Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Online Concept Begging For Comments.

Posted by timberboxes on 7/29/2013 at 2:25 PM ET 500 Points
I'm trying to collect ideas about a website I'm going to execute shortly. Looking for ways to implement better, suggestions on what else or how to do better, or not do.

name and by-line: "Dinner Bell"
"Inspirations for Restaurant Quality Cooking Outdoors"

part A of website: 2,000 SKU's of outdoor cooking tools, supplies, food and equipment

part B of website: A collection international recipes, tested, plated and shot by my food photographer.

Strategy: I'm hoping the recipe angle will substantially enhance an otherwise commodity business, as I'm selling other people's products. The notion is many people value a good recipe, and mine are specialized in outdoor cooking, complimenting items for sale. Recipe ingredients will include those that are for sale on the site. If recipe downloads and friend-forwarding is active, I'm taking this to the next level to shoot restaurant chefs in action, and their recipes, world-wide. This may create a place where chefs want to be seen...with more restaurant content and credibility for me, and maybe additional revenue streams from restaurant advertising. I do not know of any place where chef recipes and restaurant shots are available in one place, and to a sizable degree. The photography becomes the business assets.

Goal: Enhance return on advertising expense through very high visitor referral and media interest.

Competition: Lots, if you include recipes and outdoor grilling products for sale on cottage industry websites [backwater marketing at best], to Crate & Barrel, Wm Sonoma, and Saveur Magazine. Bits and pieces of my plan are everywhere. But none configured exactly. And only a few with substantial over-lapping, when marcom and product breadth are considered.

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RESPONSES

  • Posted by josephmcelroy on 7/29/2013 at 2:41 PM Accepted
    How do you plan to build community around your site? Perhaps recipe sharing with "community chef" photos - perhaps rewards for best aprons, hats, recipes, grills etc. Active user participation and generated content can create both SEO value and perhaps viral opportunities. You should plan a newsletter that aggregates recipes and chefs, etc. Earning attention with content will be primary goal.
  • Posted by Moriarty on 7/29/2013 at 2:50 PM Accepted
    Okay, well this concept will need to start from the very beginning as it's a startup. From my standpoint some guerilla marketing tactics are in order before going for the big spend stuff.

    INDIRECT: This is where you target people who aren't actually looking for what you sell but might be in the mood to enjoy a visit. The Google display network, Facebook and Twitter ads fall into this category. The spend need not be excessive, it will bring you very useful info that you can feed back into the system for better returns, and also use in direct campaigns to direct their effect.

    DIRECT: The most important thing to bear in mind is what your potential customers are looking for online when they need what you sell. In part this relies on knowing who you're selling to, and also your responses through the indirect channels (see above). The Google search network is good for this.

    Less effective/more expensive media - commenting on blogs can get you traffic. SEO can be useful and as it's very slow to respond is best used in direct conjunction with your paid adwords (searh network) advertising campaigns. SEO is best in asking the questions the searcher puts into the box. Google doesn't answer questions, it just finds the best match.

    Generally you need to focus your campaigns on what your competition isn't doing. Which means a well run display network campaign will probably wipe up no few of their prospects before they've ever seen one of their ads.

    You will need an email newsletter to keep their attention. Keep this strictly recipes/information only plus a review or two. Never, ever, ever spam your email list with direct sales patter. I know loads of people do it, but they're not playing the long game. And the long game is where the money is - the long game being to keep and nurture an email list.

    What are your thoughts and comments on this? Have I gone over ground you'd already ticked the boxes for?
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 7/29/2013 at 4:27 PM Accepted
    Rather than try to load up 2000 SKUs, you might want to scale your project back, and see what works best for you (through measured analytics). You're likely to have two distinct issues to address: 1) getting people to your site and 2) converting your visitors into customers. Posting recipes may help problem #1, however finding recipes is relatively easy (and in many cases, the recipes are rated by people who's tried them). Ultimately, the question is: can you provide more value for items you sell than your competition?

    You might want to ensure your site is extremely mobile-friendly, so people who are about to cook outside can use their smart device to get some help/hints/advice. Maybe even have a random recipe of the day (or have people describe what they're searching for) and you can direct them to something that "fits the bill".
  • Posted on 7/29/2013 at 8:23 PM Accepted
    You probably need a business plan more than anything else. Otherwise how will you know how much you'll need/want to spend to launch the business?
  • Posted by timberboxes on 7/29/2013 at 9:20 PM Author
    I have the business plan and know my startup costs. I wish I had the sales projection. There have been attempts by people to estimate sales using traffic estimators and theoretical conversion factors. But I'm relying more on category breadth and depth to make the business worthwhile. Admittedly, I too am concerned about conversions. I've done these before and you just don't know unless you've got some hard data from a similar business. My current business sells patio furniture at very high prices. Not the same business. In fact the proposed business sells purposefully smaller - ticket items.

    No, I'm not quickly loading up 2,000 sku's. I plan to reach 2,000+ one category at a time. Each category is essentially it's own profit center. I have an interest in social networking. And also an interest to work lass than 100 hrs weekly :) I think social will have to be an un-moderated type. Maybe a forum. But forums are not easy to make work. But they sure do work when they work. Yes, I can provide more value to customers over the competition, which is largely the BBQ industry, filled with disorganized sites using in-house copy and pigs as logos. Their sites create the same emotion as Home Depot. Luckily most of them will be dead soon. From their apparent infatuation with smoked meat and the like.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 7/29/2013 at 9:29 PM Accepted
    Stop.

    Please, heed Michael Goodman's sound, sage advice. To this I'll add: add a marketing plan and a solid, value driven positioning strategy. Then, I suggest you invest effort in building a community, then offering these people places to go on your site. Up front, 2,000 products all apearing at once may be overkill.

    The ubiquity of choice may mean too much time spent looking and deciding and too little time spent buying.

    Skin this back to the top 100 best sellers in arange of outdoor cooking niches, then, create informative articles for each. To these articles you'll then need to add a strategic overview of social media, PR, press releases, and back linking. This will take time and it will cost effort and money to do it well. Screw this up and do it too quickly and Google will drop you down an SEO wormhole you may never find your way out of. Hear me on this: slow and steady wins the race—PARTICULARLY, it you plan on going toe to toe with Williams Sonoma and the other large players.

    Which keywords and key phrases will you choose and which ones can you rank for? Note here that my question is which words CAN you rank for, not which words WILL you rank for. Unless you can own the first five spots of the first page of Google and do so wth a keyword or keyphrse connected domain name, you may have an idea and a goal, but you may not have a prayer when it comes to ranking for your chose keywords or phrases.

    Please, before you execute this site, do more keyphrase searching and research, and carry out all due dilligence on your main competitiors and find out how many backlinks they have for specific pages, for particular keywords and phrases, and find out which sites their sites and their specific pages are linked to.

    Next, figure out which sites you'll advertise with and which industry publications (online and offline) you'll advertise with. Then hatch out a solid strategy that offers these sites specific content, and figure out what your ads will look like, what they'll say, and which page son your site those ads will link to. Your calls to action on your banner ads MUST be strong and they MUST stand out against other ads on the same sites. Once an ad triggers an action the landing page for that ad again, must clearly telegraph that the reader is in the rihgt place.
  • Posted by timberboxes on 7/29/2013 at 11:02 PM Author
    Thanx, Gary. You're right, I should make more scientific efforts. And get my market position down a lot tighter. Talk about ubiquity of choice - there's one guy selling only hot sauce. How about 3,500 SKU's! That's thirty-five hundred different bottles. I'll digest your reply thoroughly in the morning.
  • Posted by Moriarty on 7/30/2013 at 3:08 AM Member
    Good morning.

    You say "My current business sells patio furniture at very high prices." - because this is very useful information that you didn't include in your initial question. What's more it's linked to your startup.

    The question is how.

    I will explain: you are intending using social media a lot - and that implies engagement. Engagement isn't about what you're saying, it's all about how you say it.

    Which is where your old business and your new business meet. Different markets, sure. Different customers, sure. However the people will like what you do because they like how you sell it.

    Whatever else, this is the fulcrum of your new business. There is something that will run through both of them that make them distinct and different in marketplaces that are jammed with competition. This is the core of what Gary Bloomer calls a "value driven positioning strategy".

    Why?

    Because values are perceived. What's more, to share them effectively you need to engage your audience. In both your businesses, how you engage will be the same - or will have enough commonalities to get you moving.

    With this in mind, searching for keyword phrases becomes a lot more meaningful.

  • Posted by timberboxes on 7/30/2013 at 1:17 PM Author
    Gary, I'm not understanding this sentence: ..."top 100 best sellers in arrange of outdoor cooking niches"

    The top best websites [indicated by their search engine position?] or top best products [determined by SKU performance on my new site?]

    I assume "cooking niches" means product categories?
  • Posted by josephmcelroy on 7/30/2013 at 5:02 PM Member
    You know the question I am wondering - are you building an Affiliate site or do you have the inventory? Because there are different marketing options based upon the answer. If you are selling product, you can use Google pretty effectively through its Merchant Center product listing advertising. And while, as a brand model, limiting to 100 items is effective, a searched based model could look at 2000 pages of content, if presented uniquely, as an attractive approach. For example, look at FindtheBest.com - it is grown pretty dramatically by targeting a Long Tail strategy of 10s of thousands of product URLs with product names dedicated to comparisons - it makes money as a super affiliate. If you wanted to pursue an SEO strategy, you could create several thousand variations of of product pages by combining them with unique recipes.... like product name top beef recipes, etc. Part of FindtheBests strategy is also to create reseller portals for other brands - providing yet differently combined datafeeds and product heading names to create unique pages - the brands like it because they get a fast solution, extra income, and seo value ... https://bags.golfdigest.com is an example of a findthebest powered store. It strikes me that given that you want to combine home product (Grill) with recipes, a perfect treasure trove of potential resellers for you would be the thousands and thousands of Mommie Blogs desperately looking for ways to monetize their sites - so perhaps you don't want to be brand focused but white-labeled focused. Anyway, this got rambling - hope it feeds some thoughts.
  • Posted by timberboxes on 7/31/2013 at 10:13 AM Author
    Gary and Michael, thanx for urging me to put things on paper, instead of in my head only. Gary, the seo analysis I had not gotten to but it's best to do right now. This will illuminate many things, not the least of which to offer greater clarity about my competition and the business generally. Gary, also your post-launch social / categories / articles / niche suggestions I have noted. Good stuff.

    Joseph, I'm assuming brand-based means a proprietary product line and search-based is being a re-seller?

    re: "home product (Grill) with recipes" ... yes. The model I know best is just simply selling direct to consumer... using seo, paid, 3rd party like Amazon, and PR. I use Facebook casually with friends but FB will be an explosive medium for this business. I bet I can grow it so fast using FB it will become a case history. And end up in Business Week. Absolutely no doubt about it with the right plan of offerings and subjects. I'll eventually sell small outdoor furniture pieces, also. Because I know that market.. plus lighting, tableware and decor.

    FindtheBest... I'll call them with practical questions. Good idea... I had misgivings about stuffing away recipes on a blog. No matter how much you promote them. I'm complementing my custom food photography with stock images to create the look of France, Sau Paulo, Beijing or whatever recipe nationality happens. Idea is adding recipes or recipe abstracts with jagged page edges right onto every single product page. Maybe the recipe automatically downloads with every order. Or comes by email with the receipt. This is a very strong branding element. And a thank you like a mint on the hotel pillow. A lot of thinking needed. But the point is, if I'm paying money for photos and stock images why not give them maximum exposure. I amortize their expense quicker. They don't have to hide on a blog, even if that's where I'll archive them.

    Joseph, "Mommie Blogs" thing. An enormous market. But what do you mean by "reseller" ? I can not re-sell what I re-sell. They could use my content I suppose...recipes...but that would water down my website, I think. Or maybe you mean for their Adsense program?
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 7/31/2013 at 6:24 PM Member
    Forget about SKUs for the moment. I mean the "top 100 best sellers in a range of outdoor cooking niches" in terms of SEO popularity. Outdoor cooking is a wide niche, you may want to focus on sub niches: cooking utensils; cookware; spices, rubs, marinades, and seasonings; recipes, outdoor kitchens, and so on, each of which is a sub niche.
  • Posted by timberboxes on 8/5/2013 at 9:17 AM Author
    Than everyone. My new competitor spreadsheet reveals more and better ones. You can talk all about strategy but in the end I'm on page one [maybe] with 10 of the biggest brands on earth. I'm improving my proposition.

    Community is the number one aspect to use as my competitors aren't doing it, particularly where consumers are active.

    I am still convinced FB is an enormous opportunity.
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