SEO Basics course.

 However, developing a broader strategy that improves performance across a number of keywords, SEO is a digital marketing discipline that divides marketers. It is also arguably the discipline where a little knowledge really is truly dangerous, whilst a lot of knowledge is essential if you want to be able to deliver your digital strategy. This is because as soon as you have a website you are using the SEO channel whether you like it or not. If your knowledge is minimal then you might try to rank number one on a specific key term and this could cost a significant amount of money and time to achieve.

 would be far more efficient and would also reduce the risk of a penalty. Even if you have appointed a great SEO or broader digital agency you still need to ensure that you understand the fundamentals of good SEO as agencies cannot achieve success without guidance and direction from their client (despite what some may tell you).

That is why it is important that you should have some good grasp of the SEO concepts. It will help you understand what kind of service are you hiring and how it will help you, and also discuss with the one who is providing the service to you.

This course is not on Udemy anymore, but you can access it here:

Video Courses (uteach.io)

SEO Basics - Yellow Corn School (coursify.me)

One reason why so many digital marketers and business leaders are reluctant to embrace the detail of SEO is because they have the misconception that it is a very technical and complex discipline. Technical SEO considerations are very important, but they are just one area of SEO. Truly strategic SEO is in fact very closely aligned to more traditional marketing techniques. If your background is in marketing then you probably already have the skills needed to implement a great SEO strategy. It is worth noting that when we are talking about SEO we are probably talking more about Google than any other search engines sine it does have the biggest market share on searches performed. That said, many of the principles of good SEO are actually about good content, design, user experience and other marketing principles, so good SEO is likely to work for most if not all search engines. 

The final note is that when optimizing your site it is important that you do not try to learn Google’s techniques and find ways to work around them to get to position one. This is a sure-fire way to cause yourself problems in either the short or medium term. SEO should always focus on optimizing for the user, not the search engine. Ultimately this is the aim of every good search engine as well – to improve the internet experience for users. If you have the same goal then you will find that your SEO strategy will be aligned to the philosophy and therefore algorithms of the search engines and you will be able to win now and in the future.

Positioning your product / brand or testing the market ?

In this digital era, everything you can do that slightly change your results, even small percentages like 0,01% (due to the scalability of the digital environment), can provide us a very palpable results in the end. 

I was undergoing a project to actually show an analogy to what it is the difference when you position your product in the right way, the project did fail, but I still can use as an example for other areas of marketing

 Coming back to that failure project. I did took a red led put on some batteries and did take it on the lookout on top of the hill outside city limits (Jiujiang city, Jiangxi - China) . I was hopping to see the red led light when I was back home in the city during a night time. I knew it could not be seem at day time because the light was to small but I I was hopping to see at night, it turns out it was too small even to be seen at night…

 

This concept or analogy still would work, that failure did not invalidate the concept, I just not invest enough on the resources to make it work, when you position your self or the product right you can reach much more people spending lot of less resources with much better results. Marketers are supposed to know that and be able to provide a good deal for the buck you invest with them after all this what they do.

 In my opinion it would always be a good investment if you put “x” in and get out “2x”. I would repeat the process of putting “x” in as much as I can as long as I am getting “2x” out. Lets say you sell a product for $10 for a profit of $5. If you invest $1 in marketing you get 3 new clients. So if you do a proper marketing you may get 10 new clients instead of 3. Even better.

Now the question becomes how do you know you are doing proper marketing ?

Let me introduce you to a testing concept now within the digital era. To test a “copy” (selling script) is very easy and fast, you can have data to base your next move in perhaps only 24 hours, just like my experiment with the red led, few hours later I knew it did not work, so now I am planning my next move based on the result of this failure experiment, witch is not wise to call it failure because in reality it is only a part of a process of getting where you want to be. There is no way of getting there without under covering a few ways it doesn’t work by experimenting it. 

There a technique call “testing A/B” in selling funnels, it consist in establishing 2 different web pages to sell a product, as you get the results of your sells you know each one converts better, and you keep the process of trying to improve from what it is working.

If you don’t want take much of your time from your business to run such experiments, you at least should consider hiring such a service, you not only going to improve your sales but also keep all your time to dedicate to your business, while still being sure to receive a good quality marketing service. The last one here is possible because many marketers offer you such a service on a monthly basis, you pay only if you satisfied with the results.

Now let me wrap up this post. I could make this post about positioning my topic as “positioning your product” but my project to use as the analogy did not work, so I did position my topic as “testing the market” because I have learn something with this project, and if I will try again I will improve it somehow that it may work at the next time.

There is always so many good options a good marketing provider can discuss with you to improve your business, best of all you when you hire such services you can use your time to take care of your customer (your most important priority) than otherwise having to learn digital marketing.

How do you educate your prospects?

I copy this post on Linkedin from "Nathan Willard" mostly because I like this picture and he went precisely to the point...  He talks about educating your customers, and that is where social media posts comes in. If you have good website with posts and info about your product on your page, when you do the advertising your customer already is educated about your product from your pages and is more willing to pay the price you could justify in those earlier engagements, I refer this process by having a foundation before running ads...

When most of us go to buy something we usually don't know exactly what we need. We try to get informed. We may be acutely aware of the problem we're trying to solve, but sometimes we may not even understand what the real problem is. We could just feel the symptoms. We may have even convinced ourselves we need something, and it turns out that's not the solution at all. So we then find someone who we hope is going to be able to fix our problem, and we hope they take care of us.

But how will we know?

When a prospect comes to you, you need to educate them. And you need to do that in a way they'll understand. If you don't, and they can't tell why your solution is more valuable than another, they'll feel forced to shop on price. But in reality most people understand that quality products cost more. They are willing to pay more, if they can see the value. You have to show your value - that's good and ethical marketing.

Understanding customer lifetime value (CLV)

CLV is the profitability of a customer over their entire relationship with the business. Businesses need to look at long-term customer satisfaction and relationship management, rather than short-term campaigns and quick wins – this approach leads to increased value over the entire lifetime of a customer and means that CLV is a metric central to any CRM (customer relationship management) initiative.

It’s important to look at your customer base and segment them according to how often they purchase and how much they spend with your company. Very often, customers who spend more cost more to acquire, but they might also stay with the company for longer. Referrals made by a customer can also be included as part of the revenue generated by the customer.

The key is to understand these costs and then target your CRM strategies appropriately. CLV lets you decide what a particular type of customer is really worth to your business, and then lets you decide how much you are willing to spend to win or retain them.

For example, a potential customer looking to purchase a digital camera is likely to search on Google for cameras. As a company selling digital cameras, your excellent search advert and compelling offer attract the potential customer, who clicks through to your website. Impressed with your product offering, the user purchases a camera from you, and signs up to your email newsletter as part of the payment process.

Analyzing the amount spent on your search campaign against the sales attributed to the campaign will give the cost per acquisition of each sale. In this case, this is the cost of acquiring the new customer.

As the user’s now signed up to your newsletter, each month you send her compelling information about products she might be interested in. These newsletters could be focused on her obvious interest in photography, and highlight additional products she can use with her new camera. The costs associated with sending these emails are the costs of maintaining the relationship with the customer. When she purchases from you again, these costs can be measured against the repeat sales likely to be made over the course of the customer’s lifetime.

Assuming that a customer buys a new camera every three years, moves up from a basic model to a more expensive model, perhaps buys a video recorder at a certain point – all of these allow a company to calculate a lifetime value and ensure that their spending on a particular customer is justified.

What is Digital strategy anyway ?

This is perhaps best answered with another question. Can you tell in one sentence what you will be trying to achieve over the coming years? If not, then you don’t have a strategy. If you can articulate that but you don’t know how to get from where you are to your end vision, then you don’t have a strategy either.

If you have a vision and a path to get there then you have a strategy but if that is not based on research, bought into by your leadership team and with clear deliverables then your strategy will almost certainly not be a success.

If you were to Google the word ‘strategy’ you would find definitions such as ‘A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim’ (www.oxforddictionaries.com) and ‘A method or plan chosen to bring about a desired future, such as achievement of a goal or solution to a problem’ (www.businessdictionary.com). Both of these definitions are of course true, but we need to look into the area of digital marketing and incorporate some of the following ideas on the context to a strategy that is robust, and aligned with your business

 Core areas:

● understand what is possible;

● understand your business and market context;

● understand your customer;

● understand the potential challenges you face;

● plan your strategy for optimal delivery;

● understand the possibilities within the relevant digital channels and touch points;

● measure and evolve your strategy.

Here is another article that nicely talks about 5 rules of digital strategy.

A history of digital marketing

Digital marketing first appeared as a term in the 1990s but, as mentioned above, it was a very different world then. Web 1.0 was primarily static content with very little interaction and no real communities. The first banner advertising started in 1993 and the first web crawler (called Webcrawler) was created in 1994 – this was the beginning of search engine optimization (SEO) as we know it. This may not seem a deep and distant past but when we consider that this was four years before Google launched, over 10 years before YouTube, and that social media was not even a dream at this point, it shows just how far we have come in a short time. 

Once Google started to grow at pace and Blogger was launched in 1999 the modern internet age began. Blackberry, a brand not connected with innovation any more, launched mobile e-mail and MySpace appeared. MySpace was the true beginning of social media as we define it today, but it was not as successful as it could have been from a user experience perspective and ultimately that is what led to its downfall. Google’s introduction of Adwords was their real platform for growth and remains a key revenue stream for them to this day. Their innovation, simple interface and accurate

algorithms continue to remain unchallenged (although Bing have been making some good steps forward in recent years). Cookies have been a key development and also a bone of contention over recent years with new regulation

and ongoing privacy debates. Whilst cookies have played a role in the ongoing privacy concerns of digital technology, they have also been a key development in delivering relevant content and therefore personalizing user experience.

 Web 2.0 was a term coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci but not really popularized until Tim O’Reilly in 2004. With Web 2.0 there was no overhaul of technology as the name might suggest, but more a shift in the way that websites are created. This allowed the web to become a social place, it was an enabler for online communities and so Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Skype and others were born. One trend that has certainly appeared in the last 10 years is an increase in buzzwords. There seems to be a new word or phrase for everything. From ‘big data’ to ‘dark social’, new terms arrive all the time. At nearly every marketing conference these days there is one speaker who is trying to socialize a new phrase they have

coined. Whilst these buzzwords can inspire us and open our eyes to new ways of thinking they rarely change the underpinning strategic planning of an effective marketing-led organization.

 As this are evolving so fast no wonder if you may feel lost between what it is the best approach to do online marketing. Let me give you a counsel. It is not a bad idea to hire professionals for this (I know I am suspect to give this kind of counsel, but hear me out), those professionals need to be on top of their game if they want to stay in business, there are many professional like me who will not make a contract, you can stay as long as you were satisfied and seeing results, that is why I do a report every month to my clients, and the best reason may be… you save your time to do what you do best, to serve your customers.

Connectivity

Writing "market-ing" instead of "marketing" suggest  that marketing is about dealing with the ever changing market ,and that to understand cutting-edge marketing, we should understand how the market has been evolving in recent years.

The clues and trends are there for us to see. A new breed of customer, the one that will be the majority in the near future, is emerging globally — young, urban, middle-class with strong mobility and connectivity. While the mature markets are dealing with an aging population, the emerging market is enjoying the demographic dividend of a younger, more productive population. They are not only young, they are also rapidly migrating to urban areas and embracing a big-city lifestyle. 

The majority of them are in the middle class or above and thus have a sizable income to spend. Moving up from a lower socio economic status, they aspire to accomplish greater goals, experience finer things, and emulate behaviors of people in higher classes. These traits make them a compelling market for marketers to pursue.

But what distinguishes this new type of customer from other markets we have seen before is their tendency to be mobile. They move around a lot, often commute, and live life at a faster pace. Everything should be instant and time-efficient. 

When they are interested in things they see on television, they search for them on their mobile devices. When they are deciding whether to buy something in-store, they research price and quality online. Being digital natives, they can make purchase decisions any where and anytime, involving a wide range of devices. Despite their internet savvy, they love to experience things physically. They value high-touch engagement when interacting with brands. They are also very social; they communicate with and trust one another. In fact, they trust their network of friends and family more than they trust corporations and brands. In short, they are highly connected.

Connectivity is arguably the most important game changer in the history of marketing. Granted, it can no longer be considered a new buzzword, but it has been changing many facets of marketing and is not showing signs of slowing down.

That is why perhaps you should consider social media marketing or branding before running some ads, you will notice that running ads after having a well engaged audience before will bring a much better result on the budget invested in advertising

Bad reviews are valuable too…

All reviews are valuable, and a mix of positive and negative reviews helps to improve consumer trust in the opinions they read. Consumers trust reviews more when they see both good and bad scores, while some suspect censorship or faked reviews when they don’t see any negative opinions on the page.

Too many bad reviews aren’t good for business. The benefits of bad reviews very much depends on the proportion of good to bad. The negative reviews make the positive ones more believable, but there is a point at which it does the opposite. If, for instance, a product page contains 20 reviews, and 3 are negative, then the other 17 look trustworthy. If that proportion changes too much, it’s a different matter.

If you want to implement Reputation management to you business....feel free to contact me