About.
Reverse Engineering Marketing Strategies.
As a marketer I’m fascinated with strategies. In competitive website niches, why does one website rise to to the top… when the competing website offerings appears near identical? In my experience it’s almost always the same reasons. Better product, better systems, better marketing.
I’m an Aussie based in Berlin. For 10 years back in Australia I ran a digital web/marketing agency. I moved to Europe where I have been Head of SEO / Head of Marketing for multiple startups, spanning the niches of Directory, Marketplace, and SAAS.
I’m a big picture guy. My marketing strategy is, your marketing strategy should drive your product development. Many companies do this in reverse, tacking marketing onto their products. This is a mistake. Write your business plan, work out your marketing strategy, build your digital assets around it. Successful online companies get this right – unsuccessful ones invariably get it wrong.
I built this website to document my experiments pulling apart the marketing strategies of companies to test my theories.
It’s been a lot of fun and I hope you find it useful.
The Secret Stuff
WHAT REALLY MATTERS?
So what are the most often repeated problems I see with the web development and marketing strategies of big websites?
01. PRODUCT AND MARKETING TEAMS NOT BEING ALIGNED.
Your marketing team can bring the people, but it’s the product’s team to ensure that the marketing team has something to tell people about. If your offering is inferior to the competitions by any discernible amount? No amount of marketing will bring you success in the long run.
Align your product and marketing teams. They should be working closely together.
02.PERFORMANCE MARKETING WITH A START GAME BUT NO END GAME STRATEGY
I hear a lot of CEO’s saying “Focus on the 80/20 rule and your Kpi’s”. This is a great place to start, but a terrible place to get stuck at. End game for Performance marketing must be following the 100 / 0 rule and focusing on getting everything right. I see campaigns no user personas not considered, user experience glossed over. Ads served not being a match for the problem the user indicates they need solving.
Each ad needs to be perfect to optimise your performance marketing spend.
03. RETARGETING IS DONE AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT
Retargeting done without consideration of where the user is in their marketing journey. Creatives that are too busy, the wrong colours, that are not appealing to their target market. A generic retargeting campaign served to all visitors, rather than a targeted one based on their behavior.
04. WEBSITES BUILT WITH POOR SEO
Yes – page titles, content, links and PR… but it’s much more than that. When you build big websites, link juice funneling and link juice loss are your major challenges. Websites that don’t perfect the art of link juice funneling don’t achieve top rankings in competitive niches.