Coming from an advertising background, I love nothing more than sexy branding. By sexy  branding I don’t mean underwear models on giant billboards or TV ads seeping with innuendo – although done well, these can both be effective! Sexy branding for me is cohesive branding. Sexy brands have confidence; they know who they are and don’t try to pretend to be something they are not. By this definition, any business can have sexy branding. In an already overcrowded market, a brand’s self-awareness and individuality will set it apart.

So tell me, is your brand sexy? Ask yourself the hard questions, answer them honestly:

1. Who is your target market?

So often we ask this of the brands that we work with and they say something like ’People of all ages, male or female’. Now of course, this may apply to some brands, but not many. Try using other demographic markers, such as economic position, personality traits and common interests to gage who your ideal customer might be. It will make reaching them and converting them so much easier. Global domination will come after you’ve established a strong base to work with, so don’t rush it!

2. Now that you know who your market is, where can they find you, and you find them?

Be honest here, and do your research! Do your demographic spend hours online reading blogs and interacting through social media? Or do they use the internet for email and banking and spend their leisure time watching television? Knowing where to talk to your market at a time when they are ready to listen is key to effective communication.

3. Does your brand personality truly reflect your brand?

Test your marketing on your target market. Are they seeing your branding and getting a snapshot of what they can expect from an interaction with the business? There are many simple ways to project an image to potential customers – make sure yours is being accurately portrayed and received.

4. Are your customers showing brand loyalty?

How much of your business is referral business? A business with strong repeat or referral business will thrive. Delving into social media with a clearly defined strategy may be a great option for you. Also, reward customers for referrals and repeat business so they know that you appreciate it.

5. Is your brand a leader or a follower?

There are success stories in both leading and following in different industries, but which are you? Are you happy being where you are? If not, what would it take for you to make a change? A great start to being a leading brand is an information-rich and authoritative website. Build one, inject it with content that you are confident the market needs and wants to know about, in a format in which they can ingest, share it, and you’ll be LOLing!

6. When moving your brand online, have you decided the manner in which you will talk with your target market?

Online social forums are more about light-hearted discussion and entertainment, rather than a hard sell. Simple things like the language you use are a constant reflection of your brand – so be aware.

7. Are you being creative with your communication or is your message lost in a sea of advertising?

Advertising is everywhere. We are constantly inundated with messages, so many in fact that we simply cannot see and react to them all. How different is the way in which you talk to your market?  There are so many innovative and impressive ways to break-through the marketing clutter; it may just be a matter of thinking outside the box!

So, get to know who you are and show it to the people that matter, through strong, cohesive marketing and the world will be your bivalve mollusc (Thanks Wiki, the sexiest dictionary I know!).

One of the reasons small business can’t live without SEO is that fact that it is one of the only marketing channels available where the smaller players can compete with, and even trump big business.

Consider the marketing alternatives to SEO and the costs associated with achieving global exposure on TV, Radio or Newspaper?

So how exactly can small business utilise search marketing to compete and even thrive on the web while big business can’t?

1. Focus on the Longtail

The basic premise of the Longtail is that our culture and economy is shifting away from mainstream products and markets to a number of small, specific niches. Many of the typical constraints such as production, distribution and marketing (SEO) are changing and being alleviated by technology and the internet.

Take a big site like Amazon, they must cover all their bases and sell a large number of unique items in smaller quantity. However, when consumers are faced with unlimited choice, shopping around to get exactly what you’re after becomes much easier. Niches are so successful because they allow people to satisfy and fulfill their specific interests.

With SEO and SEM it is easy to measure exactly how profitable your different niches are so that you can focus on the highest performing ones.

2. Unlimited Ad Budget

Traditional marketing tells us that we need to ‘set a budget’ for our marketing costs. When you can measure the exact cost of a conversion, why not simply keep purchasing ads while it’s profitable? As long as every ad click is costing you less than you’re making from that click (accounting for overheads), then there’s no reason to threshold your budget.

In big business, how often have you heard a marketer tell you ‘we don’t have the budget for that at the moment‘?

As a small business, armed with the tangible information of digital ads, you can now say ‘we have an unlimited budget for ads that work‘.

3. Create Valuable Alliances

Unburdened by bureaucracy, small business can easily align with other business’ when it mutually beneficial. Big business can often be slow to change because of procedures and legal issues making it take much longer to create strategic partnerships.

Ask your strategic partners to link to you and they will do your marketing for you. Make it easy and beneficial for them to talk about you and they won’t be able to help themselves.

4. The Personal Touch

How often have you phoned a call centre, only to be greeted by a faceless voice that tells you they can’t help because ‘it’s not standard procedure‘?

Small business has the luxury of taking the time to add that personal touch. If it makes sense to both the business and the customer, why not break the rules? When you can give people something they don’t expect you’re giving them a reason to remember and talk about you.

Rather than trying to disguise it, emphasise the fact that you’re small. Shout out the advantages to the customer; lower overheads, faster responses and savings passed onto the customer.

5. Change Often, and Quickly

With so many freely available research tools, it’s easy to stay on top of trends and discover new niches. When there is a shift in direction in a market, how long does it take a big business to react?

Small business has the advantage of flexibility. If it makes sense to change, you can do something totally different tomorrow. If it doesn’t work out, change again. That’s where the beauty of SEO comes out.

photo by fisserman

SEO Tip #3

If there’s one catch-22 in the SEO game, then having a high-ranking, fully optimised search result that is right at the top of Google but is not getting any clicks is it.

This problem normally comes about because a business has spent so much time optimising their page full of keywords that when their listing appears in Google or one of the other search engines, their result is just a mash of keywords.

Having your website ranking highly is one thing, but actually getting users to click on it is another.

The trick then is to optimise your site well whilst still keeping your listing as an attractive result for the user.

One of the first ways to do this is to include your business name at the start of your listing. So instead of having ‘Neon Lighting Brisbane, Neon Lights, etc’ as your listing heading, you want to modify it so it reads ‘Search Strategy – Neon Lighting Brisbane, Neon Lights, etc.’ This allows your business’ listing to still remain attractive to the user.

This logic is also followed through to the second and third lines of search engine listings, where it is important again to ensure your description is attractive to the user. Once again, simple things like capitalising appropriately and punctuation makes a big difference, whilst avoiding those unsightly keyword mashes.

And finally, having a primary domain name, rather than a free subdomain, makes a big difference to the appearance of your listing as it gives your business a professional look.

In today’s electronic marketplace, search engine placement can, and is, proving the difference between whether online campaigns thrive or come crashing back down to earth with an expensive thud.

As a result, getting to the top of Google and other key search engines is critical. The way to do this is through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

There are many companies out there who claim to “guarantee” your business the number one position or claim that SEO is beyond the reach of everyone else but them. Both of these claims are false.

No SEO company can technically guarantee you the top of Google (or on any other search engine) as the search engine algorithms are independent and no-one actually has any influence over the way it actually works.

Also, SEO can be done by anyone with a little HTML and FTP knowledge. But there’s a catch. SEO is a extremely time consuming process and there are a number of reasons why it is difficult to conduct SEO by yourself and why SEO companies exist:

• Google’s (and other search engines’) algorithm change constantly, and SEO companies are in the business of knowing how each of these changes will affect your site’s position and ranking. Unless you’ve have plenty of spare time to read up each algorithm change, an SEO company will save you time.
• SEO is competitive. If you’re undertaking SEO, you can bet that your competitors are doing it too. For this reason, you can’t just optimise your website when you put it live and expect it to sit atop the rankings forever. Search engine rankings are updated daily and hence you need ongoing SEO programs to continue to perform well.
• You need to know what keywords work. SEO companies have a variety of tools and expertise at their disposal to determine what keywords are likely to generate results for your site. They are then able to optimise your site’s pages to improve your ranking.

The best part about SEO programs from SEO companies is that they are very competitively priced.

The majority of SEO programs on the market are 12 month programs, so you are ensured that your site is continually optimised for better performance for at least a year. Basic packages start from around $2,000 per year and can range up as far as you your budget will go.

So while SEO can be done by anyone, for the vast majority of businesses, it is FAR more cost and time efficient to employ someone to do it for them.

Many SEO’s claim that Google AdWords and other PPC programs are simply for people who aren’t smart enough to undertake organic SEO. This, however, is far from the truth.

Organic SEO and PPC programs have two very separate and distinct uses. Organic SEO has the benefit of being able to generate unlimited clicks for free, but the catch is that you need to be in the top few results for a given keyword in order to pull it off. It is also limited in that you cannot optimise for every single search query you want as your site would be in danger of being blacklisted for keyword spamming.

Pay-Per-Click, on the other hand, forces you to pay for every click you receive, but it has the benefit of being able to be targeted to a wider variety of keywords. As a result, conversion rates from PPC ads are usually much higher than those from organic search engine results.

So when should you use PPC programs instead of SEO?

Pay-Per-Click programs should be used on keywords that are not performing organically but you would like to target. The key to a succssful PPC campaign is to ensure that your ad text, landing pages and targeted keywords are all congruent to ensure optimum placement in search results. This is because your ad’s ranking is not just dependent on how much you bid, but also on the quality score of your ad, which takes into account the relevance of your ad to your keywords, location, landing page, etc.

And just like SEO, managing your own PPC campaign is possible, but determining exactly how the quality score comes together, which keywords to set what budget, and what ad text works well is something that is generally best left to the experts, unless you have plenty of spare time.

Companies such as Reload Media are web strategy and online marketing experts in managing Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click campaigns and by employing a SEM company to look after your campaign, you are ensuring your ads are given the best possible chance of generating sales.

What’s wrong with this?

Well, the most common problem that emerges from this is that these businesses tend to blow thousands of dollars on websites that are visually stunning, but don’t convert into sales. Too many businesses then put this down to the “internet being a fickle thing” or “our industry is not set up to support web sales.”

The actual reason why these websites fail is because they have not been strategically designed.

Web designers are not web strategists or strategic business consultants, and while they are great with the flashy components of your site, they are not business strategists.

Issues such as usability, navigation, search engine performance, and most importantly, conversion to sales, are not a web designers forte. This is where a web strategist steps in.

A web strategist, such as Reload Media, takes you through all of these elements and more BEFORE you see a web designer, ensuring that by the time you walk into a web designers office, you know exactly what needs to be done and the entire process is both time and cost efficient.

So what exactly does a web strategy company like Reload Consulting do?

To begin with, they determine from you what “Aims” you have for your business in terms of online sales. From there, they work with your business to develop a “Strategic Web Plan” which can be taken directly to a web designer, ensuring you don’t waste your dough on a website that doesn’t earn a crust of sales. These web strategy companies use industry knowledge gained from years of experience to assist you with all elements of planning your website.

You might be thinking that this all seems like a lot of work, after all, it is just a website. But think back to how much time you spent developing your business plan, and how much time you spent searching for retail or office space, the sign out the front, and the marketing campaign.

Your website is essentially just like another retail space, only it operates in its own medium that requires new strategies and marketing ideas. And just like your physical store, if customers cannot find their way to or around the shop, get help when needed or be able to make the purchase decision, then the investment to open that new space is wasted.

SEO Tip #01

One of the most important factors when it comes to your website’s performance in search engine results is the keywords meta tag.

The keyword meta tag is embedded in the HTML code of your web page and is read by search engines during their indexing process. The keyword tag allows you to specify what search keywords you would like to appear for in search results.

But don’t think that you can just add whatever keywords you like and appear in every search results page from then on. Google (and other search engines) have systems in place to deal with excessive keyword meta tags.

The practice of filling your meta tags with large numbers of keywords is called keyword spamming and is a very quick way of being booted out of a search engine for spamming. The jury is still out on exactly how many keywords is too many. Some “experts” argue for no more than 50 while others are as conservative as five.

There are also some pundits out there who claim that 13 is the magic number. Recent results from our SEO campaigns suggest that keeping to 25 keywords and below is optimal. However, keyword relevance is also important. If you have 32 keywords for instance, but all of them appear in your web page copy numerous times (in context and not just stuffed in there for the sake of it), then that will most likely be perfectly acceptable. However the reverse is also true. You might only have 12 keyword meta tags but if none of those keywords are relevant to your content then you may be blacklisted for spamming.

But still you can write good content, fill your keyword meta tags properly and submit your site to search engines and still not get any traffic. In this case the reason is most probably your choice of keywords. Keyword meta tags should not be too specific to the point where no-one would ever search that term or too broad to the point where there is way too much competition to appear. Getting the right keywords into your site is critical to search engine performance. An SEO company can help you determine what keywords are being used to search your industry and provide advice on how to change your content to match.

But don’t expect to just go ahead and optimise your keyword meta tags and suddenly appear #1 in Google. SEO is made up of more than just keyword tags, and for this reason SEO is an on-going process that is very time consuming. For the average business, it is not cost-efficient to employ someone to look solely after your company’s SEO and at the same time not time-efficient to get someone already in your business to take up the responsibility.

Fortunately, web strategists, such as Reload Media specialise in SEO programs, which manage your keyword meta tags in the context of your overall SEO program. These programs are cost effective, last for at least 12 months, and ensure that your site is getting top-of-the-line optimisation from specialists who are paid to know everything there is to know about search engines.

So while keyword meta tags are important to a website’s search engine performance, they are just one slice of the overall SEO pie.