BrAndrsn.com

7 Cool Tools cont.

Last week, I covered the first 3 of my cool tools, Unbounce, KissInsights and Flowtown. Now, here’s the rest of them; Usertesting.com, Survey Monkey, Visual Website Optimizer and Clicktale.

Usertesting.com

Usertesting.com makes it easy to conduct usability tests without having to invest massive budgets in doing so.

For €39 (or $29 if it’s your first test) you can hire an individual to carry out tasks on your website and receive feedback in the form of a 15-18 minute screencast video of them doing so. The tasks you ask him (or them, as it’s recommended that you ask 3 or 4 individuals to carry out the same tasks to get more balanced feedback) to complete is up to you, and you can choose from various demographics when picking your testers to get an accurate representation of your website visitors.

Why would you want to do this? Well, undoubtedly you’ll learn about how your users are interacting with your website, and more often than not they tend to do things that you weren’t expecting. Identifying problems that your users are having is key to your website’s evolution, and a service such as that offered by usertesting.com will allow the feedback to come from the horse’s mouth, rather than from any number of internal departments squabbling over what they ‘think’ is best for a casino’s users.

I recently asked the usertesting.com team to run a test on the Sporting Index website. As Sporting Index offer a rather niche service themselves, I wanted to see how easy it was for a user who was unfamiliar with their offering (sports spread betting) to learn more about them. So first, I dictated that the individuals who were to test the site had previous sports betting experience. I then tasked them with finding out what sports spread betting was, asked them to sign up for a free account and wondered whether they could place a bet on the upcoming England match. One of the videos returned by the testers is shown below or click here for a larger version. The written detail of the task is also shown here.

Continue reading…

7 Cool Tools & How Online Casinos Can Use Them

One of the things I enjoy doing is researching new technologies that can make my job as a marketer easier. OK, that’s not the only reason; it’s also to satisfy a masochistic tendency I have of making myself incredibly jealous that someone else out there is making cool, simple tools that I myself want to be creating. Oh well…

These tools, of course, can be used by non-casino operators, but since I work in this industry I thought I’d shed a bit of light on how they can be used for our specific gain.

The tools I’ll be focusing on are:

• KissInsights
• Flowtown
• Unbounce
  
• Usertesting.com*
  
• Survey Monkey*
  
• Visual Website Optimizer*
  
• Clicktale*

*The final 4 tools will follow in a future post.

• Oh, I almost forgot to say that each of these reviews is based on my own opinions and I’m not being paid in any way to write them.

KissInsights

KissInsights is the latest tool from Neil Patel’s innovative company (their more popular tools are Crazy Egg and KissMetrics).

Continue reading…

The best CV ever

Free Online Marketing Plan (Gambling-focussed)

I have created a marketing plan overview using a mind-mapping tool I’ve recently discovered and I thought I’d share it with the community. You can find it here.

As my interests lie in online gaming, my marketing plan focusses on growing an online bingo brand. It is (loosely) based on the SOSTAC framework, as used by renowned digital marketing trainer Dave Chaffey.

The SOSTAC model for digital marketing planning involves looking into:

• Situational analysis (where are you know?, what’s worked?, what hasn’t worked?)
• Objectives (where do you need to be? NB, objectives should be SMART)
• Strategy (a summary of how you are going to get there)
• Tactics (the details of the stratgy)
• Actions (putting the plan into action. Who will do what? In what order? With which resources?)
• Control (creating KPIs then measuring, reviewing and altering them to ensure you are moving towards your objectives)

Continue reading…

5 reasons why marketing projects fail

There are many reasons why an internet marketing campaign might not be successful. Here I’ll share with you my experiences, so hopefully you can avoid the same problems.

Lack of senior-level buy in
Almost anything you try to do within a small-medium business will fail if you do not have buy-in from your superiors. This failure can appear at different times throughout your project, from a lack of freedom to investigate the viability of a new initiative, to having budget pulled just when you are about to set everything live. Whenever it happens, it’ll have you pulling your hair out.

What to do about it:
You MUST have senior-level buy-in before you invest significant time on your projects. Believe me, any time you invest in getting your boss on-board will be worth it in the long run. Take time to create a document outlining:

* the potential benefits of your initiative,
* the risks involved (you are a conscientuous project manager after all, right? You know that not everything will go smoothly.),
* the costs (in terms of the three M’s of Manpower, Money and Minutes (time),
* industry stats or third party analysis on why others find this project to be worthwhile.

You might have to overcome specific objections here, so be prepared to fight for your cause. I have had to overcome the fears my FD had about PPC being ‘just too expensive’. Unless you have a worthwhile argument, your project might be on the back foot before it has even begun. Continue reading…

5 custom reports for Google Analytics and how they help

Custom reports in Google Analytics can give you some great data for beating your boss over the head with. Does he think that you only have one chance to convert your visitors before they head to a competitor? Does he think that brand keywords are the best thing since sliced bread and generics are only there to bump up your PPC spend? Does he assume that all your visitors are from the same place? Well this is your chance to set him right…! Oh, and they also give you some great insights for improving what you do, in general. Without the boss-bashing.

Below is a screenshot of some of my custom reports: Continue reading…

Review of Maxymiser, Conversion Rate Optimisation Provider

For those of you who don’t know, Maxymiser are a technology company based in London who focus on increasing the conversion rate of websites. My company hired Maxymiser, as we were convinced that we needed to improve our ratio of visitors to sign-ups.
Getting straight to the point, I would not say that our project with Maxymiser was a success, nor would I say that we received a positive ROI on over £40k invested in the project over 6 months. Perhaps I can shed a little light on why this was the case, which may also help prevent fellow marketers from making the same mistakes. Continue reading…

World Cup Odds – The Long Tail

I’m quite disappointed to see that only one bookmaker has made it into the top 10 Google positions for any of my 5 long-tail, world cup betting phrases:

Continue reading…

Quick Tip – Bespoke Affiliate Landing Pages

In trying to up the affiliate channel performance, I’ve decided to create bespoke landing pages on our site for our affiliates to drive traffic to.

We have hundreds of affiliates of all shapes and sizes, and focussing on many different areas, so I had to think of an efficient way to roll these landing pages out, without using up my designer’s time with dozens of completely different pages.

I decided that we would create a single template. Elements of this template could be altered individually, allowing us to create a bespoke page based on the type of affiliate, the affiliate’s core message about us, which games they were promoting etc. Continue reading…

Poker.org Goes For $1million. Worth it?

So, the sale of poker.org for $1million broke the record for a .org domain. That’s all well and good for the .org domain family, but is the domain actually worth $1million?

It depends on what they do with it. Obviously if they sell poker chips then it won’t be, but lets assume that they’re either going to build a poker site or create a big-ass affiliate site.

It’s quite obvious that they’ve bought the domain with SEO in mind. Continue reading…