The Heavy Chef Project

I arrived in South Africa three weeks ago now and after a couple of manic weeks of buying a car, finding a home and moving offices I’ve started getting out and about absorbing SA business and visiting our SA clients.

One thing that is really good (from a World Wide Creative business point of view) is the real desire from companies to tap into the possibilities that web marketing offers. However there appears to be a real lack of understanding of effective web marketing. Three surprising comments that have been made to me this week were:

1) The amount of traffic I get to the site is the most important thing.
2) Web Marketing is all about getting to the top of Google.
3) SEO is all about keywords on the page and links.

Businesses are getting caught up in the internet frenzy and repeating what they have been told by someone two years ago or by their mate who stumbled upon something thats worked for his website.

It really highlights the importance of educating the market about web marketing so businesses can make informed decisions about what is being sold to them. They don’t need to know the details of googles algorithm and they don’t need to be hard sold PPC as the only solution to their problems. They need to know whether PPC is a tool that will provide a good return on investment for their particular business, and if not what other options will work.

Before one goes down the SEO, PPC, Social Media, etc route, you need to analyse you marketplace, the customer and your competition. Get an understanding of where any gaps online may be. What can you do differently and offer differently? This information should then be used to weigh up the different tools available and see which ones fits the bill (as well as your budget). Then measure and react accordingly. Web marketing is no different to any other form of marketing communications, the basic principles still stand true.

Its great to see some web marketing companies are responding to this need to educate. Obviously we have our own Heavy Chef sessions starting soon but a big shout out must go to the guys and girls at Quirk for their Web PR+ conference which I found out about too late to try and get to. I know they are our competition, but from just a short space of time in the country I really like what they appear to be doing. Also Mike and Dave at Cerebra with their 27Dinners.

- Perky