very
... one's a B2B that's obviously ... unless you've got a huge following on social media
you're probably not going to get a huge [mail 00:44:18] out of it, as Cameron was saying
earlier. If it's going to be there make sure it's ticking over and updated, because there's
nothing worse than going through a Facebook page that's got a couple hundred likes and
hasn't been updated in six months. How many likes do you have roughly at the moment?
Speaker 4: We have like 500. Nathanial: Okay. Yeah I'd suggest ... make
sure it's updated at least twice a week. It will be fine [inaudible 00:44:43].
Cameron: Yeah I've got a long ... I've got a very strong opinion of the content strategy
in marketing that you probably don't want to hear, but one thing I will suggest is that
content strategy which is your blogs ... your blog ... you can also re-purpose your blog
as an [inaudible 00:44:59] series, which is what we do here at Appster. We try to take
our best quality content and re-purpose it as an [inaudible 00:45:06] series.
Now the ... I'll only mention one thing, and this is what's really important to me with
content strategy. Customers can come to you hot to trot, ready to go. You then want to
take the order and process that order. You don't want to say, "Go and check out my blog,"
and whatever it might be. The issue that I have with some versions ... depending on the
industry ... is that if you try to educate the customer too much, if you try to provide
them with too much information, then you could actually overload them. They'll say, "Wow,
I've just seen the tip of the iceberg. This is everything that exists in the realm of
this industry. Maybe I don't want to get involved." You could actually end up outselling yourself
because you're showing them through content strategy. "This is either so comprehensive
I can't afford to take this on," or, "I need to spend my time downloading books from Amazon.com
and reading all of them," so you actually take yourself out of a sale. When I'm doing
content strategy my energy is not going to be so much focused. Of course you need to
provide great quality content but it has to be for me really inspirational, motivational,
not just educational, because it's that tip of the iceberg. If they see that there's more
to the picture and you're freaking out too much, you can end up losing the sale because
of that. That's the flipside of content strategy you want to be really careful. Does that make
sense? Speaker 4: Yeah.
Cameron: Yeah so just think about your industry ... obviously I don't know it as well as you
do. Content strategy is a really dynamic creature and trying to get ROI from is incredibly difficult.
One thing you can do is you can set up lead-tracking within your CRM. You can use platforms like
Hubspot, Marketo, [inaudible 00:46:48]. These are marketing ordination platforms, and they'll
actually do leads scoring for you. As people review the webpage, each of the webpages,
you can see your links scored based on how many pages they have viewed, and what pages
[inaudible 00:47:03]. That's on Marketo. They're actually time-degraded so if the customer
was there yesterday they're a higher customer than someone that was there 12 months ago.
Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua which is supported by Oracle, and [inaudible 00:47:18] which
is supported by Salesforce that heavily degraded into their CRM. Adserum is going to help you
get transparency on your ROI for content strategy. Marketo is going to give ... Marketo, any
one of those four solutions. Hubspot is doing to give you all the data on the individual
user. It's a very complicated arena. It's something I personally love, particularly
for our customer based here in Appster, but you need to understand what you're doing because
if you are telling them about the iceberg underneath the water you don't want to create
the Titanic. You want to keep them motivated going through
the sales funnel, because ultimately the objective of content strategy is to take people towards
a sale and not away from it. If you freak them out that's the one thing you have to
be careful of. This applies for every industry and that is a generalization. Sometimes people
need a huge amount of education to get them to cross the line, particularly with complex
sales. The more complex a sale becomes the longer the sales cycle and the more touch
points there are. You want to condense that down to get pipeline velocities you can close
that sale as quickly as possible. Again that's a fraction of what content strategy is. It's
a really complicated monster. CRM and marketing motivation -- Hubspot and
Marketo. That's how I'd see that question. Anyone else?
Speaker 5: What does Hubspot actually [inaudible 00:48:31]?
Cameron: Hubspot's a marketing motivation platform. It's a bit different ... so you
got Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua and [inaudible 00:48:42]. These four different platforms.
Hubspot gives you insight to how many customers are hitting your website. It allows you to
do what's called [inaudible 00:48:50] inbound marketing, get transparency into the customers
and also through e-mail series [inaudible 00:48:55].
I was talking to one of the guys I work with only the other day and he showed me a picture
of Hubspot and a customer. You can actually define the path where customers can go through.
You send them an e-mail. If they fill out this lead form they then go on this e-mail
series, right? If they don't fill out the form then they go on this e-mail series. It's
really ... you have to go check it out. It's like a paradigm shift. It's a whole ecosystem.
It's not like just AdWords to lead generate closed [inaudible 00:49:25] conversion page.
It's a whole ecosystem for generating leads through content strategy, but it's in the
realm of marketing motivation and inbound marketing.
Speaker 6: Can I just add something to that as well in terms of content marketing? Those
platforms can get really expensive. Eloqua for instance is about eight to ten thousand
dollars a month [inaudible 00:49:45], which is a lot of money unless you're targeting
tens of thousands of people. When you start that process you don't ... I know what you
guys feel but I feel like if you're a small business you kind of start a content lead
nurturing process. The easiest thing to do is to sign up to something like [inaudible
00:50:04], or something like this which are $30 a month. You can afford a responder series
and put some sort of newsletter on your site, define an ongoing process and combine that
with re-targeting. Using a tool like a Hubspot or Marketo is
really valuable when you have a huge amount of white paper, there's a huge amount of videos.
You already have tens of thousands of people in your CRM.
Speaker 7: [Inaudible 00:50:29] 200K or plus of income then maybe ...
Speaker 6: I wouldn't even really consider going down that path yet until you're at that
stage. I would say start off with getting an account at MailChimp ... free 30-day trial
to play around with it ... then basically set up your lead nurturing process, get some
return from that. If you figure out content marketing's for you and it's the right strategy
for you guys, then move across to one of the bigger platforms. Does that make sense?
Speaker 8: It might be that a lot of you guys aren't even ... maybe you're doing basic [inaudible
00:51:00]. If that's the case then starting in a place like [inaudible 00:51:04] or MailChimp
is a really easy way to start doing some really basic lead nurturing. Maybe you've just got
a few newsletters. Maybe you're segmenting over a few different types of customers. Then
going into Hubspot [inaudible 00:51:16] that's really when your abilities start to generate
revenue and you want to capitalize upon that. That's when you start automating what your
[inaudible 00:51:24] process needs to look like and doing that the way ... is it a lot
more manageable ... Speaker 7: That was really what we did. We
started off with [inaudible 00:51:23] and eventually moved to post with MailChimp, and
it basically got the results out of that. The content and follow-up and all those things
where our sales team couldn't keep calling someone six to 12 months after they touched
base with us, or you still wanted to continue that conversation using an auto-response sequence
where you don't actually have to write the content every week. You just load it all up
and say, "[Inaudible 00:51:53] this month we'll follow up three times. We'll have this
conversation." The one thing I'll say about content marketing
... maybe I'll say two things. The first is make sure you're conversations ... if you're
going to make a video you'll be likely [inaudible 00:52:04] and the pop-up videos we film end
up being 40 minutes long. Keep them ... we're now testing on [Wizdeo 00:52:10] which is
a video platform. The optimal length per video is two minutes. If you're going to do video
content to educate your clients, any longer than two minutes and they drop off like crazy.
The second thing is always be selling them on the next stage of your content follow-up.
Sorry to hijack your ... Cameron: No that's great. With the video obviously
I think it's a great idea. Or even through content saying, "This is what we're going
to discuss in the next e-mail." I'll just give you a tip if you're going to do that
through a video ... pause the video and then record that as a different segment. Fine you
[inaudible 00:52:42] put that in, but sometimes you have products or your processes or something
you can change and you actually want to take out that section because you want to take
out that entire video. You want to just make it real easy to rip that out in post-production
and put in another section so you can remove that entire video segment or just one single
video. That's what I've learned the hard way. It's just thinking of, "Next week you're going
to learn about doing 'x'," and then you do 'y' instead. They're like, "What the hell
are you doing?" You just want to make it a congruent experience.
Any other questions? Promise you guys [inaudible 00:53:13]. Absolutely.
Speaker 10: [Inaudible 00:53:16] contents in different platforms for instance social
media, a website, a blog, other sources ... those are carrying the same content basically in
certain cases. Will a site get penalized based on that or will ... that will affect the performance
of the e-commerce site? How does this affect the performance of any ...
Cameron: Is this duplicate content? This might be a good one for you, Nathanial.
Speaker 10: Not in duplicate content. For instance how would we differentiate a duplicate
content for instance there's a same set of content in a blog in a slightly different
... the internal meaning is pretty much the same but it's differently laid out in the
social media, whereas it's differently laid out in the AdWords. How would you differentiate
or will that penalize a particular sector ... or probably it doesn't affect? Any idea
about it? Nathanial: Google frowns upon duplicate content
on website, so if the blog's appearing on more than one website technically Google will
penalize you. Whether it'll happen in practice with just two blogs on two separate websites
is a different story. Having it published across your social media ... I've always posted
my blogs across social media and never ever had a problem with it even for all of our
clients. Speaker 10: Basically the same content appearing
on social media ... Nathanial: Yeah.
Speaker 10: It doesn't get penalized. Nathanial: Not in my experience, no.
Speaker 10: Okay. Cameron: You can always use tools like position
[lead 00:55:01] to look at your rankings. That should give you a guide, but I think
largely you're trying to figure out what's in the black box of Google's multi-billion
dollar black box. That's not an easy thing to do, to reverse engineer it. Some of the
guys are really good at optimizations, through experience have figured that out. Largely
I think the best indicator will be looking at your position lead reports [inaudible 00:55:30]
service provider to provide you with your rankings, but generally yeah you'd want to
stick away from duplicate content. If you're ripping something off of well-known
bloggers' websites, putting it on your page, it probably won't work. I've actually seen
people pull stuff like that and they'll get discovered for a couple of months and they've
ranked but when they get smashed they get hammered. Google doesn't like it. You want
to play along with Google. If you look at [inaudible 00:55:54] in that
space, he's basically advocating just being a good web citizen and do things the way they
should be done. Don't try to out-game the system. These days Google's getting damn good
at outsmarting the SEO guys. SEO did very well for a while. I think now particularly
with the Penguin and Panda update ... Speaker 10: [Inaudible 00:56:15]
Cameron: Yeah [inaudible 00:56:17]. Now what's happened with that is you can't ... you can
no longer access the keywords that people were using to access your website through
[inaudible 00:56:26]. It's just interesting what Google's ... so the players have been
taken with this stage. Any other questions? Otherwise we might have to wrap up. Okay.
Got one more. Speaker 11: What is basically for the standard
SEO the best thing to do with a mixture? What would you say works best?
Cameron: It depends on your approach. Yeah it really depends on your approach because
if you want to engage an agency, check their reviews. Yeah you need to be really careful
who you go with. You don't want to [inaudible 00:56:56] through the mill and find out your
$500 per month minimum or 1000, 2000, 5000 per month is getting chewed up.
You can ... if you're going to hire someone in Australia ... it's very hard to get healthy
metrics on it because your rankings will fluctuate regardless of whether or not someone's optimizing
your website anyway, keeping your website up to date all the time, being W3-compliant
are the main things and obviously using the H1 tags -- the header tags -- and just making
sure that your website is semantically correct when its developed. Simple tools and checks
out there. Also making sure that your web developer does
understand SEO, because often they'll say, "Oh don't give the SEO guy. We'll optimize
your site." When they update your website they change all the links. All the back links
go to all URL addresses so all your back links now go to [inaudible 00:57:46] areas. Your
rankings just go straight through the ground because you've updated your website, so there's
a whole load of things like that you need to consider.
I've seen that happen a lot. It's usually just amateur web developers coming along,
not telling the agency or the SEO optimizer, "We're updating the website with a new design."
It comes out, it breaks all the back links and then you got all these [inaudible 00:58:05]
areas and you need to put in a bunch of 3-to-1 redirects to the new website. I hope that
answers that question. Nathanial: Just to add to that. If the SEO
company you're dealing with is guaranteeing that they'll lead you to the number one position
on Google, that to me would raise a big red flag because there's no way that any SEO company
can guarantee that sort of result. Normally the guarantee would be something like, "We'll
get you there within three months or we'll keep working on it until we do," which means
you're locked in for three months or whatever is. [Inaudible 00:58:40] a month and then
... Cameron: I could tell you my pitch when I
was [inaudible 00:58:43]. My pitch was depending on the package you get to pick 20 keywords
that will guarantee 50 percent of them will be on the first page of Google within six
months [inaudible 00:58:52]. Nathanial: Yeah.
Cameron: That's the exact pitch, word for word, that was sold through agencies. The
biggest agencies, and they just use the same thing. Then they'll bicker and argue on a
couple of keywords and this and that. That's generally what they ... You need to be careful
because some of the keywords like, "Yeah that's great, I'm number one for a keyword," and
then another search is formed -- congratulations, you've got no traffic. There goes your revenues.
Okay so that's bad for Christmas time. Mark: I'll add to that as well. At the moment
we're in a good place with SEO because I think we've got about 80 of our main keywords in
the top 10, like [inaudible 00:59:25] developer, app developer, we're all within the top three
or four spaces. I don't know if you remember but we used to have ... [inaudible 00:59:32]
were really growing and we're still like a one- or two-person company it's like, "Why
are we sending so much in SEO?" You have to wait like six to 12 months often before you
start seeing any results. You've got things like AdWords, things like other sorts of advertising
that are driving ROI and you have to decide, "Do I continue with SEO or I don't?"
I actually wouldn't be doing SEO if the cash flow management is the big problem. If you're
not going to be around in a month because it's that tight. I'll be focusing on whatever
[ugly gorilla 01:00:01] attack that you can have because SEO is more of a long-term thing.
Speaker 8: Yeah three ... three, six, nine. Mark: You'd better have a good relationship
with your business partner because there'll be lots of fights about the SEO bill ... I
didn't say that. The other thing I'll say is that I wouldn't try and figure out SEO
by yourself because it's such a complicated thing. I was learning SEO when I was 13 or
14 years old and even since then it's changed so much. It's a different game. I would always
hire an agency, but like you guys were saying check the reviews. It's very compelling or
interesting when you find out X company plus reviews and there's [inaudible 01:00:38] I
would do your research. Also don't expect the SEO company to do miracles.
If you don't have good content, if you aren't blogging a couple of times a week, if you
aren't on social media like sharing and contributing, if you aren't having genuine links back, you're
not going to rank. Heaps of people try and outrank Appster in our search results. That's
pretty hard to do because we've a link [inaudible 01:01:00] get back to us in about 10 major
newspapers that have written articles and linked back to us just within the content.
They're the kind of links you can't fake by doing blog commenting or things like that
that traditional SEO companies do. SEO works as your company works, right? You
have to do so much peripheral stuff that helps SEO. Don't think your SEO company is going
to wave a wand and within three months you're going to be at the top of the engines because
it just doesn't happen. You have to be a good company that's getting media reviews, getting
on social, publishing regular content and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 8: Also one thing I'll add as well is really ... you really have to think, "Okay
what does Google really want?" What they want to do is they want to deliver incredible value
to the people that are searching. People that are using their [inaudible 01:01:44]. That's
why they're still relevant today and that's why people use them. That's what their USP
is. The USP is that, "When I start typing to Google it's going to give me the most relevant
information possible," and that's why we always Google. I don't know how many of you have
used Bing. I'm pretty sure no one does. It's useless, but that's the point right?
You should really think about that in terms of how you develop a content strategy, in
terms of how you're putting out information in terms of what you have on your website.
What do people really want to learn about [inaudible 01:02:10]? How can I actually deliver
incredible value to the people that have been searching for me? That's always ... I think
it's been a good [inaudible 01:02:17]. Something that we try to focus on as well.
Mark: Even we're not perfect. For the first ... we've got 400 pieces of content just designed
[inaudible 01:02:25]. In one of our marketing meetings we discussed, "How do we publish
10,000 pieces of quality content?" We're trying to build our sites into authority sites, so
we're launching 42 of these sites around the world in different countries as we roll out.
The big challenge is how do you sustain that quality content? It's a tough thing. I'm not
going to say producing good ... it's very easy to say, "An app is a mobile application,"
which would be definition-based. You see that cliché, article-spun stuff all the time.
It's very tempting to say, "If I just keep putting quantity on there we'll be okay,"
but if people aren't sharing your content, people aren't liking your content ... they're
the kind of triggers Google's looking at as well.
Cameron: Yeah of course. I'm going to give [inaudible 01:03:06] and I'll give you guys
a chance to chat to everyone else. I just want to thank Nathanial for coming today.