Digital Marketing Lessons From .AU
My concerted effort to reveal the .au domain proposal for the sham that it is has begun to spread to all corners with the issue being raised in Federal Parliament last week. It will also be featured on ABC TV tonight, which has sparked outrage from the trolls who accuse me of using the issue as a marketing campaign.
What I learned
- Your voice can be heard in the highest places with a little effort
- We are not interested in backlinks ?
- It’s a great data analysis opportunity
- LinkedIn may be more useful than I gave it credit for
- Why you should utilise available platforms
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. I’m having a good week. The .au campaign that we’ve been focused on, it made it into Federal Parliament last week, which is pretty exciting. It’s going to be on the TV tonight. If you have access to a television in Australia, free-to-air, check out ABC TV tonight. Now, there’s been a lot of criticism of me now. The trolls are coming out, and they came out again over the weekend. One of the criticisms was that, “He’s just doing this to get backlinks. He’s just doing this for a marketing campaign.”
We don’t care for backlinks
Look, in case it was unclear, yes, this has become an internal marketing campaign, within my business, and I’ve learned a lot through doing this. I’ve learned a few things. The first thing is, is that … I’ll get back to the backlinks thing. We don’t want the backlinks. We get annoyed in here because we’re running some tests on what our involvement is in this, what it’s doing to our brand. I’m very passionate about this, and I want to stop it because I have incentive, a really good business case, but because I’m going through this, it would be stupid of me not to look at what’s happening with the data, and not to understand if we are penetrating and getting the message through. And I would say that getting into parliament last week is a pretty good indication that we’re doing a good job of our digital marketing, and it’s continuing today.
Over the weekend, for instance, we knew the story was coming out on ABC TV tonight, so over the weekend, we’ve been targeting Canberra with a whole bunch of ads, and down the track, I will tell you what those ads are. And they’re not what you would normally think you would advertise to someone, but we’ve just focused on Canberra, so it’s in the minds of people in Canberra, so when they see it on Monday, people are going to say, “Oh, that thing. I know what that is.” So, there’s that.
I’ve also learned that I need to spend more time on LinkedIn. I know, right? I have been a long-time LinkedIn hater, and I’m not anymore. It’s weird. I want to test their advertising products. I’m yet to find some really good case studies about LinkedIn, but I think we’re going to be able to write one soon through focusing on this .au stuff. And the other thing is that … I guess I learned this a little bit with David Meerman Scott when he talked about crisis management in the digital age in his “New Rules of Marketing & PR” and what he was talking about is if someone complains or shouts out at you in a particular platform, whether it be YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever, make sure you go into that space and respond in that space.
Utilise your platforms
What I’ve learned is sort of parallel to that in that if you want to get a message out with video these days, you’re better off putting up something natively on those platforms because people don’t want to go out to YouTube, right? It’s taken me a while to learn this. But until you get a project like this that you’re passionate about, and you can do something with, you can test things on … And, yeah, we’re testing it, but we don’t want the backlinks ’cause we want to see mainly what citations do without necessarily backlinks. Like, we got a backlink last week from one press story. I think there’s been about eight to 10 press stories on this so far, so that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good penetration. And, yeah, I am putting all this in a book because it’s a really good exercise in trying to get a message out.
So, for all the haters that are saying, “He’s doing this for SEO,” no. I’m doing it because I’m passionate about it. A by-product of that is, is that we’re getting more traffic. In fact, traffic has doubled to our site in the last two weeks, which is … We haven’t been going after backlinks. We’ve just been getting out there, trying to get a message in front of people who will care about it. So, there’ll be more on that in the coming weeks, and I want to dissect where the traffic’s coming from, how we penetrated, how we pushed through. I, personally, have sent probably 120 emails. It’s over 100, I know that, on this topic in the last two weeks. The videos have had, cumulatively … There’s been two videos, but cumulatively on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube, there’s been about 20,000 views now, so that to me was a real eye-opener that I need to be working more natively in these sorts of mediums.
But it’s really hard to do as a business owner, as you would know, when you’ve got a lot of other things on your plate. Look, we’ve got a small social media team here that we use for ourselves, but usually they’re doing more client stuff than they’re doing our stuff. But that’s why I want to have a look at their ad product a little bit more closely, so if you used the LinkedIn ad product recently … I know we’ve all used it in the past, and we haven’t had a lot of success, but I think it should work better now. We’ve got some campaigns going. I’ll let you know how they go.
But, hopefully that’s helpful. Thanks for watching. Watch the telly tonight, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
