The real Mayor on Foursquare

With news of the Mayor of Tampa Bay using Foursquare to show people around his city, it got me thinking about what the collision of technology and travel is doing to tour guide business models and the future of destination marketing in general.

You could argue that being a ‘tour guide’, your locality is your niche. Knowing a bit about an area is a good start, but in todays travel industry is it enough?

For a background on new approaches for tourguides Tour Guide Marketplaces - is auseful guide from Tnooz

 Designing the location based experience

A video that takes a peak at the intersection of storytelling and peoples experience of a destination. It talks of augmented reality but also, importantly about user experience design, albeit in a real 3D world not just on your website.

Mediating Mediums – The Digital 3d [Short Version] from Greg Tran on Vimeo.

The following talk about perceptions and perceived value are insightful and relevant to anybody working in marketing, digital marketing or otherwise, there is always another way to frame a product or service.

Adopting this mindset when thinking about Web design, creativity in PPC advertising, content strategies for social media or offline direct marketing. If you have 10 minutes to spare the following video is well worth a look.

Building Links in 2012

For quite some time now online marketers have recognised that links are an important part of  success online. There is lots of great stuff on Linkbuilding around at the moment so I thought I would quickly document some linkbuilding stuff I have stumbled across recently.

What’s a good link?

Lets start off with identification – or “what does a good link looklike”. This excellent infographic from David Klein courtey of SEOGadget is a good place to start.
Link Evaluation Survey 2012 infographicBy Orange Line SEO

Prospecting Tools

Will Critchlow tells us more about the linkbuilding tools they use at Distilled

Linklove Roundup

And to finish off (and at risk of a little duplication) we have a complete list of tools from the Linklove 2012 conference lovingly curated by SEOptimise

Happy Easter!

The little guy can win

The tourism industry

The tourism industry is largely made up of small businesses often micro businesses . In other industries distribution is always important, but with information as the core product, travel and tourism is dominated by distribution.

The end result – suppliers & intermediaries are all thrown into the same competitive landscape.

For most hoteliers, holiday cottage owners, and bed and breakfasts the reality is that the vast majority of their customers are delivered through an intermediary of some sort.

Be Realistic

Effective channel management – If you’re small forget competing directly for high volume direct traffic in the conventional sense. Instead Use analytics tools to work out who can provide you with customers in a cost effective manner. Hotels are often plugged in directly to ‘the travel distribution’ network they are more comfortable with managing inetrmediaries, holiday cottages and B&B’s less so.

I am not saying forget about directly acquiring customers – only to strike at the right time, in the right place with the right offer.

Long Tail – If you are familiar with the long tail you will know that people describe what they want differently and niche products and services can often provide welcome volume for small businesses.

this is the sweet spot you are looking for, that where volume and clear intention exist

Why  not take a leaf out of the Paid Search managers handbook. Don’t spend budget on high volume low converting terms.  The deal is often done after the prospect has narrowed down their options and is ready to specify exactly what they want – this is the sweet spot you are looking for, that of where volume and clear intention exist.

Beyond search – The long tail doesn’t just apply to search – for every nich interest there are directories, communities and portals to gain exposure through.

The good news is a small business doesn’t need that much volume – it is quite feasible to run a healthy small business in this long tail.

Recontact strategy – with so much hype about social media these days its easy to forget that email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to market. It can be highly targeted and highly effective. Be realistic and pay for traffic you could never get, but once you have a customer make sure you keep them and get lifetime value from them.

Be Local

In terms of search, one advantage of being a small local business is that you are exactly that, small and local.

What tell tale attributes does a real life, bricks and mortar local business have?

• A physical address and phone number
• A local presence
• An affiliation and presence in a relevant trade directory (Trip Advisor, Local Tourism Association)
• Links to other local businesses
• A reputation – real life reviews from proper paying customers

These concepts are the foundation of local search engine optimisation – its an example of one of the truths of SEO “think like your customer”.

Details like which networks and sources search engines are currently favouring may change but these principles underpin the process.

Be Different

One way of re targetting your business online is to simply do something different. Many businesses have products or services that differentiate them like a hotel offering murder mystery weekends. When I look at hotel or self catering websites I see all the effort going into competing headon with intermediaries or bigger businesses when they should be exploiting what makes them different.

When I look at hotel or self catering websites I see all the effort going into competing headon with intermediaries or bigger businesses when they should be exploiting what makes them different.

Be Seasonal

OK so this wasn’t in the title but it would be a glaring omission if I left it out.

Seasonality, Volume and Realtime marketing – Small capacity of micro businesses means that much of their marketing is wasted. They will have choke points in their season where they are full and lulls when they struggle for occupancy. Social Media and Paid Search are not often talked about together, but they both share a valuable characteristic – they are both real time marketing technologies perfect for the tourism industry.

Couple these technologies up with a good content calendar and you have the ability to exploit the benefits of being a small business squeezing value from intermediaries but also feeding on the seasonal and long tail nature of the tourism industry.

SEO or CEO - Customer Experience Optimisation

The new process interview

I was catching up on some SEO reading courtesy of inbound and I came across an interesting interview with Mike King.

A lot of what is discussed  will resonate with anybody who has ever carried out  in house SEO or been a digital marketing manager within a large organisation. To me Mike King always talks like an SEO who really ‘gets’ marketing and harnessing an organisations processes to result in better performance.

Question: Is it better to pay an agency to go out and build relationships with industry authority sites? If you have a PR department why not re purpose them?

A follow up question:  While spotting the opportunity might have required some SEO insight, its a management skillset that makes this happen for an organisation so what levers do you use to reprogram PR?

I digress….to get back on track and to quote the interview “Far more needs to happen first before we fire up the keyword tool”

Some nuggets…

Opportunity Discovery within the vertical – Understanding the business domain is sometimes neglected by agencies, yet is essential first step.

Business Goals – This is usually the second element after you understand the space the client operates in. Quite often business goals takes some teasing out – after this is done its worth revisiting the opportunity discovery phase armed with more detailed information.

Audience insight – success online is usually found via obsession with the customer and the end user. In the days when social media information wasn’t readily available understanding user intent was a process of reverse engineering keyword phrases. Key word research is still important but there are now many platforms and techniques that expose what your customer really wants and is interested in – remember we are not just interested in what somebody types in – its the motivation behind it that will inform much more than your SEO (think landing page design creative, copy etc.) This process is usually pulled together by some form of persona development.

SEOMoz to Moz – A customer centric move?

SEOMoz may soon drop the SEO from its monicker and be going with ‘Moz‘ . I don’t want this to be an ‘is  SEO dead’ style comment  but with social media and its relationship with search its worth asking…

Does SEO mean anything to anybody but the most technical of clients? The process eloquently described in this interview would be best described as digital marketing rather than SEO.

Secondly, a whole bunch of small businesses  are pestered  daily with people contacting them ‘promising them to make you number one in Google’ using SEO. So, back on the customer centric tip – calling yourself an SEO may be a badge of honour with your peers, but are you selling to your peers?

Image: epSos.de

Can the Welsh Government continue to ignore the digital economy ?

How will Wales shape its New Media Strategy? Two commentators come at the same problem with different perspectives

Why the Welsh Government should buy Media Wales

Interesting post by Robert Andrews that plots the financial trajectory of Media Wales and contemplates a Pravda style take over by the Welsh Government

Plumbing and Platforms

The technologist in me really appreciates this perspective from Will Stephens of Cube Media. The reliance on state funding in Wales often translates to a ‘Welsh way’ that lends itself to fragmentation and silo’s, not just in terms of money and organisations but also in terms of digital assets.

Why not invest in a “digital infrastructure” for Wales?

Make Welsh data and digital assets accessible not only to app developers, but investors, foreign business, firms looking to relocate…..

Who in Cardiff did Snoop reach out to and what was the digital strategy behind it?

When Snoop came to Cardiff smart digital marketers could see he brought more than his hip hop game to town.

This campaign is nominated for a Mashable Award. As somebody involved in digital marketing on a day to day basis,  I found it a great case study.  I am going to call it Snoops Cardiff campaign but obviously Mr Dogg and his agency Cashmere rolled this strategy out all over the UK.

What’s interesting for me is that the campaign challenges some traditional approaches to marketing.

• The only way to achieve mass exposure is by using TV
• That mass promotion requires  ’shock and awe’ levels of bulk media buying. (This is not the same as saying viral campaigns are cheap, quite often they are not.)

Does marketing come in two flavours?

A personal bug bear of mine is the notion that marketing commonly comes in two flavours. Online and Offline or Traditional and Digital. This is increasingly becoming a pointless distinction.

Snoops approach illustrates that media is not confined to online or offline.  It also proves that when content is planned and executed well, channels naturally combine to great effect, you could say virally!. As any Social Media Guru will tell you, people love to share and recommend across social media, but its worth remembering strong content can also move across different channels as well.

The power of diffusion and common denominator content

Cashmere's local targeting worked like a charm

Finding ways to access people with content they usually would have no interest in is hard. You need ‘common denominator content’ or ‘go between’ content like a football team or.. erm.. a vegetable!

We use Cardiff based examples here, but elsewhere Snoop uses other football clubs and celebrities and popular figures such as Pippa Middleton and Ricky Gervais to provide a suitable hook to engage people with.

So, not only was this strategy local in its focus it was also enhanced by the fact that it hit a variety  of  interest groups, some far removed from the core product of a Hip Hop.

The importance of detail – ‘Looking out for yer Mama’

Tired of hearing the old adage ‘content is king’?  It’s undeniably true but it is often a throwaway line.

My background is in Search.  Search marketers tend  to be preoccupied with relevancy and user intent which is another way of saying ‘the audience’. This preoccupation with the audience and relevance pays off  with other digital marketing strategies as well.

Being fixated with the audience helps you to understand them, understand what excites, angers, or titillates them. It also enables you to prepare for their reaction whether that’s a sale, a signup, a like, a comment etc etc.

Snoops team obviously did their homework on their audience they new the triggers would be football clubs and the key bloggers to reach out to. Even down to mentioning obscure local news stories where Snoop praised a young local girl for looking out for her mama whenn she chased a thief away.

What about the vegetables?

Who did Snoop talk to and why?

Snoop didn’t succeed because he talked about rap, his album or even his tour date. He didn’t target his fans either.

• He talked about Cardiff with Wales Online
• He talked about Cardiff City Football Club with Cardiff City fans
• He asked the local blogging community for advice (amplification)
• And finally he reached out to vegetable growers like Ian Neale*

The disconnect between a gangster rapper and a prize vegetable grower was too much for TV news networks like Sky News to resist. Snoop turned ‘small, local and obscure’ into a national media news story.

So what happened when Ian Neale met Snoop? The pay off.

Good to his word and “Keeping it real” as they say in hip hop, this is what happened when Ian Neale ‘hooked up’ with his boy Snoop.

Graphics, educational and effective – Why don’t we use them in our online marketing more often?

Educational infographics

I am trying to make a habit of posting some good infographics up here on a regular basis. Inspired by a great on page optimisation infographic from SEOmoz today, it really registered with me how great these things are to get a point across. It also fits nicely with way in which inbound/content marketing is becoming the way to gain traction online.

How does your on page content stack up?

Focus on the users and people

It really is a great post, and in an SEO world where links and link acquisition seem to be the focus for every man jack, it seems to me that the whole exercise is futile unless you deliver for the end user once your found. Be sure to check the rest of the post out as it deals with some classic problems facing anybody charged with putting together effective web sites today.

The second infographic is somewhat of a monster. Its a brave attempt at summing up the whole digital marketing shooting match. Have a look and see for yourself

Unbounce – The DIY Landing Page Platform

I have sat through many online marketing seminars, read thousands of blogs about the ‘new’ tools of digital marketing. There is quite often little that’s original in them. They tend to be rehashed, reworked or reconstituted for a new medium and a new audience.

Once you learn how to use these new tools, the underlying principles of marketing remain the same.  Regardless of the tools we use we are still working with the same material – we are ultimately trying to influence what Seth Godin calls the ‘lizard brain‘.

Digital Marketing v General Advertising

Anybody who has worked for marketing directors for which “the big idea” is everything will recognise the tensions between general advertising and direct response. It seems that the data driven, customer focussed nature of successful online marketing is at odds with those that worship at the alter of creativity. But, this is nothing new. The David Ogilvy clip below tells it far better than I can.

Do you worship at the alter of creativity?

Four quick links

1. Designing for Conversion –  Oli Gardner from the Unbounce team illustrate the visual design principals that encourage users to do things we want them to do.
2. Many people still think Adwords is a Direct Marketing tool and they would be right. However, the GDN (Google Display Network) has matured into an effective branding and awareness channel in its own right – check out these case studies for more.
3. We may be at a pivotal stage for bricks and mortar retailers – Get Elastic’s summary of some exciting retail developments for this years shop.org runs through the big trends for retail in the future.
4. Content in the social space – nice post that looks at content from the point of view of a marketer with marketing objectives rather than the creator and creatives.

image by Leo Reynolds