New Zealand Is An Online Opportunity for Your Business

There are hundreds of businesses in New Zealand with fantastic websites. But many of these websites are under-performing in terms of SEO, website traffic and ROI.

We are introduced to so many business owners and marketing managers who are frustrated by their static websites that aren’t enjoying healthy numbers of visitors or sales, and which haven’t been growing in line with their offline business.

This is because online marketing in New Zealand is still far behind countries like the UK and Australia in terms of the priority it is given by marketing teams and ad agencies. Website marketing is not seen as being crucial for brand awareness and business growth – therefore, online ad spend makes up a small percentage of total marketing budgets comparatively.

This will change, and has begun to already, as evidenced by August’s Interactive Advertising Bureau of New Zealand (IABNZ) and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) online advertising expenditure report, which showed that online advertising in NZ grew an impressive 19% year-on-year.

Michael Gregg, IABNZ Chairman says, “The online sector has transitioned from an emergent advertising choice to a mandatory mainstream medium. With $62.58m of advertising spend entrusted with publishers and search companies in the April-June quarter, the industry has reached new maturity and is collectively focused on delivering strong traffic results, powerful branding opportunities and consistent measurement practices.”

Despite this growth in advertising (thus competition) there is still a great opportunity for local advertisers to take advantage of the relatively unsaturated market. There is a huge opening for businesses who are ready to invest in online to gain significant traction and presence, where it would take much more time and investment in a country like the U.K. or even Australia.

So what should you do?

Make the most of your website and the investment you have already made in it, and grow your online presence, credibility, and ROI through smart online marketing. Be bold and aggressive in a still dawdling market and reap the rewards. Here are some initial tips to get you going:

Start implementing an SEO campaign NOW because it takes time and patience to see results. The best time to start is yesterday.

Start developing great content for your site NOW so that you give yourself plenty of time for the long tail keywords to be picked up and start driving targeted traffic to your website.

Look at what people are searching for with keyword tools like the Google keyword planner and develop personas as well to assist you with what your customers are searching for online. Put the two together and you will know the sorts of content you need to start producing.

Start a targeted Pay Per Click (PPC) aka Adwords campaign NOW so that you can drive targeted traffic to your website and test / measure response with landing pages that are conversion focused. Work out what combination of keywords and landing pages are returning the highest number of conversions.

The above is just for starters, but you need to start something sooner than later!