Optimism – the force that pushes us onwards
I don’t know about you, but the last five months have been a real roller coaster for the AdMarula team. From suddenly having to work remotely, schooling kids at home, to doing virtual client meetings and eventually dealing with the reality and adjustments of returning back to the office, life has certainly thrown us a few curve balls. While this time has forced many of us to stretch ourselves further than we ever thought possible, it has also shown us what we can achieve when we have no other choice. And it’s this realisation, that I think will have a profound impact on how many of us approach life, business and our futures going forward. Yes, it has been (and still is) scary fearing for our own health and that of our loved ones. Fear of the unknown, what the future will bring. I find myself wondering, will there ever be a vaccine? Will we ever travel long-haul for holidays again? Will I need to fly to Durban and Johannesburg for client meetings again? Are business networking events a thing of the past? Now that we’ve seen how things can be done differently, and more efficiently at that, it’s hard to return to the old normal. Perhaps this crisis really is the universe’s way of telling us to wake up, to change our bad habits, to simplify our lives, to be kinder to the environment and to our planet, to make time for ourselves and those we love, to stop being greedy, and to see the beauty in every day. Because our health is everything. Once that is gone, nothing else matters. Having said that, I have definitely in the last week or so noticed that life is slowly starting to return to a new normal. Once empty cafes now have quite a few customers, hair dressers are open and busy, and when I tried to book a place for myself and my family to go away somewhere local over the long weekend EVERYTHING was fully booked. That’s encouraging. Not only does it mean our local tourism and hospitality businesses are finally making a turnover again, but it also shows how resilient humans are. We have an inherent desire to explore, live and be around other people. We just need to keep in mind that this thing isn’t over yet and the rules, although they seem unreasonable and frustrating at times, are there for a reason. For our safety. Back to business: naturally and like most other businesses, AdMarula has also felt the pinch of the economic crisis that we now find ourselves in, with Travel being by far our hardest hit vertical. But five months in and we are already seeing a doubling in transactions from last month, and with local leisure travel given the green light we remain optimistic that our local tourism sector will start to make a recovery after months of lockdown. The entire AdMarula team, management included, have taken a 25% pay cut since the start of the lockdown in order to preserve cash and jobs and I am glad to say that so far we have not needed to retrench people or take any other drastic measures besides keeping our spending down. We have also done an intensive business development drive during the lockdown period which has resulted in several new clients coming on board. You can read more about these in our ‘Featured offers’ section further down. Finally I would like to pass on my condolences to anyone in our business community (publishers, clients, partners, suppliers and friends) who have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Whether you have lost loved ones, lost your business, are suffering financially or been ill yourself, we wish you strength and recovery in the coming months. This storm too shall pass, and we will find light in the darkness once again. As per the words of the Dalai Lama: “Choose optimism, it feels better”. All the best for the rest of August, stay warm and stay safe. Daniel Gross – CEO
A changed world
The world we suddenly find ourselves in feels surreal – a bit like stepping into a sci-fi movie from the 90’s, and yet here it is, playing out right in front of our eyes on our social media rolls and in our neighbourhoods. Overnight we’ve all had to radically change the way we live, work, school, shop and do business. It’s scary to read about large, established businesses filing for bankruptcy, to see the Rand fall to over R19 to the dollar, and about South Africa’s new junk status. But from the ashes rises the phoenix, so what positive lessons can we learn so far from this global crisis? Perhaps the most prominent that comes to my mind is prudence. Something that seems to have become lost, even considered boring and narrow-minded in the modern world. The world before Covid-19 was one where more is never enough, fast is too slow, and where we were all victims of the break-necking pace that life and society has somehow come to expect of us. Made to believe that more equals productivity, we worked too hard, exercised too little, filled our children’s schedules with one structured activity after the next, planned our holidays a year in advance to some exotic destination, and lied awake at night thinking about how we can make more money to keep on affording that life. Instead of being prudent and investing for a rainy day, businesses that flourished focused their resources and energy on further increasing their size and profits. Large-scale events featured on everyone’s agenda, and large organisations were flying executives in from all parts of the globe for 2 or 3 day-long visits. With half of the world now in some form of lockdown, we are forced to take a step back and re-assess ourselves. Despite the initial disbelief when we learned about the lockdown in SA, we all eventually had to accept it. Whether we liked it or not, we had no choice but to change our behaviour. Suddenly instead of flying we are doing business meetings through Zoom, instead of going to the gym we are doing virtual exercise classes from the comfort of our homes, instead of sitting in hours of traffic we are working from our home office. Instead of spending our hard-earned money on stuff, we realise that we don’t really need all of that. Suddenly we are home schooling our children and spending more time playing and interacting with them than ever before. Just in the past week my two boys have learnt to make their beds, cook, unpack a dishwasher, operate a vacuum cleaner, play Rummi, read more books, use the garage wall to improve their tennis shots and build the biggest blanket fort I’ve ever seen. Would they have done any of these things if we had still been stuck in our old life? From a business perspective AdMarula has of course been affected by the lockdown just like every other business. Many of our clients in the travel industry have been hit hard, some even doubt they will survive. This is tragic. The retail industry, which was already struggling before this crisis, is fighting for survival and we will no doubt see many brands and shops disappearing from our malls in the near future. On the flip side we have seen businesses take amazing initiative to make certain products and services available to customers during this difficult time. From crisis often comes innovation. Online food delivery services, health stores, e-commerce, finance and tech clients are finding new ways to expand and adapt their offering to benefit clients. It really is amazing what can be achieved when the situation is dire. Someone else put it perfectly: “Companies and publishers who can work together to help bring solutions, products and services to people functioning in this new world will come out on top. In our industry, we have a chance to really help people stay healthy, happy and productive right when they need it the most”. Looking at myself, I now think twice before going to the store, and instead chose to order food online. I value space and distance and hygiene. I appreciate our beautiful blue South African skies and see every new day as a gift. I realise that as long as I have a roof over my heads, food on the table, and my loved ones around me, nothing else really matters. I realise that perhaps our life was too busy, and our priorities not exactly what they should have been. I realise how stressed I often felt, when I am now forced to operate at a slower pace. I realise that it’s rather nice not to hear any traffic outside my window, and that I actually enjoy having a wide, open schedule for the next few months. And perhaps more than anything, I appreciate my freedom. My final thought is how amazingly adaptable the human race is. When it really matters, when we have no other choice, we CAN turn things around and drastically change our behaviour in basically no time. We CAN find solutions where we never saw them before, and we DO have the intelligence and insight to learn from our mistakes. I’m sure that when this crisis is over we will all look back and miss the time we were forced to slow down, and maybe we will all come out of this with some positive changes and healthier habits. Stay safe, stay healthy, and keep innovating! Danie Gross – CEO
A quick update
As I see the autumn colours around me I am reminded that time does not stand still and that the middle of 2019 is just around the corner. A good time for reflection and a bit of a sanity check to see where we are. I am happy to report that as we approach our 8th year of business, AdMarula is still growing. In fact, Q1 of 2019 has been our strongest quarter yet, thanks to clients dedicating more of their marketing budget to the performance channel and AdMarula’s targeting technology yielding continued results. I can also report back that our round-table seminar at the Two Ocean’s Aquarium on the 9th May was a big success. We had a full-house, some very interesting discussions and good feedback from our audience. Thanks to our speakers and to those of you who attended. We hope to host more of these events in future as we believe it is important to connect with our partners and clients face-to-face – these discussions and knowledge exchange can only benefit our industry as a whole. The performance marketing model works best after all when we work together. Below are a few pics from the event: Finally I would like welcome Wanda Meyer to the AdMarula team. Wanda joined us at the end of last month in the role of Account Manager and holds a degree in Marketing from Stellenbosch University. No doubt many of you will be hearing from her in the coming weeks as she gets acquainted with the business and our partners/clients. We wish her the best of luck in her new role. Onwards and upwards! Daniel Gross – CEO
Push notifications – what you need to know
If you’ve got a mobile application, then you need to know what push notifications are – and no, they are not the same as text messages. Push notifications can be an effective marketing tool for anyone with a mobile app, because they help you stay in touch with your users. Just make sure you use this strategy carefully. If you overdo it you can cause users to mute your notifications, which you’ll want to avoid. Although there are lots of similarities, push notifications are not the same as text messages. Both of these messages go directly to the user’s phone and look similar on their lock screen, but they’re still very different. For a push notification to show up on a lock screen properly, you need to have a restricted character limit. Text messages can be longer because the user can open it up to read the entire message. But if your push notification gets cut off on the lock screen, it’s going to hurt your conversions.That’s why push notifications with fewer words have higher click-through rates. The value Push notifications can provide assistance and value to app users e.g. provide sport scores and news on their lock screen, utility broadcasts like traffic and weather, flight check-in and connections data and more. Banks and vendors also use push notifications to send important transactional data to users. So what are the do’s and don’ts of push notifications? Do segment AND micro-segment your audience. The more relevant the information to the user, the better. Find the right time and frequency. Dive into the data and discover when your users are most responsive, then include that into your app marketing strategy. Location, location, location. Nearly half of mobile app users opt-in to both push notifications and location-based content, and when used in tandem, they can create extremely engaging and useful experiences. Reminders: If your app has any form of scheduling in it, people will want to be alerted when their schedule calls for it. When they see they have an event coming up, they will click through to find out details about it. Excessive usage of notifications will lead to spamming and the user unsubscribing from your notifications. Not all decives are capable of handling multiple push notifications within a particular app, which means only the current notification will be displayed and others won’t be seen. Happy marketing! The Affiliate Management Team.
Understanding Intelligent Optimization
The terms SEO and Optimization are nothing new and we’ve covered both topics extensively in the past. While having a well-executed SEO strategy is vital for any online business to succeed, the buck shouldn’t stop there. Many web developers still overlook the importance of other on-site tactics that go beyond SEO auditing, to create value from users. This is Intelligent Optimization and the new future driver for search engines. What we are talking about here is taking it a step further; think expanding into sales funnels, pixels, automation and most importantly, data harvesting. In recent years SEO tactics have focused heavily on rankings, but the next time you and your marketing team sit in a SEO pitch with an agency, be sure to bring up these points: Which pixels? – Simple? Sure. Yet very important to get this right. Not only should a Google Analytics tracking code be placed, but a Facebook Pixel needs to be added as well for the most effective retargeting. The best way to organize your pixels is still through Google Tag Manager. If they’re not familiar with GTM, they need to be. Automation, the right way – No, we are NOT talking about automated follow-up emails here. These are very apparent and generally come off as cheap, annoying and dishonest. However automating social media postings from the blog will save your business time AND doesn’t require personal interaction with customers. A simple Zapier script that cross-posts to all social channels from your blog would be a great start. Data harvesting – One of the first questions your SEO agency should ask is: “how do you collect data on customers.” Data driven marketing is the future, and being able to leverage your site’s data is the first step in creating a high end one-to-one marketing campaign. Combining web pixels, sales funnels, and custom audiences gives your company an edge to creating a powerful CRM database. Do they know Schema.org? – Schemas are lines of code added into the backend of your website that tell search engines, like Google, information about your site. Google treats schema marked-up sites with authority, allowing you to move up in rankings quickly. More importantly though, schema creates rich snippets (those boxes you see in Google search), allowing your business to be found more easily. Do they understand your sales funnel? – It may be simple for you, but many web developers don’t understand sales. Intelligent optimization places a heavy emphasis on pushing your web visitor to create an action. This is common place for business owners, but web developers need to understand this as well. For e-commerce sites, make sure your best selling items are also presented at the bottom of your page (you want them at the top as well). Happy selling! Daniel Gross – CEO
