‘marketing strategy’

Jungle Gym World was established in 2007 by André Ferreira and has since then grown from being a small player in the playground equipment industry to a formidable competitor receiving orders from Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana and even from Hong Kong and nationally. The company is now employer to more than 47 workers. Online marketing is credited for the growth of the company to have become one of the largest steel gym manufacturers and suppliers in the country the past five years.

Jungle Gym World has grown into a formidable competitor in jungle gym equipment over the years using three marketing channels:

• Online marketing which includes a complete marketing mix of Search Engine Optimization (noted by the owner André, as one of the most important reasons for their online success), Pay Per Click advertising, banner ads, article writing and content generation, as well as traffic monitoring.
• Online affiliate marketing where leads are gained from iLead affiliate pages.
• Passive advertising in the printed Yellow Pages.

From the above it becomes clear that Jungle Gym World has increased its exposure and brand awareness by means of the Internet rather than using offline media which is more expensive and can only reach a limited number of people. One of the most important reasons noted for the company’s tremendous success is their ongoing Internet based advertising.

Their website receives on average between 6000 and 7000 visits a month, and all are highly relevant. Getting so many people, who are interested specifically in playground equipment to your website, means that your online marketing methods must work. iLead Online has proven that SEO is essential in increasing search engine visibility and should be the first step in online marketing.

According to André, around 99% of their clients come from the Internet. With thousands of suppliers on the Internet in specifically outdoor play equipment, the company had to ensure that its site would be noticed and more important would result in online sales. Because of this marketing strategy, the company could be more focussed on production of top quality products because iLead has taken the responsibility to ensure a regular stream of visitors, leads, and content for increasing sales conversions.

Important Factors For Online Success

Jungle Gym World has not focussed one only one aspect of online marketing, but several. With only the minimum effort required from Jungle Gym World, iLead Online has ensured ongoing success by using:

• Search engine optimization.
• Article writing by experienced copywriters to ensure credible content that is useful to readers and search engine friendly.
• Incoming link building.
• Blog creation for marketing in the social media environment and reaching more Internet users.
• Pay Per Click advertising management for direct sales leads.
• Creation of landing pages.
• Constant website visitor traffic monitoring.
• Banner ad creation and placing thereof at iLead Online affiliate pages.

Five new pages are added to the article base monthly ensuring that content increases and more visibility are gained regarding organic search engines. Proof is in the stats.

Link Popularity

Link popularity shows the number of websites and search engines linking to a website. The more relevant incoming links from a major search engine and directories, the more doors to a website, and also better ranking.

The Jungle Gym World website has 346 incoming links from Yahoo! which is a major search engine for their co.za domain and 872 for their .com domain. Other search engines sending links to Jungle Gym World are that of Google, Ananzi and Bing. The focus on major search engines has proven to be effective. Google has sent 3617 visits in February 2011 as part of organic searches and 150 referral visits. The website shows only 36% bounce rate, which is excellent. This means that 74% of the visitors explore other web pages on the site before exiting by placing an order.

Visitor Stats

Demographics of the users play an important role in the return on investment when it comes to marketing. Marketing to users which fall outside the scope of your business is indeed money lost. It is never possible to not also receive international visitors if your market is only one country, but you want the majority of visitors to come from within the preferred geographical boundaries. Jungle Gym World has an excellent return on investment because the majority of visits to their website originate from within South Africa and more specifically Gauteng with visits from Pretoria, Sandton and Johannesburg being the most. The site also receives visits from Cape Town and then neighbouring countries, accounting for the successful expansion of its market into neighbouring countries.

Origin Of Traffic

The site receives 64.67% from its traffic from search engines and 3.35% from referring sites while direct hits account for only 31.98%. The site ranks top for several of the main keywords, ensuring that whenever an Internet user searches for playground equipment related terms that Jungle Gym World comes up in the top five results and in many instances is at position 1 to 3. The ROI is all important, and according to André, without the online marketing efforts of iLead and thus the Internet based activity, Jungle Gym World would not exist.

So successful is the company that it is now one of the largest and best known play equipment manufacturers in Southern Africa with regular requests from the USA and important manufacturing countries in Asia. Becoming a major player in the educational and outdoor equipment industry by making use of the Internet as main marketing vehicle and thus also the most cost-effective, is possible if you follow the route that Jungle Gym World did. It is perhaps one of the most inspiring stories on the web and with a longstanding relationship with iLead Online; Jungle Gym World is growing day by day.

So successful is Jungle Gym World that André has been asked on occasion to address a Google and related conferences on the topic of their online success. According to owner, André, a website can be compared to a bottle of water in the desert. The resource is there, but it must be found and for that a map is needed. Online marketing including SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing, link building, and content generation creates the paths to the resource. If done right, Internet marketing, as done through iLead Online, guarantees an excellent return on your marketing investment. Contact us at iLead Online to help you gain the same success through online marketing.

SEO companies and website owners have to work around the clock to adapt their online and website marketing strategies to ensure that the sites they promote don’t fall victim to the latest Google algorithm changes, which highlight the importance of original well-written content aimed at the reader and not the search engine.

Not too long ago, most of the articles written for the purpose of search engine optimization were still around the 450 word mark and before that you could find hundreds of long copy in the range of 600 to 700 words. At the same time also came the notion that all you needed to pass the Google algorithm was about 250 plus words. It became more cost-effective for website owners to have several pages of just over 300 words focussing on keywords, than paying more for high quality articles in the range of 600 words. SEO companies have employed several content writers paying them for mass production and thus a lower tariff rather than paying more for high quality articles.

In effect it has been fine up to now since the general agreed perception is that online users prefer shorter rather than longer articles. Web users often scan rather than read. Of course, you also need to consider that once the article goes over 600 words, the writer must be paid more as it also means a new ball game of quality. All of these factors have  contributed to a massive influx of articles rather than truly in-depth articles not saying the same old thing over and over just in different words.

Google isn’t trying to harm website owners. The opposite is true – to get better, more accurate results for searchers ensuring that the web doesn’t become one big mass of useless information. At the end of the day it all boils down to original content being the king. Google has through its algorithm changes targeted the content farms with names of numerous article directories and ‘how to’ sites being affected. Demand Media has been one of the sites hardest hit by the changes in search algorithms, but some innocent sites have also fallen victim to the changes in algorithms. The online search engine marketing strategy will have to be changed if it is focussed solely on rewrites and content creation without the user in mind. Website owners can still create stunning websites, but with articles aimed at informing and giving the user something of value.

What Is Value?

Determining what Google sees as value is altogether something else. Some have speculated that grammar mistakes, repeating of keywords too many times, length of articles, value of incoming links, age of the site, and loading time will all play their fair share in the website ranking.

How To Beat The Changes

Some tips on how to minimize the effect that the Google algorithm changes will have on your site are briefly shared below, but it should be noted that there are more than one hundred factors to be considered. Striking the right balance between search engine marketing and design of the site can mean the difference between landing in the sand box and still ranking in the top five for organic search results.

Share Traffic Between Sponsored/Direct and Organic Search Results

Don’t focus solely on the search results pages. You need to minimize the effects of any algorithm changes and with that then it will be better to have a loyal customer base coming back because you offer value. You will thus have to rethink quantity over quality. Rather have fewer new articles added to your site with keyword density carefully considered than having loads of shorter articles and blogs added offering little other than marketing value. SEO companies will have to reconsider their hiring policies and the pay rate offered to ensure that the writers will not simply write as many as possible articles to get enough income, but will take time to do proper research and of course, also because the articles will contain more words. Website owners will have to take note of this as higher ranks will also mean higher SEO costs.

Design The Site For Fast Loading

Not all users have the same Internet connectivity speed, but Google doesn’t penalise the site owner for that. Rather, it is looking at minimizing the effect on the environment by ensuring faster loading sites complying with the standards for accessibility and usability of W3C. Get rid of too much Flash and get back to basics. Focussed, easy to navigate, fast loading sites will do better. The website owners should reconsider videos at their sites. It may become better to have the videos run at YouTube and have them linked back to your site. Thus, having a YouTube channel for the purpose of website marketing will be better than showing all the videos at your site. Doing your part in minimizing the blue print we have on our environment, will help to decrease loading time and ensure the plus of better ranking.

Keyword Density Considerations

The keyword relevance to a site, topics discussed, and length of articles may in future play an important role. Keeping in mind that through the Google algorithm changes, sites adding the same old content just rewritten will be penalised, one must consider original content of value. With longer articles also comes the benefit of being able to space keywords better and reduce the risk of being noted as just a content farm.

Value Of Links

Incoming links will be judged according to the ranking of the sites from where the links are obtained and relevance to the content of the receiving website. Too many one to one links will be penalised. It comes back to good quality original content. If your site offers true value for the reader, other sites will link to it. Link exchange programs must thus be reconsidered. It doesn’t mean that one on one links will be out altogether, just that a balance must be maintained rather than relying on link exchange programs.

Impact On Article Marketing

Article directories have been severely affected by the Google algorithm changes on 25 February 2011. Some of the hardest hit sites are that of Wisegeek.com, Ezinearticles.com, Suite101.com, and Hubpages.com. Mahalo had severe staff cuts because of the changes and millions of dollars have been lost by the content farms. Website owners will find that article marketing will take on new meaning. Getting links in by submitting articles to the article directories can still be done, but with caution as to not to overdo it. Websites gaining traffic through negative comments at their forums will also see a severe drop in traffic.

Other Steps To Take In Meeting The New SEO Challenges

Create a Facebook account and build a business profile on the Facebook site. Ensure that blog posts are longer and offer real value. Join Twitter and move videos to a YouTube channel. Review your websites and remove any form of keyword stuffing or any resemblance to such. Rely less on article submission and more on the creation of well written longer original content. It may mean that the SEO companies will have to pay more than just doubling the amount for 300 to 600 word articles for the articles written by content writers because the depth of research must visible in the articles, but at the end of the day original content will be king in the battle of surviving the Google algorithm changes.

A recession is generally seen as a bad time. Jobs are lost, banks loan less, and, as the consumer tightens his or her belt, businesses start to suffer. Generally businesses try to counteract the negative consequences of a recession in one of 3 ways:

• By retrenching and laying off workers
• By closing loss making and marginal divisions
• By cutting budgets across the board

Although these steps are often painful, they are necessary to ensure the survival of the company during tough economic times. But lately more and more companies are hesitant to cut their marketing budget to save on expenditure. In fact, Kellogg’s actually increased their marketing budget during the Great Depression and as such their sales increased. Today, more than 80 years later, Kellogg’s is the only breakfast brand of that era that is still in existence and their case study proves the short as well as long term benefit of advertising during an economic slump.

During the recent economic recession (some have even called it a depression) the majority of companies took a hit. In fact,  even those who were considered to be doing well also felt the pinch.

Interestingly enough advertising agencies in South Africa experienced the recession more severely than other industries and many had to retrench employees in order to stay afloat. This was because businesses cut on their offline advertising (radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and billboards) – choosing to spend their advertising budgets on online advertising instead.

Online advertising has allowed companies to spend less on advertising but still build on their equity and solidify their client base; not to mention gain new clients and taking on their competition. Indeed, many progressive companies are finding that when weighing op the two advertising methods, that internet driven advertising has multiple benefits.

Costs

From a purely financial consideration online advertising is far more cost effective than offline advertising. Purchasing airtime for a TV commercial is very costly, especially for the prime time spots when most of the targeted consumers are tuned in, and the risk is always there that the channel might be changed during ad breaks. Online advertising on the other hand works with a fixed cost per click (CPC) budget and website advert. Moreover, an online advertising campaign is far more cost effective (with savings of over 80% for the same results found in offline advertising) and controllable in the short- and long term.

Target Audience

People tend to think that you simply need to design and create a website in order for it to be seen, but business owners need to remember that there are literally thousands of websites in any specific vertical and market. Don’t let this scare you however, because while consumers may read the newspaper or watch television on a daily basis, they are not particularly looking for a product or service. With online searches on Google on the other hand, they are specifically looking for the product or service that you offer, and are therefore much more likely to take the time to read your advertisement.

In this case your advertisement would be your website. With online advertising you can be very particular who your target audience is. Moreover, if your website is set up correctly, you will be able to track your statistics. This will give you the particulars of your viewers, such as their age, location, how they came upon your website, what keywords were used to search for your website, and so forth, thus giving you an edge on your marketing strategy.

Reach

With offline advertisements you can never be sure that your particular target audience paid much attention. Yes you can definitely say that a certain amount of viewers were tuned in, but were they actually noticing your ad and were they the right demographic?  With print ads there is of course the chance that the reader will simply page over. The fact is that online readers look at this form of advertising differently. They typed in specific keywords into the search engine looking for the product or service that your website offers. This is why online marketing plays such a significant role.

When your website is properly optimized, you will be sure that your website will be one of the top search results that the reader finds, and by tracking the readers actions, you will be able to see exactly what pages they went on to on your website, how much time they spent on a page, and even if they left your website directly or clicked through to another page. In the online world this is referred to as the click-through rate (CTR) which is used to measure the success of an online campaign.

Speed of Campaign

Another reason why companies choose internet marketing (online advertising) over offline advertising is the speed at which campaigns run. While most offline ad campaigns can take quite some time before the reader/viewer even sees the ad, advertising online is much quicker. From the moment you publish a new page, story or pay per click (PPC) ad it will be live on the internet and have the potential to be viewed by your targeted audience instantaneously. This means that you have to be much more particular with your timing of running an ad campaign offline, and often you are limited by outside influences, while internet advertising allows you to take that new story or ad live whenever it suits you.

While offline advertising still has its place in the world, the fact of the matter is that online advertising is growing rapidly because of several reasons – speed, cost effective, target specific and reach. Does this mean that you should let go of your offline campaign and go fully online? Not necessarily. But you definitely should include online advertising as part of your marketing strategy. Not only is it much faster, cheaper and targeted, but online advertising is also more flexible and offer you as business owner options to get your message across. At the end of the day you can be certain that even during tough times, you will see a positive ROI.

In our online world one thing is certain – content is king.  It is for this very reason why we place such emphasis on the importance of creating informative and genuine content pages specifically aimed at search engines, particularly Google.

Writing copy for websites is no easy task though.  While many people think that there is no difference between offline copywriting and web copywriting, nothing could be further from the truth.  To begin with there are more than 15 SEO factors that the copywriter needs to keep in mind while optimizing content.  Then there’s the daunting idea that failing to do so with any one of these factors might lead to an overall rank drop for the site, which is why we insist on using the services of professionally trained and experienced SEO Copywriters.

Another reason why web copywriting differs so much from offline copywriting is the fact that people interact differently to content on the web.  Google estimated that the average reader takes approximately 30 seconds to decide whether or not they find a particular page relevant and interesting. So instead of reading content like you would a book or magazine, the reader is scanning through it to find highlighted thoughts and links, following links from page to page. From this we can take it that the importance of optimized content is to draw your potential client in in order for them to get to know your product or services better after which they can make the ultimate decision to engage with your company.

In our last blog post on The Importance of Website Speed we briefly touched on the subject of content relevancy. Without a doubt this factor carries the most weight in Google’s search ranking algorithms, the “calculation” by which Google determines what website pages to give as result to your search. Whenever you do a search for a particular product, brand or subject Google’s spiders are sent out into the world wide web of websites and within mere seconds provide you with pages most relevant and of the highest quality in terms of your search. This is where keywords definitely plays a major role and why it is absolutely imperative your website is well optimized, making use of meta tags, link building, and so forth.

At the end of the day optimized copy serves not only as relevant and useful information to your visitors but also affects the overall ranking of the website by attracting the search engine spiders that will ensure that your website does well in general. This will enable you to set up goals to achieve, like getting a reader to fill in an online query, purchase a product or download content.  Whatever your goal/s may be though, you need to take the time, money and effort to invest in informative, relevant and well optimized content as an essential part of your marketing strategy.