Digital Marketing Essentials (scroll down to view video)
Olivia:
Hello, everyone. This is Vaughnn and I am Olivia. I’m from Officeway. And Vaughnn looks after our website. We first called Vaughnn when our office furniture website, which is officeway.com.au … It just crashed. The shopping cart was doing, it just wasn’t working. It wasn’t adding in the total value of the goods. It was doing all sorts of strange things and because it’s such a major part of our business, it was a bit of a disaster. And so we were looking for someone to help us and we got on to Vaughnn who fixed it within a day.
Vaughnn:
Within a day.
Olivia:
Yay!
Vaughnn:
I love fixing problems.
Olivia:
And we were so impressed. I had been toying with the idea of updating the website and we were really impressed with your work and we said, “Let’s do it.” And we gave Vaughnn the job of completely revamping our officeway.com.au website from the ground up. Completely refreshed it and Vikki can tell you. Vikki you can confirm this, we were chatting yesterday.
We were looking at the figures and the office furniture sales have gone really well and we put that down largely to the website thing, so good. So thank you. And also-
Vaughnn:
It was a good project.
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Olivia:
Yeah, we’re pretty proud of it. And the other thing that you do is help us out with SEO, which Search Engine Optimization. Now before we get on to that, I just want to let you know about the other side of Vaughnn too because we’ve all got sides to ourselves outside what we do for a job. And I’m going to show this picture. That’s Vaughnn, a.k.a. The Relay Man. There he is with some lovely ladies doing Zumba.
Vaughnn:
I did Zumba too but I’m not very normally very good at Zumba but Relay Man’s good at Zumba so, yeah, that was fun.
Olivia:
So Vaughnn is, and we could go on all day about that because I know that’s a huge passion is to volunteer and help out the Cancer Council and that’s part of the fundraising.
(reading Facebook comment) Officeway website just caused a massive increase in sales, yes.
Okay, so let’s get into it. Okay, let’s start with SEO seeing that’s what you help us with our website and our technical web issues. And SEO, I’ll let you explain what that is.
Vaughnn:
So SEO is so many different factors.
Olivia:
So should we start what it stands for?
Vaughnn:
SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization. So basically anything to do with getting a website better in the search engine, and there’s two types of SEO. There’s onsite SEO, which is things you can do on your website, things like page titles and making sure your images have words on them rather than just be called X, Y, Z and a bunch of numbers. It’s better to put a bunch of words on the pictures that relate to the picture. So they’re all onsite things you can do, and then there’s offsite things, which is about building the links to your website and things like that. So SEO isn’t just … Yeah, it’s complicated. So that’s why you need specialists to come in and help you with that.
So I can do basic SEO, but to get really in depth SEO, I’ve got people that I can get to help with that as well. So if you go to your website, and I know we were talking earlier when people couldn’t hear us, about how we’ve got a plug-in on the Officeway website, it’s called Yoast, Y-O-A-S-T. It’s a Search Engine Optimization plug-in for WordPress. Basically that allows you (to optimise) on each of your pages, and I would recommend optimizing each page, especially if you’ve only got a smaller site, not an e-commerce site. If you’ve got an e-commerce site with hundreds of products it can take … How long does it take to optimize every page? Quite a while.
But if you’ve got a small website, you can optimize the whole site pretty easily. And it allows you to see in the back end of your website exactly what it will look like in Google when you do a search result. So the page title, which is pretty crucial because you want to stand out in Google, so you want it to say something that’s going to appeal to the person that’s doing the search on Google. And then the snippet, which is the next little bit of text on the page description. You want that to stand out as well, maybe even have a call to action. Some people say put the phone number in there. It all really depends on what it is that you’re trying to get people to do on your website. So, yeah.
Olivia:
So, yeah. That’s that little bit, isn’t it? When you’re searching in Google and you see all those, that list of different things come up, the title for each-
Vaughnn:
Yeah, the title-
Olivia:
Site and the little bit of text underneath. You can manipulate that-
Vaughnn:
You can manipulate that.
Olivia:
With Yoast at the back end to make it-
Vaughnn:
Yeah, otherwise what Google will do is guess off the page. They do generally a good job, because remember Google is, their whole business model is about being the best search engine, so they want to give the best results for whatever you’re searching for. So they’re making their money off the ads that people put at the top of the search results and at the bottom and things like that, so they want to make sure that people use their search engine. So don’t be scared of Google. Just make sure you’re putting great descriptions on your pages and good text, especially in that description.
Olivia:
Yep. So Google will throw something up anyway automatically, but it’s nice if you know where to look and you can make sure you have it-
Vaughnn:
That’s right.
Olivia:
Have it there in the most optimal way. Yeah, and so you were saying just before to keep active on the page. So keep adding content so it gets found, so you get around it.
Vaughnn:
So depending on what your business is all about … Does Yoast work for non-web price sites? There will be a plug-in that lets you do it. Just depends on-
Olivia:
So it might not be Yoast, it might be something else?
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so if you’re using something like Joomla or one of the other-
Olivia:
Hootsuite? Is that one that does it or not anymore?
Vaughnn:
Hootsuite is an application for social media-
Olivia:
Yeah, that’s right.
Vaughnn:
So you can link in all your Twitter accounts and things like that. Yeah, so-
Olivia:
That’s not the one I’m thinking of. Yep.
Vaughnn:
But I can definitely find one for, each of your CMS will have a tool that will do it-
Olivia:
So maybe people can comment on what their platform is like if it’s Wix or if it’s-
Vaughnn:
Yeah. I’m not sure about Wix. Wix will have it inbuilt as well. So really the key is that page title and making sure that that page text and somewhere in your content management system it will let you tinker with that. So you get the best result in Google when it comes to that.
Olivia:
Okay. So what should people … Did I ask? I asked it before. So now I’m losing track if I asked it this time or the time no one heard us. What do we ask to make sure that we’re getting someone who’s actually doing a good job with SEO?
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so if you’ve got somebody who’s doing SEO or you’re looking for somebody with SEO-
Olivia:
(reading comment on the screen) Drupal.
Vaughnn:
Drupal. Yep, that’s another platform as well. So there would be a tool or a mechanism within Drupal to actually control those page titles. And there’s a certain length of string that you’ve got and most of the time the platform will actually let you control that. And then the description, you should be able to have control over that because you want to have control. You don’t want Google to guess what people are searching for because you want to get results from having a webpage up. So what were we talking about just before that?
Olivia:
Okay, getting someone good? How do you know that they’re-
Vaughnn:
Getting someone good.
Olivia:
Going to be good and you’re not wasting your money on someone?
Vaughnn:
Well, you want them to appear on the first page or second of Google if they’re promoting themselves as being good at SEO. So you want to find somebody who actually has great testimonials, and people who’ve got results from it. So I remember years and years ago, when I was first doing websites for people, there was a lady who had a scrapbooking website and she had a little shop. And she didn’t have that many products online and we rebuilt her web shop, put some of her products in there, and just the rebuild of her website and adding all of her products in there and optimizing the titles of the pages, I didn’t do anything else, her sales tripled from her website. Yeah, so by doing those things, probably not as much impact now because everyone’s doing it, but yeah. So making sure page titles and your images are labelled correctly. These are some basics that people should do before they get into the fad things that are out there.
Olivia:
So rather than maybe optimizing for a broad keyword, for example, like office furniture Melbourne. We’d love to be at the top for that, but maybe for, if we’ve got a page on, using my industry because I know I work on the website, an office chair or something. Are we best on that particular page to optimize for ergonomic office chair?
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so whatever that page or product is, you should optimize for that product or that page. Especially if you’re doing a shopping cart because when somebody’s searching for a specific type of chair, you want yours to come up on the front page of Google. People often optimize or they used to optimize just the front page, but if you’ve got a website with 100, 200 pages, you want all of them to be coming up on front page depending on what people are searching for.
Olivia:
So if someone’s searching for … Hi, Jeff. If someone is searching for, for example it’s HR Staff and Stuff, or they’re looking, they might have a page on a particular staff issue so instead of just the broad-
Vaughnn:
Just rather than a broad topic-
Olivia:
Broad topic they might be found on a particular problem that someone’s having with their staff if they’ve got a blog on it, which is probably another thing I would like to work on is all these live interviews is have them on our website as blogs. So that would be-
Vaughnn:
We could, yeah.
Olivia:
That would be an extra SEO benefit, wouldn’t it?
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so I think we were talking about this earlier. If your website has 6 or 10 pages and you don’t regularly update it, Google will visit your site less. So there’s no point in Google visiting your site every day if the content hasn’t changed for like three months. But if you’ve got new articles, people commenting, all this sort of stuff happening on your website all the time, then Google will visit more often.
Olivia:
So interaction on your website and allowing comments is a?
Vaughnn:
Yeah, but I wouldn’t want to write comments because sometimes people will write nasty things.
Olivia:
Write dodgy things.
Vaughnn:
So yeah, keep new content, refresh content. There are some tricks if you want to really get in to making more people visit your site because there’s things called content spinners or text spinners where you can actually put a block of text on your page but never have to revisit editing your page again. And what will happen is every time or every few times it loads, it’s probably not really appropriate to do it for everyone but some people might be appropriate, it will flick around the text. So instead of saying, “We are,” you might put, “They are”. And so every second or third time someone visits, the text will change just automatically.
Olivia:
Oh my God. They have that?
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so you can do thing. It’s called text spinning or content spinning. Yeah, so if someone wants to look at that, that’s one of those, that’s something I would not suggest to everyone.
Olivia:
Okay. All right. What about other areas? I mean, we’d all love our advertising or something about our businesses to go viral. What are the elements that help things go viral?
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so I never read books but someone from my Kris Kringle this year gave me this book, which was all about making things go viral and in a digital age type of stuff. And there are actually some factors, but if you do all the factors it doesn’t guarantee that it will go viral. But one of the things on there was … What was the first one I explained earlier? Was stories. So telling a story is better than just a tagline. So we remember some people like AAMI because of Rhonda and Ketut. And we remember the Meerkats because of Aleksandr. And we remember Captain Risky as the insurance company. So they tell a story through their advertising. And sometimes at Christmas you’ll see Apple or Telstra put together one of those really nice ads where basically it takes you to the end before you know what company it is. But what they’re hoping is that you’ll engage with that whole story and get a feel for what their company’s about through that story, and that you’ll stay obviously to the end to see who it is that’s advertising that. So stories is one of those factors.
Olivia:
So it takes a lot of imagination then, doesn’t it? And-
Vaughnn:
Well, you have to think about what you’re selling, I suppose. So when we have websites, we’re actually selling something. So, yeah.
Olivia:
Okay. And finding ways to tell those stories, I guess.
Vaughnn:
And finding creative ways of telling stories. So one of the other factors is emotion. I think I’ve already given you the answer but your answer earlier when I asked you, “What emotion you thought would be the most impactful when you’re wanting to make something go viral?”
Olivia:
Okay. Yes. You asked me before when no one could hear.
Vaughnn:
I think you said sadness or-
Olivia:
And I said, no, I said humour-
Vaughnn:
Humour, that’s right.
Olivia:
Because the funny ones seem to go viral.
Vaughnn:
But it’s not humour. I would suggest that it’s awe. So when we’re in awe of something, that’s where the word awesome comes from. So think of Susan Boyle for example. So when she came up on the stage, she was this larger lady, wasn’t dressed that flash from memory. I think in the way they were telling the story on the TV, people were laughing at her when she came on the stage. And then all of a sudden she sang and people were, they were more in awe than of anything from her. So awe is probably a really good factor.
Another one would be how many times do people post pictures on their Facebook nowadays of food? And then it’s not just meat and three veg they’re posting. They’re posting milkshakes that have 70 ingredients to them or hot chocolate that has fairy floss on the top that you pour and it’s all interactive. So these things are, they’re awesome. And that’s why people share them.
So it’s about awe, I think, more than anything. That emotion of awe. If you can make people go, “Wow, look at that.” Yeah. And so Susan Boyle was also the story of Susan Boyle. So if you add the story and the emotion together-
Olivia:
I notice that all the time being a singer. I notice that those ones that have impact on these X Factor shows and things like that. I love Susan Boyle. I think she’s got a gorgeous, gorgeous voice and I love listening to her, but part of what got her attention besides the voice is, would people have listened to her if they didn’t get the story … They got your attention first with that story, didn’t they?
Vaughnn:
There was the story.
Olivia:
And then she got heard, which was beautiful. So there was the snigger and everything, like you say, and then the shock. Wow!
Vaughnn:
So there are six factors that our professor came up with, so they’re just two of them. It’s like, yeah, telling a story and that emotion of awe because it’s awesome.
Olivia:
Okay. So, that kind of inspires me to want to have … Those ideas are easier to come with when you’re in groups of people, I think. So I kind of want to get together and brainstorm-
Vaughnn:
I think if you work togther, you’re better off and you come up with a wider range and sometimes it’s not always the weirdest idea that’ll be … So you know some of these milkshakes are so complicated-
Olivia:
These freak shake things, aren’t they?
Vaughnn:
The one that always gets me and I really have to do it soon is the hot chocolate with the fairy floss on top.
Olivia:
I don’t know that one. Okay, so there are many different ways of digital marketing. Tell me about complimentary and multi-channel marketing.
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so I’m really excited because for the last 10 years or so I’ve been mainly focused on the web. But for the last year I’ve been working with a company that does more direct mail and things like this, like the newsletters you get in your mailbox and things like that. And they’ve always wanted to set up a digital enterprise part, so doing fax marketing and email marketing that they do now, but they also want to do websites. And so we’re setting up a thing, which is all about targeted marketing, and so we’ll have freelancers work with us and essentially multi-channelers using multiple types of marketing at the same time. So a client might come along and need some sort of campaign put together and the best way of getting it out might be through email marketing and doing some search engine marketing. So we’ll put together campaigns like that.
So multi-channel marketing is really about using multiple channels of different types of marketing. So the best types of marketing will always be face-to-face, but it’s really hard for one person to visit a thousand people every day, that’s why we use social media, and business networking and things like that. I’m a big fan of that because again, that’s word of mouth and you get recommendations through that. So word of mouth and face-to-face are the two things that you can never beat because if you get told, “Here’s a plumber. We’ve used them before. They’re really great.” You’re going to use that ahead of somebody who you just go and Google online. So, yeah.
Olivia:
People ask for recommendations all the time. It’s that trust.
Vaughnn:
Well this is a question I had, and I’ve been asking people all week or for the last couple of weeks actually. Is when somebody rings you and it’s a new customer, do you ask them where they heard about you?
Olivia:
We have at certain times done that and then it falls away, to be honest. It’s a real discipline to do that all the time.
Vaughnn:
Because it’s really not the right question to ask because where they heard about you might not have been the first place they looked. So where did you first start looking for somebody like me is probably the better question to ask. Because where they first looked, isn’t that where you want to actually be advertising and marketing yourself? Rather than on Facebook, which was the third place they looked? You want to be at that first place they looked, which might not be on Google. So now we’ve got all these groups on Facebook and there’s a recommend feature on Facebook now. You might find when you ask the people who come, a whole percentage, a bigger percentage is using a different channel than you actually imagine they are. So asking people where they first looked for you is probably better than “Where did you find us?”
Olivia:
Right. I wonder whether people will be able to tell us if they’re watching us on a mobile device or a computer at the moment. Now, how about a thumbs up for a mobile device and a heart for a computer? Will this work? I’m not seeing any love guys. That’s all right. Never mind. But obviously, people are using mobile devices more and more. But we still have our computers. A heart, computer.
Vaughnn:
It’s a heart. Someone on their computer.
Olivia:
Thank you.
Vaughnn:
Multiple hearts.
Olivia:
Oh, what have we got? Oh, lots of love.
Vaughnn:
I think they like-
Olivia:
Everyone’s on the PC. Okay, so how do you make sure … Oh, I love seeing that. It just feels lovely seeing all those hearts.
Vaughnn:
A mobile with headphones in, that’s good too.
Olivia:
Good one, Tanya. Okay, so how do we make sure-
Vaughnn:
So mobile and desktop.
Olivia:
That we’re optimized for both?
Vaughnn:
You definitely need to be optimized for both. Some people will say you need to optimize your website for a mobile and then build it for a desktop. I sort of build websites the other way around, but you definitely need to make sure that it doesn’t just work on a desktop PC but it works on a laptop, it works on a notebook, it works on a mobile, it works on iPad. So you need to make sure all of these things are covered. And a good web designer or developer should be able to build a website primarily using either a foundation based framework or another one called Bootstrap where you can actually build a website in columns so that when you go to a smaller device, imagine your website is built with blocks, it can move around and the boxes fit better on a mobile device-
Olivia:
Adjust.
Vaughnn:
Yeah. So there is a way, and what I might do is put a link later to show people how. I found definitely you can do it on Chrome and you can definitely do it in Firefox where you can actually, without leaving your desktop, click a button or two and see what your website will look like on different devices.
Olivia:
Yep. You showed me that first when you were working on our website. I think in Google Chrome it was in developer’s tools or something?
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so you inspect an element and then-
Olivia:
Or somewhere at the top where you can choose-
Vaughnn:
It’s really easy to do and it’s really easy to then look around what your website will look like rather than having to go and find 20 different devices.
Olivia:
Yep, you can see it all on your desktop screen.
Vaughnn:
You can see it. Yep.
Olivia:
It just shows you-
Vaughnn:
And then if your web developer is telling you, “Oh yeah, it’s really mobile friendly. It’s really good.” You can actually go, “Well, it doesn’t actually look that when I do it using this tool.”
Olivia:
Isn’t there also, that reminds me, there’s some sort of Google thing where they test out … There’s some Google site somewhere.
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so there’s lots of Google tools.
Olivia:
There’s a Google site where they test your website, I think.
Vaughnn:
Yeah, so there used to be this thing called Webmaster Tools and they’ve just renamed it. I’ve just been getting emails about it for all the different website that I have in my account. Where … Because I’m using-
Olivia:
Because I’m using my PC to design stuff at the same time. Yeah, it’s easier on PC, I find still.
Vaughnn:
Yep, it’s easier on PC. But you can…at the same time as using a PC you can actually use your PC and look at what it’s going to look like on a mobile. So it’s perfect. I use it all the time. In fact, I have two screens normally so-
Olivia:
If you’ve got any questions too that you’d like to try on Vaughnn.
Yeah, we’re seeing the comments. I’ve had trouble with that in previous ones, but I can see the comments. Yay! I might be if I’m missing any of you all.
Vaughnn:
So what was I talking about? I was talking about-
Olivia:
Sorry.
Vaughnn:
Got side-tracked, have we? Yeah, we might come back to that. Because we have to go…
Olivia:
Alright. I think we might have covered most of the things, well everything that I had planned. So unless there’s, is there anything that you wanted to cover off on before we say goodbye?
Vaughnn:
Well probably another thing in marketing. So just email marketing and fax marketing, people-
Olivia:
Some people still use faxes?
Vaughnn:
People still use faxes. Like 400,000 fax machines at least still connected. Lots of people who have their faxes come through to email account or something like that. And obviously it’s just black and white on a fax, but … Just recently we got an email from the Melbourne Stars because they had a really crappy Big Bash season. But they sent an email out to apologize to all their members for doing so badly. And I’ve actually talked to a few people about this-
Olivia:
That’s interesting, isn’t it?
Vaughnn:
Yeah. It’s really interesting. (reading comments) What’s a good digital marketing course you would recommend? I’d have to look up some and then we can post that.
So going back to the Melbourne Stars, they sent out this email and it’s called a touch point. So some of the people I talk to go, “Oh, that’s really a bad idea because why would you want to say-
Olivia:
Point out a negative.
Vaughnn:
You’re doing a bad thing?” But the good thing is, you need to find ways of keeping in contact with your mailing list. And so this is a perfect way of really inertly being in contact with your mailing list, because what you want to do is also be in people’s minds because they might have got some memberships renewed, might have had some people come to the last couple of games, those sorts of things might have happened just from sending out an email, which is a really cheap form of marketing especially if you’ve got a big mailing list. Yeah so, that sort of touch point.
Christmas cards at Christmas time to all your clients, that’s another good way of keeping in contact. Especially because at the start of the year, lots of businesses have this down time because they have a four week break or a few weeks off and then they come back and they’re going, “Where are we going to get our new customers from?” So having sent that Christmas card might be just that thing that, so one of the last things they get in the mail that they remember at the start of the year. “Oh, I should get in contact with them and investigate getting solar panels,” or whatever it might be that you’re trying to sell to them.
Olivia:
That’s a good cheap way to do it. I might, I think maybe I’ll come back to that. Maybe another time, because I think that’s a whole topic in itself. That actually, I do some email marketing and some of you might have joined because of it. But I am conscious of how do I keep it interesting? How do I not annoy people? How do I just inform people of something that might be of real value to them and-
Vaughnn:
Well, digital marketing has so many aspects.
Olivia:
So I’d love to talk in depth on that one, maybe separately.
Vaughnn:
Another time. Separately.
Olivia:
Because I think that’s, don’t you think that one you can go on for a bit?
Vaughnn:
Yeah, because digital marketing is everything from SEO to email marketing, fax marketing, that we’re just about to do SMS marketing. Last night, I received my first SMS spam message I’ve ever received, so I’m lucky.
Olivia:
Oh, really?
Vaughnn:
Other people are getting them every day. So SMS marketing is another way-
Olivia:
It’s good because people actually look at it, but it’s got to be-
Vaughnn:
Yeah, but there are rules around in the Spam Act around email marketing and things like that, so you can market to a brand new list but it has to be appropriate marketing. So you can’t, for example, send a marketing message to the CEO because it’s not really his role, but if you sent a marketing email to the marketing manager at a company, that’s quite fine with the spam rules because you’re actually interacting with somebody who it’s not really spam to. So you have to be careful with email marketing because you can get in trouble with ACMA.
Olivia:
Maybe because Vaughnn has so much knowledge, you could schedule another live interview. I’d be happy to learn more. Yes. I’m thinking maybe unless anyone wants to hop on and ask a quick question, we might leave it at that because I think we can do a whole separate-
Vaughnn:
We could do a whole session on digital marketing.
Olivia:
Yeah, on what this is. This is it. But on each separate part of it.
Vaughnn:
Each separate part.
Olivia:
So, all right. I think I’ll leave it at that because I don’t see any more messages. So thank you. Thank you for watching.
Vaughnn:
Have a good Wear Red Day today.
Olivia:
Yes, enjoy your-
Vaughnn:
I haven’t got any red on, so I’m breaking the rules already.
Olivia:
And thank you, Vaughnn.
Vaughnn:
Thank you, Olivia.
Olivia:
Okay, bye.
Vaughnn:
Bye, everyone.
Interview conducted by Olivia de Sousa-Ferres
You can contact Vaughnn Brooks via his webpage www.targetedmarketing.com.au
You can find the SEMBA South East Melbourne Business Associates Facebook page here.
SEMBA is sponsored by Officeway, business to business suppliers office furniture. www.officeway.com.au
