It’s been a huge year here at Click-Winning Content!

In addition to our ongoing optimisation of AdWords campaigns for new and existing clients, here’s a quick recap of a few of the year’s highlights.

 

1. Being a Google Partner

The Google Partner program continues to go from strength to strength. Being an active Google Partner continues to help us grow our business on a daily basis.

The support we receive from our wonderful Google Account Manager, the Partner community and marketing team adds a huge amount of value to the services we offer our clients.

By being part of the program we’re able to ensure that we’re up-to-date with new AdWords features and campaign types, and that we’re maximising every opportunity to improve the results our clients get from their ad campaigns.

At the end of September we hosted a Partner Connect event in conjunction with our fabulous website design and development partner, Italicherry design. The event was a great way to connect with businesses in Gippsland and let them know about the benefits of AdWords. Read more about our Key Takeaways from the Partners Connect event, including:

• the importance of local search for locally targeted businesses (like restaurants, cafes, plumbers, hairdressers and anyone who wants clients from their local area)
• how Smartphones have changed your clients’ behaviour
• and the importance of people being able to easily “click-to-call” you directly from the Google search results.

This year we were also able to spend an amazing afternoon working on account strategy with our Google Account Manager and the support team at their Sydney office.

And we get fun gifts in the mail, like this “Google Partners” jar of jelly beans that we recently received!

2. Local Business Networks

I mention this in every annual highlights article but I couldn’t be more grateful to my network of business friends and contacts. This year there’s been so much cross-over where business contacts have become friends, friends have become clients and business contacts have started doing business with other business friends. I could go on and on about the brilliance of what I perceive to be only one degree of separation between all the awesome, honest, trustworthy, knowledgable business owners in my network, but instead I’ll simply say that I’m incredibly grateful to the business owners and friends that surround me, make me smile, refer me work, provide advice and make me feel valued on a daily basis.

I’ve particularly enjoyed being a member of the wonderful Australian Businesswomen’s Network. Membership includes being able to attend a quarterly Business Mastermind Roundtable Event which I always leave feeling inspired, motivated and confident in the direction that we’re taking our business.

I’ve also enjoyed attending events with the She Will Shine network and had a fun experience being interviewed for the Business Addicts podcast.

3. Custom Google AdWords and Analytics Training Workshops

One of my goals this year was to deliver more fully customised Google AdWords and Google Analytics training workshops to in-house marketing teams.

By “fully customised” I mean including their real time AdWords data and website performance information into the workshop content to show how they can use the information to improve their business results.

I delivered workshops for marketing teams ranging from 2 to 14 people attendees and the feedback has been great. I hope more and more organisations continue to realise the value of training their teams in AdWords and Analytics. The training sessions leave their team empowered to understand what data is important, how to act on it and where they need to spend their time to improve their results.

Here’s a testimonial that I received recently:

“Melinda’s expertise in the Google world is second to none and has resulted in setting up Google Analytics for businesses across the Arrium organisation so we can get more value out of our websites. Not only is Melinda’s engagement professional, she goes above and beyond to ensure she delivers the best service to the customer. Our organisation learnt so much in just one and a half hours, more than we had time to learn on our own, and Melinda’s clear and thorough delivery meant we walked away with knowledge over and above the affordable price we paid for her assistance.

Even since our workshop, our relationship with Melinda continues and we have been able to turn to her for advice on other related matters. I cannot recommend Melinda’s services enough – she truly partnered with our business to up-skill our team in an efficient and productive way.”

Shannon Eagles, Arrium Mining and Materials

If you’d like your team to become more knowledgable about the in’s and out’s of Google AdWords or Google Analytics in 2016, contact Mel to enquire about scheduling a customised training workshop.

Two important predictions for 2016

I recently read an article where 69 Experts Share 2016 Marketing Predictions and wanted to include my thoughts here on two things that I think will be important for online marketing next year.

1. Content Amplification to help your website rank higher

In addition to AdWords questions, clients and contacts also regularly ask me about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which is how they can get their websites to appear on page one of the Google organic (free!) results.

The fact is that Google moves fast. They regularly update their search algorithm with the aim of getting the most authoritative, relevant websites to rank high in the search results.

My go-to-gal for SEO training is Kate Toon. She is fully across the in’s and out’s of Google organic search. In October I joined Kate’s Recipe for SEO Success eCourse and enjoyed every minute of it. The course shares information about what is, and isn’t, important in terms of your Google ranking, plus loads of free analysis tools, copywriting tips, advice about analysing your results and so much more!

One of my key take-aways from the course was the importance of Content Amplification, which is also a topic that I’ve enjoyed discussing with Shae Baxter. The concept is that a lot of people are creating a lot of content every minute of every day. This means that while creating content regularly is still an important part of any SEO strategy, it’s now even more important to make sure that the right people find your content, share it to their network and link to it. The first step is to create content that provides incredible value, so that when people do read it, they want to amplify it by sharing and linking (like I did with the “69 experts” article that I linked to above).

If you’re ready to step up your SEO efforts in 2016, including finding out more about how to amplify your content, check out the Recipe for SEO Success eCourse.

2. More businesses will tap into the power of YouTube Video Advertising

Of all the new AdWords campaigns and features that we implemented in 2015, I think that YouTube Video marketing has the most potential! Watch our new video below to find out why.

We’ve set up and managed a lot of YouTube campaigns this year and here’s why they are awesome:

• More people in Australia watch YouTube than any local TV channel – so your reach is huge!
• Video ads build the top of your sales funnel and promote your brand.
• When you’ve already spent time and money getting a video created, YouTube advertising is a cost effective way to put your vide in front of the right person, at the right time, in the right place.
• You can advertise any video that has been uploaded to YouTube
• You only pay if people view the video for 30 seconds, or the whole video if it’s less than 30 seconds long.
• Views can cost from as little a few cents.
• You can add a link to your website or YouTube channel from the video, so that people can directly click through from the video to find out more.
• We can test different versions of your video to find out which gets the best results.

Sounds great, right? Contact us to find out more and request a quote for a video advertising campaign.

Well, that’s it from CWC for 2015. Thanks again to all our clients, business partners, contacts and friends for everything that you’ve contributed this year. I’m looking forward to more success for everyone in 2016.

Melinda