Digital Marketing Insider | October 2013

October 2013 £2

Digital Marketing Insider

SEO Results – A Case Study In Ranking Quickly On Google

How To Tell If Your Online Marketing Is Working

How To Set Up Google+ For Business

Entrepreneur Insights Pete Jenkins

A Note From The Editor

First a warm welcome to October’s edition of the Digital Marketing Insider, produced by ROARlocal.com

If this is the first time you’ve received this a hearty welcome to you!

About Us

Contents

You’re receiving this because we want to show you what we’re all about and also give you some usable strategies to help your businesses grow.

We create great looking online advertising campaigns that enhance your brand, we use scientifically proven online advertising methods to drive visitors to your website and adverts and then we optimise your site to make sure those visitors become paying customers that tell all their friends and come back for more.

01 / A Note From The Editor

Our team is different, we focus on making you MONEY we couldn’t care less for winning awards for being “creative” our reward is money in your bank. We’re successful online entrepreneurs, world class copywriters, website optimisation specialists, online advertising mavericks and the geekiest SEO people!

06 / The Secret To YouTube Success

This month has been a profit making one for our ROARlocal clients and so I’m going to share with you some of the strategies we use to make our clients money.

I have a great article for you on Google Plus, VERY important for your SEO sterategy.

Talking of SEO you’ll love my down and dirty guide to ranking your site online. and my personal favorite is all about making sure your marketing is making you money. In these competative times this is extremely important.

02 / SEO Results – A Case Study In Ranking Quickly On Google 03 / How To Tell If Your Online Marketing Is Working

07 / How To Set Up Google+ For Business 09 / Entrepreneur Insights

Henry Ford said it best “I know ½ of my marketing is working I’m just not sure which!”

I hope you’ll enjoy reading this months magazine it’s jam packed with our usual level of brilliant content and as always if we can help you in any way please get in touch Neil Asher CEO ROARlocal

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by Neil Asher

SEO Results – A Case Study In Ranking Quickly On Google Here’s our latest SEO results, which are for our own digital marketing agency. We work hard on our own marketing and treat the business as we would any of our clients. This results in great marketing improvements for our own business, and the lessons we learn spending our own money on marketing, we can then apply to our clients marketing for their businesses.

Using Google’s ad diagnostics tool to ensure the results are not influenced by my IP and being logged in to my Google account, we are now on Page 1 of Google, position 4, for the search term “digital marketing agency” (see below for an update on this!)

This exact match gets 1200 searches per month.

Google says to get a click costs $7 Meaning the top position would be worth $8400 per month in traffic for us.

We are currently position 4 and according to Google we can expect 10% of the organic clicks

Page 1 Position for for the search term “digital marketing agency”

With the top 4 positions in any Search Rank obtaining 80% of clicks, it proves how valuable the top 10 positions are for any keyword or phrase. Unfortunately, ranking below page 2 has almost no business value other than tracking and trending, but there is a slight lift in results for the first place of the second page (position 11).

We have been working on this keyword and SEO strategy for a little over 3 weeks now, and admittedly we have spent A LOT of time, money and energy on it, but as you can see the results speak for themselves If you would like my team to get your website to page 1 of Google then get

in touch here P.S a quick update. I just checked this and as of this morning we are now No 1!

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How To Tell If Your Online Marketing Is Working There’s nothing worse than spending money on marketing and not being able to tell if it’s working so here’s a simple way to tell if your marketing is working.

When we start work with a new client one of the first thing we put in place is a way to show the client that the marketing we’re doing for them is making them money. This (as you can imagine) is extremely important as our fee, £4000 – £5000 per month, must be off set with FAR more money in the bank for our clients.

So one of the easiest ways to tell if your online marketing is working is to use Google Analytics Event Tracking.

You probably have Google Analytics installed on your site. You check various statistics you hope are relevant.

You can set it up to track two different triggers a visitor makes on your site: Tracking for Goals and Tracking of Events.

Why do you want to track these?

Once these triggers are set up, you won’t have to search through your Analytics reports wondering what’s going on. You’ll have a quick way to measure the movements of your visitors and find out what’s working.

To me, Goals are “big” things. These are the things affecting the bottom line of your business. These can be customer conversions/sales, opt-in conversions, people who request to be contacted for a consultation, etc. Goals are the endpoints I want my visitors to reach while visiting the site.

Events are smaller details. They’re not critical to the bottom line, at first glance. With Event Tracking you can monitor human behaviour on your site in ways goals don’t. Events allow you to grasp what’s working on your site – what’s moving visitors from one page to another – and ultimately to your goals.

Customer Segmentation Many businesses are changing their homepage from a traditional blog layout, a listing of most recent posts, to a more traditional homepage. This allows them to better segment their visitors.

For our newest client in Australia, successful resumes of Australia, we’ve set up various events from time on site to downloading their free report and watching the videos. All

designed to get a better understanding of what it is that their customers and prospects want. For instance, we can see who favours watching a video vs reading a PDF, and which group of people is more likely to convert to being a customer.

I don’t see many sites Tracking Events. When a business approaches us it’s one of the first things we check, as it’s easy low hanging fruit that we can implement and get great fast results for our clients with. Most businesses (if they do any analytics reporting at all) find how many people clicked through by creating cumbersome custom reports inside Google Analytics. It’s a lot of work. Events make it simple.

Other Events You Can Track: Outbound Links – If you frequently link to other sites, you can use events to track how many people click away.

Affiliate Links – How do you know what links are working to make you money? If you have three different affiliate links in a blog post, you can set up tracking for each individual link.

This will allow you to test and adjust links to maximise your income.

Downloads – You can track downloads of eBooks, free reports, videos, white papers, whatever people are downloading off your site.

This is a good way to learn about a problem in your distribution or if a free, no opt-in required download is becoming popular.

Now you have a few ideas for things you might want to track. Here’s how to set up the tracking code so you can pull the reports.

Setting Up Events: Google Analytics Event Tracking Tutorial Setting up the tracking code is fairly simple.

If you want to read the technical details, you can find more information in Google’s Event Tracking Guide. My instructions below will solve 97% (made up statistic) of the uses

you have.

The Event Tracking code looks like this: onClick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘category’, ‘action’, ‘label’, ‘value’, ‘noninteraction’]);” In a second I’ll show you where to place this on your site. But I want to go through the definition of what each option you have available.

In each Event you have an option for the following information: Category (required): This is the name for a group of Events.

Action (required): This is an additional detail for grouping each Event inside each Category.

Label (optional): An additional description to help you detail each Event triggered.

Value (optional): This has to be a number. This can be used to identify a value for a click or any other number value you ascribe to the Event.

NonInteraction (optional): This is either “true” or “false.” It’s used for you to tell if the Event will be used in your Bounce Rate calculation.

True is yes, false is no.

Category and Action are the only two pieces of data you need to track. You don’t have to include a Label, Value, or NonInteraction.

Placing The Event Tracking Code To use the Event Tracking code, you place it within the HTML code of the link you want to track. Like this: <a href=”http://domain.com/” onclick=”_gaq. push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘category’, ‘action’, ‘label’, ‘value’, ‘noninteraction’]);” >text</a> Think of the events you want to track and lump them into different categories. For example I track all downloads from this site.

The Category I use for this is “download.” The

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by Neil Asher

Action is the URL of the download. I don’t have a Label, Value, or NonInteraction on each download link. So, my Event tracking code only needs to look like this: <a href=”http://domain.com/download-url. pdf” onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘download’, ‘/download-url.pdf’]);” >Download Here</a> For my affiliate links I use tracking code like this: <a href=”http://domain.com/affiliate-link” onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘redirect’, ‘affiliate-link’, ‘Affiliate Product Name’]);” >Affiliate Product Name</a> If I had a value for this affiliate link, I could add it to the code like this: <a href=”http://domain.com/affiliate-link” onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘redirect’, ‘affiliate-link’, ‘Affiliate Product Name’, 5]);” >Affiliate Product Name</a> This would give it a value of “5” whatevers.

Because it’s an affiliate link I would say it’s a dollar value. I don’t track Values and only show this to give you an idea. A Value is not required.

Before you start setting up Event Tracking, think of what you want to track and how you want to categorise it. This will keep your reports clean later and save you time down the road.

Quick And Easy Event Tracking For Outbound Clicks In WordPress If you’re using WordPress on your site, install Yoast’s Google Analytics For WordPress plugin. In the settings section there’s a checkbox to “Track outbound clicks & downloads.” When you enable this option it will automatically add the Event Tracking code

as your page renders.

Then, click on the Goals Tab

You’ll still have to set up Event Tracking for other events (segmentation, affiliate links, etc) but this will save you time tracking outbound links and downloads.

Then, click on “+Goal” to set up a new goal.

Setting Up Events As Goals Yes, you can set up Google Analytics to track Events as Goals. This may be a little confusing at first, but it’s really simple.

As I said before, Goals and Events in Google Analytics are two different things. I use them for two different purposes on this site.

However, if an Event is an important piece of information for your business you can also set up Analytics to treat certain Events as goals too.

This is great for affiliate marketers. If your goal is to get someone to click an affiliate link, you can set up Google Analytics to track these clicks as Goals.

Why Track An Event As A Goal?

Give your goal a name.

As an example, when I did a lot of affiliate marketing I was able to beat most of the other affiliates promoting a product and get preferential commissions and updates because I tracked everything. I knew exactly what the visitors to my affiliate offers did and I could make educated guesses (and then test those guesses {hypotheses}) about why they did it. This gave me a HUGE edge online and I quickly became one of the top 100 affiliates in the world.

Change the “Goal type” to “Event.”

If you have a reason for setting up an Event as a Goal, here’s how.

How To Set Up Events As Goals in Google Analytics

In the Goal Details section choose which option you want from the Event to trigger as a goal (Category, Action, Label, Value). You don’t have to fill out each field. Or, you can fill out a combination of the fields that match for your goal.

In this example I used the Category “redirect” from the affiliate link code example above.

This means any Event with the Category “redirect” will count in my Goals Reports.

If I want to limit it to only affiliate links in the “redirect” category, as opposed to other links in the “redirect” category, I can change the goal to look like this.

In Google Analytics click the Admin button in the top right of the site profile you want to track.

This will only count Events with the Category This will only count Events with the Category “redirect” and the Action “affiliate-link” as the Event. Other events won’t trigger the goal.

Each of these events will show up in your Google Analytics reports nicely laid out. Your category will be “outbound-article” with the action listed as the domain or full URL of the outbound link.

The flexibility here allows you to track goals as broad or narrow as you need. Simply set up the field(s) you want to trigger this goal.

Last, if you’re not using the Value option in your Tracking code, choose the “Use A Constant Value” option. If each click has a value to you, like a sale, put the Value here. If not, give it a value of “0.”

(continued on next page)

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How To Tell If Your Online Marketing Is Working (continued)

by Neil Asher

That’s it. Hit save and you’re done.

You’re allowed 20 goals per domain profile, so don’t go too crazy. You can’t delete a Goal once it’s set up. You can set it as inactive, or change the triggers, but it cannot be deleted. Use them wisely and only track goals important to you.

Event Tracking And Goal Tracking Reports In Google Analytics

Install These Dashboards and Reports For A Quick Glance With the rollout of the new Google Analytics platform last year there are some new features most aren’t fully utilising yet. Mainly the Dashboards and Reports.

These will save you a lot time. You won’t have to click through pages of the Standard reports for a quick overview. Simply choose the dashboard you created and it will give you a quick report.

To find the events in your Google Analytics reports, go to the content section. In there you’ll find many ways to filter and manipulate the data to analyse how people are using your new events.

I like to take a quick look at “Top Events” page. This will list the Events by Category.

Then you can add the “Secondary Dimension” of either “Event Action” or “Event Label” to filter and see what’s happening.

You probably don’t want to spend time trying to figure out how to create and customise a group of Dashboards and Reports. Once you know what you want it’s fairly simple, but it takes time.

You can click on the following links and automatically install each of the Dashboards and Reports into your own analytics account.

Some of these I created. (A couple I took from Avinash Kaushik over at Occams Razor.)

My Shared Dashboards Main Dashboard – This is my main Dashboard with goal, event, SEO, and top content.

Now Get To Work You have more than a few actionable items to start on now.

When I started my direct mail pieces, I hated guessing and waiting for postcards and phone calls so I could figure out the results.

Tracking Events in Google Analytics will give you another way to slice your data. It’s another way to take the guesswork out of your site results.

And you may be surprised at the results.

Have fun.

Now, take a moment and share this post on your favorite social network and sign up for updates.

P.S Want us to look after your online marketing for you? Then get in touch for an informal chat P.P.S TONS of this material comes from matt fox over at persuasion theory, he has an awesome blog that you’d be crazy not to read! go there now and sign up to his newsletter

Blog Dashboard – This has some slightly different data than the Main Dashboard.

Event Tracking Dashboard – Tracking Events.

SEO Dashboard – SEO. Duh. You’ll have to edit some of the filters to get the most from this Dashboard.

Social Media Dashboard – View shared content and referral sources.

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The Secret to YouTube Success

by Libby Thomas

There are 800 million people visiting YouTube every month. Most of them will be watching One Direction.

Hopefully, some will be watching your advertising videos. And even more hopefully, some will watch your video and make their own way to your website to get in touch or make a purchase. If you’re finding that‘s not always the case though, start using call-toaction overlays. These are semi-transparent text ads that sit at the bottom of your video enticing people to click & visit your external website.

Here’s our step-by-step how to…

1.

Make an awesome video.

2.

If you don’t already have one, set up a YouTube Channel. You must have one of these to use overlays.

3.

Upload your awesome video to your channel.

4.

Next, sign in to your AdWords account.

Either navigate to your Video campaign, or set one up. Follow all the relevant steps to get this campaign for your new video live.

5.

Once you’ve done that, head to the ‘Videos’ tab and you should find a plus box next to ‘Add call to action overlay’. If it’s not there, it’s because your AdWords and YouTube accounts aren’t yet linked.

To do this, simply click on the ‘Link YouTube account’ button under shared libraries.

6.

Once it appears, click on the plus box next to ‘Add call to action overlay’.

7.

Fill in the required fields. You can even add a little picture!

8.

And there you go. Now with any luck viewers of your awesome video will click on your overlay straight to your site, rather than heading off to watch Harry Styles eating a sandwich.

Good luck, and don’t forget, if you need any help with your marketing, we’re the only team to get in touch with!

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How To Set Up Google+ For Business Since the launch of Google + in 2011, it now has an estimated 350 million users. Not quite the amount Facebook has, but then, Facebook was founded in 2004 and opened up outside of Harvard shortly after.

So, 350 million users over a 2 year period isn’t so bad.

In fact, having a presence on Google+ is imperative if you want to be found. And if you’re a business, you really want to be found.

Because your business page/ personal profile is linked to all of Google’s other services, i.e. maps, places, search etc., having an active profile is paramount for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation (you can be found)).

OK, now the basics are out of the way, and it’s fair to assume you realise how important being on Google+/ Places is, here’s how to go about setting up…

Google+ Profile First off, check you don’t already have a Google+ profile. The reason for this is that if you have a Gmail account, you may have inadvertently set one up. To check for this, log into your Gmail account (or YouTube – whatever Google service you already use) and then go to Google+.

If you don’t have a profile already, you’ll see the following screen:

The fields on this form are self explanatory, but you must make sure you use your real name, or something that sounds like it would be a name. Rockin Chick or the like won’t be accepted. Google’s bots are somewhat more intelligent than Facebook’s, it would seem.

And do upload a profile photo so that your friends can easily find you!

Once all this is filled in, you’ll be taken to your Google+ profile, which you can now edit to make it more personal to you.

Cover Photo

Neil Asher, ROARlocal.com’s CEO, and someone in the know about all things marketing/ SEO related, has optimised his Google+ personal profile. Following are screenshots of how he’s filled them out.

Work When entering the places you’ve worked, the most recent will appear at the top of that section. Like it does on LinkedIn. Here’s Neil’s:

By default, Google provides a generic cover photo, but it’s not going to show off your personality, so upload one that will.

The cover photo size on your profile page is pretty big – 2120×1192 pixels – so find an image that’s going to look good at that size. In fact, until you do, you won’t be able to upload it.

You can also use one of the stock cover photos that Google supplies, but why blend in when you can stand out.

The About Section, AKA, Story On your profile, you’ll see a section under your ‘About’ tab called ‘Story’. This is where you can talk about yourself. Pages have the same section:

It’s important that this email address belongs only to you, and everything will work better if it’s the Gmail address you’re using already (providing it’s personal to you).

Your other About sections

The same applies to your Education section.

To make the best of your profile, fill it out as completely as you can. 77 of the first characters will appear beside your name in Google’s search results when people are searching for certain keywords. This is a crucial factor in your/ your company page’s visibility.

Places

The same applies to your tagline and bragging rights (specialities).

Links

As the links to your website/ social media accounts that you’ll want to add appear further down, add them to the introduction section to hyperlink to your most important websites.

Now here’s a section that’s incredibly useful!

You can add links to your website, your blog, your social media accounts, things you contribute to anything where you have an online presence – and that’s going to be great for your profile/ business page’s visibility.

Not to be confused with Google Places!

Your places section is where you can add all the places you’ve been and have them show up on a map within your profile. Like the Facebook map section.

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by Neil Asher

Here’s Neil’s as an example:

Benefits of Google+ Authorship In building your authorship, you get to have your Google+ profile photo show up in Google search results, and that boosts your CTR (click through rate (when people click on your link)). Readers, on seeing this, can use authorship to judge the relevance and quality of your content.

Your Android If you use a mobile phone with the Android operating system, then at the very least, you must have a Gmail address!

The reason for this is because you will be unable to install apps (applications that enable you to do useful or fun things) without going through Google Play.

Android had a worldwide smartphone market share of 75% during the third quarter of 2012,with 750 million devices activated in total and 1.5 million activations per day.

The operating system’s success has made it a target for patent litigation as part of the so-called “smartphone wars” between technology companies.

This enables people to not only click into your content, but also to click by you to discover everything else you’ve done.

See? It’s fab!

Contributor to OK, so let’s delve a little deeper into ‘Contributor to’, as it’s not as obvious what that section is about.

If you contribute to a blog with your own content, anywhere on the web, on a regular basis, link to it. That way, you can claim Google+ Authorship for the content you’ve created (and the content you still create), which will serve to boost your author ranking.

So what is Google+ Authorship?

Google+ Authorship is for those who want to build authority within their industries.

Making sure your links and Contributor links are visible is one way. The other is to link your Google+ profile page/ business page to all the content you create around the web; from your own website to your social media profiles to other blogs and online media content you’ve contributed to.

There are also other benefits to be had from your Google+ Authorship.

Google+ Authorship also allows you to use their Webmaster tools, author stats and analytics data to see all about you from any page on the web.

OK, so how do you claim Authorship?

You can claim authorship by having the email address on your Google+ profile from the main domain you create content for (doesn’t work so well if you contribute to a lot of sites).

And you can also link to your content from other sites on your Google+ profile under the Contributor to section, with a link to your Google+ profile page/ business page on each of those pieces of content.

And another thing… Your links should have a ?rel=author added to it, which you can place in your author bio, to specify that you are the author of that content.

Following is a Here’s How screenshot:

Remember that big hoo-ha between Apple and Samsung? Well, those wars are like that.

However, as of May 2013, a total of 900 million Android devices have been activated and 48 billion apps have been installed from the Google Play store.

That’s insane!

In fact, the only way you’ll be able to operate some of the apps on your Android powered mobile phone is if you have a Google+ profile.

That’s as good a reason as any to create one!

Setting up a Google+ Business Page Now that you know how to set up your Google+ profile page, you’ll also have a good idea of how to set up a Google+ business page. They’re pretty similar, and all the same rules apply.

Start by searching for yourself on Google and see if your listing comes up.

Then, if you click it, and you haven’t claimed it already, you will be able to ‘claim this Page’.

But if this is not the case, don’t worry a here is a video on how to create a Google Brand Page – for a Google Local Page listing simply choose the ‘Local Business or Place’ category.

From there you will be asked for your phone number and that should find your physical location. That will set it up.

We’ll cover this in more depth later on, but if you have neither the time nor the patience, why not have us do it for you?

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Entrepreneur Insights

New ROARlocal client and brand new dad, Pete Jenkins is a busy man! Co-founder of e-AdvantageSolutions.com, 5 years of being Vice-President of Brighton Chamber of Commerce, “Entrepreneur In Residence” at The University of Brighton and he has just graduated in the Top 5% in “Gamification” from Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. ROARlocal caught up with him for a quick interview about how he got started as an entrepreneur...

What one thing about your childhood, your personality or your upbringing do you think had the biggest influence on you becoming an entrepreneur?

There was one thing that should have put me off, which was my father going bankrupt when he was running his own small business, when I was a child. But growing up in an environment where everyone around me believed that one person could make a difference.….I was given supreme confidence in my abilities from parents, family and the people around me that intelligence can be applied and that you could make a difference.

So what better way to do that than running a company to affect lots of people and hopefully for the better.

My Dad ran a company importing PCs, personal computers before everyone had one on their desks Importing and trying to sell them, he learnt very quickly (and what made him go bankrupt), was that margins are often pretty thin in hardware sales. Before it all went wrong, he commissioned a piece of encryption software for banks, which was starting to sell well but not fast enough to deal with cash flow issues. We lost the house, he lost both his yachts. He was highly competitive and racing two yachts in two different series (he did manage to win both series).

We had to move, they were stressed. Yeah I was very aware of the impact the bankruptcy had. e-Advantage Solutions was started 13 years ago. Just before, I went to work with my Dad, he’d been recruited to find a CRM piece of software to build a business around for that

particular company. He found a wonderful business software, not a CRM but one that enabled managing projects well, but was having trouble getting them to build demo versions fast enough. I’ve done various IT related things for him over the years, because he has always been related to software sales and IT, and he brought me on board for a couple of weeks to build some demo systems.

We did that really quickly and well. But we didn’t think the company that he was working for was going about selling it the right way so we thought “Let’s do ourselves”!

My dad said to me, because I was a qualified financial adviser at the time, “Why don’t you help me out for year founding with this company.”

I said: “A year? Why not?” Now he is retired and I am still here.

Funny enough, the six-years after he went bankrupt he earn more per year that he ever earned before.

How did you do at school and what you most love or hate about school?

Well. I went to a private school to begin with and the only aim was to… they basically train you up for a number of years to take exams, to qualify for Lancing Collage, the biggest nearest big private school. So you are basically drilled to be taking exams and getting a scholarship. And that’s what I did. I got an open exhibition scholarship to Lancing Collage. However, because my parents were now bankrupt and broke, even with a complete year free and with the various discounts that the scholarship gives you, they

still couldn’t afford to send me there. So I went to a local college and I was so “over it” from that point on in terms of academia. Maybe because I’d been doing it so intensively for about eight years aiming at one thing and I did my end of the bargain, but didn’t get where I wanted to get. So you can say that the next few years were a bit of an academic drop out.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.

What would you say is the one thing that made the difference to your success in keeping e-Advantage going for the last 13 years?.

Stubbornness. Certainly 3 years in, we probably should have gone into administration and started again, because we’ve grown too rapidly seling the wrong sort of products and services. So we had a huge wages overheads and owed money to the tax man and we couldn’t really afford any of it. We cut right back to just two or three people.

What we should have done was going into administration and started again. Where’s instead for the next four years, instead of being able to invest back in the business we were just repaying debts. On the other side, the stubbornness means that we kept going and we kept some of our clients all the way through. Maybe we would have lost those if we had gone into administration.

I did a crazy deal with the tax man as well, which was every three months the amount we repaid to him doubled - for two years!! It was a massive struggle every month and then in the fourth month we thought “My God this is now twice as hard”.

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Tell us how you pulled it through, how you got into networking and how you became “Entrepreneur In Residence” at Brighton University.

So the first week we were in business I joined Brighton Home Chamber of Commerce and within about a month I was co-opted onto the executive committee. One of the nice things about it was I already giving back to the local community, the business community, even from the first day while learning and getting advice from other people running businesses.

There were about 40 members when l joined and there’s now about 400+.

So I was on the executive committee for 8 or 9 years and now I sat for a couple of years, as Vice-President of the Chamber, being involved in all sorts of things, from accounting behind the scenes, being involved in the events, to being involved with local issues and debates.

Basically staying kind of invisible as well as helping. That’s how I started working with the University of Brighton. They are very practical in their business school. They like to get businesses in from the local community to work with their students. The first thing I did there was being a Dragon, on a Dragon’s Den, judging business plans and presentations. I think I have done about 20 of those now. It’s been great fun. And then they took me on as “entrepreneur in residence”, which basically means going in, teaching the students how it really works rather than the academic theory.

There are lots of mistakes I’ve made over the years that I can tell them not to do. And here’s some of the stuff that’s good to do.

When you stand there at the front of the room with a new intake of bright eyed and bushy tailed students in front of you, can you spot the ones who are “most likely to”?

Not instantly but it’s really obvious later because they are the ones who actually come along and ask the questions. And the quality of their business plans and their presentations is just streets ahead. That topic is an elective so they choose it, it’s not forced upon them.

So they are all pretty keen but I think there’s a difference between personality and willingness to learn not just the academic but the practical stuff. And I think some people are there just to learn the academic stuff.

What one thing you would do differently looking back over your 13 years with e-Advantage, knowing what you know now?

I know exactly what that is, actually. Because I have networked for 13 years locally with the Chamber of Commerce, the federations

for businesses, Worthing and Adur Chamber of Commerce, several other organizations. I have worked with lots and lots of very different businesses and industries and I have never had a niche of my own, shall we say. It always has been very interesting but it has also been very difficult to do marketing for a business that way. So if I was to do anything differently, it would be to decide who my customer base was and just focus on that verticle of the market. It just makes it much easier to do all the marketing, the storytelling, everything that makes it easier to sell. It also means you are applying your effort more consistently to the right places, and getting the right sort of business.

And in fact you potentially change the way you network as well but there’s still plenty of networking, no matter what the vertical is or the market. So that’s actually one thing, I am doing differently at the moment.

Which lead us on nicely to what you’re up to at the moment, and what gets you buzzed now about being a business and what’s fulfilling you most?

For 13 years, one consistent thing we’ve done as an IT company all the way, has been to choose supply and implement CRM customer databases for our clients. I notice a while back that some of customers coming to us, we were moving them from other CRM systems and with even some of our own customers, generally after a while some of them fade and stop using CRM. It’s a kind of long lingering death, I would say. It can happen over a few years.

A bit of research, that we’ve been running throughout that time, showed us that a lot of it was down to how complicated the systems are, and people being scared of using them and if they get a chance not to, then they might not use it. And if there are a few people not using it, the other people, who are keen on using it, are getting less benefit from it and eventually that stops them using it too. What we did notice was that bigger companies didn’t have this problem and the difference was they were constantly paying for more training, more hand holding and so the challenge was how to be keeping people on board with the systems in the smaller companies.

I thought, there’s got to be a better way. So I went off researching and I thought I would find… ideas about the layout of the CRM systems and software being the answer.

But what I really discovered was gamification is all about the psychology of getting people

to use software. Then having gained the qualification at the Wharton Business School, I went in search for a CRM that actually had gamification elements built in the heart of it.

And rather wonderfully we found one very quickly, became the first UK partner for it and it’s exciting to sell, it’s enjoyable to use. How often do you hear that about software?

I understand that, not only are you able to help people with a gamification orientated CRM system, but you’re actually going into businesses and you’re helping them to explore how using gamification can help their profit outcomes, as well?

Good spot! Obviously the way I got into it originally was through using gamification to make CRM easier to use but actually all techniques on gamification can apply to almost anything in business, not just software, but also all sorts of processes. Whether from getting retailers to get their customers to come in more often, getting people to turn up a business networking events more often, getting more people re-using plastic bags, there’s lots of different ways that we have started using gamification to improve other processes. A great way to get people to change their behaviors.

The motivators in those games are often intrinsic. You get real benefits, a real feeling of a good buzz because you’ve learned something, you’ve mastered something, you’ve got better at something. That’s the sort of thing we are trying to build into any gamification process or strategy or game that we come up with. The best bit about it is all this is great fun. We are applying it to different industries and making whatever it is more enjoyable and everyone’s benefiting. It is truly, what I started off the conversation saying, that I hope to help to change the world, make a difference.

My team is there now to implement gamified CRM systems and to help me with any software related projects that I come across in terms of my work as a gamification consultant.

So I am coming at it from the angle of helping people with gamification strategies and sometimes it will be CRM related - great I’ve got a team there to implement that - and the rest of the time it could be working on anything else at all. It’s really fun.

If you would like to find our more about Gamification & CRM, or discuss how using Gamification principles can help your business and boost your profits, contact Pete Jenkins at www.PeteJenkins.com

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