Good afternoon and welcome back to the touchline on Y25 for my name is Maxwell Waseek, we are going to speak about state of Kenyan football, international football as well as at Y25, we are going to start at what is happening back home but before then I am lucky to be hosting two gentlemen rolling behind a team that got thrashed last weekend on Sunday, 7 nil drabbing and someone was wishing me happy 7th day adventist and good to have Ken and Eric, Eric good to see you, how are you doing? I am doing well, the last statement was unnecessary. How is the feeling getting thrashed 7 nil man, you know that is something that has not happened to your team some time back, several years down the line. Ya you run away from the social media for quite some time I think 2-3 days and then on the street everybody is telling you what is the day today, I think the next day was 7th. So Leonia Sita, Sabah Nikesho, it was not easy, it was a week and everybody you meet on the street ask you how many days are there in a week, so you have to say 7 or the same number of goals you received so I think we got over it and we won. Ya Ken I think Kenyans are too forgetful and events get overshadowed by others, I am sure in the next few so weeks Kenyans would have forgotten about 7 nil drabbing of United by Liverpool. But you know there is something you guys used to be proud of 8-2 thrashing of Arsenal and 7 nil trounzing of Roma in UEFA Champions League, now you are past heroic exploits are getting overshadowed by whatever happened last weekend. I think if you look at those two results at the end of those competitions United, Liverpool won 7 nil and they won't win anything this season. No one will forget, obviously no one will forget but I am still confident in the United team because they have come for, they are 3rd in the Premier League, they are still in 3 other competitions with the possibility of winning the Europa League and the FA Cup. I am still confident in the team, it happened, it grounded the fans because we were in 7-7 dail. You were in high spirits. Dail now it grounded us and we saw where the team is but there is still improvement needed, there are still I think 2 big players needed but you know the trajectory Riktenhaga has taken this season, the team is in good hands. But it was nice to see him making a stylish comeback in the midweek in Europe and he is beating Real Betis 4-1. That was a statement too. And he hit a lot of praise on Bruno Fernandez, who got to be criticized over the weekend. I think over the weekend he was played out of position. If you look at against Liverpool when he started his red on the flank, that is not his best position. He does not have that pace. He wants to be involved in each and everything that goes around. So he is better off either behind the strikers or right at the heart of the midfield. And you saw in the midweek march he was brought back to his favorite position and you saw the damage he created. He was able to create hard work for Real Betis. And that tells you Maxwell a lot about the coach that the kind of person Tenghaga is. He is able to rally behind, to rally the team and say look here, we forget that's gone. We have to give an answer, we have to give a feedback. And I think after 4 gods I saw him referring, telling his players I still need 3 more. So he really wanted to give the fans something to celebrate. When he was at 4-1? He was at 4-1, he kept on gesturing 3-3. He wanted now the 7 he had considered over the weekend to have a kind of a revenge. And that tells you the mental strength that he has been able to put in this team. You can come from 3 days after you've lost 7 nil. You come and win 4-1 at the quarterfinals or at the knockout stages of a Europa League. That's not a main achievement. And Ken, that is something we really get back home. Kenyan football never draws that attention European football does when it comes to headlines. If it was Gormaya playing against Bidko and probably the newcomers in the local top tier are getting between 7 nil. Probably that attention wouldn't have been mouthwatering like what was witnessed when United got beaten by Liverpool. Back home we're not following top flight as we supposed to do. Ya I think it's lack of visibility on TV. It's a huge reason for that because not everyone actually goes to the stage in this country. It's mostly just the W or A.C. Lopez or Gormaya matches even though some teams actually play within their communities. 3 teams like Bandari, they play in Mombasa but still they don't get that visibility. A lot of people watching them. And also the players here are not superstars. Because when you tune in to watch a Liverpool vs. Magneto game you're not only tuning in because it's Magneto vs. Liverpool. You have Rashford there, you have Varan, Walca, Puynaz, Salah, big big big players. So you also want to see that. We haven't been that great in advertising our players because if you think of the number of players who would attract new fans to the sport here in the local scene, you can hardly name five. That's a key reason why we cannot get the same visibility and the same passion people put into the European sport. So 7 nil for Man United and whichever result across the world I don't think anyone wants to see. As long as it's Man United beaten, I know the whole world. Even if the team you are playing for loses 7 nil, you'll be like Manil Tokaji. So Eriko, like locally I'm running behind the slambos of Mother United 2008 Kenya Premier League champions. But despite being a scribe and I would have to confess the truth. I rarely attend their games because I'm supposed to cover them, write stories and also enjoy their games because I'm their supporter. But it's something I rarely do. So what do we do? Is it value for your money? Ken said because someone would argue that going at a bar to consume some fruit liquids in exchange of catching a Premier League game overseas compared to going at a national stadium to watch FC Leipards against Atlanta playing, let's say 500 book. Ati, they won't get value for them. I think one me in my personal opinion three things, one quality. Look at that team we've talked about Mother United. It used to have the likes of Simon Molama, Titus Molama. These are people who could play some beautiful football. Almost everyone who's conquered in Kenyan football scene started that. You see, from an early age it was put into them, knock the ball around, enjoy. That one you rarely find in Kenyan football. We have only a few teams who can be able to do that. That's the first problem because somebody will think why should I go and get mediocre. Secondly, organization from the organizers. Have you ever tried to get a ticket to go to the game? It's a hassle getting the ticket itself, it's a hassle. And then thirdly, as Ken has said, has put it rightly, publicity. You see, the Premier League is advertised all over. Everybody talks about the Premier League and it has overshadowed the other leagues, even the Bundesliga and such kind of thing because of publicity. Publicity will bring sponsors on board. Sponsors will bring money on board and money will be pumped into teams. So players will be paid well, players will be looked into. So we find that the Kenyan Premier League, the main problem is overshadowed by side shows that are not really important because we've refused to focus on what is really important. We improve the quality of the game. We improve the quality of management of that. Because I remember there was a time we used to go floodlights to watch those games at night. Mazen memba. Pa le nyayo kasa. Pa le nyayo, instead of getting caught in traffic, you go and catch a game. You see, and we used to have double headers. A game, you have a game that sets around five, another one will set around eight. So by the time, you see, traffic is done. You can drive home. You see, what if we have such kind of arrangements? Even you look at in Europe, they have those games that are played at night. Where by now everybody has leaves work, you go and catch those games. So I think that is what is also lacking in the Kenyan Premier League. And if they can improve on that, I believe Kenya is one of the countries that loves football. Football is loved. And that's why most Kenyans will have allegiance towards international teams. The likes of Arsenal, the likes of Manchester United. Because they want, they have failed to get that home. So and get it somewhere else. That's why you prefer to get into a bar or a social place to catch a game. Look at the hulabalu behind international games. You'd find that even us as now in the media, I think we should bring a lot of hype about Kenyan football. We need to publicize it. We need to publicize it. Because today if you say on your social media pages, we are going to Nyaya to catch a game. There are people you will influence online. Which game is this? So they start following. But you will find that us will say, man, you know how happy Arsenal and social place. People will flock there. So if you go to Gondogu Piazna at Coastline, have a friend of mine called Tofik Balala, former transport Cisimombasa County. He was attending a game piting Bandari and Tazka and he was complaining that Tazka's host team could not provide spectator stands. Bandari had to come with their own shipping containers to improvise somewhere to see it so that to continue enjoying the game. I think those small things are the one that you know, drawing us back and making our Kenyan football to be retrogressive. Especially if those things are connected to the fun experience. If it's your first time and your first seat on a container, that knocks you out for the rest of the season. You look at the example of the Derby at Nyaya Stadium because many people who attended it, paying the ticket wasn't the problem. But when you get into Nyaya National Stadium and you find that all the seats haven't been cleaned. The whole stadium. That's something that really leaves you thinking. Do you really want to be here again? I think the fun experience is really poor for not only the FKF, but also the teams themselves. And also the investment in public relations should be, they should try to invest more in it because they never talk to the funds really about what is needed in the game. You look at teams like Gormaya and A.C. Lopez. How many fun forums do they have? But they have all these big funds. They meet them and ask them about their experience. Things change in the next game. Very, very minimal. And again, we have to stick with what Erika said. The quality of football that's also the pitch. You watch it, it's totally different from what you do. You watch the Premier League your whole life and you watch KPL. You just see a shift, a difference in it. And I think that's another place that's really shocking because if our top teams cannot play football and compete even at the top African level, I think we are still in big trouble. Because I think fans from the paramount aspect of the development of the game, when they don't show up in large numbers, there is no revenue, there is no get collection, and even corporates want to associate with numbers. It's all about numbers. I think that's why we have to work together to make sure that we have a good relationship. What are we targeting? Numerical superiority. Look at what is happening across the border in Tanzania. In Tanzania, they've been able to rally their fans because they're organising their games better. That's why you find that younger Simba, it will be filled to capacity. Even here, nowadays, we have to rally a lot to get numbers. People are no longer going to the stadium. And before it was a tradition, people could just show up, not necessarily getting coerced. And there's something my good friend Simon said. Why would you struggle to bring gormaya as home matches to Nairobi when most of its fan base is home there? Why would you struggle when instead of having city stadium as home ground for FC Lopad, put those matches in Kamega and you'll see, they will start singing at 10 a.m. in preparation for that game in the evening and they will feel Buhungu Stadium. Making Buhungu Stadium to be the venue of the clash, I know it will attract a lot of fans around. Even the locals, they love FC Lopad. Identify you with their role. That's their team. Long time ago, it made sense to me and I thought long time ago we had those now community based clubs and they used to be supported a lot. Now we are not going to the community based club but now if that club is left by that community, FC Lopad is associated with a lot of people from western. Have their home ground, let them play their home matches at Buhungu. And you'll see the quality of Buhungu will have to improve because you have to make the pitch and the stadium. The business opportunities around the stadium on that much day, people will make more money and the stadium will be filled to capacity. Other sponsors will take notice and they will support that event. Like there is a team in Mombasa, it's participating in Mombasa Premier League. It's called Vita Youngsters. This team has been using influential figures and personalities who attract some following to rally behind fans to show up in large numbers at the stadium. I don't know whether that is self sustainable but it's been working out for them. Like you see when Bandari is playing at Baraki, like hosting Gormaya, fans attending that game will be countable. People attending a concurrent game when Vita Youngsters is involved because they are celebs who are social media tweeters so people are showing up in large numbers. I don't know whether that one works for Kenyan football overall. I think it does work because following is important and if you have the numbers on social media you attract more people to come and watch and also I think for some reason the lower leagues kind of have a bigger fan base than KPL because these tournaments that are away from NSL and KPL they usually have a huge turnout so I don't understand there. And also I think for visibility the simple thing they can start with is having proper pretty much interviews. I think to add on that you've talked about something about the lower leagues. I will tell you a few down on the grounding careers to find that they are well managed. They are well managed as compared to the higher league. The higher league there is a lot of bureaucracy there are a lot of issues you find that before the game is played you are tossed left, right and center but this one is not bureaucracy we are playing tomorrow we are playing next week against this team money for referees there provided and you see football has to start from the grassroot even if you look at the Premier League you'll find that if it's the Masai Dabi the fans, the Everton fans they know where they come from and it starts from there and the rivalry has to start from down, down, down there because if you look at I was on the ground there in Khares the rivalry between gas team in Ghidurahi and Khares team the fans want to come everybody wants to come and support their team it has to start there and then we push it upwards and that calls I believe there is hope because we have a cabinet secretary now who is listening we have a cabinet secretary now who is engaging I hope he say that multi-choice will be coming back and when multi-choice comes back super sport comes back that will be a huge boost because you remember when they were here things were a little bit okay Kenyan players got an opportunity to play overseas in foreign league because at least now there was visibility visibility people getting monitored and nowadays we like playing in the dark sponsorship football is about money they were able to pump in some money whereby now players will not go for months without being paid there are teams that struggle even to honor their way matches because of a lean budget so you see those things we should be able to put them behind us and if the players are comfortable I am sure they will be able to concentrate more they will be able to play better and we will be able to see value for money now the future of our ambassadors we have heard a lot regarding our national team changing name because I think we qualified for Africa we took up of nations in 2019 in Egypt after 15 years of waiting the last time we had done that was in 204 Indonesia and you know under Sebastian Minye it was a prestigious opportunity to play in conendal football though we got eliminated at the group stage and you know the following AFKON we didn't make it and so his work up that took place in Qatar last year what do we do because we keep talking about strategies programs in place structures at the grass roots youth programs getting a proper tactician someone who understands technical aspect of the game to be in charge of the national team packaging a club football better but the end product is for a fan who is at home I think for the fan it's really number one number two we cannot forget what Erica said it's about money for all these Kenyan clubs they should at least but they should not get comfortable and be too dependent on the government because that's not where the corporate these are the people who can pay up up to billions just have people see their logo on TV see their logo being won by the champions of this club so these teams and clubs they have to utilize the deal the multi-choice deal that will be coming back they have to write out to these corporates and give them anything they want have their names on shorts and try to bring in as much as they can money so that when they make something good of their season with the money they can do it again next season because I don't think the government can you know necessarily pay for all the teams in the country because this is just football we are talking about this rugby, this basketball clubs this all that even volleyball clubs will the money be enough for all those teams no they'll have to get a smaller slice of the cake for them to be part of the money that the government will dish out so for those in the FKF you look at our national team Harambistaz you look at all the other national teams that maybe are the world cup they had sponsors they weren't wearing them during playing but they are training kids all of them had sponsors you know that's where the money comes from so for FKF and the clubs themselves especially Godmahia, FC Lopez those clubs they need to find solid sponsorships first they need to look out for these sponsors get them and stop being overly reliant on government or people stepping up and coming through for them at the last minute I think we need to move away completely from that and pump real real money also to the corporates you know into football and make it a proper sport because it's the biggest in the world we cannot excel at athletics do fairly well at rugby and our football is dying we really need to invest in it because we are not self-sustainable enough a team like Efsinepans it's been there since time immemorial the last time they won a league is several years down the line and it's a team that has had an opportunity to you know contribute immensely to success of Kenyan football even by the virtue of players who've donned the late joke kina saimon mula mabonfa sambani the list is endless but sometimes it's very embarrassing to see these teams behaving like you know when they are standing they are reaching out to politicians to our prime CSM salya mudavador former defense CSU Jinguamalo to come to their rescue that's not long term it's not long term because we've refused to invest in structures my friend if you look at a team that has been able to dominate a little bit to have consistency look at taska taska has had that consistency if you pick 10 years you'll find that they have been in the top 4 consistently simply because of the structures that are there set by Kenyan broolies East African broolies and the sponsorship is consistent now if you look at now these other I'll put them they used to be community based teams go to my FC Leopards they are more on individuals rather than officers they want to create structures and you'll find that when the chairman is very powerful leaves the team also goes down because he was the alpha and the omega so I think we need to rethink our football and these teams as you say need to put structures in place structures there is the office of this and this office their work is to lobby for fans their work is to bring sponsors on board we don't have to fundraise because it's very embarrassing when FC Leopards is fundraising in the 21st century we are doing a fundraiser to pay players salaries we are doing a fundraiser to honour our marches it becomes really embarrassing and that is a wake up call to and I think also the government should be able to come in maybe parliamentarians come up with a law to regulate these teams and say that you have to look for sponsors for you to register you have to look for sponsors and these are the guidelines so these teams to protect the players welfare to protect the welfare of the workers and eventually it will improve the Kenyan football in totality and also feel like they should be quick to accept some deals because you know we saw the the one they did for the the cup I don't know they did with which betting company but I think they got 60 million for three seasons for three seasons and I was looking at it you break it down and that is the lack of now structures if there was an office of somebody dealing with that definitely you will have a lawyer on that table you will have an accountant on that table you will have financial advisors on that table you will study this deal you will take the deal you will go and sit down with it and when you come back you say no thanks if it doesn't make sense it doesn't make sense because 60 million over three years it was totaling to around there is no there is no there is no indemnity exactly and then there is no professionalism how do you sign such kind of a deal actually to be honest to be frank because on this particular platform we always can do those corporates are benefiting much than how these clubs are getting these privileges in exchange it's just exploitation it's exploitation because you see when you sign a sponsorship deal with Gormaya it's a team that draws overwhelming following locally and whatever you get in return from the fans who get to support this team it's so huge unlike what the team is getting in return so the team is being used by these corporates and I'll say it is because of our own stupidity because we should put there people who can package the deals advocate for proper sponsorship deals but I think also some of them are looking at what they get in return individually another team benefiting we're gonna close on that we've been speaking about the state of Kenyan football and I think this is something we can talk about the whole year without getting tired because we mean well for Kenyan football and we want it to be juicy and as beautiful as possible so that you know at least it can draw fanatical following like what European leagues and you know several leagues across the world do we take a short commercial break before we return with matters international football with focus on fixtures lined up for the weekend don't go away


throughout the whole competition. At the end of the board is when we'll tell you who wins. We're not going to keep you up to date on your scores as everything is scored. We've got some lemon and lime in there for the asparagus.


What would I like to do? I would like to talk about a national German national innovation strategy and Then use a very specific example, which we in Germany Framed industry 4.0 and I will put that into a European context and Into the context of European Research and innovation policies. So this offers you at least three ports of entry one is Innovation strategies from a national perspective The second is the specific example of advanced and modern manufacturing and the third is the European level so Let's start with with the first in Germany. We have worked for quite some time on Expanding our national research and innovation system. We are spending a whole lot of money in 2005 German R&D spending was 2.5 2.4 percent of the gross domestic product in 2014 these are the latest figures Numbers moved up to 2.9 percent. So we are close to the 3 percent Objective and we are in a group of European countries that spent quite some amount of money together with Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria We seem to be the front runners on the European level on a worldwide scale There is a small number of countries that spend more money on Research and innovation Israel as you all know Korea Japan so we try to be among the group of innovation leaders and if you look at the European Innovation Union scoreboard Germany belongs to the group of front runners Are we as good as the rankings indicate if you look at other rankings on International level that take a much broader perspective on framework conditions It seems that we could do better than the numbers indicate. So we are among the top five to top 15 Innovation-friendly countries on the globe. Let's take it that way What did we do in order to? Be part of this group in 2006 we started with a national innovation strategy which we framed the high tech Strategy the strategy involves all stakeholders It tries to be an initiative at the national level which brings different Business sectors as well as the various government departments under one roof We updated the strategy now. We are in a third phase. Where did we start the first one was driven very much driven by a Perspective on key enabling technologies. We identified about 15 key enabling technologies and Try to see what a potential they had for value creation In its second phase we did not change policies totally But we changed perspective from a technology push to a demand pull perspective So we looked at what is the societal demand? What are the areas that require? innovation and so fields came up just like climate and energy health and nutrition mobility communication of civil security and if you look around the globe you'll find those Phrases and those keywords all over My most favorite example is back in the 1990s. I attended a meeting of the Max Planck Society and They brought together Academic leaders from all over the world talking about their strategies for the future and the outcome was they all focus on Bionano info and optical technologies that we did in the first phase of the high tech strategy in the second phase We all just like many other countries looked at the grand challenges. What do we do right now? We merge the perspective. So we look at key enabling technologies We look at societal drivers. We look at global challenges Which we can address and which we should address and we look not only at innovation from a technological perspective, but also from a societal perspectives we try to Come to grips with what we call social innovation as well Well, as I said in the very beginning if I may make four points to sum that up Innovation policies require a great deal of money and policies always compete with other policy areas in Germany in the past ten years even in times of budget consolidation We set priorities At research and innovation and it seemed to pay off It seemed to be one of the factors that helped Germany to come out of the financial and economic crisis after 2008 fairly fast and A second aspect is that we combined and reoriented our innovation strategy And addressed grand societal challenges One of the challenges of course is the digital economy and I will talk about that in a minute from now a Third angle and the third aspect of the further development of the national Innovation strategy is that we try to be more systemic and try to be more inclusive so in terms of planning research agendas in terms of Executing research agenda. We try to tie in various groups and actors of society so Downstairs, I said the federal Ministry of Education and research differs from quite a number of other European research ministries In that we are not only a governmental actors with regard to rules regulation Legislation execution of legislation. We are at the same time a funding agency We spend about two point point five billion euro every year on direct funding for collaborative research of academic institutions and businesses and when we set out our research and funding agendas we try to have discussion and focus groups prior to Finally formulating this agenda and we try to bring in the perspective of non-governmental organizations and other actors of society in order to come up with a joint and common understanding of the objectives of science and Research so participation and transparency is a third aspect which is important for us and then of course we try to improve communication and cooperation of the stakeholders in industry and in the business world in science and within the government One of the key examples of this strategy is what we call industry 4.0 in other countries. It's called the Internet of Things. It's called advanced manufacturing It's called modern or digital manufacturing and each term Has a slightly different perspective, but in general they address they all address a similar challenge if I may try to provide you with a definition the term industry 4.0 from a German perspective Describes a modern mode of production that brings together cyber physical or embedded systems and network-based communication Driven by internet-based communication processes production equipment Communicates autonomously and tech technological components of industry 4.0 processes are sensor and actuator devices hardware components communication technology data processing devices and Software and in addition there is the human factor and I will talk about the human factor as well And if we take all this together we talk about smart factories indeed Why do we phrase it industry 4.0 in Germany? It's a historical perspective We look at the first industrial revolution with the steam engine We then look at mass production in the Ford Motor Company as a second phase of industrial development The third phase would be the entrance of computer technology into production processes and the fourth step Industry 4.0 is the introduction of network-based technologies into the production world about seven years ago as part of our National Innovation Strategic approach and we have an advisory board for this Which we call the high-tech forum a group of Production pioneers academics engineers business representatives got together and said we have to address this new challenge of network based production and they started to come up to design a research agenda which built upon prior research projects on on embedded systems cyber physical systems and They extended this to a network Technologies and so they came up with a research agenda which we funded and about four years later we thought that The baby had grown and the child was able to walk on its own and so we gave it away and there was a group of business associations bringing together all Actors in the manufacturing Industry and They started to create their own what they call platform discussion group strategic circle to further promote industry 4.0 And over time they developed what they call a common reference Architecture for the further development of industry 4.0, but it turned out if I may be frank it turned out that The association could not really combine the various company interests because this is a competitive field and we talk about competitive advantages by Improving and modernizing modes of production and so they to some extent met on Not probably the lowest common denominator, but definitely they did not aim very very high because it was so competitive And so about three years ago at the beginning of the current legislative period in Germany We decided that we take a fresh look at this group and at this process of self-organization Organization within industry and even companies were happy that we as a government take a took a fresh approach to bring together The various ministries within the German government together with company Representatives rather than business association representatives. So we brought in company representatives amongst others Siemens But also small and medium-sized companies to have a fair representation of different Enterprises different branches different sectors and different economic approaches to the topic and we brought them together with experts from the academic field from engineering but also from Vocational education and training amongst others and we brought the trade unions in and as I said the research organization so what we have now is called the industry 4.0 platform a network of experts to further promote this Development and we established individual working groups that focus on amongst others research and innovation They focus on another working group focuses on software architecture to have a common and joint architectural software architectural model that To some extent and as far as possible provides a uniform standard for the industry We look at standardization on the national and international level. We look at data security We look at legal ex aspects and we look at human resources and training legal aspects are Extremely challenging to whom belong the data if you create data during the production process And you share data on a joint platform Is it the company that produces and creates the data during the production process? Is it the software company that provides the platform for the exchange of data? Is it the user of the data and if one of the intermediators? Goes bankrupt what happens to the data which are stored someplace and no longer are within the company So very complicated and challenging topics which are addressed by the various working groups But to talk about industry 4.0 is one thing to see it happen is another and so we established a window An internet-based window. There is an interactive map on the internet which provides 200 showcases of industry 4.0 applications all over Germany What are the challenges one of the challenges is of course? Research and innovation we have to continue to provide research funding We spend about almost more than 300 million euro in the past euros in the past to for research projects And we are currently funding and we moved away from fundamental and Research we've moved away from research on Individual cyber physical systems now to as far as possible and within European regulations to research projects that try to apply the knowledge now on the company level And we try to reach out to small and medium-sized enterprises Because in Germany if you look at the development There is a small group of companies which are the front runners which apply the latest technologies And then there is a very large group of small and medium-sized and mid-cap companies in Germany Which are quite hesitant because they like the expertise And they don't know what to make out of the development and if you have to invest into Production equipment, which you use for 10 20 or 30 years. It's a major investment and companies Hesitate to make the investment right now. So together with our colleagues in the Ministry of the economy We established information hubs all over Germany to inform and to reach out to small and medium-sized Enterprises and we provide test beds Places to try out modern technologies both for those who develop industry 4.0 equipment So to the machine producers and at the same time Companies that try to take advantage of it and try to Emulate and model their production processes based on these new technologies. So providing test environments seems to be one way in order to motivate company to move ahead and I mentioned the human factor We also established research Programs together with employers and the unions on the future of the workplace Because industry 4.0 the digitization of production processes Comes along with new requirements for those who work on the production lines and new demands for on the one hand digital knowledge software application software development and flexibility because if you have a Network-based production process one of the advantages is that production equipment Adjusts to the different parts that come into the production process and you can start to Individualize mass production, but that means that those who work in the factories have to be more flexible and have to adjust to this flexible production process So we look at qualification. We look at training of people This was my industry 4.0 example as one of the showpieces of what a national innovation strategy can do Identify a topic address it from a research site then hand it over to a collaboration of public funders and business Appliers those who apply the knowledge In the business world and then try to further promote an issue and bring it forward by providing incentives as I said Building up test environments new research projects on the social development that come with a new technology We monitor this and we do have an expert group which we call the expert group on research and innovation And they published their annual report just recently and they criticized us why so because they said a focus on Modern modes of industrial production is pretty much in line with the present state of the German economy You we came out of the economic crisis amongst others also because we had a strong industrial base But the question and the challenge they gave us is is this the future? Is it right to focus on the? digitization and the network And the application of network technologies in the production field only and what are the new fields? Which we probably do not see application of digital technologies in medical in the medical world so health and digitization Or in a more abstract and general way New services coming out of digital technologies. Do we in Germany? Invest in companies that provide digital platforms for new services So are we too much path dependent by looking at the digitization of Manufacturing and what else shall we do? It's an open question. We haven't found a real answer We've set up within our expert group. We have set up a group not as a result of this criticism as a matter of fact already a year ago on Life science medical services and digitization and we have set up a working group which focuses on autonomous systems ranging from robotics in production as well as service robotics to Autonomous driving and autonomous mobility so we try to address new fields in order to Be in line with further development. I'm afraid however other countries pretty much do the same. So The unique selling point that still has to be identified My last point the European perspective If we look at Research and innovation This is a field on the European agenda Which is taken for granted and you don't make headlines with research and innovation and at the same time We all pay lip service to Europe has to become more competitive We have to compete with the United States and the Americas on the one hand when we have to compete with China and Asia on the other and we can only do this if we work together and Europe is united and strong. That is the lip service. We all pay What is the reality? Research and innovation policies have not really become the number one issue on the European agenda Finance wise. Yes, we have done not bad Horizon 2020 is the largest transnational research program ever on the globe 75 billion euro committed to this. However, if money is needed during the Current financial framework period and money has to be found someplace very often It's horizon 2020 where you can take it away for other purposes. So It seems to be at least ambivalent So what can we do and what is the current state? As I said horizon 2020 is well funded but the individual performance in science and innovation Is probably not in line with the objectives which we have phrased on the European level. The 3% GDP Goal as I said in the very beginning has only been reached by a small number of countries and We still try to find ways to make better use of the knowledge which we have in Europe for value creation in Europe Horizon 2020 has a well-balanced architecture now with blue skies research on the one hand and market application on the other and We do have a wealth of instruments to promote science and research When we set up and designed horizon 2020 there was a huge Outcry make it simpler make it better and simpler and simplification was the issue Now being almost halfway through horizon 2020 It seems to me that we have lost some of the impetus We try to make it a little bit simpler at the very beginning and from then on we differentiated and further developed and We have created again Toolkit which only the very experts can really understand and make use of So this is not really conducive for those who try to get Appropriate funding the challenges are out there. Of course aging societies in Europe Neurodegenerative diseases as one of the big health challenges health and nutrition The digitalization of societies Commissioner Moedas has answered with a strategy which he called the three O's Open science open innovation and open to the world Yes, we have to be open to the world, but what do the other two open actually mean? Open seems to be a keyword Which is now being used and applied in quite a number of countries at the beginning of this week I spoke to the Chinese Research Minister Wang Gang and he spoke about or reported from the 13th National People's Congress and he said we have come up with a new innovation strategy and There are a number of adjectives to describe them to describe the strategy one is green one is open and Then there was coordination there was innovation and there was sharing so these are the buzzwords so open seems to be a buzzword for the digital world and Prior to coming here. We sat downstairs together in a small group of people and we talked about intellectual property rights and how do we find the right balance of Research within academic institutions that can be applied to business applications and IPR of course is the legal tool to Provide an appropriate frame framework for the transition and use of ideas a different development are indeed open innovation Campuses and one of the most shining examples. I've seen in end-hofen in the Netherlands. We are Philips the company Philips stopped operation on its own R&D campus and they actually pulled out the Philips company sign They gave it away. They opened the gates in a literal sense to new companies and Academic institutions and they created an open innovation campus Does an open innovation campus work without IPR rules? No The difference is that you talk about IPR rules in the very beginning and you apply the same rules to all actors on campus But then you at the same time agree on sharing Some part of the knowledge which you develop by jointly using the research Equipment which is available and then you define the ways on how to Proprietary in a proprietary sense take advantage of the knowledge even further so Open can be one of the answers another answer certainly has to be Resume the road of simplification make the instruments better understandable to others and pave the road from blue skies research to Applied knowledge in a structured way a new development is a new instrument Which is called important project of common European interest. We do see that in a number of Business sectors amongst their microelectronics and one of the major International chip producers is here in Ireland In this field we no longer need regulations to make sure that we have competition within Europe We hardly have any companies left so if we talk about competition we talk about global competition and this global competition is disturbed by a National funding policies in countries like Taiwan Korea and even the United States So in order to provide a regulatory framework that helps companies Within Europe to compete on an international level in order to have this this instrument of important project of common European interest was developed and We curiously take a look at this in order to see whether it can help the European microelectronics industry to survive in this global competition if we look at European governance We do see that the European Commission at least in the field of research and innovation plays an even stronger role Which is not clearly defined if the Commission Does not reach its objectives by discussing it with the member states They make a shortcut and talk to the research organizations directly. This is called stakeholder dialogue To some extent we from a national perspective perceive this as circumvention of member state perspectives So in addition to simplifying the instruments with in addition to Providing the right regulatory framework to compete globally We see that the Commission should define its role clearly With regard to the member states we need a clear definition of labor and we need a clear definition of what added European value means and at what level Commission activities are necessary and to what extent the member states can live up to the ambition They formulate themselves That means however at the same time that the member states have to come up with a clear vision of what research and innovation means and This in a modern world means that we have to look beyond research policies and have to take into account Education and training on the one hand, but on the other hand also Industry and labor policies and we do have to do this on a national level We in Germany try to do it by bringing actors together under the umbrella of the high-tech strategy in Germany But we also have to do this on the European level as well So what does this mean if we run up for the follow-up program of horizon? 2020 we should take all this into account and we as member states have to be more ambitious in shaping a and ambitious agenda of The research and competitiveness Council we have to look at intersectoral discussions and at inter departmental discussions because The bottom line is We cannot do without Europe of course as Hans-Dietrich Kencher the former foreign minister in Germany who died just recently As he said Europe is our future We have no other and let me add research science and innovation are the key to European future So we have to work on these fields as well So thank you very much for your attention and I look forward to discussions


All right Welcome everybody to the one-stop marketing shop Gutenberg's marketing toolbox And if you think I changed that title to fit Gutenberg in there, you're absolutely correct You can tell I'm having a couple of technical difficulties because I can't get this to load properly So we're gonna have to deal with some of the navigation showing a little bit. Hopefully that's not a problem for anyone if it is Yell at me afterwards that'll be fine So we're gonna go through all the slides here. We've got the WordCamp organizers who you just met This fantastic crew kind of put all this event together. This is my first time attending a WordCamp So I'm very grateful to everyone here very grateful to the organizers as well Especially Robin who took his time to go through the deck with me and kind of give me some pointers You're beautiful wonderful super amazing sponsors. I'm gonna call out Bloom host because it's very hard to read. So it's this one right here Yeah, that'd be great if we can do that. Oh that's there you go, so and Fancy all right, so welcome to WordCamp Toronto And my title sign so so fancy So I wanted to go is it gonna load very slowly. It's very exciting So what do I hope that you're gonna get from this presentation because I know that the title slide or the title is not especially clear I was gonna do these in fancy kind of rollout bullet points, but this will work So one of the things I want you to walk away from this if you forget anything else is an understanding of the growth stages of of a business as they relate to the four critical digital marketing channels and obviously I Want you to have some confidence in WordPress's support for your business from small to medium to large There should be no reason why you have to get pushed out of WordPress unless you're in some super fancy edge case And the last piece is how you can leverage Gutenberg to better support your your marketing efforts Who am I I'm very sick if you hadn't noticed So if you want to shake my hand, we maybe should just do one of these that'll be okay But my name is Troy Fox. I'm the founder of a digital marketing agency called Delta growth I've been in the space for almost 10 years doing mostly search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization But my team right now does a lot more than that And so we're talking about all the elements of that and the strategy involved in engaging different sizes of businesses I love warm countries rock climbing scuba diving and WordPress Who are we so Delta growth is the company that I represent and the founder or one of the co-founders of the company We're a digital marketing agency based out of Toronto right now we're Hiring our eighth employee. We're actually hiring currently as well So if you know anyone who's an intermediate to senior SEO specialist send them our way We have a six-hour work day and three days work from home. Everyone seems to like that. I'm not entirely sure why I want to talk a little bit about some of the brands that we work with just to establish a little bit of trust here If you've heard of carfax or car proof we work with them well dot ca maple and you're gonna hear a lot about maple today We work with a company called easy grass. It's just an international organization bargains group excel homes in us stove and more so The the start of this presentation is on just kind of growing the business online What are the major components of of growing a business the first is search engine optimization? And this is obviously just the digital marketing channels So the first is search engine optimization and when you build your business online when you when you start putting your website together Frequently the first thing you're gonna be thinking about is SEO.  I think Ryan at the back may be doing we haven't seen your president Okay. Yeah, okay good So you can get that somewhere else what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna figure out how we can integrate the The different strategies into your business and you can kind of get a sense as a business owner as a marketer as a developer Designer supporting a business owner a business how you can kind of enable them to get to this so Critical digital marketing channel number one is SEO. It's the long-term channel It's the one where you have the highest return on investment over time It's the one where if you didn't invest in it ten years ago your business is gonna be very expensive today Paid advertising so I group a lot of channels together under paid advertising I do it because they all serve the same business purpose So if you look at Facebook advertising Google advertising Instagram Snapchat a lot of these channels they all fit under paid advertising because what you can do is you can pay money to get users and sales and This is a very fast turnaround time So I can immediately for you right now enable a campaign Spend a bunch of your money and get you some sales The question is is it as efficient as it could be is it as well targeted as it could be is it driving the right sales? But all those things fall into the same bucket, which is paid advertising It's one of your critical channels another one is email and marketing automation and a lot of business owners Some business owners about 50% of them will actually think about email and digital or in marketing automation And then 50% just will have never thought of it. It just won't have ever crossed their mind There's some something about it that just kind of turns you off but it's this idea of reaching out and engaging your customers after the purchase process or during the nurture process before they become an actual client and Even beyond that being able to talk to user at different stages in the funnel and they're in their customer journey All the way down to things like you know sharing your business They want to they want to say hey, I had this great experience working with you How do I share your company? How do I share your business with my friends and email and marketing automation will help you do that? conversion rate optimization is the last piece I sometimes use this interchangeably with user experience and It kind of bothers me sometimes that user experience and CRO don't go hand-in-hand in some people's minds So I'm using them perfectly interchangeably just to annoy those people But the idea is that conversion rate optimization has a goal of Improving the number of people on your site who actually convert into a paying customer or a lead or somebody donates to your charity Whatever your goal happens to be It's improving that conversion rate and user experience is enabling a user to get to their desired goal So if you're saying, you know, I'm I'm someone on the site and I want to pay you for your services Well, let's make it as easy as possible for them to do that Let's give them all the information they need to do to make that decision and hey That's what conversion rate optimization is give them what they need take away blockers So those are your four channels and we're gonna be kind of covering those for this whole process But this is this is by far the most theoretical presentation I have ever given I I teach a three-month or I used to teach a three-month SEO course where it was just granular Most of my presentations are very specific to changes. You can make to your business today This one's gonna be a little bit more theoretical and I that was driving me nuts. So I said no, we're gonna do a case study So this is a client of ours. They're called Maple. They're an online doctor. They're competing or they're disrupting I should say the walking clinic space. So this is gonna sound like a sales pitch.  Yeah, that's clearly a whatever and then they create a prescription for you You can go pick that up at your pharmacy. Whole experience may take 30 minutes so they're a fantastic solution and They're gonna be our case study today because we started with them as a new business and we helped them grow into What I would like to call a medium-sized business. We'll get to that so We're gonna kind of cover this in two different parts So we're gonna cover every single critical digital marketing channel for Maple when they were a small business and then we're gonna cover them all as Maple as a medium-sized business, but then I'm gonna show you the big picture so that you can take that home and say This is what I should be doing for my business or what the high watermark is for my business And if I'm not even close to there something's wrong if we haven't started that something's wrong Essentially, these should be questions. You ask yourself. Am I in the right place? So for paid advertising for Maple when they were a small business They only had a couple of things that they were working on they only worked with Google ads and Facebook ads And for a lot of small businesses, we actually don't recommend having two marketing channels We recommend only one or paid advertising channels I should say and the reason for this is because depending on what you can spend per user You don't have enough data to make any kind of decisions because your decision-making process for paid advertising should be do I feel confident spending more and If your answer is yes, then you have all the metrics you need generally You know how much you're costing or you're paying for a user You know how much you're you're getting for a conversion You know that that's profitable and so you're confident paying more and for a lot of businesses Especially B2B organizations or anyone with like a lead value or a sale value over a thousand dollars You're probably gonna want to stick to just one marketing channel So Facebook or Maple had to this is because they're a B2C company Their cost per acquisition is and I can say this because it's not super crazy below $30 And that's that's pretty clear because their price for their product is something like $50 So they can't pay anything more than that But that means that they can quickly get results and see results by channel so they're focused on a couple of marketing channels We drove traffic directly to the homepage So this may drive some specialist nuts to hear this I don't recommend creating a ton of internal landing pages all the time it as a small business as a new business It's it's valuable to kind of take as an as a next step After you've kind of started to see some results But your home page should be a very good experience for the user There can be a much better a much more targeted experience for the user But hey, you're a small business your marketing budget is not very large. I think the objective Marketing budget is something like 10% of your gross revenue somewhere between five or five and 10% of your gross revenue So how much money do you really have to spend on all sorts of new pages new things like that? So maple right now They will when they started out, they just had the one home or the one page and Then with the paid advertising we only focused on three or four major ideas So we didn't say what are the 10 million campaigns that we could run for maple because there are a lot We were running campaigns against online doctor virtual health care We were running campaigns against walking clinics and we were running campaigns against. Oh, that's interesting We were running campaigns against conditions. So This is one of those weird things as a marketer where you're actually happy to be working with things like ed and uti's and stuff like that We actually that gets thrown around the office a whole lot. It's just like, yeah, how's the uti campaign going? So they're they're paid advertising campaigns very simple and now we're talking about search engine optimization so what were they doing I'm gonna be very honest with you almost nothing and We didn't actually push this a whole lot because the paid advertising channel was fairly strong And SEO is a very long-term game But some of the parts of this long-term game are something that you should be focusing on as a new business So we're gonna get to that and delta growth does this as well If you're a specialist if you're an SEO specialist and you're sitting in the room going you're wrong You can look at the delta growth site and you can see that we're actually following these rules as well Because we're only about two years old so maple started out with just a home and conditions page and Our end conditions pages I should say so they had their home page which targeted things like You can see here online doctors virtual health and prescriptions in Canada Those are the types of things that people would search for whenever they were looking for maple So their home page ranked fairly well for that surprisingly and then their inner pages So the only inner pages they had were just conditions. So uti diagnosis prescriptions Treatment same thing with like ed same thing with like colds or coughs They have a ton of conditions they treat so we've got a ton of pages for it But that was about it. They had less than 30 pages. So that was fine That's actually a pretty straightforward website if you're a designer developer in WordPress You're going yeah, okay. I've gotten Website scopes like that from small businesses all the time totally fine The last piece that's probably more important is this investment in media and partners so the hardest thing to do from a search perspective is to create authority over time to grow your authority over time and What this is and if you're if you've heard about SEO you've probably heard about link building This is kind of that except in in 2018 or I guess 2019. Geez. This is coming up So this is kind of the modern equivalent of this How do you create authority for your website and is it a quick thing to do not really a good way to do It is to go say speak at conferences, which is what I'm doing Or you can host meet-ups or you can work with partners very closely or you can work with charitable organizations that want to give back You can do all sorts of things to create authority just by working with your with the media say with your partners However, it is you can do that any kind of small business should be looking at doing that to some extent not to the extent of Hiring like a PR agency or something like that, but kind of just doing what I call founders stuff Can I swear probably not founder stuff? and That just involves you know actually going out and talking about your business right trying to put your business out there And we did it all in WordPress. This is should be a no-brainer. It's a small business is a free platform It's solved every problem. Why would we not? conversion rate optimization so For a small business I think a lot of people consider conversion rate optimization to be a B testing if you've heard that if you've heard CRO You've heard a B testing. You think they're the same thing. It's not really the idea behind CRO is removing blockers and Making it easier enabling users to get to their their desired outcome So you don't actually have to a B test with Maple They were redesigning their website when we engaged with them and we got to work very closely with their design company Which I believe was called humanistic Man if I wrong they're gonna be mad at me almost referred a bunch of business to you guys that they mispronounce your name So when they were working on the new site, it's so small. I'm sorry about that, but We got the chance to talk to the design company and we said well What do people need to see to feel confident and comfortable giving their information and working with Essentially online doctors like I'm gonna give you a bunch of information online That's medical and scary and you know all these kinds of things and it's not it's disruptive a lot of these people We've captured them in this walking clinic kind of space and they were just gonna go like they're all bundled up They've got their three kids just bundled up and they're putting them in the minivan They're going wait. What's this maple thing that I found while searching for the closest walking clinic? And so we need a way to capture them right Really quickly and so one of the things we did was we said let's make it really obvious what we do So instead of chat with a doctor on your lunch break, which I don't know What does that mean are they gonna give you advice? Are they just really friendly doctors that are really sad is this like live with sad doctors so that they're happy No, so okay, we're online doctors. We provide virtual health care and prescriptions in Canada That's awesome, right? How does the app work? Well, this is actually how the app work It's a gift of how the app actually works How you go through the whole process of engaging with a doctor and what the outcomes look like You can actually just sit on the home page and look at it for a couple of seconds and be like I actually know what this does which is great and then we actually Did a couple of fancy things with their conversion form. So now this is something that we could do without an audit I just said, you know what like your little register button is not super useful because I don't know what I'm registering for I might like I'm registering to chat with a doctor. I that I'm not entirely sure what that is So we said, okay, let's just get started and we kind of switched We looked at both of those and we drove traffic to both of those We actually did use Google Optimize for that But we set up an experiment in 15 minutes to add this email address field and then get started now field And then when they type in the email address in the registration form it just Pre-populates the email address.  I've already started this. I might as well pay these guys $50, right? That's how that works in data So we focused on a strong brand identity with maple we focused on educating the customer and We focused on the unique selling points that maple offers and we tried to make sure that the entire Site reflected that I'm so happy. Everything is loading the internet. It's so horrible So email and marketing automation This is one of those big scary things for small businesses like I was saying we'll get to how big and scary it should be What maple was doing was capturing emails on registration. So whenever they actually did sign up Maple would take their email address and pull it into their database. They would have an onboarding drip campaign So whenever once you signed up, they send you an email Right away giving you a full walkthrough of how to use the platform any kind of frequent concerns that people have had Answers to that any kind of links to resources that are very valuable to someone who just needs to use the app right now Because there is a walkthrough in in the mobile app and on the desktop app But a lot of people skip that stuff. So let's let's kind of give it to them a couple of ways But then they also had another email that would go out two or three days later That would start talking about things that you may not have known about the app because you were in an emergency You had you know one of these conditions and you just wanted to get a resolution for this right away but did you know you can see a therapist on Maple oh, that's kind of cool Did you know that you can treat this? Did you know that there is actual and actually an annual plan where you can register your entire family for a flat rate?  They had no metrics. They were really looking at they did no a b testing They just said I think this might be a good idea, and it was I think it was a good idea Okay, that's maple, but what about you? Do you have to do all that? Hmm. I don't know. I don't think so so This this is all available. It is almost impossible to see So this is all available In the slides, and I'll give you a link to the slides. I'll give you a link to This kind of document and it goes all the way from small business to large-size businesses not quite enterprise So you'll be able to see this but for SEO you should put a bit of effort into SEO whenever you start your business You should start thinking about well Do I have a home page and then what are three or four other types of pages? I should have and those pages just speak to user intents and I love the word user intent I don't use the word keyword a whole lot So if if I'm an SEO specialist that doesn't say keyword and that makes you not trust me I fully understand but you're wrong So user intents are great because you can think about a user intent as for example searching for your specific product or You know if you develop for example, let's say your web developer web design developer and you say yeah I do web development. That's great, but everyone every web developer does web development So do you also do WordPress development? Do you do Joomla development? Do you do Drupal development? So okay, if you do make a page for it and talk about how you're better than everyone else is doing that Right, so as a small business just take a couple of minutes think about the four or five things that you could do for that Yeah, that's an expectation. That is a that is a high-water mark for for a small business if you don't do that You're not doing it right You're at least you're behind an SEO There's a couple of other things I didn't really talk about here But one of them is this idea of an indexable website. This is one of those Have you heard of FUD fear and fear uncertainty in doubt?  If let's say you're gonna start a business You need to you need to look at how plausible this this business is because you're investing your money in it, right? So same thing with SEO at least do your due diligence one requirement as you know that your website is in Google Because there are ways that you can kick it out of Google. So Google yourself, right? And if it's not something's wrong call an expert, but that is that is definitely a requirement You would be surprised how frequently that happens Capture and build authority and leverage business relationships. So this is another thing that it's like a 50-50 I don't know how this happens, but I think what happens is you get a lot of business owners who are specialists in a certain space So I'm a specialist developer. I'm a specialist designer. I'm a specialist speaker I'm a specialist whatever it is and then you create a business But you don't really have like a business kind of mentality or relationship-building mentality I would like to encourage you to build that especially with regards to Leveraging business relationships and trying to get other people to work with you and to work with other people Try to provide value to other organizations Try to provide value to the community through meetups through things like that and naturally organically What will happen is these people will link to your website and Then you have these very high value associations that are now linking to you, right? We work with action against hunger for pro bono because I think it's a really great initiative We work with operation grounds. Well because they're a really great initiative And working with kind of charitable organizations like that Yeah, it gets you a lot of authority because they love you and they want to do something for you and putting a link On their websites free, right? They don't have to pay for that. That's great Paid advertising. What do you have to do to be successful as a small business owner there? Start it You got to try it But you also have to know what you're trying so I would stick to Google or Facebook I can't give you the full rundown of what paid advertising is But a really quick summary you need to know what your cost per acquisition is what the maximum you can pay per acquisition So easy example of this is if you sell shoes if it's a $20 pair of shoes and your profit margin on that is like 50% which would be nice I guess then you can pay less than $10 to make a sale So you need all the metrics required You need someone to give them to you or you need to get them yourself to show that this is a profitable campaign that's something you need to think about and Just do it in Google do it in Facebook ads and start remarketing Remarketing is always going to be profitable. I've never seen a remarketing campaign not be profitable The problem is and actually I'll walk you through what that is So remarketing is let's say you land on my website. I follow you around with ads I go, hey, I know you were on my website 30 minutes ago. How is that? No So that's kind of what remarketing is but we do it a little bit nicer than that Which we try not to be kind of super sleazy. I think it'd be funny I think for certain brands just to be like but We try not to so most people at least as someone who's been on your site They have some kind of interest in your brand. They've got some interest in your product They're much more likely to convert than other people so you can actually spend a little bit more on those people and get a good return on investment Email and automation. I actually have this little zero percent effort thing here. Just capture their emails It's not that hard to capture someone's email address So if they're signing up if they're making a purchase if they're doing something like that Try to capture the email. I know there are certain industries where this doesn't work This is for every single business in the world. So, you know, it's a little bit hard, right? But capture their emails because when you become a mid-sized business, you don't want to start from zero You don't want to start from oh, let's try this brand new channel because you're gonna get frustrated and move on No, just capture the emails and then if you get bored someday you go, I wonder if I could write an email Right.  So I love digital marketing I think it gets a weird rep as this Make money online We're gonna be we're gonna save your lives. We're gonna do super cool stuff. It is a magic pill It is not a magic pill. It takes a lot of work And one of the things that screws us trying to do digital marketing is having a really crappy user experience So if we direct people to your website and you have a really bad visual identity It's almost impossible to know kind of who you are Then well, we're not gonna be able to make you any money It's just not gonna work Because nobody likes you nobody trusts you so think about your your visual identity and I can't talk too much about that I think there's a lot of design sessions today. Some of them are actually talking about that I would go to that if you feel like that might be a weak point Make sure your home and service pages or you know those two or three pages I said you should have Your home page and those service pages run through them make your friends run through them make somebody who hates you run through them Because you're gonna say I want you like let's say I sell the phones I want you to buy a phone on my website and then sit over them and ask them to talk about what they're feeling and Experiences they're experiencing as they're going through. Oh, this is recorded. I can't tell the story Yeah, so Let's say you're going through I can just remove the brand there you go Let's say you're going through the purchasing of a of a handset and the first question I ask you is what's your sin number? Are you going to actually buy a handset from me? No, that would be ridiculous and this is a major telco that did this Just just you know And if they had their their best friend or anyone look at this they'd be like no don't put that there That's stupid.  Why would you ever ask for my sin number, right? So think about that and this is user testing so you can either get someone to do that Just kind of casually or you can get someone to run through the site. There's there are services that do this There's a user testing calm. There's try my UI. There's probably a bunch more I don't not affiliated with any of them. I don't really care.  What's wrong with that? That shouldn't take someone making a recommendation to you You should just run through it me like this is annoying and then give it to a developer and let them fix it Like it should be pretty straightforward So if you just do this from a digital marketing perspective as a small business or a new business You should be okay. That's what what I expect from you What's very likely true is One or two of these channels you haven't done and I don't hold that against you. This is Kind of an idea of saying what is holistic marketing? I just said that that's bad This is an idea of like taking all of your channels and balancing them out Because this is where you should be in each channel to be getting your optimum return All of our images are just gonna that's fine medium or gross-sized businesses So I'm gonna run you through what maple looks like is a medium or gross-sized business the only thing with with this category is It's really hard to define. I'm gonna just say any business. That's under five million dollars Maybe any business under ten million dollars is gonna be a small business and then anything over that can be midsize So paid advertising What should we be doing differently with paid advertising? Maple when they become a became a midsize company They started prioritizing measurement a lot more. So one of the questions that we asked them Was do you know which channels? created awareness for maple Because we know which channels are converting we do what's called last touch attribution Which is the last channel you came in through the website? At before you converted But you'll find that over time that skews very strongly towards organic search Because what'll happen is you start creating a lot of awareness in another channel Somebody who's never heard of your brand before and then they search for the name Maple and they come in through the website and they convert Well, that's going to be called organic search and the attribution is going to be towards organic search But what if they saw the ad somewhere else that ad should get some kind of attribution So one of the things we did with maple was we started looking at first touch attribution And we did a really fancy solution for that But now we can record a user based on what original channel brought them in And like who just showed them maple and then which channel they actually converted through So now we have a more of a whole picture for what's going on with that We also increase spend and this is something that you should pretty much always be doing Like I said at the beginning if you're thinking about paid advertising the question you should always be asking yourself is Do I feel confident spending more In this channel because if you don't Then you don't have the right metrics in front of you or you don't understand the metrics And you need someone to explain them to you right and make you feel confident in them Or you just need to actually look at all the numbers. Am I making more money every time I spend more? You know, but if you do feel confident spending more, why are you not spending more?  I get that much in results, right? So just keep increasing your spend. So mid-sized businesses just do that a lot faster Um experiment and channels.  I'm going to try kijiji. I'm going to try all sorts of things like that Start experimenting and the reason we started experimenting with maple was because we got through a lot of the low hanging fruit There are a lot of campaigns that are very core to what maple does And we'd already built those campaigns and we already spent a lot of the money in those campaigns So to make sure that we were staying efficient We wanted to try linkedin. We wanted to try all of these different channels Just to see if we could get the low hanging fruit there as well And then one of the things is a mid-sized business that you absolutely have to do is optimize based on a full life cycle of your user So you can't just look at like let's say you're a new e-commerce company and you sell that that pair of shoes So okay, the customer comes in buys a pair of shoes. That's $20. That's the return for whatever investment you made Okay, but what if that customer comes back every week and buys a new pair of shoes because they're just that kind of person Well, that customer is worth a lot of money But we're not attributing that to the the acquisition channel. We're not saying yeah lifetime value is very important And the reason this is such an important consideration is because if we knew That our customer was worth $10,000 rather than $200 we could pay a lot more to pull them in And we'd feel a lot more confident pulling them in and if that's a question for you If you're like, I actually don't know what that would look like for my customers That's maybe something that you would start digging into but again, this is mid-sized and maple is definitely ahead of the game there So for SEO excuse the slide all this stuff is going to pop in. It's magic. So for SEO We started also looking at new user intents So we wanted to start thinking about new ways we can be in front of users when they're searching for us Because search engine optimization is a form of inbound marketing Which means we're going to just be there when someone is looking for us So one of the things that we're doing is we're disrupting the walking clinics And when someone's searching for like toronto walking clinic or vancouver walking clinic or mississauga walking clinic We don't have any pages for that and google doesn't show us for that. That's not how that works We need to have a page that talks about this before google will even put us out there So we started building Geo specific pages so seeing a doctor in toronto And we talk about how we're disrupting the walking clinic space and why we might actually solve your problem Better than going out to a walking clinic. I'm sure every walking clinic hates this. I don't care. This is amazing And you can you can get that and that we're going to go over a couple of examples with kutenberg blocks on How you can do this with your business and different types of things you can do. So i'm just going to skip on Greater time investment in growing the site so Once you've kind of built up this authority like I was saying go speak at events go Go work with partners that kind of a thing you now have this authority to leverage And if you look at the six a successful website from a search engine optimization perspective It's not a single page And and I know this is a design principle that existed for for a while this idea of simplicity and brochure websites and everything That doesn't help for SEO because you're essentially answering fewer questions Okay, well, who does that help it just makes your life a little bit easier because your site map is five pages And you're like I can remember that I know every page is none of the pages are ugly That's fine But what we want to do is we want to make sure that we start growing the site We start answering more questions And if you work with an SEO specialist or agency, they'll they'll direct you and in the way you can kind of get there And then you we also revised the navigation with maple because Their navigation was not big enough to accept. I think the 200 new pages that we created so And one other interesting thing just because this is wordpress everything is built on wordpress The way we did this was we used taxonomies and I Delta growth doesn't do development or anything. The maple team is just in love with wordpress. So they've been using it that way But they use wordpress taxonomies to build out these pages So that they didn't have to individually create every page They just uploaded a spreadsheet and it just created all the pages for them. It was amazing Uh email and marketing automation So this is where this gets fun So with maple we started considering the full user journey in our communications And i'm not going to walk you through the whole journey The slides are available, but uh what we wanted to do specifically was We'd been focusing on this idea of activation So when someone signs up we wanted them to get a consultation And that's fine because it makes sense. It's a primary business goal But we weren't really thinking about onboarding or usage over time Because what would have benefited us was to look at lifetime value and to say okay How can we get someone to come for two consultations with their account instead of going away and forgetting about us or three consultations We're signing up for a membership So now we started thinking more about this So we created unique paths for different types of users You know we we can tell if a user is a family user not because we're creepy but because they sign up for a family plan So it's fine And then we we can identify users who are just paying for one consultation who have an emergency and just needed to get that resolved And then we have users who have a single person subscription because they just want the peace of mind and they hate walking clinics for whatever reason So we've created unique paths for different users and our focus was on activation campaigns So uh making sure that we can increase the lifetime value of our users But eventually we we did build out some ideas for cross-selling and advocacy But i'll let you take a look in your own time And then we started getting heavy into conversion rate optimization So like I said conversion rate optimization is not just split testing one of the things that we did was Uh, we did a lot of user testing We ran a lot of users through the website with a bunch of different hypotheses that we wanted to test hypotheses sure that we wanted to test And uh, we took a lot of that feedback and we said what are some changes we can make To make it easier for the user or remove blockers. I make cro sounds so easy. All of you can just go home and do it now Remove blockers make it easy great And then we looked at data and analytics So one of the cool things with maple is their funnel is actually very short It's usually home page register convert or home page how it works convert But the conversion form is another thing that we wanted to look at so we looked at all the different funnels Someone could go through in the website They can start with the conditions page or the home page or the how it works page or wherever it is and where do they fall out And why do we think they fell out? What's our hypothesis for why they they stopped in this journey? Uh, when they're on the actual form What form field might have stumped them and interesting note. It's the phone number Who would it's at right so there's all sorts of things that you may not have picked up And then what we did was we started doing always on optimization So from our audit we just came up with a bunch of really cool ideas for testing and we just started running them We're like, yeah, cool. Let's just keep doing it And we did it with wordpress. It was not hard. It's not some fancy hub spot thing It's not, you know, whatever no landing page testing whatever It was wordpress and google optimize and it took a couple of minutes to set up and it's fine There's no it doesn't cost anything either. None of these things are You don't pay for either of them. It's great so This is this is kind of our medium-sized growth company. Um, and I'm gonna Skip through this. I think but this is kind of where your business should be if you're a mid-sized business This is kind of where you should be aiming to get to and We'll we'll hopefully be able to get to that really quickly mature and large businesses. This is the same thing. So This gets really complex For mature and large businesses because they just have so many moving parts and they create new business units and they have all sorts of history and they have Stakeholders who are combative and stakeholders who are amazing and you kind of need to start like focusing on which stakeholder Is going to help you the most and which business unit is going to work? But this is kind of your overall plan for a mature large business I did want to show you a couple of examples of some cool late stage things. So late stage seo This is Shopify and I always use Shopify as an example because they're awesome. They do really cool seo work So Shopify's user journey starts with a business owner who's thinking about building an e-commerce website Well a business owner who's thinking about building an e-commerce website is also thinking about building a business And a business owner is thinking about building a business Maybe thinking about a slogan and so for whatever this is way far back in the user journey, right? Then Shopify is like sure whatever will be there. We're out of other things to do and so they built a slogan generator Um, so I I searched for word camp and it created came up with some good ones If you want to get ahead get a word camp Um, gee your word camp smells terrific. Uh word camp makes your day obey your word camp. Anyway So he's going to whip through I have five minutes. I have five minutes. Yeah, okay Um, so let's cover some of the the Gutenberg benefits So I'm just focusing on modular thinking in Gutenberg because uh, there wasn't a ton of stuff I could really take from it most of it's in the editor and some of it's just in in use So, um, I wanted to start talking about some of the types of blocks You should be thinking about when you're building a new website and kind of why So, uh, number one think about features What are the features that your service provides? Um, you can list those in a block. Why not? It's one of those things that's just valuable to know about your business A lot of people have questions about maple for example. They say is this condition covered? Well, those would be kind of features and we just have a block for that We just put that on any page where we think that user intent will be there Unique selling point or your brand position Um, this is really important because you're almost always going to have to do this Most people don't think about their website or their web pages As being entry points a lot of people think of their homepage as being the entry point And then they spread out and look around from there every page on your website can be an entry point So let's say someone lands on maple's conditions page And you're looking up whatever condition it is. Well, I need to sell you on my company great You you handle colds. That's awesome. Why maple? So, okay, let's answer that Let's have a block that we can just plug in there that answers that social proofing Super important if you've been in media mentions if you've spoken to conferences if you have Any kind of partners big clients that people would recognize How it works how your service or how how your product works pricing reviews calls to action So that would also be that'd be your purchase calls to action It would also be like middle of funnel calls to action just to capture people's email addresses, for example Also subscribe to my email Never works Videos and gifts so if a video or a gift can better tell your story Try that that's a really great module And this kind of helps you create simple layouts Okay, this is my favorite part. Let me get through it really quickly Um For SEO when you're you've got this kind of modular design You've got all these types of blocks that you've already built everything is kind of good to go You can start thinking of the different pages that you want to create And they're a lot easier to create with these blocks because essentially all you need to do is write two or three paragraphs And then put you like your usp brand position social proofing called action. Everything's already done. You just plug it in there, right? So well, what types of pages if you have any kind of local intent if you are in a medical space if you're allied health if you're um, if you're in the Like service industry if you're doing anything like that you probably have location searches someone goes toronto mechanic, right? Um, so build a page for that industry and demographic So people self identify very frequently. So if you do uh web development Well, think about web development for enterprises. Is that a different problem to solve? Are there different issues that a stakeholder is going to come up with or web development for small business or web development for e-commerce, for example Um and demographics. So if you're getting uh, if you're an insurance company, how many people here are insurance companies? If you're an insurance company, uh, you would ensure students for example So car insurance for students would be a demographic page Problem process. What types of problems lead you to this uh, this site or this service? Or what kind of process is someone going through where oh all of a sudden I need you like I'm building a business I'm launching an e-commerce site. I don't have a host Okay, well, that's part of the process. So build a page for that Competitor pages. Um, we call these conquesting pages. I'm not sure if that's the actual term But I think it's awesome sounding. So the idea is you rank for your competitors names So Shopify does this they have this page called Shopify versus big commerce, which is a direct competitor of theirs Um, and so now they rank for big commerce reviews big commerce testimonials big commerce alternatives It's great. It's really smart because they don't they don't say anything. I'm trying not to swear They don't say anything bad about big commerce They just have reviews of customers who switch from big commerce to Shopify saying that Shopify is pretty cool and then they have the business the the position of Shopify and the the usp Seasonal pages. I mean Christmas is coming up the holidays are coming up So you can always build pages targeting that that doesn't apply for every industry Though I think it'd be amazing to have an SEO for Christmas Um, kind of page just because it'd be so funny. Uh, landing pages for paid advertising You can build really quickly and code free abn tests. I'm going to skip that because I'm out of time All right Questions We're doing questions That's a good question. This is a very good question Um, so the slides are available at dg.agency forward slash word camp 2018 There's a hyphen in there forward slash word camp hyphen 2018 The flow charts available here as well. And if you're interested in talking about delta growth, it's Any other I have a good rule of thumb for that So I had a really great mentor who said this whole blue ocean thing is I can't swear is bad Stupid Because if your competitors are somewhere and all of your competitors are fighting tooth and nail somewhere It's because there's tons of money there Right. So if all your competitors are doing paid advertising and you're not performing It's not because google ads is bad. It's because you're bad at doing google ads or your campaign that your first campaign didn't work out That's fine. Keep trying. The other problem is a lot of people have very high max cpa's is what I call it So if you're selling it like the average client that comes over to us is worth upwards of $12,000 Because if they come to us and they get on a retainer easily $12,000 Okay, what do you think I'm willing to pay for that customer? Decent sum of money. So if I spend a hundred dollars on google ads and it doesn't work That's not right, right? Of course, you didn't get a customer for a hundred dollars. It's worth $12,000. That's crazy So it's it's really about like if you're selling pencils. It's super easy You know immediately if it's working or if it's not but just keep trying Yeah different campaigns Yeah, we've actually had really bad results with merchant ads and I've talked to a couple big e-commerce companies And the merchant ads aren't aren't doing quite as well So they can be effective, but they're just harder to target right now than just search network ads in the states That's a different story merchant ads in the states are doing really really well Pardon Um, it's more just sometimes they'll show up for things that you're really not expecting them to Yeah Um, okay one more and I think that's it. Yeah It's out the window. Yeah, unfortunately I think there's a McMaster course on SEO or digital marketing that's trustworthy. I don't have any other recommendations Yeah All right, thank you


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