Post updated in July 2019.

Keyword research. These two words sound about as sexy as an empty milk carton in a windy car park. But, unlike said piece of packaging, keyword research is insanely useful. It helps to identify big content marketing wins without relying on trial and error only.

And the good news is that on early stage startup scale it relatively simple and quick to do.

Keyword research is based on 2nd-grade mathematics. The more monthly searches a keyword has, the better. The less competing blog posts and pages are about the same topic the better. And finally, the more relevant that keyword is to the service or product you want to promote, the better.

High number of monthly searches + low competition + high relevancy = content you should be creating.

Let me give you an example from the world of sales and CRMs. Which one of the following four keywords would you start producing content for?

“customer relationship management” sounds like a huge opportunity, and “sales pipeline report” kind of pointless, but it might be a mistake to start by creating content for the former and dismissing the latter.

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Update 24/2 : I got fooled. This post is about a Facebook ad for a nightclub. I kept seeing the ads and I examined the link later – it doesn’t link to Club Hollywood as one would expect but to a shady dating site. I wouldn’t expect meeting the love of your life on that site..

Rest of the post makes sense even with this ad being an example of a scam, not of a social media campaign, so I’m leaving it up.

 

I came across the following Facebook ad some days ago. At first glance, why make a fuss? People come across 3000+ marketing messages every day, there are many worse than this.

But at closer look this ad is symptomatic of internet marketing in general. There are four five things fundamentally broken with this ad:

 

1. Bad targeting

Facebook knows my age (mid-30’s), but I haven’t specified things like my hometown and  relationship status. I haven’t “liked” the club’s Page. Surely an ad for a mainstream meat market vaguely in my geographic area, in English, is not a good use of anyone’s ad budget and my Facebook feed.

2. Zero authenticity

You’d think a nightclub would use a photo of a “local beautiful woman” here, perhaps even shot on one of their advertised club nights.

Not quite. When you do an image search on Google with that image you learn it’s someone called Mechelle Montes, and you learn that from a forum where guys with an IQ of a toaster are discussing MILF photos anonymously.

[Addition 24/2: Given the scam context, the photo makes perfect sense]

3. Irrelevant landing pages

If you click through you end up on a generic homepage which is sub-optimal to say the least. A hopeful clicker will find no reference to local singles there.

[Addition 24/2: I am almost sure I clicked through to the landing page when I first noticed the ad but I guess I didn’t. Lesson learned: will click on shady sites more often in the future]

4. Poor grammar

… is poor form, no matter what the language.

So this harmless nightclub ad is a caricature of internet marketing. We’re in a hurry and often spending money that’s not coming from our own pockets. So we cut corners on targeting, steal images or – on a good day – use tried and tested stock photos and treat copy as an afterthought. I, too have made these mistakes. (With the exception of featuring Ms Montes on my ads).

Decent targeting, some level of authenticity, reasonable landing pages and grammatically sound copy are not rocket science. They save marketing dollars and make internet a tiny bit better. How about let’s get them right more often?

In the process of moving this blog from the old rusty diesel engine to the new shiny WordPress engine, old post drafts popped up like dead fish in a pond after an accident involving lots of chemicals. One was titled Everything I’ve learned about marketing in ten years. It didn’t have an ending or a beginning yet, it was just a sketchy list but surprisingly it made a bit of sense. So I dusted it off and edited it to be readable, but didn’t add or remove anything. Here goes:

Stand for something. A little bit better than the competition leaves everyone cold. If you have nothing to say, there’s no need to shout about it.*

One message at a time.*

When conducting market research, ask only whether the message you are sending out has been received as intended, and nothing else. The one thing you definitely shouldn’t ask your customers is “what would you like to have”. *

Always put 10% of your budget in risky channels and promotions ie. where they might bomb but, if successful, that generates a healthy ROI.*

Work for a boss that wants big change.**

Test where the limits that shouldn’t be crossed are, with advertising or whatever you have to play with. ***

None of the above tips apply if you just want to sell a bit of goods, and not do something remarkable.

Footnotes AD 2012:

* Fully agree to this day, I thank the year 2007 version of myselt for the reminder.
** 2012 addition: or be an entrepreneur that wants big change.
*** Back in 2007 most of my marketing career had been in media or FMCG, where there’s hardly any disruption in the business itself. So it made a lot of sense to push the limits with communications, because this was all there was. With startups, you’re so much closer to disrupting businesses and business models and there’s much less of a need to do scandalous communications.

Please help me complete the commandments of marketing. What have I missed?

Today I took a bunch of clothes I hadn’t worn for a while to the Tallinn re-use centre. It’s a fine social enterprise that accepts clothes and other items in reasonable condition, sells them or gives them to the people in need of clothes and uses profits from sales to educate school kids to reuse and recycle. After handing over an armful of T-shirts, jeans and sweaters the girl at the counter thanked me and handed over a thank you card. I took a quick look at the card before handing it back (to be used again, you know) and what got me thinking was that the card featured a small discount off my next purchase. I reckon that while the people buying stuff from the centre may be very price sensitive the people taking their stuff there are most probably not. What I think they could have done instead:

Taken my email address to engage me with newsletters in the future.

Taken my email address to send me information where the clothes I donated ended up, making my contribution more tangible.

Allowed me to pick a free book from the selection of donated books

Nothing. (In addition to the smiling thank you I got anyway). Promos may work wonders but they’re a hindrance if price sensitivity is near-zero.

Any other examples where discounts don’t work? 20% off your next wedding and 2-for-1 funerals come to mind.

Shit doesn’t happen. Shit takes time and effort.

I was recently in a meeting where co-founder of a next-big-thing-startup, when probed about marketing plans, said something to the line of we’ll do something viral so we don’t need to worry about marketing too much. Right. I’m in no means a viral marketing expert but this much I know: viral marketing does take time and effort.
There seems to be a widely spread misconception that viral marketing doesn’t cost anything and that if you do even tiny bit of it, customers will turn up on your door or website like zombies. In my view this is only true on four occasions. First, companies like Skype or Facebook whose product is so viral in nature that they seem to grow “just like that”. Second, brands like Apple or Obama that have such loyal followers that every step they take is echoed on blogs, social network profiles and T-shirts of fanboys across the world. Thirdly there are those whose idea is just so spot-on that no-one can refuse to pass it on to a friend. Blendtech’s Will it blend? campaign is a good example of that. And lastly, some just get lucky because a celebrity blogger somewhere happens to like it.
That leaves 99% of folks to make viral marketing happen with their sweat and/or marketing dollars. I’ve seen the behind the scenes of quite a few viral campaigns, and none of them have been super cheap or super easy to do. Take my recent task of generating blog coverage for Pledgehammer. I now know I have to do about a dozen units of work (this can be an email, blog comment or a guest blog post) to receive one unit of coverage. I’ve made north of 250 contacts to get about 20 people interested and writing about Pledgehammer. That’s good many evenings and weekends spent on creating “something viral”. (Luckily the weather has been rubbish). See here, here, here (got to love this one) or there for results, more links are available on Pledgehammer blog.
Long story short – viral marketing is a powerful thing, definitely worth some experiments, it just takes time and effort to work.