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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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Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management, SEO
Many people love to flick through property images online – they’re well shot, usually highly aspirational and give you an insight into your neighbours lives – but these images are more than just property-porn, and should be used to their fullest beyond just on the property listing on major portals like realestate.com.au and domain.com.au.  

Real Estate companies are a bit of a special case when it comes to digital marketing because their primary customer is not the one you immediately think of – the buyer. Even though real estate companies spend a lot of money advertising to the buyer, their primary source of income is the seller but some do not optimise their homepage for that user.  

Speaking to all your customers
One of the first things we always begin a conversation with is establishing who your most important user is, and then optimising your website to speak to that person in the first instance – or we review your website user experience in other words. In the case of real estate that person is the vendor. So, rather than having the ability to search for a property as the top item in the content hierarchy – you should first have the ability to search for an agent or office. Champion your office location contact details and think through the content of the agent profile – always with the vendor in mind.
 
Targeting customers who know they want to sell
If you are spending money on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) make sure that you’re getting a good return from it by designing a landing page that is specific to your campaign. Keep it simple, on brand and with one clear call to action. SEM is a great way to put yourself in front of customers who already know that they want to sell their house but what if you want to reach customers who haven’t yet made that decision?
 
Targeting customers who don’t know they want to sell
Using data and technology to find new customers (programmatic media advertising) is a great way to target potential vendors. Use digital platforms to find users according to their demographics and behaviour, meaning your brand is front of mind when they decide to sell their house.
 
Targeting customers who don’t know they want to buy
If you’re trying to sell a home that is high-end, which typically would have a long sale cycle because of its high value (and therefore lower number of customers who can actually afford to buy it), doing your own programmatic media campaigns is a brilliant way to reach those customers wherever they are browsing on the internet – not where you think they might be. It’s a low-cost, easily trackable means of advertising, which comes with the added advantage of then being able to understand in real-time who is interacting with your ad and from that create new lookalike audiences, thereby exposing your ad to more potential buyers.
 
Making sure you join the dots
When you make the decision to go down this pathway, make sure you join the dots between the various parts of this same campaign. Ensuring that your website can talk to your AdWords which can talk to the other buying platforms – the more complete data you have the more knowledge you have to feed back into future campaigns.
 
Championing your amazing content on social media
As we said at the start, your photography is your hero, so use it for everything it’s worth on social media platforms – Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook are your key platforms here. Don’t just post links to the property listing on your website, use the different types of tech available on the platforms to help sell property – Instagram Stories / Facebook Live videos of auctions and inspections. It’s great to market your properties through the major portals but remember they are only one of the channels open to you to find buyers.

There are lots of other ways you can do more online for you to find new vendors. We love a bit of property-porn so if you want some assistance with your digital marketing – shoot us an email.
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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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