An interesting incident arose today when Dixons changed the strapline on it’s homepage to read “The last place you want to go”. As the brand is no longer on the high street they wanted the customer to come to their website as the last price comparison they would need.
Unfortunately the plan backfired and many customers thought the site had been hacked. This lowered confidence in the brand and undoubtedly made customers nervous about shopping there.
Getting tired of answering the phone to explain that it was a part of their online strategy Dixons’ gave in and changed the site and removed the strapline.
A clear case of trying to be a little too clever with an online strategy
Email Marketing: Connecting the Reader with the News
I often display this picture at seminars I have the good fortune to present at. After the laughter dies, a serious message follows. When broadcasting your message especially via email marketing, you need to make sure there is a connection between the reader and your news.
Many email newsletters are used for sales and not marketing. They are easy to spot. They usually have a corny strapline then mention the product/service accompanied by a price, an image and a link to go and buy. These email broadcasts do work for commoditised products or services but the emphasis is always on price and margins are typically low. These emails play a numbers game and rarely require much thought. Even good retailers don’t lead with price, they lead with lifestyle promises and create aspirations. Price lead email selling will give you back what you asked for, low margin sales.
On the other side of the coin we are often tempted to put in news stories about our latest award or accolade, the company golf day out and the chairman’s welcome. Stories often make our newsletters that have appeared in the mainstream media and are republished verbatim.
As a reader, I often don’t care about your award or golf day (although these activities do play a marketing role just not right now) and I sure as hell don’t need to read another “Welcome to our newsletter/website/snorefest” from the chairman. And yes, the industry news may be of mild interest to me, but I want you to translate it into what it should mean as features, benefits or drawbacks to me. I want to know your opinion on the news.
It’s hard to make our email marketing customer centric and not price lead. Our enthusiasm about what we do is rarely identical to your customers. As a marketer it is our job to put ourselves in the reader’s position and ask, ‘is there a connection between the reader and the news?’
There is a strong argument that being #1 in the natural search engine results in Google for some industries is no longer what it used to be. I’m not arguing that search is irrelevant or that a site should not be built optimised for search engines, my argument is that the customer and how they purchase has little to do with being top of Google. Rather, it is how you are represented in terms of your online reputation. My argument is that online reputation management is fast becoming more important than search engine optimisation in service based industries. Better still, get your ORM right and the SEO takes care of itself.
Take a hotel for example. Many hotels work hard to be in the top page of a search result for most of the big search terms like “Hotel in [insert destination]”. The site is built optimised for search. The text is written with key words appearing frequently within the body of the text. Inbound links are generated artificially to make it appear that the site is relevant under key search terms and the hotel gradually floats north toward the top of the search charts. So how does Google reward these efforts?
Take the example search term “Hotel in London”:
The first 3 links are paid for sponsored links and not influenced by SEO
The 4th link is a local business directory link
Links 5 to 11 are Google Local links based upon both geography, reviews and other non-SEO related activities
Link 12 is a hotel resellers site
Link 13 is the Ritz Hotel. At last a hotel that has focused on SEO! In SEO terms the Ritz is #2 in the natural SEO results. In real terms it’s not in the race.
SEO Natural Position #1 is Now 13 Links From Top
I don’t have the conversation figures of lookers-to-bookers for the Ritz in London or how many people eventually convert from Google generic searches like mine. What I do have however, are the analytics results of many other hotels in different regions and the results show similarities across the regions and search terms.
Even though most of the hotels, restaurants, shopping centers or any service based destination clients we look after have good natural SEO results for generic terms, around 80% of the searches for their site include their brand name and not simple generic terms like “Hotel in London”. My guess is that the Ritz is no different and that the vast majority of bookers who find the hotel search for it by name. It has an enhanced reputation. This means the visitor is looking specifically for that destination. They have researched elsewhere and their decision on where to stay is already at a closing stage when googling the hotel name.
If you extrapolate this out further and take the amount of visitors to the site that search by brand name, have clicked on inbound referral links or visitors that have simply typed in the URL of the destination, it vastly outweighs the generic search term in the order of 95% to 5% of visitor traffic. Unless you have a really generic name like “Smiths of London” appearing #1 for your own brand takes little to no SEO effort.
The question then switches to being “Why do we spend so much time, money and effort on being #1 on Google when less than 5% of the visitors arrive at the site for generic terms?” Where is the customer taking their influence? Why am I only getting attention as part of their already filtered field of view? The answer is that the customer is taking the opinion of others that have used these services. They are reading the reviews of what other people say about the business and believing that before the businesses own marketing message.
If you are in the services industry this is happening to you. Regardless if you supply stag weekend clay pigeon shooting in Brighton or zorbing in Ballymena, your online reputation management and what is said about you on review sites, forums and blogs is having an enormous influence on your bookings. ORM takes effort and means focusing on leveraging customer’s good experiences and getting them to publish their positive experiences. It requires a deep understanding on where your customers or potential customers are taking their influence from and understanding how you can influence that process. A bi-product of good ORM is that your natural SEO will look after itself.
SEO is still a valid channel and shouldn’t be ignored, however its relevancy in converting lookers-to-bookers is weakening as Google restructures its results pages and customers become more informed and only Google your site as part of the decision making process. The pending introduction of Google Real Time search is set to further enhance the argument that SEO isn’t what it once was.
