Hi! Hola! Bonjour! Halo!

Here I am! Finally!
After all I've been trough with my computer ( be carefull even Mac crashed sometimes!) I finally decided to use one of the e-lab to post this article on our "fantastic" blog! (you're right Tash, this word has a special effect)

Lets introduce myself first,
My name is Sarah and Im from Reunion island.. Which is actually the best place ever!
You gonna tell me: So, why are you here?
To be honest, I am not really sure..

I've always wanted to travel, so after my graduation I choose Australia over France ( I mean Paris) to continue my studies... Australia seemed to be, at this time, the ideal place; I could learn another language, the weather would not be as good as in reunion, but yeah, still.. and it was only seven hours by plane from my native island!

Thus I've been here for a year and a half and I really enjoy Perth!

Concerning studies.. I spent a year at Central Tafe, doing a diploma of Mass Communication,
what leaded me in second year at ECU. Im actually doing a Bachelor of Communication with a double major in Advertising and Creative Services. Im really enjoying being at Uni, even it is pretty hard for me to study in a language that is not my mother tongue.. Sometimes I dont feel like I can handle everything but, anyway, we will see at the end of the semester.. I'll do my best =)

Ive decided to take part in the Google Marketing Challenge because the simple name"Google" attracted me!
The others assessments seemed also to be boring (and Im not really confident about writing essays in english!)
I think Challenges are always good, you have a lot to learn from ,and it is always a good experience too..!
Moreover, Im a kind of Internet person, I love spending my free time on the web..

About my team.. Well, Calli and Natasha are amazing! They're working hard and I wish I could do as much as them..
But as an international student, I get easily lost =/ especially when its about reading pages and pages.. but again, Im trying to do my best and I adore working with native speakers! At the end of the semester, I'll be more than fluent!! :p

Back to the campaign..
Today, during our usual meeting, we finalized our pre-campaign strategy ( as you can see in the picture, my colleagues are more than focused!) But because of technical problems,we did not send it to our client yet.. that should be done soon..
To sum up,we still need to send our pre-campaign to Verve Active ( one other team has done it already rrrhhhh!) then we have to prepare our oral presentation ( which is only a 5 to 10 minutes speech about our client and some adwords we are going to run with.. that will be in our next week lecture; in hurry to hear about what the others' ideas!) And finally we'll need to write the personal reflection report.. before the actual campaign starts.. Wooah that's actually coming soon!

That is all I've to stay, for now..
Oh no, I almost forgot, I've got a new place, hihi!=)

A library full of know-how

I thought I'd make a quick post while I'm at uni in the lab researching for this project. Sarah, Natasha and I have a major amount of reading to do. In particular, we need to educate ourselves on the ins and outs of how Ad Word works. All those "algorithms" (that's quite scary - we all agreed we are definitely Humanties - strong, and quite suck at Maths). It seems the more you read, the more resources you find. They are all linked to eachother (in true SEO style) and keep on going like a premordial black hole. I stopped at http://adwords.blogspot.com - Although I know these blog posts were written by Google Employees and would be invaluable, I realised there was about 10 years worth of reading available there and it was all too much for my poor brain to handle.

I was browsing About.com and have learnt a little more about the Content Network. Here's what happened when I searched for Health Club:



So, it's all our competition! Brint it ON. Natasha said the winning team in 2008 received negative feedback about not using negative keywords, or capitalising on the Content Network. I don't blame them - its just more work to figure out how to use them! But, we'll be making sure we don't repeat their mistakes. Some ideas came to mind on what *kind* of content we could advertise under:
- Fitness
- Workouts
- Lose Weight
- Postnatal Exercise
etc. etc. etc. Some of it is extremely broad and hence will attract a high CTR, but at the same time we want to be up there stealing our competitions's prospects :) I personally think their ad text is slightly poor, and wasn't written by a Direct Marketing Expert. We can do better. Maybe "March Madness" by Fitness First.. meh, yeah, Special Offer, Call To Action. But they are a mass produced, service-lacking giant and the only thing going for them is the multiple locations and lines of fancy exercise machines. They do not have any client retention strategies - just "piss clients off" and "harrass prospects by phone" strategies.

I am feeling more confident by the minute..

The challenge now begins!

HELLLLLLLLO

Welcome to our blog once again, back for more huh? I will introduce myself before I start blogging about our challenge. My name is Natasha and I am currently a 2nd year student at ECU, majoring in journalism and PR. Studying journalism and PR but competing in a marketing challenge? Hmmm. Well I wanted to compete in this challenge because first of all it is a challenge, I really did not want to do the other assignments (boring) and I knew I would learn so much from this and gain some great experience (helllo resume). I also forgot to mention that I am the team leader for our group which, is very intimidating since I'm not the leading type but again it's another challenge for me and I know I will learn a lot from it. Wow, I am saying challenge a lot! Anyways after meeting our client on Wednesday our group met for our weekly meeting at uni Thursday afternoon. While working on our client profile, we realised that finding certain keywords for our adword was going to be difficult because our client now caters to men not just women. With everyone's ideas and thoughts about our client I will now be putting the client overview together for the pre-campagin strategy.
Below is just a few key points that we will be using in our client overview.

Client Profile
*Currently a women's health club which has been open for 3 years
*14 staff members
*Stress relief environment
*Community feel environment
*No longer a women's only club
*A club where they take care of you and want you to achieve your goals

Client's Objectives
*Target Western Suburbs
*Increase stakehold
*Increase membership intake
*Promote their new co-ed expansion
*Online purchasing
*Awareness of the clubs community environment

Market Analysis
*White collar customers
*Competitors
- Next Generation, Kings Park
- Fitness First, Subiaco
- Healthy Life, Cottesloe


Current Marketing
*10% advertising online, 90% offline
*Direct mail
*Emails to customers
*Personal selling at shopping centres near the club
*Small signs on the main road situated near the club
*Customer Service is very important, different from the bigger gyms
*Weaknesses are that the website is information filled and lacks involvement


Our meeting was helpful and we came up with a lot of information for our client profile but that doesn't mean it was easy. Two lovely middle aged ladies who were sitting next to us in another QUIET study room apparently thought we were interested in what they were talking about. Talking so loud in a quiet study room should not be tolerated and while our group was talking louder than a whisper, the ladies next to us were far more annoying (I could use another word). So when a library person (really didn't know who he was) came into our room and told US to be quiet, lets just say we weren't that very happy. The fact that this man stood around the rooms and more than likely heard these ladies talk and did nothing was shocking. Old-er (hehe) students are just as loud as us younger students but noooo, we get told off like little children. Mr Library man, you wait till next week!!

And next week we will have finished our pre-campaign strategy for our client and will be anticipating his feedback. So our tasks for this weekend is to individually work on our proposed adwords strategy and send each other our ideas. Calli and I are meeting up on Tuesday to put it all together because Sarah is very busy at the moment. Sarah will be posting a blog hopefully soon, since her laptop unfortunatley crashed.
Enough of me rambling, PHOTO TIME! Thanks for checking out our blog, come back soon for more on our adventure during this CHALLENGE and to see what happens to Mr. Library!



Moi, Calli & Sarah before our marketing class









Myself, Calli & Sarah at Verve For Women, our client.

The First Meeting

Hi there. If you're reading this, you've somehow stumbled across the Google Online Marketing Challenge blog of Natasha, Sarah and Calli, 2nd years Public Relations students at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. Maybe you meant to visit, maybe you're lost. ;) Howevever, Thank You for visiting our blog, and we hope you enjoy our posts!

When originally posed with the option of taking part in the Google Online Marketing Challenge, I did what many people would immediately do - I thought "That's too much work, requires too much thinking, and I don't have the patience." Then I remembered why I'm at uni, in the first place.I'm studying a Bachelor of Business, majoring in Marketing and PR, and I currently work full-time at a Fitness Marketing Company which mainly advertises through direct and online marketing. I adore the online culture, and I've been designing websites for over 10 years. I love a challenge. I want a job in the future which deals with the internet and marketing online. Now it's turned into, WHY NOT?!

My team members Natasha and Sarah, and I, met last Thursday to discuss. We had to firstly consider who we would choose to market, keeping in mind some important criteria:

• Small busines
• Local area
• Niche market, specified targeting
• Minimal competition
  

We've chosen one of my VIP clients at work, Verve Health Club in one of Perth's most affluent suburbs. We had a great brainstorming session about what kinds of Ad Groups we can create, the associated keywords, Ad wording, and most importantly, how to optimise our ads and make them as "specific and granular" as possible. We came up with some great campaign ideas. As I already have a good understanding of marketing concepts like "Unique Selling Point" and
"Call To Action", writing copy will be even easier. We've written 3 pages of meeting minutes, including one whole page of "To-Do"s for this week.

I emailed our client the appropriate letter, and we had our first REAL challenge. Verve, who currently is a Womens-Only Health Club, is opening their doors to men on April 1st. So our selling point of "womens only" is all but gone. We'll now have double the market to attract, but we'll have to play smarter to formulate our targeted ads.

Our Pre Campaign-Strategy is due Thursday, 2nd April. Today we have our meeting with Verve Health Club, where we can and formulate our campaign goals and strategy. At our meeting tomorrow, we'll use this information to create our strategy. To do this effecively, we're going to read the hell out of all of the user guides, tip sheets and other Google Online Marketing resources (our lecturer Peter Ling gave us two pages of links). I've just purchased the Full Disclosure Guide from GOMCHA, which on first glace looks fantastic (Now I want to write an e-book!!). I can't wait to educate myself to the brim and then have fun writing the Ads with Sarah and Natasha.

I'm the type of person who gets really passionate and stuck into things, so much that they consume my life (Sorry Rob). I guess this challenge kind of attracts people like that.

Here's a photo of myself at Duckstein Brewery in the Swan Valley, with a beer in true uni student style. I'll let the the girls post their pics.

Signing out for now,

-- Calli