Online Retailer Australia : Do more with less - The digital marketing tool box
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Ben Liau head of marketing at tinyme, Australia most loved children brand, shares his digital tool box on how to successfully build an online commerce business.
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Online Retailer Australia : Do more with less - The digital marketing tool box
- 1. 1 Do More With Less – The Digital Marketing Tool Box Ben Liau
- 2. 2
- 3. 3 5 reasons why you’ll love these tools...
- 5. 5 Offer Pop
- 6. 6
- 7. 7
- 8. 8
- 9. 9
- 10. 10
- 11. 11
- 13. 13
- 14. 14 Mail Chimp
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- 21. 21
- 22. 22
- 23. 23 Keyword Spy
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- 28. 28 SEO Toolset
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- 31. 31 Hootsuite
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- 36. 36 Majestic SEO
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- 40. 40 Chartbeat
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- 45. 45 Wrap up
- 46. 46 Extremely Excellent Speaker Ben Liau Marketing Manager benliau@tinyme.com twitter.com/benliau au.linkedin.com/in/benjaminliau Blog: www.digitalonlinestrategy.com
Editor's Notes
- Hi, Hows everyone doing. Hope everyone is enjoying the second day of online retailer. Today im going to talk about digital marketing tools, more specifically some of the digital marketing tools in my digital marketing tool box. There many great digital marketing tools out there, some relatively cheap and some really expensive. The expensive solutions will always tell you the cheap ones are crap (you get what you pay for), and ofcourse the cheap ones will say they aren’t crap. So Im here today to tell you about the tools ive tried, and recommend you the good ones that wont cost you an arm and a leg . I have tried many tools over the years, and spent a lot of time on software review sites. But really, the best way is to always to try it out for yourselves, but obviously not all of us have time for that. Lucky for you today going to share my knowledge and experience about the tools ive used and go over how you can use these to help your digital marketing. CLICK 1.09
- Ok Im going to talk about 10 tools that I use, or have used in the past. For each tool that I talk about, I will go over what it does, but more importantly how Ive used it, Ill share any tips I have and also mention some alternatives to the tools I use. Why you ask? Well not every tool is for everyone, so some of the tools suitable for me might not be suitable for you, vice versa. That’s why I mention some alternatives. Also there’s probably other great tools out there that I may have missed, so if you know of any good ones, please feel free to share them with me, because I always love testing new tools. CLICK 1.51
- Now here are 5 reasons why you are going to fall in love the tools im going to talk about: 1. You aren’t locked into any contracts, so you can stop with when ever you want. 2. Most of the tools im going to talk about are SAAS type solutions. (software as a service for the non techie it means web based solution, so no need to complicated installations) 3. There are no setup fees. 4. The tools are easy to use and relatively cheap. 5. Most come with a library of video tutorials, so if I don’t do justice to any of the tools in my presentation, you can always hop on their website to get a deeper understanding of how it works. Click 2.41
- Lastly before I begin. The tools im going to talk about cover a whole range of digital marketing channels: Including Email marketing Social Media Marketing Search Engine Optimisation Search Engine Marketing / Pay Per Click & Web Analytics So you guys are in for a treat. 3.02
- The first tool in my tool box is Offer pop Offer pop is a social media marketing platform that allows you to execute campaigns on facebook and twitter. By executing campaigns I don’t mean posting on your facebook wall with “ like this post and win, or comment on this post to win” Those type of mini wall comps are actually in breach of facebook’s terms and conditions . Im sure a lot of you didn’t know that right? Lorna Jane the brand initially lost all their fans (30k) because of breaching facebooks terms and conditions. So be careful. So when I say campaign I actually mean using 3 party facebook applications. Which is totally legal in facebook. These kinds of 3 party facebook app campaigns are quite popular at the moment, and im sure everyone on facebook have seen them around.. Click 3.51
- With offerpop you can create many of these types of campaigns. (ill show you some examples in the next slide) If you look on the left of the page you can see the kinds of campaigns that you can actually run. They span from photo competitions, to quizzes, to referral campaigns, and many more. The good thing about offerpop is, they also provide really great reporting on how your campaigns actually performed. We’ve run quite a few successful facebook campaigns using offerpop.. Click 4.23
- Heres one example of how we've used offerpop. This campaign was launched when we did our major rebrand from mooo to tinyme. It was our Discover tinyme and win! Campaign. So with the campaign we ran a competition with prizes and the goal was to obviously tell people about our rebrand and also get new fans, and get more email subscribers. We ran the campaign for a couple of weeks and overall the campaign was very successful for us. Click 4.55
- Heres a report of how the campaign went. As you can see the campaign went quite well, we got quite a few new subscriptions. And our facebook fan count went past the 10k mark during the time we ran the competition. Which was great, as we lost most of our fans when we transitioned from mooo to tinyme because we had to create a new account and start from scratch. With the campaign we also got a lot of positive feedback from fans about the rebrand, which was very encouraging. Click 5.31
- Here’s an example of a smaller campaign we ran. The goal was to generate some buzz around our new London book launch. We basically allowed our fans to engage with us, by letting them vote for which book cover they wanted on our new London book. We got quite abit of engagement on this campaign and there was an obvious and clear winner. This campaign ran for only a few days. Click 5.57
- So for a small campaign it did quite well. The campaign got quite a few votes and generated abit of buzz on facebook. Running little campaigns like this often is great for engaging your fans, and this is easy to setup with offerpop. Click 6.17
- So how much does offerpop cost? Well like any good application, it starts out free, but the price goes up as your fan count grows. The good thing about offerpop is you can pay for a full year and keep it at the same rate. We signed at a low tier when were transitioning, and our fans went up to 10k in a matter of weeks. So we really got some value for money. Alternatives to offerpop include social wildfire, north social, shortstack the reason we went with offerpop at the time was because offerpop was the only one that could have campaigns visible on mobiles. And because a good portion of our visitors use mobiles, offerpop was the best solution for us. Click 6.59
- Ok who in the room is using google analytics. Well if you arent using any web analytics tools you better jump on GA, while its still free. Im sure most of you know what GA does, it tracks everything that happens on your site. Click 7.18
- Now alternatives to GA, includes omniture, coremetrics, webtrends etc, all great web analytics tools that can do awesome things, but they will cost you thousands a year. And just because GA is free, doesn’t mean it’s not a great tool. Ill tell you a funny story about our experience with choosing a web analytics tool. This was 3 years ago, Ive been using Ga for a while, and after a conference like this I got all hyped up with going with a “more advanced” web analytics tool. We went with omniture, and to cut a long story short. 6 months later and 10k poorer out of my marketing budget, we had not achieved much at all, Why? because we didn’t realize how much work had to be done to implement it in the first place. With these more advanced tools you need more advanced planning, which involves a lot more time and extra resources. So guess what? After omniture we went back to GA. We also realized that we were only touching the surface of what we could really do with GA. Lots of more advanced things you can setup like filtered profiles, creating advanced segments, setting up alerts, tracking events and running content experiment, just to name a few. GA is very powerful tool and has been constantly evolving and improving. I really hope google keeps it free forever. Because they could easily charge for it, and everyone would pay. Well most people anyway. Click 8.33
- Ok by now, im sure most of you are quite familiar with monkeys in my presentation slides. (especially people who heard me speak last year) And im sure a lot of you are either using or have atleast heard about mail chimp. Mail chimp is definitely one of the most popular email service providers out there. And if email isnt one of your best performing digital marketing channels, then it definitely should be. Click 8.57
- Anyone who has used mailchimp will tell you its very simple to use. Its as easy as setting up a campaign, using the existing templates or if you a html quiz just code it yourself. Then just sending the email. And of course you can also do more advanced things like split test subject lines, and creating segments within you list. The interface is very straight forward, and anyone one could use it. Click 9.25
- The reporting is pretty good as well, its straight to the point and simple. and tells you how well your email performed. You can easily look at metrics like open rates, click thoughs, unsubscribes and on a higher level how your list is growing as well. But the best thing I like about mailchimp is this: Click 9.45
- Mail chimp easily integrates with all these software applications and more. There are actually pages and pages of applications that integrate with mailchimp. And the reason why there are so many applications integrating with mail chimp? Its because mailchimp has a million dollar developers fund for developers who builds integrations to mailchimp from other applications. Quite a good incentive right? So this means mailchimp easily integrates to most shopping carts, crms, analytics, social media and almost anything else. I have to say mailchimp is are probably one of the most innovative and fun email service providers out there. Click 10.25
- Pricing wise Mailchimp is free for the first 2000 subscribers on your list. The paid options are also quite cheap. Starts from $10. Alternatives to mailchimp range from the constant contacts, bronto, silverpops, cheetah mails, all very good solutions in their own rite. But if your just going to send emails out without the more intelligent stuff like shopping cart abandonment or a lengthy welcome series, its probably the best value for money. Click 10.55
- Google insights is an awesome free tool. We use it a lot for our marketing research. What does it do? It pretty much shows you data on what people are searching for on the web. Another thing you can use it for is to analyse search data in different global markets, which can be very useful for global expansion. Click 11.15
- Ok lets say I want to know if my next product idea has any potential. “Cloud storage” seems to quite hot at the moment so ive use it as an example. The search results show me how much that keyword has been searched over a period time. And from the graph it looks like its been really heating up over the past 3 years. It also shows you which countries have the highest search volumes for “cloud storage”. Surprisingly Singapore is first followed by USA, and India. This makes it easy to figure out which countries to target your business to. It also shows you the top search related terms, and rising stars. These are great if your looking for more keywords for your ppc campaign or for SEO. Click 12.05
- A cool thing you can do is run a simple search for your brand name to see how well your branding is progressing over time. This is a search on mooo As you can see search for our brand name progressively went up and peaked up until our rebrand to tinyme. You can also find out how well a marketing campaign went, by monitoring the spikes in brand name searches over the period that the campaign ran. Click 12.33
- Another thing you can use it for is to monitor you competitor’s brand name searches. On the screen ive compared 3 different brands, apple, dell and hp. Over the last 6 years. As you can see searches for the Apple brand has totally over taken the competition in the last few years. So google insights is definitely a handy tool to keep around. Click 12.57
- Now who here would love a crystal ball that they can use to spy on their competitors? Keywordspy is an awesome tool for spying on your competitors. You can use it for both SEO and paid search. Click 13.12
- With keywordspy you can find out what paid keywords your competitors are bidding on and what organic keywords they are ranking on. In this example ive used ebay. It also gives you an idea of other competitors in that space and shows snap shot of some of their ads. Click 13.32
- You can also drive further into their ads to see which ones are actually performing. A good metric to use is keyword spy’s ROI metric. Now its not the real ROI, the ROI refers to the profitability of the ad copy. It’s a calculated metric based on the ad’s recency and frequency. It also shows you the search volume, cost per click, average ad position and number of days the ad has been seen. But I use keywords spy to see what kind of ad copy is working on which kinds of keywords. Its a great too if you are just starting out your pay per click campaign to get ideas, or if you are expanding your campaign out. But just to keep in mind, in keyword spy the data isnt 100% correct (so do take it with a grain of salt), but it does although give you a good idea of what your competitors are up to. 14.34
- There are a couple of packages available. I use the research package, because I mainly use keyword spy for competitive research. Now one thing to note with keyword spy and with some of the other tools as well. There are no contracts, so if you don’t use them for 12 months in a year. My advice is to use it when you need it, and cancel or suspend it when you dont. That way you can save some money. An alternative to keywordspy is spyfu, which work in a similar way. So again it’s a preference thing. Click 15.07
- When Google’s adwords editor first came out. Life in adwords managing got so much easier. This is a great tool to use for managing your adwords campaigns especially large accounts with a lot of campaigns, adgroups and ads. The adwords editor interface lets you create and edit in things in bulk. You can use it for texts ads on search, you can also use it for display ads on the content network, and ad extensions and product extensions as well. You can also manage multiple accounts and transfer campaigns between accounts. We use this tool whenever we have new products to push through adwords, I always use the adword editor, because it 10 times faster than using google’s normal adwords interface. And its free. For us its been particularly useful when setting up new campaigns especially when we were expanding to the UK and more recently the US. And it was also very useful with our rebrand, I mean changing every destination URL of every ad from mooo to tinyme. We have over a thousand ads just in google. Thank God for this tool. Click 16.11
- OK, who here has heard of Bruce Clay? Bruce Clay is quite a famous SEO expert, and this is his tool. The SEO tool set has most tools you need all under one roof. It allows you to do keyword research, and competitor research You can analyse your site, or your competitors site, and you can monitor your keyword ranks and compare them against your competitors. Quite handy really. Click 16.37
- This is an example of how ive used it. With the seo tool set you can generate a top competitor report for a given keyword You can then analyze the top competitors against your own site, and see which areas of your site needs improving, in comparison with your top competition. Ok alternatives to this tool include the SEOMOZ tools, and raven tools. Both have similar functionality, so I guess it just come down to which tool you prefer using. The good thing about using a tool created by a well known seo expert is you know that the tool will always evolve with the changes in the Google algorithm. Because if it doesn’t the SEO expert will lose his credibility. 17.22
- Price wise it starts at 29.95 per month. And goes up based on how many domains you want to manage. We’re on a higher plan, because we use it for all our international sites as well. Click 17.35
- My next tool is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media management tool that gives you the ability to manage your social media networks from 1 interface and allows you to do some really cool things. There are 3 main things I use it for: Click 17.51
- 1st thing is for research I have it setup to monitor all mentions of the “tinyme” brand name in real time. Its great to have someone constantly monitor this, probably someone from customer service, so they can act on any negative or positive mentions right away. Another important thing to monitor is keywords people are using in their posts. E.g if someone mentions “nursery” or, ”gifts”, or ”personalised” I can assume they would love tinyme stuff, so I would definitely want to connect with them. Also with hootsuite you can look into a person’s social influence stats, and you can aim to connect with people with higher social influence. Another good thing to monitor is your competitor brand name mentions. Its great to know what your competitors are up to in the social sphere, also im sure you guys can think of other creative things you can do. Click 18.45
- 2nd thing is for posting. With hootsuite you can scheduling posts and post on multiple networks. Im sure a lot of you know how painful it is to always remember to post something on your social networks, and im sure a lot of your forget. I know I do all the time. So if you plan all the posts you want to do at the start of the week, just use hootsuite to schedule it all in and select all the social media networks you want to post it on. Saves you a lot of time. Click 19.18
- 3rd thing is for reporting Now hootsuite has a whole range of reporting that you can build into multiple reports. I wont go into all of them as there are too many. The example on screen is the report you get with the free version. It show you the engagement of links on your posts, which include number of clicks, what sources the clicks came from and from what country. Its great for measuring how much engagement a post got. With the other reports you can pull data from Google analytics, facebook insights, and other sources to build your own custom report. Click 19.53
- Hootsuite is quite cheap. $10 a month for the pro account. Free version is pretty good as well, but lacks some of the advanced reporting. Alternatives to hootsuite would be tweetdeck, which also works similarly , but it again comes down to preference. Click 20.07
- Ok, Who does the actual SEO for their company? Whos heard of the penguin update? Who got affected by the penguin update? Well for those that don’t know what the penguin update was, the penguin update was an algorithm update done by google to penalize sites with “unnatural link building” Linking building is a SEO technique used to get your site higher up the SE rankings. Theres a more detailed explanation for it, but for this presentation im just going to keep it simple So if you paid a guy in india to build 1 million links to your site in a week, you probably were affected by penguin. Anyway majestic SEO is a tool that analyses links to specific websites. So if you were hit by penguin , you would use majestic seo to analyse your own site , in order to “prune” those bad links to your site, and hope google will get your website back up in the search engine rankings. Lucky for us we didn’t get affected by penguin, but I use majestic seo quite often for competitor link analysis. CLICK 21.05
- {Majestic SEO is a tool that analyses links to specific websites} & {Linking building is a SEO technique used to get your site higher up the SE rankings. } So I use majestic SEO to analyse competitor sites to see the number of links and quality of links they have. This is just a snap shot of running jbhifi’s site through one of majestic SEO’s reports. You can see the number of referring domains to jbhifi.com.au and the number of external backlinks to jbhifi.com.au. It also show you how many of those links are from .edu site, and .gov sites, and breaks down how many are no follow, links from images, or redirects. This gives you a good indication of a site’s link profile, and you can use it to measure the link effectiveness of other sites as well. For more detailed analysis, you can also export out the link data from majestic seo into a CSV file to be analyse externally. Click 21.45
- Another cool thing you can do is compare your website with your competitors websites to see whos been getting more links over a time period This can be quite handy when you are planning your link building strategy. My tip is not to rush into massive link building projects, because if you do the penguin update will get you. Link building should be a slow process, So it will looks “natural” to google. And with google its all about being natural. Click 22.14
- There are a couple of packages available with majestic SEO Theres a free version which is not that insightful. My recommendation is going for the silver package 29.95 pounds a month. This is a good example of a tool that has gone up in price over time. There use to be a package that was only 10 pounds, when I first started using it. Unfortunately it no longer exists. Click 22.38
- The last tool in my toolbox is chartbeat. Chartbeat is an analytics tool that tracks your current website statistics in real time. So its kinda like looking though your website with x ray glasses. Very cool. The Geeks in the audience would love it. I know I do. Click 22.53
- With Chartbeat. You can see how many users are concurrently on your site, where they are coming from , and how long your site is taking to serve them up a page. Now this is the kind of tool that you would want to display on a separate screen in your office and have it turned on always, so you can spend the whole day staring at it. Especially if you’ve got a sale on. It shows you which page of your site most of your customers are on and also highlights the social media engagement your site has been getting. One thing it has that I find very useful is, you can setup alerts, so it emails you if your site has a record number of concurrent users, or if your website has gone down. Theres also an iphone app as well, which as the same alerts as push notifications, this can be quite handy when your on the move. Click 23.39
- This is what you see if you dive deeper into a specific page. Shows you what source your customers have come from, the number of new vs returning customers, and scroll depth. I usually go deeper into a page, when theres a lot of concurrent users on the page, just to check on the page’s load time. The last thing you want, is your users waiting minutes rather than seconds for their page to load. Click 24.01
- Another cool thing you can see is what countries your customers are coming from. This is really useful, especially if your launching in another country , and just hanging to see your first customers from that country. I know that’s what we were doing when we launched in the UK and USA. An alternative to using chartbeat would be google’s real-time analytics, but both display different results. According to chart beat, GA its not as accurate because it counts page loads instead of actually pinging the users. GA is also still in its Beta version. So I would stick with chartbeat for now. Click 24.38
- Chartbeat is relatively cheap and easy to setup. All you have to do is pretty much drop a snippet of java script code onto your site. And pop it up on a screen for everyone to see. It costs only $10 a month, which a pretty cheap. Well that was the last tool I am going to talk about today. Click 24.55
- Ok so those were 10 digital marketing tools in my tool box Now just to wrap up. I want to clarify that I have not been paid by any of these companies to talk about them. So all this advice is unbiased. { But If anyone over here works for any of the companies I talked about, id be more happy to take a post sponsorship fee. Anyone? Google perhaps? Just joking. } Also these are all solutions ive used before and my advice is based on how ive used them. There are probably many other ways you can use them, and if you find really cool ways, please email me and let me know. { And just to put it into context the cost of all the tools ive mentioned combined is still cheaper than a full page print ad. } Lastly, my advice is to always be on the look out for new and better tools. But be smart about it ! And don’t swamp yourself with tool many tools. You will find that the really good tools will be top of the range for years, but its always good to keep on the look out for better ones. Also a good thing to note is that great tools are nothing without great people to use them, so think about investing in great people as well. I hope all of you got something out of this today. And thank you for listening Click 25.50
- If you have any questions about what ive covered, or just want to chat. Here are my contact details, feel free to connect with me on linkedin or follow me on twitter, send me an email or follow my blog. Im always happy to help. Click 26.04