Change to meet consumer demand is one of the constants when it comes to FMCG growth. Amazon, of course is leading the way in online sales for the FMCG realm, but Woolworths, Bunnings and many more are adapting their sales and delivery methods to meet the demand for online and immediate purchasing. Woolworths, Coles, Officeworks, MYER, Autobarn, JB Hi-Fi and many, many more Australian companies have embraced Click and Collect as well as online shopping and delivery, allowing customers to both purchase and pick up items at their convenience.

According to Christopher Hatfield, Head of ebusiness at Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company is maximizing their ecommerce impact by being present in a huge number of channels, from brick and mortar establishments offering online shopping and click and collect, online only delivery services like Amazon and eBay, and direct to consumer avenues like nespresso.com.

One of the driving factors behind this diversification, is that outside of specific products like Nespresso capsules, consumers buy Nestle products as part of a broader basket – items that are added during other shopping rather than products specifically. Another factor is the low average unit value of a number of Nestle items. Having items such as Maggi noodles – $3.95 for a five pack – available from a number of vendors offers a larger consumer base that selling them form a single store front or vendor.

A final key factor in Nestle’s strategy or diversification of ecommerce channels comes down to the fact that FCMG products have traditionally not owned the customer relationship. The retailers themselves hold the relationship with the consumer – Coles or Woolworths shoppers are fairly loyal to their chosen retailer, a habit reinforced by the retail giants through loyalty programs rewarding repeat shoppers. Rather than building a brand identity and purpose like you would if brand marketing, Nestle has instead opted to identify the avenues of sale that already have that customer base and trust.

This, of course, hasn’t stopped Nestle from innovating in their online marketing approach for certain iconic products. In addition to the nespresso.com online store enabling consumers to buy coffee pods, accessories and machines direct, they have also launched the Kit Kat Chocolatory, an online portal for all things Kit Kat, including the option to create your own personalised chocolate bar or box.

Personalisation is a key trend across a number of markets, not just chocolates. The beauty industry is one of the fastest growing ecommerce sectors in Australia, with a massive 36% year on year sales growth in 2019. In 2020 the beauty industry is expected to net around $6.5 billion in the Australian market, and around $532 billion globally. Beauty product sales make up around 11% of total online sales. Why this rapid growth into a shopping avenue that seems on the surface rather incompatible with the products being sold? It comes down to the acceptance and embrace of new technologies and marketing techniques.

L’Oreal acquired the Canadian augmented reality company, Modiface in 2018 and has integrated the AR technology into an avenue for both allowing customers to virtually experiment with products before buying them, as well as a tool for creating personalized beauty regimens. Modiface allows users to upload a picture of themselves to experiment with how different cosmetics and hair colours might look on them, not only giving consumers a chance to try before they buy from the comfort of their home, but also maximizing the time that customers are spending on the site increasing the chance they will buy something.

In addition to virtually testing makeup, L’Oreal also uses the same technology, combined with advanced AI to diagnose signs of skin aging in women. The technology launched in 2019, Vichy SkinConsult^AI uses AI technology to analyse uploaded customer photos to identify seven signs of skin aging, such as under-eye wrinkles and lack of radiance before creating a personalised product regime to deal with their specific skincare needs as part of a subscription service.

Subscription models are becoming more and more prevalent in nearly every market, from beauty to pet care with everything in between. Subscription boxes, such as Bellabox, a cosmetics and skin care package and Dollar Shave Club, a service delivering razors, shave gel, balm and toiletries, add convenience and a sense of value to a purchase, and especially in the case of beauty products, novelty can play a large role in the appeal of such a service, with many boxes including a number of samples or trials of interesting or new products.

The beauty industry hasn’t just embraced new technology, it has also strongly embraced new media when it comes to marketing.  57% of fashion and beauty companies engage in influencer marketing. It’s no wonder, according to a 2019 Influencer Marketing Hub survey, businesses are making $5.20 for every $1 they spend on influencer marketing.

Due both to convenience and ubiquity, it’s no surprise that the number of people ordering on a mobile platform is growing at a massive rate. As of 2019, 26% of orders were placed from a mobile, and that rate is increasing at a rate of 29% YoY, in stark contrast to a decline in desktop and laptop ordering. One of the key factors driving this increase in ordering is apps like Menulog and UberEats, and better mobile optimisation of websites and the massive saturation of handheld devices in Australia. According to a 2019 Deloitte study, mobile penetration in Australia is a staggering 91%, making us one of the most mobile-centric countries of the world. With such penetration, it’s no wonder that more and more Australian are using their mobile devices for browsing and purchasing.

Ensuring that your site is adaptive and mobile friendly is a key step to securing your place in the ecommerce future. There are many steps you can take to properly optimise your site, but one of the first should be compressing images so they don’t take up too much bandwidth and slow down the site. One of Google’s indexing criteria is site speed, so you don’t want to hamstring yourself due to sluggish performance.

Over the two days I attended a number of seminars and panels on a number of marketing topics, but for ease of purpose I’ve split the information from the summit into three distinct categories; Marketing Technology and Innovation, Brand Marketing and Ecommerce. I have also added my own thoughts around topics to give each topic more substance. 

AD BLOCKERS

Did you know that in Australia around 46% of people browsing the Internet use an ad blocker? While it’s hard to accurately judge due to browsing styles, mobile devices and bandwidth limitations, it’s estimated that globally in 2019, around 30% of all Internet users had an ad blocker. The demand is so strong that Google released its own Chrome ad blocker in July 2019. The main takeaway from this must be that we can’t simply rely on traditional advertisements for digital marketing, as a large number of end users will never see our efforts.

As you can see, without an ad blocker, ads are clearly visible on the Daily Telegraph page. In fact, they take up the majority of screen real estate.

The same landing page with an ad blocker activated shows much more content as well as empty screen space.

Many sites require advertising revenue to operate and have taken the step of blocking people from accessing a site with an active ad blocker.

The Impact of Ad Blocking on Marketing and Advertisers

So what digital marketing strategies can we use going forward to adapt and thrive in this new digital marketing landscape? To combat this rise in ad blockers, social media marketing and related spend has increased quite a bit, as the consumers are there and the channel still works for digital marketing as there is no technology in place to block digital marketing posts as yet. That said, the most valuable thing brands can do is invest in search marketing. When a user is going to Google and doing a search they are telling a brand exactly what they are looking for. If a brands ad appears at this time they are not interrupting the user’s journey but are instead enhancing it. 75% of customers say that paid search ads made it easier to find what they were after, and 63% of Internet users have clicked on a Google ad, making it a cost effective and powerful way to develop leads and make sales.

The Google Chrome ad blocker is an interesting development as it hints at what we need to do in order for traditional advertising to be a viable digital marketing strategy again. Rather than blocking all ads, the Chrome ad blocker instead targets ads that breach the Better Ads Standards. This service has already been rolled out as part of Chrome in North America and most of Europe and will be released globally at a later date. The Standards look at the least preferred desktop and mobile advertising experiences, such as full screen scrollovers, popups with a countdown and autoplay videos with sound and set the base standard around blocking the type of ads users dislike most. This may seem rather disheartening, but it also shows that there are ads that end users actually find useful and engaging. Sticking to those types of ads could circumvent s good deal of blocking and help build a brand identity free of any ill will from aggravating ads.

CHAT BOTS

Another idea that was raised at the Summit is that responsiveness is one of the key factors in converting an inquiry into a sale. According to one of the speakers, Jethro Grainger Marsh of Alsco, 10 years ago a fast response was same day, now we expect a response same hour. At small scale it may be possible for people to respond to queries in a timely manner, but when it comes to creating a conversion strategy based around customer experience, a chat bot can be an indispensable tool for rapid response to easy queries, and with training and sufficient AI can answer more complex inquiries in a timely manner.

The simple fact is that between 35% and 50% of B2B sales go to the vendor that responds to inquiries first and the statistics for B2C sales skew even higher. Early in my career I started and ran a small inbound marketing call centre in the telco marketplace. We were very successful, but even back then, quick turnaround was key to sales conversions. Due to the small team and the nature of the work, the sales team was constantly making or taking calls so wouldn’t be able to take all incoming inquiries instantly. We responded to calls as quickly as possible, but often it wasn’t fast enough for the customer. What we discovered was that when we called the customer back, even an hour later we often found that they had already signed with another telco, or that we could not reach then when we attempted to call back and thereby lost the sale.

Given that being able to respond to a lead or an inquiry in a timely manner is key for sales conversion, what can we do to speed up the process? Kat Warboys, Head of Marketing for HubSpot suggests using live chat across key sales pages on your website and the use of chat bots to automate easy inquiries, such as answering FAQs, surface articles from the knowledge base (such as stock availability and location, opening and closing times and basic queries about products or services), assigning more complex queries to a live chat agent and pre-screening customers so the live agent can best serve them. 64% of Internet users say that 24-hour service is the best feature of chat bots, and given that online shops are always open, so taking advantage of an automated assistant that never needs sleep seems like a logical next step in any digital marketing plan.

Rather than trying to hide the fact that you’re using a chat bot by giving it a name, Kat Warboys suggests that you embrace the fact that it is a bot and let that fact be known to avoid any confusion and frustration from customers.

Offsite chat – communication not facilitated through the website directly – should also be prioritised in your digital marketing strategy. Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Slack and Email all play a vital role in converting leads to sales. While email allows for more personalisation in messages, creativity in design and depth of communication, messenger services such as Facebook and Whatsapp allow for fast communication turnaround through chat bots, capable of answering simple enquiries and redirecting more complex inquiries to a live agent, much like their website based counterparts. Facebook Messenger is the most widely used chat platform in the world at the moment, with around 2.5 billion users as of Q4 2019, and Whatsapp closing in fast with 2 billion users, so leveraging this massive user base into your marketing strategy can be an important step forward. Messenger can boast a massive open and clickthrough rate from both live and chat bot generated messages, eclipsing those of email.

Caroline Hugall of IAG suggests one leading approach is to embed the brand’s purpose and identity in the marketing. Examples of brand purpose we were given show the importance of keeping the purpose and identity simple, such as Patagonia (the environment), Cadbury’s (joy) and Nike (inspiration).

I’ve done my own research into some of these brands to see how they have developed their branding. Taking Patagonia as an example, the environmental brand identity is visible from the outset in the website, with a video of outdoor adventure and the second link on the site being to the company’s environmental activism efforts. In 2017, Patagonia released its first ever television ad and rather than focussing on a new line of apparel, a sale or the like, it instead focussed on the importance of protecting American public lands.  In the lead up to the Black Friday sales in 2019, Patagonia released an ad telling customers not to buy a Patagonia jacket, unless they really need it. On top of that, the company devoted all sales on Black Friday to environmental causes.

According to the Accenture Strategy Global Consumer Pulse survey 2018, 62% of consumers believe companies should stand up for issues they are passionate about and 66% highly value transparency in branding. The Don’t Buy This Jacket campaign clearly shows a brand identity strongly aligned with sustainability, recycling, and care for the environment. Giving Black Friday proceeds to environmental causes could also help people self-justify spending money on items they may not need.  With this campaign, Patagonia has effectively marketed a lifestyle and ethos seemingly at the expense of their own brand, but has strengthened their brand identity with both new and established consumers. Keeping the brand identity simple and focussed in one area (or a few closely related areas) can help in both brand building and creating a relationship with the consumer.

Being authentic with the branding and identity is extremely important when it comes to maintaining the trust of customers. Trust is hard to gain but extremely easy to lose, especially in an era of heightened consumer expectations. Building trust can be achieved in a number of different ways but authenticity, consistency and transparency form the basis of a good trust building approach. Authenticity should permeate every level of your company, not just the marketing, as saying one thing but practicing another is a sure way to lose trust. Say, for example, a company markets itself as being devoted to equality (perhaps to coincide with Pride or another celebration of diversity) but has a history of overlooking women for promotion or discriminating against LGBTQI employees. This is a sure way to lose trust from a consumer base. If the company, however, practiced what they preached, then trust could be built with the customers.

Consistency and transparency are the other two pillars on which trust can be build when building a brand identity. Being on message in all content, like the overall environmental bent in the case of Patagonia, or being consistent when it comes to customer experience can all aid in consumers developing trust in a brand. Being transparent not only means showing the ethos of the brand, but owning up to mistakes and responding to complaints.

INFLUENCER MARKETING

Influencer culture has become more and more prevalent with the exponential growth of Youtube, and to a lesser extent, Twitch, Influencer marketing has become more and more prevalent. How influencers are utilized can grossly effect trust in a brand. Oporto utilized influencer marketing when launching a vegan burger. Knowing they would most likely get some flack for launching a vegan burger in a chicken focused fast food chain, the chain chose to invite some of the most vocal haters to come in and eat the new burger. Before serving the burgers, they were first laser branded with the negative comments.

Influencers exist all across social media, but Instagram is a major centre of Influencer marketing, with beauty, travel and lifestyle being the focal point of a great deal of the marketing pushes. While clever influencer marketing, such as the Eat Your Words campaign can be effective, this relatively new avenue for marketing has its share of problems. Sponsored posts on social media and streaming/video services are required to carry a disclaimer that content is sponsored as well as any other codes or indicators as required by law. Many influencers have failed to do this on posts. Influencer marketing company, CollectivEdge found that in 2018, only 38% of brand sponsored posts were disclosed as ads or paid for collaborations.  The lack of disclosure can and will damage the reputation and brand authenticity of both the sponsoring brand and influencer, as well as legal problems.

Similarly, tying a brand to an influencer can also tie a brand identity to that of the influencer. While this can undoubtedly have positive effects, it can also have repercussions if the influencer acts in an inappropriate way. Take for example the immensely popular social media mogul and influencer, Kendall Jenner. Jenner boasts over 120 million Instagram followers and pulls in around $16 million USD a year in sponsored posts. Her reach is obviously very attractive to a number of brands, but this has backfired a number of times. Pepsi chose the very recognizable Kendall Jenner as the face of a 2017 advertising campaign but came under fire for trivializing Black Lives Matter, whitewashing an act of defiance by an African American woman, and pretending that one of the richest celebrities in the world has a grass roots social conscience. Pepsi quickly pulled the campaign.

Also in 2017 Jenner became one of the public faces of the disastrous Fyre Festival. Jenner and a number of other model/influencers including Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski were paid up to $250,000 USD per post to advertise the upcoming music festival. Jenner did this with a single post garnering almost 6 million views before it was deleted. The post touted the music lineup at the festival, hinted that Jenner’s brother-in-law Kanye West might be a performer and offered a discount code for tickets. Not only was the event a disaster, Jenner also neglected to disclose that the post was sponsored, leading to a subpoena as well as the organisers and influencers being sued for “negligent misrepresentation, fraud, breach of contract for failing to ‘provide the festival experience as promised’ as well as ‘misrepresentations’ that caused people to purchase tickets.”

CONTENT FIRST APPROACH

It’s no wonder that some brands are gun-shy about influencer marketing. During a panel on the subject, both Penny Parkinson, CMO of Vet Matters and Natalie Miller, Head of Brand and Communications at the NSW Business Chamber (formerly the NSW Chamber of Commerce) have avoided influencer marketing. Instead, Miller has adopted a web first marketing strategy based around heavily searched content. While she never explicitly used the term SEO during her panel, the NSW Business Chamber approach is SEO through and through. The content rich site currently contains around 700 articles answering commonly asked questions or search terms, such as, “how much should I pay an intern?” or “workplace advice line”.

In my experience, the first step to both establishing an authentic brand identity and effectively marketing that brand is to understand your customer. This is especially true when optimising SEO. In a panel on B2B Brand Awareness Strategy, one of the panellists, Robin Marchant, Head of marketing, APAXC for Shopify Plus used the example of trying to market software to medical practises. The assumption was made that people would be searching for “health software” but that didn’t work as the target market were those managing the clinics, so they were searching for “practise management software”.

People are always hungry for content. People are looking for tips. Listicles work well, case studies, whitepapers. You should put together content that will make your customers look good, but should always consider the target audience or market. By using SEO techniques, knowing the market and researching what that market will be searching for, I have managed to raise and keep my 2018 Digital Marketing Ted talk to the top of Google.

For more Forward Marketing Summit 2020 posts, check out Technology and Innovation and Ecommerce.

Don’t Procrastinate

Life moves fast and if you want to get the most out of it, you need to move fast as well. You should definitely make time for yourself so you can relax, but don’t put off anything you want to accomplish. Whether it’s starting a course and acquiring those new skills you’ve been wanting to learn, launching a blog you’ve been wanting to create or starting that dream business, don’t put it off until tomorrow. Do it now!

Savings and Investments

Having some money in the bank can be a lifesaver if you need to fix or replace something, but it’s also key to being able to follow your dreams. You don’t need to live like a pauper and put all of your pay-packet into a savings account, but putting some money aside whenever you get paid can add up to a decent sum very quickly, especially if you keep it in a fixed term deposit. Think of money as your little soldiers hard at work 24/7. It will constantly multiply even while you are sleeping.

Be Kind – Pay it Forward

I lost my parents at a young age and I learnt one of the most important lessons of life. You come to this world with nothing and you will leave this world with nothing. The most important thing you will leave behind are the impressions you left on people and their memories of your time together. Be kind. Pay it forward. Be good to people and try and leave the world a better place for having you in it. There is more than enough negativity in the world without you adding to it.

Do what you love

Follow your passion. Don’t get a job just for the money, find a job you are actually passionate about. While the old adage, “if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life” isn’t strictly true – you’ll still be working, no matter how much you enjoy the work – getting pleasure from your job is still far preferable to hating everything you do for eight hours a day, even if the pay packet is good.

Never Stop Learning!

Constantly challenge and reinvent yourself. Have you learned anything new or updated your skillset in the last few years? Keeping up to date with new techniques in your line of business is always important, but even outside of work, keeping your brain and body active with new skills and knowledge is both rewarding and revitalising. Over the last decade I’ve learned to play tennis and squash, have taken up karate and started learning an instrument. Take classes, find tutorials, get training. It’s all worthwhile and enjoyable.

If you’re interested in reading more you can also find a full writeup of the Digital Marketing TedX Delhi talk.

I grew up in Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi. Imagine my life, then, as I travelled to Australia for my higher education, going from a city of 20 million to a small town, Richmond (just outside Sydney) in Australia with a population of 5483 people. By five in the afternoon life would come to a standstill. There was not much to do but that was a blessing in disguise, as I discovered the Computer Centre at the university. That is where my love affair with the Internet started.

A Global Network

It was the mid-90s, the Internet was in its infancy and I loved the fact that I was reading the same newspaper that I used to read when I was in India. The same newspaper my parents were reading. It was amazing. My life in Australia taught me how to fend for myself, it taught me the value of money, time and focus. I did a degree in Marketing followed by an MBA a few years later.

I started working in sales and went about all the traditional models. I did door to door sales on a purely commission basis. This was one of the hardest jobs I have ever had. I still remember that first door on which I knocked. Picture this; I was standing outside a stranger’s house and didn’t have the courage to knock on the door. I stood outside for nearly 30 minutes before I was able to draw up enough courage.

There were times when I would reach a house to find a dog starting hungrily at me. There were times when it would rain or it was so hot that you just didn’t feel like working. After this I did shopping centre promotions, telemarketing and cold calling. Calling people to sell them something when they were about to have dinner or do something important was not an easy task. I had to patiently listen to some of the choicest swear words. That’s why even today when I receive lots of unwanted calls I am very polite to them.

Search Marketing

Having done all the above I was convinced that there was a better way to sell. I used my Internet Marketing knowledge and turned this sales model upside down. I created an Inbound Marketing model. So how did I do it?

I started a website selling Phone and Internet services in 2004. The first one didn’t do as well as expected so I shut it down. I didn’t let my failure pull me down. I learnt from it and put together a second website that was very successful. I realised that building a website was not good enough. Unless the website gets traffic it’s not doing anything. You can invest tens of thousands of dollars in creating a really beautiful website but it like building a shop in the middle of the desert. You make the investment in Digital Marketing for your website.

The strategy was based on the simple observation that the first thing people do today, whether they want to buy a car, a phone, rent an apartment or go on a holiday, is research online. They go to Google, and Google is filtering out and providing a list of the best websites for a particular topic. This is the idea I capitalised on. “SEARCH MARKETING”.

I did a lot of research on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (pay per click) and optimised my site so that when people search on Google for phone service related search terms my website ranked on top.

Four Pillars of Search Engine Optimisation

I discovered there were four pillars to SEO:

On Page Factors like Keywords and Content – are you giving enough info about your product to the user?

Technical Factors like code and site architecture – how do the pages within your site link to each other.

Conversion Factors like Usability and Web design – such as load speed, use and size of images images and the like.

Popularity Factors like which sites link to your site – hyperlinks that we click on when we go from one website to another. Think of this as votes to your web site.

I was competing against the biggest Australian Telcos & I was winning the online marketing war! For keywords like “home phone service, international calls, mobile phone deals, broadband internet etc…. I was on the first page of Google and some were even ranking #1.

The phone lines were ringing & so was the cash!

Paid Search – SEM and PPC

I then invested the money back into the business & this time in addition to SEO I invested in Paid Search such as. Google Adwords. So now I had two opportunities to get the customer. I experimented with various deals and as soon as I found customers liked a particular deal I would promote it like mad!

I created a small inbound marketing call centre that was generating more sales then larger 50 seat call centres. We were able to sell over $15 Million of services and became the largest dealer for the Telco.

Website open 24/7 = Sales Superstar

At this point I was now literally working in my pyjamas a couple of hours per day & didn’t have a challenge. This is when an opportunity arose for me to go back to India and start a digital marketing agency. I had long aspired to go back and work in India but leaving behind a successful business was a very difficult decision. However the inner calling and my adventurous nature eventually won.

I came back to India and started a digital agency in 2010. Since my exposure involved Telco & Digital Marketing, it was only natural that one of my first clients was a small local Telco hoping to make it big! We helped them set-up an eCommerce business model which sold over 2 Crore ($20,000,000 USD or $29,016,000 AUD) worth of products within a few months. This, at a time when the CFO of the company said eCommerce was not a channel worth exploring. The common thought was that no one in India would buy a Rs25,000 ($510 AUD) product online without the opportunity to get their hands on it first. Why would they trust the company or the fact that they would get the product?

We sold the first product on the first day of the site going live.

The best thing about the Internet is that it is a great equaliser. A small business website running out of a garage can rival the website of much larger businesses. On the Internet the consumer doesn’t know how big or small your business is.

Video Content is King

While I was able to take advantage of Digital marketing strategies like SEO and PPC, today I would recommend that you also take advantage of video.

Everyone has access to a video camera in their mobile phone and anyone can become a star. Unleash your creative genius. Become the storyteller you have always wanted to be.. You don’t need high quality video or a large budget. If kids can make millions of dollars unboxing and reviewing toys, why can’t you make your mark?

Product reviews are the most watched category of videos on Youtube, with popular content creators from across the age and experience spectrum delivering videos running the whole range of production values from extremely cheap to high budget professional. Ryan’s World, the channel that is home to Ryan ToysReview (pictured above) is an immensely popular and profitable content stream with the most popular videos being those of Ryan playing with and giving his opinion of new toys. The channel is a combination of product review and unboxing, a subset of product reviews that are literally people unboxing products and reacting to their first impressions. It has over 24 million subscribers and his most popular video “HUGE EGGS Surprise Toys Challenge with Inflatable water slide”, first published in 2016 had a staggering 1.9 billion views as of March 2020. As of 2019 Ryan’s World was earning $22 million USD annually through views, and that is only set to increase with the rise in subscribers.

As of late 2019, Youtube boasted 1.3 billion users, with 5 billion videos being watched every day and more than 500 hours of content being uploaded every minute. Out of all that content, the five most popular categories of Youtube videos are:

• Product Reviews – there is a massive market for product reviews and reaction across a huge range of product categories and levels of production quality.
• How-To Videos – no matter what you want to learn, there is probably a video available on Youtube to instruct you on best practises.
• Vlogs – Vlogs are the video version of a blog and usually feature an influencer or Internet personality talking about their life or a subject important to them.
• Gaming Videos– Video gaming content comes in a variety of forms, from let’s plays (showing a person playing a game, sometimes while interacting with an online audience and tutorials, to reviews, opinion pieces and previews.
• Comedy/Skits – both established comedians and Youtube amateurs upload a plethora of standup, skits, parody songs and goofs.

The Rise of Mobile Internet

With the rate of technological innovation and streamlining of manufacturing processes, mobile phones are becoming progressively more ubiquitous. According to Statista.com, 51.65% of all global Internet traffic is mobile as of September 2019. The rates of mobile Internet usage vary from territory to territory, with some, such as South America and Asia showing over 60% mobile internet browsing. How are you taking advantage of this? Today everyone is carrying a mobile phone in their pocket. Imagine the millions of customers who are bored on a long commute and with nothing to do. Is your website catering to the mobile audience?

Making sure your website is fully optimised for mobile browsing is hugely important if you want to rank well and get conversions Making sure the design is scalable and responsive so it will be readable on any size screen is a vital first step, but making sure that your images are optimised for fast loading is also incredibly important. Compressing images greatly reduces file size without compromising quality, allowing the site to load faster. Loading speed is one of the indexing factors looked at when Google is ranking pages, so getting everything running a fast as possible is great for overall SEO.

Vernacular Content

English may be a language with a large number of native of second language speakers, but sometimes it is valuable to target specific markets through the use of language and vernacular. Take India, for example. It is one country but separated into 29 states, each essentially their own little country with their own language or dialect, culture, food and customs. Essentially every few hundred kilometres you are entering a new country.. You can take advantage of this and differentiate yourself by creating content in local languages. You could even start blogging in a regional language– It doesn’t cost much, and anyone can blog about subjects they are passionate about. You could video blog (vlog) – some of the most popular channels on YouTube are video blogs, and they make a ton of money.

Although I used India as an example in my TEDx talk, this vernacular content is relevant worldwide on both macro and micro levels. In the US, in states like New Mexico, California, Texas and Arizona, depending on the product or service you’re trying to market, it could be beneficial to create Spanish content to cater to the large Hispanic populations. On a smaller scale, if you’re trying to market something in Sydney Chinatown, creating content in both English and Mandarin might be advisable.

Vernacular content can also be tied with local idiom rather than language, using key phrases, saying or landmarks that are intrinsically tied to that market, whether it be references to local sports teams or cultural icons, or using local slang that doesn’t resonate anywhere else.

Life Lessons

Since I had a young audience at the TedX event at the beginning of their careers, I wanted to share some of my general life lessons that would have helped me on my journey if I had known earlier. You can find some of that hard earned wisdom here.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments below and I’ll answer as quickly as possible.