Marketing

In the attached graph the green line is our traffic on Yuppiechef from 9th to 15th of July (ie 2 weeks ago), and the blue line is traffic from 16th to 22nd July (ie last week). In both weeks traffic dips towards the weekend, but otherwise the figures are pretty similar.

The odd thing is that last Friday (the third blue dot from the right) there was a large article in Die Burger punting our site and our products. Very exciting at the time, but apparently completely useless?

Well, we're still hopeful. We assume that at least a few people read the piece, and the next time they come across our site or a Yuppiechef advert the sense of familiarity that they have with our brand will help them in the buying process. As Fred says, branding is about consistency and pervasiveness, so any media coverage helps in the "pervasive" department.

Thanks to our new PR company, Yuppiechef had the opportunity to feature in Die Burger, one of the biggest papers in the Cape. For all our foreign readers, and even some of the locals you might not get it all as it's written in Afrikaans. It's about kitchen gadgets and current kitchen trends. But basically its all good stuff and it cost us nothing!

Click image to see full size.

This week we hooked YuppieChef up to Jump Shopping. As a merchant you create an XML file with all of your product information (name, description, price, picture etc) and point Jump to it. The Jump server downloads the file once a day and keeps their comparitive shopping database up to date. Visitors search or browse the categories for stuff to buy, and if they click on the link to "view more on YuppieChef", we are charged R1.

We were impressed with the personal support that we received from the jump guys, and our products are displayed nicely in their listings. We are not expected hoards of traffic because our brands are not regularly searched for, but the lack of setup or monthly fees makes listing here a no-brainer. We have also created a banner that is displayed randomly on the site, again with a R1 cost per click. It is great to see a South African company offering CPC advertising options, unlike many who still only charge per impression, or worse, like Ananzi, a flat rate per month.

Google and I are circling each other around the ring, and I’m trying to spot his weaknesses so that I can pounce.

In the last month Google has sent YuppieChef 665 visitors. That’s not a bad number in itself, but unfortunately our legacy of having recipes on the site means that a lot of visitors came looking for “mulva pudding” and “cooking game fillet”. There is a chance that those people might spend some money on cooking tools, but it’s more likely they’ll take their recipe and head back to the kitchen and use what they’ve got. We need more targetted traffic!

Currently (18 June 2007) on Google, if you limit the results to South African sites only and search for “KitchenAid”, we came up 5th, behind a semi-competitor and an auction site. Try the search here. There are many theories about how to improve search engine rankings, but “inbound links” is probably the leading one - if lots of people link to our site then we must be important, and if they link to us with a particularly word then we must be important for that topic. So to experiment a bit, and use this blog as a shameless promotor of our stuff, I’m going to write the next paragraph in a way that tells Google we’re important for the word “KitchenAid”, and some appliance names, and we have a great cafe category.

YuppieChef is the leading South African online store for buying the KitchenAid range of mixers, food processors, blenders and coffee machines.

Now we sit back and wait a few months to see what happens. This method is the same one that was used by bloggers to manipulate Google so that if you searched for “miserable failure” it would bring up George Bush’s page on the Whitehouse website at number one. They way they did it was to ask everyone to link to that page and use the words “miserable failure” as the text. Google rates the text in those links so highly that it didn’t matter that the Whitehouse page itself didn’t contain that phrase at all. If you do the same search now the page doesn’t appear any more, which is probably because the Whitehouse removed that page.

If you have a site or a blog and want to participate in a similar experiment, how about linking to some of the pages on YuppieChef like I did in the paragraph above, and we’ll see how well we do at beating the system?

And now, while I’m in the mood, here are a few more:

Buy Global Knives from YuppieChef and have them delivered to your door, anywhere in South Africa.

YuppieChef also stocks Eva Solo kitchenware, Trebimbi kids cutlery and Chef’n kitchen gadgets.

We've just had some "I'm a Yuppie Chef" button badges printed up, as part of our marketing efforts for www.yuppiechef.com. If you want one of these limited edition badges, you'll find them at The Good Food and Wine Show in Cape Town, 24-27 May at the CTICC. See you there.

I recently stumbled across this tool:
http://www.glyphius.com/

Do you think it's possible for a computer program to turn you into a better copywriter? I'm guessing this would be most relevant to creating good Google Adwords ads, but I’ve read stuff which suggests it's useful for blog titles, website copy, e-mail subjects etc.

A blogger I read did a bit of an experiment here:
http://www.artofmoney.org/blog/glyphius-and-the-tag-line-redux/

It's not cheap, but if it works it would definitely be worth it. My cynical side is telling me it's just snake-oil or it only works for certain products/ads, but is it worth taking up their money-back-guaranteed trial offer?

Here are two ads that we have been running on Google Adwords. Guess which one receives more clicks:

The ad on the left has been viewed 125 times, and nobody has clicked on it. The ad on the right has been viewed 73 times, and 4 people have clicked on it. The only difference is in the URL at the bottom - one displays YuppieChef.com, and one displays YuppieChef.co.za (both addresses go to the same place).

200 people is not a huge test-group, but if the trend continues it raises an interesting question about what our branding and marketing strategy should be. Until now we have been pushing the .com version of YuppieChef because we feel it looks more professional and allows us to expand internationally in time. However, for now our market is entirely South African, and this little test seems to suggest that South Africans would rather visit a .co.za website if they are looking for stuff to buy. Perhaps they have been disappointed too many times after looking at a lovely international website and then finding that delivery to South Africa is not available or too expensive.

Changing the address on a Google advert is easy enough, but what about when we print vouchers, business cards and vehicle signage? Perhaps the same rules don't apply - if you see YuppieChef.com on a vehicle driving down Long Street in Cape Town, would you presume that the site has South African delivery?

We've made some changes to the look of YuppieChef.com after our new marketing guy told us that the old design sucked, our branding was up the pole, and we dress funny. Fortunately we're bigger than him, so we didn't have to listen to the last bit.

Here is what the site used to look like. It was fairly pleasing to the eye, but it wasn't sending the right message to visitors. We are trying to sell cool kitchen tools, but for the first 2 thirds of the home page there were no pictures of tools! We were using up space with a picture of two love-birds, some clever snow-particals and a sign-up form for our recipe newsletter. All stunning stuff that Shane had lovingly designed, but it appeared that we needed to ditch most of it. He cried a bit, but then agreed.

Here is the new design. Here is a list of the changes:

• The strapline changed from, "Free recipes, top cooking tools, tips and gizmo's for cool cooks and cool cook wannabes" to "Seriously Cool Cooking Tools for your inner Gordon Ramsey". This is the first text on the page in the pink bar at the top, so it's the first thing the search engines will pick up. Search for YuppieChef on Google to see how it uses that text in the description. The new strapline is a lot more focused on what we're trying to do - we sell cooking tools. For "recipes" and "tips" I'm afraid you'll have to look elsewhere.

• The "There is nothing in your shopping cart yet" used to be right at the top, but it's shifted to just above the main content of the site. We felt that the old position was too out of the way. It's important to have this text clearly visible so that people know they are on an e-commerce site, and not just a brochure type site like Makro.co.za.
• The logo has grown in size, and we've dropped "Cooking Good" from underneath it. It was a clever phrase, but it was too broad.
• The happy couple have been axed, and the space to the right of the logo now features a random product banner. We can use that to highlight new and featured products. Now one of the first things you see on the site is cool cooking tools, which is really the reason you visited us in the first place.
• We have changed the first square from having a boring intro paragraph, to having more featured products. We can now fit 6 featured products on the home page.
• Under the featured products we have a "browse by price" section. As our product range grows we are trying to make it easier to find stuff. Browsing by price has already proved to be a popular option.
• We have added a new footer which gives more ways of finding stuff:
  

We have implemented CrazyEgg tracking on the home page to measure what people are clicking on. We'll post the results when they look interesting.

We are in the process of giving our work space an extreme makeover which let me tell you is not the easiest task. I now know why Interior Designers exist!

In SA, when you are looking to purchase something, you need to decide whether this is going to be something that is available on the net, or whether you are going to thumb it through the Yellow Pages. Most of the time the Yellow Pages wins hands down because most businesses don't even appear online. Optimistically, you decide to start off with Google, hoping that something has miraculously changed in the last 24hours.

I'm looking for office furniture. I type in "office furniture" on Google and do a "pages from South Africa" search, and wait for the results.  There are a few SA ads that come up (well done to those companies that are taking technology by the horns), it looks promising and at this point your heart rate starts increasing. Could this be it? Is there someone who has their entire offering online? Do they have what I am looking for? You frantically click through, the design is fresh, looks like this one could be up to date - and then you realise that you still have to phone through anyway because there is no pricing anywhere. A great example is CN Business Furniture, these guys could really up their game very easily and if we had seen something we liked, we may very well have purchased it online. I know, alot of stores don't want their competitors knowing their pricing, but is this still valid argument in this day and age? If a competitor wants to know what you are charging, they'll make a plan.

This whole process could be a lot easier if stores positioned themselves online more effectively. If they realised that there IS a growing market out there; people who would like to at least start the process online. At the end of the day, I think it comes down to understanding, priority and budget.

Bfg have taken their products online, I have ordered one of these couches already. I like the fact that someone can look around and get the full extent of their offering without having to first visit the store.

Also, fatSak have done an excellent job in presenting their gigantic "beanbags" online. Well done.

Every month, YuppieChef sends out a newsletter called, "Cooking Good with Sophia Lindop" and the service that we use to send it, Campaign Monitor has put us in their Design Gallery section for the second time. We like them.

To see the newsletters that made it onto the Gallery, go here and here.

And, if you haven't signed up to Cooking Good yet, go here.