The term “legend” doesn’t apply to many people in marketing in Australia, but one man who clearly qualifies is Bob Miller.

Long-time general manager of marketing for Toyota Australia, Bob is best known as the man behind the classic “Oh, What a feeling” campaign that placed Toyota at the top of the Australian car market.

Bob is one of Australia’s leading authorities on sales and marketing and numbers among his many awards the Australian Marketing Institute’s Sir Charles McGrath Award, Marketing Magazine’s Marketing Executive of the Decade and BRW’s Marketing Director of the Year.

Now working as a speaker and consultant on marketing and Internet business development, Bob has written a number of books and magazine columns on marketing, and is also an adjunct professor of business at Macquarie University.

I had the privilege of interviewing Bob for this month’s HotHouse podcast (podcast to be published next week.) When I asked him about the biggest change to advertising and marketing in Australia during the past 30 years, he didn’t nominate the rise of digital marketing, but the end of the fixed margins and commissions of the media accreditation process in the 1990s.

During his tenure as president of the Australian Association of National Advertisers, Bob Miller was instrumental in the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission calling an end to the media accreditation system. Started by News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch in the 1960s, the system allowed media owners to select the firms which could receive payments (some called them kickbacks) of up to 12% for placing advertising, while advertisers were excluded from such deals.

He made a few enemies in the process of pulling down the accreditation system. Several years down the track, he rates the outcome as “disappointing, because agencies haven’t taken advantage of the situation, while media houses have.”

Marketing as symphony

The job of marketers, Bob Miller says, is similar to conducting an orchestra. “It’s the conductor’s job to take all the individual musicians’ activities and turn them into Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. That’s the marketer’s job, though whether they get on with it is another thing.”

Asked whether the fundamentals of marketing have changed in the past two decades as a result of the digital revolution, Bob is emphatic. “No! Marketing hasn’t changed since the markets of ancient Assyria. ‘Buy my oranges, they will last longer, taste better, etc.’ The same applies today.

“Marketing may be more complicated, but it essentially has not changed. Markets are conversations. The ideas are the same.”

Social media, he says, like everything in its early phase, “is over-hyped – but it is meaningful. It’s evolving.”

At the end of the day, according to Bob Miller, whether you’re using digital or traditional marketing, “it’s about generating predictable future cashflow for the business and shareholders. The job of marketers is to convince the board to give you money so you can generate that cashflow.

Digital technology, he says, “complicates the life of marketing directors,” particularly because most CEOs and CMOs are still firmly entrenched in TV, newspapers and direct mail, three media they grew up with and understand.

His advice to marketing agencies of the future is to address the cashflow issue by embracing statistics. “You need to have numeric insight, to sell your ideas to shareholders and stock market analysts.

“Agencies who service business accounts need to have conversations with econometricians – or hire some young ones with this background. You need to demonstrate to a company board that here’s a new way of thinking about the future, the future of your cash flow. That’s why we do advertising.”

For companies to be successful in the future, Bob reckons, “The finance department should be integrated into marketing department. I know the CFOs think it should be the other way around, but they need to work more closely together understand  that it’s a marriage of interests – and the stakes are high.”

…

Oh, you want more information? Sure!

We want someone hungry to learn from the best, someone who can multi-task and work within an extra-ordinary team and who isn’t afraid to rise up the ranks.

We want someone who wants to work on some of the world’s biggest brands and who is willing to show off their skills and talents.

What else do we want? We want you.

Send your CV to: Please send your applications to careers@hothouse.com.au

Boring blurb below:

At HotHouse:

• We encourage everyone to share their ideas for the client - inspire us, inspire them.
• We want pragmatic doers that show clear thinking about problems and solutions.
• We want you to learn and improve on every job, to do things better.

You need to have…

• Exceptional attention to detail.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Superior organisational skills with a proven ability to multi task, prioritise and manage time effectively.
• A can do attitude, a passion for the web and an eagerness to try your hand at new challenges.
• Experience using programs including Visio, MS Project and MS Office is desirable.
• Basic HTML an advantage.
• Commercial experience an advantage

Boring huh? Yeah, you’re right. It’s dull. It’s not the job for you. You’d get bored easily. You probably wouldn’t want to work with a world-class team in our awesome new offices. You wouldn’t want to talk shop over foosball? You wouldn’t want to work on International brands?

What’s that?

You would? Well read on…

We want someone who isn’t afraid to be vocal and share their ideas to help create interactive content and brand experiences for our clients

We want someone who can think clearly and smash problems into solutions

We want someone who isn’t afraid to continue their learning while working

We want someone who can talk to the client, woo the client, understand the client and deliver to the client. Basically we want someone who is shit-hot. Are you shit-hot? Cause if you are then we want you!

Do it. Send us your CV. Do it. DO IT!
Send your CV to: careers@hothouse.com.au

Boring blurb below…

You need to have…

• 5+ years experience in an agency or other web development environment
• The capability to lead major integrated interactive projects.
• A strong understanding of a wide array of web technologies and environments (e.g. FLASH, HTML, JAVASCRIPT, AJAX etc.)
• Examples of signature projects and project documentation including Statement of Works, Project Plans etc.
• Experience using programs including Visio, MS Project.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.

While most country Australians will be delighted at the improvement in internet services the NBN will deliver, until the business and medical services that will make best use of it are invented, the network will accelerate a new TV industry, which will need an exponential increase in demand for this new bandwidth.

Read more here

This seminar will be presented by Jeremy Tang, our Director of Search who has over 9 years experience in Search, most recently as Head of Search at Telstra Business.
In this seminar he will provide clarity on how to tap into the highest quality traffic on the internet, specifically uncovering:

• Why SEO really isn’t about search engines.
• Why SEO is the closest thing to marketing’s holy grail.
• What The A-Team’s Mr T can teach us about Google’s algorithm.

While the technology constantly evolves the principles do not. The goal of this seminar is to arm you with enough information to understand the core of SEO from which you will be able to make more informed decisions about how your organization can tap into the single largest media channel in the world.

Seminar dates:

• 8am to 9am Tues 20 July
• 8am to 9am Thurs 22 July

Location:

HotHouse Interactive
95 Nicholson Street
(end of Albany St cul de sac)
St Leonards NSW 2065

The office is approximately 5 minutes walk from St Leonards train station. Entry to the office is via Albany street (please refer to Google Maps link below). Street parking is available as are vouchers for the Wilson Parking station directly opposite the building.

View directions from St Leonards station in Google Maps

RSVP:
Please contact Tina to advise your preferred date, and we’ll reply with a confirmation, depending on availability.
Book your places ASAP as spaces are limited.
Email: tina.williams@hothouse.com.au
Phone: +61 2 9432 3602

Order your breakfast:
When you contact Tina, please tell us your coffee preference and we’ll have it here for you on the day, along with a range of breakfast treats.

Your online presence fairly bristles with opportunities to collect data about every visitor to your site. And it’s also easy to collect information about the competitive environment in which that your site operates. Measurement and analytics tools can inform your marketing with hard data about consumer behaviour that just can’t be measured in the offline environment.

In a world where your customers use Internet search to inform an increasing proportion of their business decisions, from the most basic to the most critical, getting your website into a strong search engine position is crucial.

Whether you’ve put extensive (and expensive) resources into search engine optimisation (SEO), or you are still testing the waters, its vital to test and analyse your site based on actual, measurable data rather than subjective opinions.

There are plenty of search analytics services and tools available which will gather data, report and interpret the performance of your website on search engines.

There are two types of site analytics: on-site (that is, measuring the traffic on your own website) and off-site (which might measure competitors’ sites, potential customers and other aspects of the overall web environment).

Site analytics tools allow you to record a wide range of information about the visitors to your site. You can record the geographic location of each arrival, which site they arrived from, what they are looking at – even how much time they spend on each page.

But it is in combination with other information that site analytics becomes a most useful market research tool. For example, you can measure the effect of the launch of a new ad campaign (either online or offline, using traditional print or broadcast media), by tracking changes of site traffic over time.

What data should you pay attention to?

Your own site will deliver information about a number of areas:
Hits: (individual files served - not terribly useful unless you are analysing server load)
Visits: This is most useful when you look at trends over time, the number of unique visitors, their geographic origin, and which pages are visited most frequently.
Pages: Which page do people come to first (it won’t always be the home page); how long do they spend on a page; where do they go next.
Search keywords: If they came from a search engine, what keywords did visitors use to find you?

And market analysis can give you a huge amount of information including the following:
Search trends: What are your potential customers typically looking for?
Reverse search: Which keywords will deliver visitors to a particular site?
Keyword monitoring: what keywords are most frequently used?

Tools to use

Measurement has matured greatly from its somewhat arcane early days – while plenty of cowboys still roam the backwaters of the web, there is now a strong field of reputable players offering measurable and usually fairly robust services designed to arm you effectively to do battle for the coveted top spots in the search engines.

• ClickTracks: Aimed at marketers without a strong technical background, these tools range from $25 per month upwards and specialise in giving detailed analysis about the behaviour of visitors to your site.



• CoreMetrics: This tool has some unique features that are useful if you operate an online store.



• Google Analytics: This free tool brings end-to-end adwords reporting for sites and is the most-used first step in most web analytics programs.



• Omniture: The hosted analytics packages include data-mining and other tools and are rated as one of the easier-to-use options, but you pay more for the comprehensive service.



• Webtrends: This company offer a range of tools useful for understanding your customers and the overall marketplace. They offer a range of packages – either hosted or installed on your own server – with prices ranging between around $30 a month.

Search engine optimisation can make a huge difference to the way your site ranks on search engine result pages – and therefore will directly affect your traffic. And most experts engaged to develop a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy for any website will follow a similar process.

First, what is your site about? Understand who your customer is, what they are looking for – and which keywords will lead them to you. But while keyword research is a critical early step, lots of other factors contribute to SEO.

A site audit will examine what works – and what doesn’t work – on your current website. It’s surprising what a difference a few small changes can make. Appropriate title tags on each page, useful meta-description tags and descriptive titles throughout can really help your site ranking.

While these sound like basic, simple tips, the case studies below (two bad, one good) show how some of the highest profile sites in the world were able to improve their ranking following a straightforward SEO audit.

Search Engine Land: Bill Gates Blog

Tech journalist and editor of the hugely influential ‘Search Engine Land’ site, Danny Sullivan, took a mischievous look at Bill Gates’ personal blog recently – and used it to demonstrate some basic search engine optimisation techniques that could really improve the results for the Microsoft founder and chairman.

When Sullivan did his case study on Gates’ blog back in January this year, the site was number four on Google, sharing the page one space with plenty of spoof blogs.

Now? Well, it seems Gates has taken Sullivan’s advice to heart; Bill Gates’ blog is now ranked number one on Google.

Sullivan suggested that Gates use the word “official” in his blog title to distinguish it from the parody sites. He also advised Gates to create a succinct meta-description tag and make sure each of his pages had a distinct title. Make sure each blog post has a unique, descriptive title, Sullivan added – and make sure those titles will still make sense out of context, if somebody links to you.

Try the special free webmaster tools offered by Google and Bing, advises Sullivan.

• Google Webmaster Central
• Bing Webmaster Center

And finally, it’s time for Bill to build some reputation, get some links – and keep using Twitter.

Barack Obama: Yes, he did!

The marketing gurus over at DWSmg.com analysed the US President’s campaign site in 2008 and concluded that his web team did an outstanding SEO job. Despite extensive resources actively working to dislodge him, searching for the keywords “Barack” and “Obama” in four major search engines returned his presidential campaign website at the top of the search results.

The home page opened with a data collection splash (optimised for keywords), then each subsequent page boasted a different, descriptive title and carefully-developed header tags were distributed throughout a site that was constantly updated with useful content.

Every image on the site included descriptive Alt-tag descriptions. And through judicious spending on pay-per-click and sponsored listings, Obama’s team captured most keywords related to the presidential election campaign. A team of active bloggers continuously posted relevant articles, with some posts receiving more than 300 comments in their first hour of posting. Integrating SEO with Facebook and LinkedIn helped the tech-loving new president capture an even larger audience.

Google Fail

Google spokesman and search engineer Matt Cutts put together a tongue-in-cheek case study of the SEO of the company’s own websites – and delivered a less-than-favourable report. Without a dedicated SEO expert working on their own sites, the company didn’t score very well on meta-description tags, consistent internal links, and title tags. One section even used copied (and wrong) page descriptions from a completely different section. Duplicate URLs abounded, there were bad site links and a random ALT tag appeared at the top of one particular page. Title tags – which are a great opportunity to include keywords – were not used well.

“A simple SEO audit has really made a big difference,” he says – and he recommended site owners go to the Google webmaster section and download their basic SEO guide.

Number one on Google – that’s the Holy Grail that search engine optimisation (SEO) was meant to deliver to savvy site owners.

SEO involves tweaking your website to appear in the first page of Google search results for the keywords your customers are most likely to enter and yes, it’s Google we care most about, because Google still reigns on the Internet.

According to search engine data collection agency comScore, Google accounts for around 67% of all search queries worldwide. Next in line with just 8% is Yahoo, then Chinese search engine Baidu, which holds 7% of global search. The remaining 18 percent is distributed among a range of other search programs including Russian engine Yandex, Bing, AOL, Ask.com, eBay and Facebook.

In Australia the figures are even more stark. Recent Hitwise data shows that Google Australia accounts for nearly 75% of Australian searches, with Google.com taking more than 12%, equating to an overall market share of more than 87%.

In comparison, Yahoo and Yahoo Australia combined for only 7% of Australian searches, while Bing accounted for only 4% of the market.

But as search engine optimisation has moved from a contest of geek-stardom to a critical business feature – and more and more companies are vying for that page one spot – ranking highly in search is becoming far more challenging for most organisations.

Jeremy Tang, newly appointed director of search at HotHouse, who I interviewed for this month’s HotHouse podcast, says that the biggest issue for most companies is a lack of understanding about how SEO works.

SEO is not just about rankings, he says; it’s about optimising all of the organisation’s communication (online and offline) to the customer, not to the search engine. “You need to understand exactly what your customer is looking for - and make sure you deliver that,” he says.

“Get that right and you’ll not only do well in Google ranking, but more importantly, your  customers will be more engaged because you’ve been able to address their information needs better than your competitors.”

Jeremy firmly believes that SEO has to be an ongoing process to be effective, because your customers’ needs are always changing and the competitive environment is dynamic.

If you want page-rank nirvana, though, you have to make sure you get a combination of things right. “The most technically optimised website possible won’t rank for terms that are important to your customers without the right content strategy,” Jeremy says.

“Or you might have a great content strategy - but if much of your content isn’t visible to the search engines you’ll get sub-optimal results.”

Google SEO spokesman, software engineer Matt Cutts, recently gave a presentation to search engine experts showing the results of a site audit that Google did on its own website.

Cutts is one of Google’s most accessible personalities and search engine experts wait breathlessly on every tip he shares about getting good search engine results.

(Cutts is so geek-cool, he’s even been immortalised as a cut-out and dress-up cartoon doll.)

He gets peppered with questions about the secrets of Google’s algorithms and how much difference tiny tweaks and links and strategies might make to the ranking of a website.

But a lot of the time, the advice Cutts gives is not about mathematical algorithms or convoluted ways to raise your site’s rankings – it’s about thinking like a customer.

“Think about what users are going to type to find your page,” Cutts told USA Today. “Then just make sure those words are on the page.”

Jeremy Tang agrees. He says having good insight into what information your customers are looking for is a critical first step. Next, you need to deliver that information through your website in your customers’ natural language, in a format that search engines can read. And finally, you need to build the authority of the website as a trusted source of this information through backlinks.

“The success of the program will hinge on that first step: understanding your customer sets the entire direction into which everything else falls into place,” Jeremy says.

And these days, there are many ways of finding out exactly what your customer is looking for – even when they are not too sure about that themselves.

“Search is behaviour,” says Jeremy. “So when you are trying to understand your customers, always pay more attention to what they do, than to what they say.”

Plenty of companies base critical decisions about their web strategy on the opinions of management - or at best, using customers’ self-reports from focus groups and surveys.

But it’s possible now to tap into the actual search behaviour of millions of Australians to find out exactly what they are looking for.

“Not only is this statistically more significant as a data source – it is all based on actual behaviour,” says Jeremy. “This leads to much better marketing decisions.”

Some businesses make the mistake of believing that they can change the terminology in the marketplace – but the web is beyond their control.

On the web, people will search the way that makes sense to them. If your website doesn’t include the critical keywords for your market, your customers won’t find you.

Jeremy says that he has had several clients recently ignore recommendations for keywords, despite being presented with search data on the terminology people used for the product they were selling.

Both times, the client believed their multi-million dollar advertising campaign would dictate - or at least heavily influence - the terminology in the market. Both times, the client was wrong.

“These days, running TV, radio and print ads will trigger people to search to find out more. If they can’t find the information in the language they are using to search for it, then their interest is lost - or worse, intercepted by a competitor who understands search better,” says Jeremy.

If you are going to optimise your website so that it appears high in the search results for your keywords – you’ve got to be really sure of your keywords and research them well.

Keyword research is about understanding the conversations your customers are having; and the best way to capture this conversation is to ask the people in your business who interact with your customers every day - your call centres, your sales staff, customer service, resellers, and of course your actual customers.

“Having enough conversations with these stakeholders helps to quickly uncover patterns in what they are looking for,” says Jeremy. “Team that up with online research by a qualified SEO person, and you’ll get some powerful insights into customer interactions offline and online.”

Once your customers find you – there’s got to be good reason for them to stay on your site. For that reason, if people are searching for information that your brand is in the best position to provide and you aren’t ranking for that search, someone else can control that messaging.

Building deep, continually refreshed content will build your brands reputation as a trusted source of information as it continually appears in the searches your customers are making.

If you want to develop a deep relationship with your customer, you have to provide them with information that they are interested in and keep it constantly updated because their needs are dynamic.

“It makes sense from a human perspective which is why it works from a SEO perspective because Google is all about delivering relevant and valuable customer experience,” says Jeremy.

Listen to the podcast

Listen to the podcast below.

In this month’s HotHouse podcast, Econsultancy vice president Rebecca Lieb talks about how web content strategies are going to take over from traditional advertising strategies. Here are links to a few case studies about companies that have already taken the plunge.

• Reed Business Information (US) – Here’s a look at how a major publishing company took a strategic approach to its myriad web properties. One tactic: “if a team looks at their editorial calendar for the next three months and identifies a few key topics they are covering, they can now develop those conversations on LinkedIn and Twitter to shape the focus on articles, find sources and get quotes.”



• NCI – A comprehensive, well-written post on how this company migrated their brand strategy from marketing to content. One key observation: “Everything on the web is Content, in Google’s eyes. There isn’t differentiation between advertising, marketing or creative content: it’s all out there. And the more content that is in one place, the more people that create it, the more people that share it, the more Google pays attention.”



• Bezos and Beedle the Bard – An analysis of Amazon’s strategic decision to buy the single “for auction” copy of J.K. Rowling’s handmade “The Tales of Beedle the Bard”, frequently mentioned in the Harry Potter books. “The real takeaways from Amazon’s Beedle the Bard idea are the four criteria any company could use to brainstorm and evaluate content strategy ideas: 1) Relevancy, 2) Community, 3) Exclusivity and 4) Cause. Amazon nailed every one.”



• Study Group – How using ‘killer’ rather than ‘filler’ content boosted sales for this education consortium by well over 100%. Keep in mind that this case study was written by the company that produced the content strategy, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.