Internet Marketing SEO

SEO is one part of Internet Marketing, there are many forms of marketing on the internet but SEO often provides the most cost effective and measureable channel for a business to market itself.

Areas such as Social Media are very hard to gauge how effective they have been, even areas of SEO such as brand awareness campaigns can be hard to measure and identify how much value it returned.

SEO can take time to be at its most effective, there are many areas to consider so it is not recommended that SEO is the only channel an organisation focuses on. Marketing itself is about communicating messages successfully across a number of channels, then each channel is reviewed and improved for the next cycle of efforts.

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Walkers Crisps: Yahoo Do us a Favour for our Flavours

After munching through a packet of Walkers Crispy Duck & Hoisin crisps, I noticed the Yahoo logo on the back of the packet. It prompted me to have a look at how the Walkers “Do us a flavour” campaign has been going; it has always seemed strange that Walkers would want to partner with Yahoo when over 90% of UK searches occur through Google.

The campaign began in July 2008 with an expected 250,000 crisp flavours entries, however Walkers received more than 1.1 million entries for a £50,000 prize and 1% share of future royalties. If the sales match those of the BBQ flavour, for example, that would equate to £57,000 a year. Votes cast on the Walkers website between now and May 1 2009 will decide which flavour stays permanently on sale, and the creator will win £50,000, on top of the £10,000 that each finalist has already received. Since the website launched it has seen a total of 2.4m sessions, with visitors spending an average of nine minutes on-line per session.

Walkers first tested its multimedia campaigning with its "Brits Trips" promotion in 2008, which generated a 2,575% growth in unique users to its website between June 2007 and June 2008.

Walkers are working with the mobile telephone network 02 to allow free text voting and have had a very powerful off-line marketing campaign with celebrity involvement, national and local press coverage and wide on-air media coverage.

All other methods are tried and tested forms of marketing, where the online partnership with Yahoo is a relatively new concept. At first this appears as a mash-up of two needy brands who both have a national audience, Yahoo with a very low UK user base and Walkers wanting to take advantage of the reach and cost effectiveness the internet can offer.

How important are Crisps to a UK consumer?
The summary section from the “Snack Foods Market Report Plus 2008" states:

Penetration of snack foods in the UK is high, standing at around 85% for potato snacks and around half the population for other savoury snacks and snack nuts. Nevertheless, the high degree of NPD and intense competition ensure that the market remains dynamic. Both the UK and global markets are dominated by PepsiCo. Research commissioned specifically for this report revealed that penetration of the US company’s core Walkers brand in the UK was above 59% in 2008, which was significantly higher than that of its nearest competitor brand, Pringles

85% of the UK’s population eats crisps or potato snacks and Walkers have a 59% market share of this consumer base. So walkers are a large player within the UK and they continue to stay in this position by promoting the brand and engaging their audience.

Offsite marketing is key to creating awareness online, Internet Marketing is becoming more like an online public relations exercise on a scale that traditional PR could struggle to comprehend and effectively manage.
Awareness is important, but it creates an appetite that needs to be satisfied. Once consumers have shown interest in the concept, the campaign website needs to continue to deliver and ensure that consumers are engaged to complete the campaign objectives.

I visited the website and was greeted with a full screen animation that took time to load, once it loaded the website had been stretched to fit my screen and the animated visuals were low quality and pixelated. When I tried to watch the TV advert for Crispy Duck & Hoisin, it had no sound although the video played.

According to Walkers, the average time spent on their campaign website is nine minutes. I wonder how much of that time is spent waiting for the website to load.
The whole website has been created in a graphic designers favourite technology, ‘Flash’. Flash has not vastly moved forwards as a platform for developing websites since its original conception.

Websites that are completely designed using flash are often accessibility and usability nightmares. Web 2.0 elements are often not included; these elements are increasingly becoming familiar to internet users and defined as a standard.

Flash elements are now common place within websites, flash offers great portability on-line and can be easily embedded into a website or page as a specific element often used to stream live data from another source.

Flash websites are also bulky in file size and this means loading times, back on 56k dial up load times were common place, but now thanks to broadband we all have become used to the lightning speeds of email, messaging, file and photo transfer. Forcing people to wait for a flash presentation to load is very off putting in a modern online world.

So why join forces with the 2.79% Yahoo UK Search Market Share?
Yahoo are offering Walkers coverage on six of its channels, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Eurosport, each online channel will take on one of the finalist flavours. Yahoo has also developed a bespoke video channel for Walkers using their Yahoo Video platform.

From a senior decision makers perspective the offerings available from Yahoo could appear as a nicely packaged solution, with everything required to launch a campaign on-line. The problem is that internet users are voting with their fingers and choose a variety of different on-line services to frequently visit.
Services such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Blogger and Social Go are all experts with what they offer, each with their own specialised user interfaces and structures that allow content to be easily shared or embedded.

The days of one service for all needs are gone, simply because no one organisation can spend enough time on all aspects of what they offer to compete with niche on-line services specifically designed and created for common needs.

Google has spread itself widely across the internet with many different websites and technology’s under its belt. Although Google seems to understand the benefit of separate specialist entity’s offering an array of services.

Where Yahoo is still trying to put all its eggs in one basket and offer one login for all needs. This is one of the reasons why Yahoo have not been as successful as Google, combined with a inadequate Search Engine algorithm that often provides irrelevant search results.
In return, Walkers have featured the Yahoo! logo on more than 50 million promotional packets of Walkers Crisps. Consumers are being urged to search for ‘Do us a flavour’ on Yahoo! which will then drive them to the video channel, to view the campaign content and vote for their favourite flavour.

Has this approach worked for Walkers?
According to Walkers, this has been a successful campaign as initially they only expected 250k entries’ for new flavours from the public. When they received over 1.1 million entries’ they were impressed with the results.

What surprises me is the minimal amount of support on-line; The DoUsAFlavourYoutube Channel has only 4 subscribers and the Yahoo Video Channel only has 7 people who have favoured the network.

Internal buy-in from the Walkers team has obviously been very minimal; I would expect that more than seven people have been involved with promoting this campaign online. It is a true sign of lack of internal buy-in and a possible reason to why the online marketing has not been as successful as it could have been.

The most popular campaign video on the Yahoo Video network has been:Cajun Squirrel…We ask Martyn Wright – How??!! it has had 21,347 views but no user comments.

On YouTube this is a different matter, the most popular video has been Gary Lineker presents: The Top T… with 51,147 views and 12 comments. The comments provide a true insight to what people think about the campaign:

• “he’s a bit dozy…. he takes the mick out ogf veggies too. veggie chicken would have been nice… "
• “tell me this isn’t the former england captain that i’d respected and held in high regard since I was a little girl. “
• “probably lineker’s worst television performance”

Only four of the twelve comments were related to the Walkers campaign objective. So it appears Youtube has offered higher views and social engagement.
To put this into perspective, nearly all the videos have been online for less than two months. The following video has been on Youtube for a month and has gained 1,433,089 views, its UK specific and shows the audience that could have been captured by Walkers.

You can watch this video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWEOHd9JNmk

Has this worked for Walkers?
Well yes it has, but the approach used has been wrong. Almost as if the Yahoo all-inclusive package was an easy attempt to move a traditional UK brand into the on-line marketing arena. Lack of internal buy-in of online marketing from Walkers has been clearly identified from the minimal support from the team behind the campaign. The over use of Lineker is tiring and the jokes don’t get any better.

People today are responding to fresh new celebrity’s and popular culture combined with a twist of humour. If one of our biggest UK brands is making these mistakes on-line, where does it leave everyone else?

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Display Trust and Build Customer loyalty with Internet Marketing

From ongoing development of technology the amount of channels now available for communication has increased vastly. A knock-on effect of this is that now people can reach audiences they would have never been able to before, because of this niche services, products and information are becoming more readily available online.

With Search Engine Marketing (SEM), even higher conversion rates can now be achieved from the visitors your website receives. SEM is great for generating new visitors to your website, these visitors are your most valuable asset for current and future success.

So how do you encourage repeat visits and customer loyalty? By treating these customers as individuals, just as you would offline.

Let’s imagine you have a shop front and a customer walks in the door. If you knew their name you would personally welcome them, and if you don’t you would be ready to impress them with your knowledge, advice, products and services. Online you don’t get the opportunity to personally greet people and welcome them, so you have to employ other tactics to treat them as you would offline.

Include a simple welcome message on your homepage, offer recommended products and services. Display additional information and advice in case the customer may want to find out more deatils. If they have registered on your website before then you should display a welcome back message, if they have not, then encourage them to sign up to your website.

This helps build a customer relationship, next you need to help the customer trust you and your website. The following points are steps to help you achieve this:

• Your website should be user friendly – Offline, your customers will have to drive to a shop, find somewhere to park and then browse the products. Now if everything is clearly displayed and logically categorised a customer is more likely to stay and browse. Online, customers have much shorter attention spans and will quickly move to another website if they cannot find what they want. If it is hard to find key products, the website is slow or after using the search box a product is not found, then a customer will quickly leave and move onto a competitor website.

• Prompt, quick, responsive customer service – The speed that you deal with customer requests online is much more important than when offline. Online customers want to find what they need as quick as possible, if they have problems sourcing what they need or have had problems with your website then they will need clear contact methods displayed. Creating clear methods of contact is important, but ensuring that contact from customers is dealt with efficiently and effectively is an important part of building trust and relationships with your customers. When communicating with customers, try to make the message as personalised as possible so they feel valued. If standard messages are used customers can feel unimportant and unwanted. Personalised auto responses to messages are a good idea to let the customer know their message has been received and how quickly you will aim to respond to their request.

• Privacy not Piracy – Privacy statements are a important part of allowing your website visitors to understand what you intend to do with their data. In this day and age everyone is scared of receiving spam and having their bank account cleared out. The banks have not made enough effort to provide confidence and trust to their customers and therefore have been abused with many fraudulent attempts to gain customer details. If your customers are not sure how their information will be used, they may be tempted to use a competitor site that clearly states that their information will not be resold. You should display a privacy statement prominently so site visitors know that their information is safe.

• You have to earn customer loyalty – If a website visitor had a bad experience with your company they are much less likely to return for future purchases. Dealing with complaints as an opportunity to turn around the situation and continue the relationship with your customers is the best approach. has a negative experience with your company, they are less likely to return and the same holds true for online customers. If they feel they have not received good service, they will not likely purchase from you again.

Your online customers are even more important than your offline customers, they require less time and management. You should aim to exceed all customers expectations in hope that they will be impressed, tell their friends and return to purchase time and time again. The internet is great for spreading messages quickly, you need to ensure only positive messages are communicated by your customers, otherwise a bad reputation could quickly become a very hard problem to resolve.

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