Jonothan Stribling

I was talking with a colleague about the BONDS Facebook page today admiring their 600K+ likes when she challenged me to find another Australian brand with a higher number of likes. I’m happy to say that I did.

A few things stood out.

Australian fashion brands dominated the rankings. Global surfing brands Quiksilver and Billabong led the charge with over 1 million likes, followed by BONDS.

The NRL leads the AFL by around 30 thousand likes. Interestingly, the NRL fan site, my-nrl.com, has slightly more likes than the official NRL site.

Holden has over 200K followers, no doubt on the back of a big “social” campaign to launch the new Captiva. This indicates a well executed social media strategy.

The telcos, Telstra and Optus are pretty evenly matched. What’s interesting is that as “technology” brands they don’t have a higher number of likes.

The banks are poorly represented. The only banks I could find were the NAB and the new Bank of Melbourne. The new Bank of Melbourne billboard campaign has prominent social media icons and this has obviously been relatively successful as it has generated more followers than NAB.

Retailers like Myer, David Jones, and Harvey Norman are at the lower end of the rankings. Harvey Norman however did appear to be pursuing a pretty successful Facebook places strategy. It was unclear whether this had been initiated by them or simply organic.

The Australian brand social media rankings

1. Quiksilver 1,213,398
2. Billabong 1,040,527
3. BONDS 629,363
4. NRL 373,949
5. AFL 343,217
6. Holden 228,059
7. Optus 52,079
8. Myer 43,359
9. Big W 36,491
10. VB 33,643
11. Telstra 25,584
12. Seven Eleven 24,730
13. David Jones 22,993
14. iiNet 18,888
15. Harvey Norman 8,837
16. Bank of Melbourne 8,290
17. NAB 8,245
18. Coles 5,360
19. James Boag’s & Sons 3,814

This ranking was created 18 August and the brands ranked were my best estimation of major Australian brands. If you think any are missing, drop me a line.

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A small business I provided some advice had launched a website in a space with low competition and high margins, and the results were pretty good for a small investment.  They had knocked up a site, launched some paid search ads, put in some rudimentary processes for managing enquiries, and like the results. The problem was that the site had stopped growing.

What was missing was the kind of consistent maintenance and content creation to engage buyers, rank well in Google, and learn from your mistakes.

I find many people not familiar with the intricacies of online marketing and ecommerce are surprised that making a website successful can be hard work. Even more express dismay when they discover that integrating an online channel into an existing business requires a rethinking of all processes.

This is common in any business small or large. I think some people are sold on the internet fantasy of “build it and they will come” or think that the internet is technical stuff which is best left to the guy who runs the servers.

The fact is that online takes work. Like any business it needs to be planned and the plan needs to be worked.

Customers need to be identified and spoken to, marketing plans drawn up, search experts engaged, if you’re shipping goods fulfillment needs to be sorted out. Most importantly you need to know how you’re going to be successful. What are the metrics you will use to work out if strategy is working and what tactics you need to change?

I don’t mean to make it sound impossible but without a commitment to do the work, make mistakes, and learn, it is almost difficult to make an online channel successful. The secret sauce is not technical, it is an passion for learning. I remember listening to @sammartino, the founder of rentoid.com, talking about how he  launched the website with no web design skills at all. What he had was a hunger to build something and make it successful. As an ex-web developer who can get caught up in technical wizardry, it was a very useful lesson in what really matters.

With passion, energy and a keen eye for solving customer problems, any online business can be successful. I recently helped a neighbour and friend fix her wordpress site she developed almost single-handed to launch her hanging glass vase business. I love this kind of enthusiasm to use the web as a tool to build a business. I’m sure that she will be successful because she understood she needed to put the work in to make it work.

I think there is a place for an ecommerce mentor who helps with strategy, measurement, optimization, and coaching. The future of small to medium business is in embracing online technologies to reduce costs and grow their businesses. They just need to be shown that the skills that made their existing business successful is all they need to make their online business successful.

How can you help someone be successful online?

When I was just starting out in the web game in the 1990′s, I met a bloke just back from working in London and about to open a restaurant. He wanted to change the way Melbournians ate fine food. There would be no mediocrity. Every ingredient would be individually sourced and the finest available. The staff would approach hospitality as professionals, not as students with a part time job. The sommelier would be a verified expert at pairing the finest wines with the finest food. The venue, whilst humble would be in a great location, have parking and be easily accessible to his customers.

So what happened? Well today that man is one of Australia’s most successful restaurateurs, is regularly featured in the social pages, occasionally appears on a certain TV cooking show, and has a number of very successful restaurants.

So what does this have to do with online success?

It’s all about vision. My mate defined his vision and worked tirelessly to see it realised. He knew that in the high end market he had to do something different and be 100% committed to quality. He bought the best French butter available, he arranged Melbourne’s first degustation menu, and promoted himself whenever and wherever he could. It didn’t happen overnight but people discovered that he was doing something different and offered a suburb culinary experience.

Pretty soon word of mouth spread and the little restaurant took off.

The point I am trying to make is that the recipe for online success is not about tools, products, or a new PPC or social media strategy, it is about vision and drive.

Sure you need to get the products right, understand your market, build a great brand, and have efficient processes, but without a vision and the drive to realise it you will struggle to successfully build a great online business.

With the web, it’s easy to become enamoured by technology and bright shiny tools. Everyone has some great advice about a web host, PPC,  SEO, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, taking payments, colours, design, layout, the size of your font, your background colour, your logo, delivery and fulfillment, email marketing, CSS, YouTube, link building, Google Panda, Facebook pages, PayPal, PHP, .NET, jquery, and so on.  That’s all bullshit. My advice is to forget the tools and focus on the vision. Once your vision is written in huge letters on your wall start looking at which technology can help you realise it.

My mate wanted to change how Melbournians ate fine food by introducing a new European style of dining, what’s your vision?

I just saw a new Australia Post ad promoting their parcel delivery services to small to medium businesses in Australia. The ad encourages businesses to “zing their thing” and apart from being a little trite (zing = speed), I liked the ad.

It tells the story of a small business that makes Zing and becomes wildly successful. And guess what, they need a flexible delivery service to meet the needs of their rapidly growing business. The ad is backed by a website http://www.zingyourthing.com.au/ which builds on the idea that Zing is every product, every idea, every dream, which is of course delivered speedily by Australia Post.

The ad invites people to search for zing. So being an obedient consumer I did exactly that. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there were no results for Australia Post or their campaign sites on page 1 of Google.  There was a paid search ad. This is another case of agencies getting only half the campaign right. If you’re going to invite people to search for a low competition term like zing then spend a couple of weeks ensuring you rank for it. With an estimated 2% to 10% of Google searchers clicking on paid search ads, Australia Post are going to be missing out on a reasonable amount of traffic. Admittedly, Australia Posts click-through-rate for the ad will be higher than most terms, but it is still a poorly executed campaign. Some users will wonder if they are in the right place and move on.

It is a shame because the rest of the campaign is really great. The campaign site is one long page and has a beautiful scrolling background. The call to action is front and centre, and the privacy policy is easily found. Before the digital geniuses in agencies have a great idea like, “Why don’t we just ask them to search for quirky product term”, they should make sure they cover off organic and paid search.

This morning I noticed that GoDaddy and NetRegistry had almost identical facebook posts.

First GoDaddy posted:

Then a few hours later NetRegistry posted:

Is it just the domain registrar Zeitgeist or is there some copycat marketing going on? .xxx is a curly issue for many in the industry so there is a chance that some market probing (sorry) is underway by both GoDaddy and NetRegistry. However, I have my suspicions that NetRegistry was scratching for relevant content for their Facebook page and were inspired by the big Daddy.

The other day I had a healthy argument with an old school marketing guy about uneducated consumers in a commiditised market.

His contention was that uneducated consumers still exist online.  Like marks in an old style side show they wander blindly through the buying process and good businesses make good margin from them.

This worried me a little.  I think that the Internet has made it so much easier to find information about products and pricing that novice Internet users can become very well informed consumers very quickly. The newbie might not be a gun online marketer but they have a very clear understanding about what constitutes good value and the Internet makes it easy to them to make a comparison.

Also,  I hate the idea of thinking consumers are stupid. It is too easy and doesn’t help you market to them.

I reached out to twitter for feedback and the feedback was that there are more and more newbie consumers online which I reckon proves my point.

@thelostagency noted that targeting these users with a different user experience can drive massive increases in conversion. He also commented that:

@jonstribling problem is that business is not usually tailored and even optimised for that newbie experience

@monkeytypist disagreed tweeting

@jonstribling if you define “educated” to mean “aware there’s a better value option always”, then that’s plainly rubbish.

I think that understanding the consumers  better means understanding them intimately, their concerns, their values, the pain-points, their buying behaviour. And once you do this you patronise them by thinking of them as uneducated. Once they become ‘real’ you can then target them better using all sorts of online marketing strategies including search.  Ultimately they will compare the value you’re providing with your competitors online. Your chances of retaining them as a customer may depend on you understanding them better.

What do you think?

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I was reading in The New York Times about how Google is now a media company and it struck me that the Internet gives every business the opportunity to be a media business or at least think like a media company.

Firstly, what is a media company?  A media company is a business engaged in the production or distribution of media.  Most sales,  leads,  and opportunities result from their media activities.

News Ltd is an obvious example of an old style media company trying to make it in a digital world. 

Google can be seen as a new style of media business as can telcos like Telstra who increasingly depend on the distribution of digital content to lock in subscribers.

So how can any business be a media company?

Get a website

If you have a website you need to produce great content to delight your visitors, rank in search engines, and build fans. If the content is good enough then people will link to it increasing your popularity.

Get a twitter account

As you know Twitter is a great way to communicate with existing and potential customers. To build fans you can’t be all business though,  you need to entertain,  amuse, or inform. When you get this right you are well on your way to being a media company.

Get a Facebook page

With 500 million users Facebook offers an easy way to reach people and let them connect with your brand.  As with twitter there needs to be a good reason for people to be interested.  Hold a competition, build a game,  get customers to send photos or videos of them using your products, or ask questions.

Make a video

YouTube is an amazing place to discover Justin Beiber or that new chick,  watch a monkey fall over,  or discover how to build a retaining wall.  Making a video of how to do something related to your product,  introducing your business,  or doing something crazy to delight your customers. It is easier than you think and doesn’t need Hollywood production values.

With an audience of billions the web makes it easy to extend your reach with simple but high quality media and content. In a competitive marketplace it could be what elevates you above your competitors. Start to see yourself as a media business and the rest will follow.

Building something truly useful is a fantasy for most designers, entrepreneurs, and product people. Most will build something that is a reasonable copy of something truly useful and along the way convince themselves that it is gonna be great, that the folks are gonna love it.

The truth is that there are very few transformative tools with a genuine utility. Transformative products create a new space for utility by solving a problem that we didn’t know we had. Twitter, Facebook, Google,  Get Satisfaction, Amazon’s EC2, Amazon are just a few businesses that have become an integral part of our lives by being good utilitarians.

Utilitarianism, the moral framework and philosophy championed by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Beckham, is a useful way of understanding digital product development in a kind of steam punk way. Mill wrote in Utilitarianism:

Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

When thinking about building experiences and tools for people what better focus is there than making people happy. For a product to be huge, entrepreneurs, designers and developers need to consider how their decisions will impact their users and if their choices will promote happiness or unhappiness.

Whilst I am no great fan of Bentham, preferring a more relativist view of the world, I think that as a simplistic approach to my continuing project to combine philosophy with online marketing in under 500 words, utilitarianism should be the tool of choice for the product developers amongst us.

The latest copyblogger post by Brian Clarke, “5 Landing Page Mistakes that Crush Conversion Rates” disappointed me.

Rather than being the witty informative genius I have come to expect, it was a sales pitch recycling old information with no actionable content for the punters.

The 5 tips were:

1. Blowing the headline
2. Using your regular site design
3. Asking for more than one thing
4. Ignoring basic aesthetics
5. Being lazy

These are nothing more than a shopping list of commonly accepted truths about landing pages.

The problem with truths is that they can become so ubiquitous that they are no longer critically questioned and therefore are no longer useful.

Kind of like the flat earth theory.

It is pointless telling me I need a good headline without telling me what one look like, or how I go about getting one. That is just teasing.

And sometimes it is completely valid to use your standard site design. Tell the reader why it might not be, provide a few examples showing why version b performed better than version a.

A loud property developer once told me that there was no accounting for bad taste. All irony aside, he was right. Taste and aesthetics are highly subjective. The thing about basic aesthetics is that they are, well, basic. If a punter thinks that fuscia comic sans font on a bright yellow background is beautiful they will read this get nothing from this tip.

In fact they will probably congratulate themselves from not making a  crushing mistake. And they will of course be wrong.

A more useful tip would have included information about how you can benchmark yourself against competitors, or how you can use free usability testing tools to work out what real humans think of your beautiful landing page.

A more useful approach would have focused on how a landing page is used by buyers. That’s right, real humans. Without them you have no business model and no business.

It stands to reason that not understanding your buyer can have a devastating impact on any landing page. All buyers are different. A landing page for aged care insurance will be very different from one for summer holiday activities, or one selling an book touting the secrets to being a home mechanic.

The point is there are no hard and fast rules except you must understand your buyer before building your lander for them.

Oh and test, test, test.

The post does advise that punters “[t]hink about it from their perspective” but doesn’t provide any tools or insights about how this can be achieved.

Unfortunately copyblogger were trying so hard to generate leads they forgot that the secret to their success has been to provide short, sharp, actionable online marketing insights of a phenomenal quality.

Balancing the conflicting goals of creating great content and generating leads is hard. Normally copyblogger nail this, unfortunately in this case they got it wrong. Because they are so very cool, I’m sure they will correct this very soon.

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Years ago, I read somewhere that 42% of people abandon a shopping cart due to slow performance.

Recently it was proven to me that this might indeed be true which is surprising because most statistical factoids are garbage.

After introducing a content delivery network service into an ecommerce site I saw a 20% gain in cart conversion. This was a pretty stunning result and it made me think about all the off-page conversion factors that can have a big influence on visit conversion that might be ignored because of a focus on design and copy.

The standard approach to conversion optimisation requires a really tight focus on the value proposition and the customer. Tests are designed to:

• Make sure there is a clear message
• Make sure the page is relevant to the audience
• Drive urgency
• Reduce buying inhibitors and friction

In the excitement of lovingly crafting your website into a conversion machine it is easy to focus on the design and content of the page or site at the expense of more fundamental issues. After all, it is a lot of fun changing forms, tightening copy and call-to-actions, optimising paid search ads, and adding great product images.

But, there could be some factors inhibiting buyers which have nothing to do with design and copy. Some of these are operating like a silent do not buy signal to buyers, creating friction and making sure they bounce off your website and off to your competitor.

Some off-page conversion factors to look at are:

Speed
Is your website hosted at a $2.95 unlimited host that slows down with rush hour? Or your customers might be in New Zealand but your website is hosted in USA and is slow.

Buyers today are lazy and expect speed. A slow website signals a lack of trust to impatient buyers.

The answer might be to move your website and pay a little more for hosting, or have your web developer optimise your code to speed it up.

Security and privacy
It is ironic that people add their entire life to Facebook but may be concerned about providing email address.

Using an SSL certificate and having a good privacy policy can help you address concerns about trust and privacy and keep your buyers happy.

Your domain name
The domain name is one of the most important parts of your whole buying experience.

Research by McAfee shows that some domain spaces are not as trusted as others. Some country code domains like .ru and .no might be seen as dodgy by customers from another region. A cheap space like .info (I know, I know) might not be instantly recognisable and create some friction for the buyer. Choose a widely known domain space and a good domain name that reflects your brand.

Get off the page to get your conversion off the hook!