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Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management
There are lots of different means of marketing your product, and most companies are using a combination of different strategies and tactics to find their customers and then sell to them. But what happens when you only recognise the efforts of the final piece that actually led to the sale?  

Imagine a hockey team that only ever rewarded its forwards – the final player who kicks the goal. All the other players on the field: the defence who stop competitor goals going in, midfield who help to set the goal up, the goalie who is the final layer of defence against the competition – they’d all be quite upset. That’s exactly what you’re doing to your other marketing activities every time you reward that last click with the credit for your sale.  

What are the types of marketing activities that you should be tracking?
The simple answer here, is all of them – everything from your outdoor billboard to your website landing page, to the Google Remarketing that brought the customer back to the site 3 months after they first saw your billboard. Create a template up front to track all of these activities and work out how they work together to combine into a customer conversion.   Make sure you have all the various aspects that work together online hooked up to talk to one another – Google Analytics sync’d to Google AdWords; Facebook Conversion Tracking enabled on your website; your CRM linked to your Google Analytics. This will give you the most
complete picture of how all your marketing efforts are working together.  

What is an Attribution Model?
At its simplest Attribution is the term the digital industry uses to refer to credit being given for a sale to a particular customer touchpoint (your marketing efforts). There are many different models, four of the most commonly used below:   – Last Click Attribution – gives credit to the final touchpoint that leads to a customer conversion – Linear Attribution – which gives equal credit to all customer touch-points – Time Decay Attribution – which gives credit to the customer touchpoint the closer they are to a customer conversion – Last AdWords Click Attribution – gives credit to the final click on a paid media campaign (for example, through AdWords)  

Linear Attribution & E-Commerce
When it comes to e-commerce, 96% of shoppers don’t make a purchase on their first visit to a site. Which means you’re getting inaccurate conversion results if you consider only the last click that led to that customer sale. They may already have been to the site a few times, seen some remarketing ads and then decided to come back and make a purchase.   Personally, I’m a huge fan of Linear Attribution because it gives equal credit to all players on the field. If they don’t all exist and play in harmony together, then you’re at risk of never getting the opportunity to score the final goal.  

What’s an easy way to get an idea of your customer conversion path?
Helpfully Google provides easy access to this data for beginners. You can start by heading to Google Analytics and clicking on Conversions, then Attribution and this will give you a report that initially will default to Last Click Attribution but gives you the option to choose between and compare different attribution models.   The only caveat here is that you need to have Goals and Conversions enabled for your Analytics. Once you’ve done that and it has collected your data, you’re well on your way to understanding how multiple different marketing touchpoint impact your sales funnel.  

It’s true what the man said, knowledge is power and once you understand more about how all these marketing efforts contribute to your sales, you know more about where to spend your budget.
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Product Management
Read our post below on What Digital Strategy is, or just watch our 90 second explainer video at bottom!

When people ask what we do (and what is digital strategy) we typically get a lot of blank stares, nodding heads with glazed looks or outright looks of confusion followed by the tentative question – “So what does that mean exactly?”. Well it means a lot of things to different people but it boils down to this…  

Digital Strategy is a plan which you can follow that will help you to reach your business goals through use of technology. This plan will maximise the use of all of your online assets (your website, social accounts and advertising) to give you the biggest benefits in the shortest possible time (the best bang for your buck so to speak).  

The Analogy

We have a lot of experience in real estate, and that’s particularly useful for giving us this analogy:  Don’t confuse strategy with tactical campaigns, think of it like this, if you were building a house, before you start you need to survey the land and create a floorplan (that’s your strategy) and when you get going you’ll begin to decide what you want in each room (those are your tactical campaigns).  

Digital Strategy is similar to digital product management in that it is all about prioritising changes based on business value – making sure that you are working on the highest priority improvements at any given time. In organisations who truly adopt digital product management, this means reviewing all of that products suggested improvements – not just the ones that touch the website.  

Knowing What To Focus On

The core idea with looking at this plan as a holistic piece is that what you need most may differ depending on your business goals. For example, at a high level: if you are a consumer facing retail brand, with no e-commerce, your goal may be brand awareness, to get people informed of your product so that they go in store looking for it. In this instance, your targeted behavioural and demographic advertising is more important than your website user journey.  

Look at it another way, imagine your online assets are like football players on a field: SEO is midfield, UX is defence, and Paid Media is a forward etc. In isolation, these players are not much use, they require elements of the others in order to score goals. When you are playing, you need to know the opposition team’s strengths and weaknesses, and which players to target – which may use different elements of your team to achieve your goal.

Digital Marketing Strategy is exactly the same, let all the players work together, but know which ones to focus your effort on for a particular game.   If you’re new to this concept, you should start by establishing what your business goals are – you need to know where you are going before you leave to get there.

Creating Your Map

Once you have this down, you then look at all elements of online marketing to establish what will work best. Then you map it out the same way you would any journey. If you know how to drive then you’re ready to set off. If you don’t know the ins and outs of how to go about reaching your goals we can help – we can teach you how to drive there, so that in future you know the mechanics of how it all works.  

Lots of agencies these days offer SEO, UX, Social and Paid Media services in isolation but we believe you’re best to take the holistic approach to ensure you’re focussing on the changes that will effectively bring you to your business goals. Work with a company who actually cares about the result and will continue to give you ongoing support after the initial strategy has been developed. After all, you need to ensure your strategy is performing and adapts to changes in technology and marketing.

What Is Digital Strategy Explainer Video:




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Agile, Product Management, Professional Development
Being part of a start-up is exciting and oftentimes that means you’re moving so quickly that you might forget certain essential things. So keep yourself in check with this check-list.  

1. Start with your Addressable Market
Even if you have the greatest idea in the world, if no one wants to purchase or engage with it then it’s a non-starter. Work out your addressable market and don’t be overly optimistic. It’s better to drill your addressable market down as small as you can to make sure your business case still stands up with less people using the product.  

2. Take a holistic view
Before you begin looking at the business case, write down all the things that your product will need. Look at it laterally and investigate whether there are regulatory or legislation requirements. Establish whether you have any expertise in the areas concerned and if you don’t, build a team around you who can help figure it all out.  

3. Review competitor products
What other companies are out there who have built similar products? How do they perform, what are the strengths and weaknesses of those products and what is the gap that your product will fill? If they have 2 million purchases per month how long did it take them to achieve that goal and how much marketing investment was required?  

4. Build a business case with a long term view
Many small businesses fail within the first few years, up to 60% according to Huffington Post, so don’t just look at the numbers in the short term, look at your long term numbers. Extrapolate a business case that goes out to the 5 year mark. Yes it gets difficult when you’re launching and have no historical trends to rely on, but you can revisit and revise it as time goes on. The business case will serve as a guidance point on where you expected to be versus where you are. If you focus on the short-term, you might find you lose out on a viable long-term business that takes some time to get off the ground.  

5. Test the market
Now that you’ve established you believe there’s enough people in market who want your product, that there’s a gap in competitor products which you fill, and that there’s a long-term commercially viable business, it’s time to test your assumptions. Build your minimum viable product (MVP) to establish if there is enough interest in market before you start building the real thing. Remember your MVP doesn’t have to be functioning – it could be a video that explains the product and gets interested people to sign up; or it could be a site that isn’t actually hooked up in the back end. Its core function is to determine if you should proceed to build your product, it doesn’t have to actually be your product.
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Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management, SEO
We spend much of our time talking about digital strategy and how it can impact your business but don’t be fooled into thinking that it only applies to e-commerce sites.  

Smartphone penetration is now at an all time high (85% in Australia) and what that means is that Aussies are online a very high percentage of the time and use their phones for research on the fly. Need a bar recommendation in Melbourne? What’s the first thing you do? Google It. Need to find a good brunch spot in Bondi? Google It. Looking for a tradie to fix some things around the house? Google It. Looking for a piano teacher in the local area? Google It.  

That’s why it’s important that no matter what your business does you need to have an appropriate digital presence to make sure that you get found in the real world too.

User scenarios apply to all kinds of businesses:
– A massage and chiropractor who uses their site to provide information in their field and book appointments
– A boutique clothing store, who doesn’t sell anything online, but can provide information on the products they have in stock and opening hours
– Independent tutors and teachers who don’t work in schools but work for themselves

It’s important for a number of reasons:
– It’ll improve your brand recognition overall
– It gives you credibility

How many businesses do you use who don’t have some presence online? People are routinely doing more research before making purchases, so if you’re not online you won’t even make the draft.   Notice I say “presence online” and don’t specifically talk about mobile apps, websites or Facebook pages.

That’s because the most appropriate form of presence online is entirely dependent upon what your business is. It shouldn’t be a one size fits all approach but bespoke to your business. If you’re the type of business that takes bookings, then it makes sense to extend that online, if you’re a boutique store you may be best to focus on a great Google My Business listing which encourages people to rate and review you and if you’re an independent tutor then a website may be the most appropriate forum – supplemented by listings on things like Hot Frog.  

Spend some time researching how others in your field position their offering online and learn from it but whatever you do, don’t ignore it or you may find you become obsolete IRL (in real life ;)).  

Featured Image Credit: www.seo-plus.co.uk
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Publishing, SEO
SEO can be a complicated beast to the uninitiated. There are no real rules published by Google so it really is a skill-set that is entirely based on experience and history. These are our top 5 tips for SEO success – whether you’re in real estate or e-commerce.  

1.  Checkout how your site is rated in terms of speed
With the launch of its Accelerated Mobile Pages program, Google and the rest of the world is increasingly rewarding the speed of delivery. Run a diagnostic on your site and then fix the related problems. Not only will your search ranking thank you but your users will too. Recent data shared by Google shows that the probably of a user bouncing from your website increases by 32% when the page load takes 1 – 3 seconds.  

2. Use Unique Meta-Descriptions
Each of your products, or properties, should be set to include a unique meta-description that accurately describes your product or property thereby helping Google to find your page with more context.  

3. Don’t keyword stuff
You know what they say, less is more. Google’s code (or googlebot as it’s commonly known) is pretty sophisticated and it can tell when you’re trying to pull the wool over its eyes. So don’t go crazy on the keywords, use the most relevant ones and don’t be overly repetitive on the page. It knows when you have relevant content, so trust in its expertise and make sure the content makes sense for a human too.  

4. Review your site errors
If you’ve got lots of people coming to a page and not converting (either buying or contacting you) then it’s worthwhile reviewing your website errors and checking to see if there are pages not found or not loading properly. Good for the user, good for Google.  

5. Add a sitemap, and markup your data
If it’s available to you, use google rich snippets to give more colour and context to your content. You can use them for products, events, recipes, news articles and video. They’ll then show your content at the top of the page with a bit more detail – images, review ratings and descriptions.    

If you have questions on how to optimise your existing site without reinventing the wheel, hop on over to our SEO Strategy page.
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Product Management
If you’re publishing a website that is driven by content, as most are these days, then there are two key building blocks you should begin with before you even consider hiring a designer or developer:
1. User Personas that will visit your site
2. Content model of your site
Getting these two simple things correct at the very outset will ensure your site is setup to be well ranked in Google search results. It’s the online equivalent of surveying the land and putting in deep foundations when you build a house.  

What are User Personas?
User Personas are a term thrown about a lot by “digital people” trying to make the landscape seem more complex than it is, but there’s nothing complex about them. At a base level, your user personas are the groups that your client base falls into – broken down into all the relevant information that client may be looking for and their habits and likes. For example, if you take our site, some of our customer user personas would fall into the below categories:

1. Small to Medium Sized Publishers
– Typically a business that is sub-75 employees
– Produces content that is distributed online (via websites, mobile apps, content aggregators etc)
– Has a small tech team but limited holistic digital expertise in the form of product management or SEO specialists
– May have one or more sites that are not yet responsive in nature

2. Real Estate Companies
– Franchise, regional or national
– May have an IT team but no in-house digital expertise in the form of product management or SEO
– Require assistance on improving their online presence to maximise customer leads on potential properties for sale

3. Start-Ups
– Still in the stage of boot-strapping, yet to hire digital expertise in-house
– Need help with turning their idea into a product and doing the logistical thinking around factors that could impact that product’s success
– Actively pursuing a product in one of the following areas: mobile apps, responsive websites, music streaming, mobile SMS & IVR
Or, another example would be a real estate website. Think of all the possible customers it has and then list those customers in order of importance, e.g.:
– Prospective Sellers
– Potential new franchisees
– Property Developers looking for contact details
– Other agents who want to work for the company  
When creating user personas try to come up with as much detail as possible. Make them a real person, give them a name, age, family status etc. All of this information will assist you in getting inside that persons head and will ensure your site is best tailored for them.  

I’ve got my user personas – now what is a content model?
Your content model should be the next thing to consider. A content model is exactly that, a description of all the types of content you plan to include on your product or website, information on how that content will interact with one another and details on what type of content should be structured versus not structured. Google gives ‘extra points’ to sites that have a well structured content model which makes it easier for it to read.

By having structured data, you can then more easily manipulate that data in future without having to reverse engineer your code. An example here may be a recipe website which has been created with a structured content model and taxonomy. Having this in place means that you can easily search on all recipes which are “Thai” in cuisine and you can sell advertising against those. It also allows you to easily extract that data from your CMS and promote it via a partner website. You can more easily manipulate that data by running a database query so that for every occurrence of the word “chicken” inside ingredients, you can insert a sponsor name in front.

Building the foundations that your business runs on is more important than the speed with which you get your website live. Solid foundations will lead to a more sustainable, stronger, business in future. If this article has inspired you and you’d like to find out where you can improve online to better your business, contact us for more details.  

User persona image borrowed from Roman Pichler – if you don’t know agile and want to learn, his books are a great start.
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Agile, Product Management, Professional Development
Now that we’ve established what a product manager does, just how does that product manager prioritise competing requests that come from all areas of the business? In our mind there’s only one way to do this: Business Value.  

It’s important to note that business value doesn’t just refer to actual dollars brought in but to the long term value of the product and its users – all of which can easily be traced back to dollars, but it’s not just about sales!

There’s a common misconception that perhaps the way to make sure you get your requirement easily seen to is to be the best salesperson for that requirement. We reject that statement – strongly. It’s not about razzle dazzle, it’s about how valuable that feature is to the overall business.  

How do you assess business value?  
It’s not an exact science and it’s not expected to be, but it’s the best tool you have to gauge priorities in development. Take into consideration all angles:
– How does it tie back to the overall business and product vision?
– Is it a USP and something that will set you apart in market?
– What is the associated effort from the team to put it in place?
– Is it attached to a commercial campaign or will it drive user acquisition – how much of each is it worth?
– Are there other reasons you might consider doing it (to get an internal department on side for example)?  

Once you have all the answers to these questions it’s time to do some maths in your head. Add up all the pieces and then weight them relative to all the other requirements in your backlog. The ones that come out on top (have the biggest “bang for buck” so to speak) are the ones you do first.  

Now you continue to iterate on these calculations, always re-estimating and re-evaluating your bang for buck to make sure that your team is working on the items with the highest business value at any one time. By working in this way it may not always be obvious why you have chosen specific features (they may be hard to develop) or why you have said no to some features (when they are easy to develop but don’t tie back to the business vision) but you’ll always be working on the right thing.  

If you’re after a bit more insight into the overall agile product owner process, watch this video on YouTube.

Image Credit: Photo by bonneval sebastien on Unsplash
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Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management
It seems that ad blockers are getting more and more air time these days, with many in the digital media industry confused about just what they mean for your business. We’ve taken a look and have given the basic facts on what you need to know if your online business is ad-funded.

What are ad blockers?
Ad Blockers are a software tool that users can download and install to run on their browser (on any device) which will prevent your ads from showing. They can be downloaded for free, or users can opt to pay for a more premium version. Some run on an open-source honour system, requesting that users pay what they think is fair. Typically, they block any ads from being shown on a page, for example on smh.com.au:

With ads:

Screen Shot 2015-08-18 at 7.53.25 am


Without ads:

Screen Shot 2015-08-18 at 7.53.53 am
For the end user, they get a much clearer reading experience and, one would argue, a slightly faster load time.  

What is the usage of ad blocking software?
As with any product, there are always early adopters and usually they fall into the categories of adult entertainment, gaming and tech. So if your business falls into one of those categories, it’s time to start coming up with a backup plan. There are 144 million ad blocker users worldwide, which is growing at a rate of 70% year on year. As it grows, your potential revenue pool shrinks – so it’s time to act now. Usage is highest amongst those between 18-29 and skews towards the male demographic.  

Who are the companies who are building ad blockers?
There are a good few options out there for users: Ad Blocker Plus, uBlock, AdGuard, Fair Blocker but contrary to popular belief this isn’t something being done only by the little guys. Apple’s next iOS release (iOS9) will make ad blocking a reality for web developers, allowing them to create extensions to prevent ads from loading and block cookies amongst other things. All of which goes hand in hand with some improvements they’re making to their News app (a similar idea to Flipboard), where they are encouraging digital publishers to provide their content and opt-in to iAd (Apple’s ad serving software). So when ad blocking goes mainstream on iOS, the only way to monetize digital content through ads will be through Apple’s own ecosystem.  

Where does all this sit legally?
Coming after the business model of a company is nothing new and the internet has transformed the business model of many a company – you only have to look at the music industry to see that.  Some ad blocking companies maintain a whitelist which insists that:
  1. Ads are easily identifiable
  2. Ads are non-intrusive to the user experience
  3. Ads must be appropriate for the site that they are being served on
All of which seems to be reasonable. But one company, AdBlock Plus, when reviewing those sites that have requested white-listing, makes a determination of the size of the company, and if they are big enough, then has their parent company request a fee before going through the white-listing process.  

What are your options to defend your business revenue?
It’s clear customers have had enough of intrusive pop-ups, overlays and interstitials. At a time when the other buzzword in the industry is viewability, how do you make sure your advertiser clients get their ad seen by your users without hampering the site experience? Native content is one way to go. Rather than having advertising that doesn’t relate to your users, have the kind that is meaningful and useful for them. Just make sure not to ad serve it – otherwise, it’ll get blocked in the process!
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Agile, Product Management
A friend of ours used to joke that the name of this company should be Vertical Slice because of the number of times we’d say it in a given day and how we’re forever having to explain to new people just what it means. It’s an agile term and yes, I know it sounds like we’ve drunk the kool aid – because we have.  

So, just what is a vertical slice? Well it’s one way of describing a software development practise that can be applied to pretty much anything in life and it boils down to this: rather than developing different pieces of the puzzle in isolation, instead, work on making the smallest possible bit of the puzzle all work together end-to-end first.

For example, if you were making a trifle you would start with a very thin mould (thin slice) where you layer all the ingredients in on top of one another, leave it to set in the fridge immediately (where it sets much quicker because it’s not the full cake), then take it out, test it out and see what it tastes like (the customer response).  

mke-agile-032014-slicing-the-cake-user-story-decomposition-4-638
There are lots of advantages to developing this way. In the first instance, because you’re making all the layers of the cake work together at the start, you inherently reduce your risk of blowing your deadline by working with technologies that might be difficult to integrate. You identify problems much faster, thereby giving more time in the project for thinking of a solution (rather than the converse which would leave you at the end of the project rushing to make layers work together).  

Secondly you get to demonstrate a version of the end feature to your customer much faster, meaning you can learn from their feedback about whether this was what they wanted in the first instance and what you can do to improve the feature based on their actual requirements (not just what you think their requirements are).  

Thirdly, it gives you the option to launch the full product faster. You cut out wastage in developing features and functions that are not desired by the customer (no matter how logical they may seem to the feature team) and, if needed, you can launch a solution that makes a date requirement but doesn’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles that originally were envisaged. Meaning you get to market faster than your competitors.  

We could go on but you get the idea. Take your requirement and boil it down to the simplest possible variation. For example, if your requirement is that customers can login to your site, and the full version has login across multiple different types of accounts, start by doing login just with Facebook. Don’t style it in your initial story. Boil it back to the basic requirements: – A customer can login from X device, using X browser, via their Facebook credentials This will give you immediate visibility of any technology problems and allow you to pivot your requirement much earlier without having wasted valuable resource on design.  

*Vertical slice slide borrowed from Dave Neuman @ Slideshare
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