Sharing our Mistakes: Chasing the wrong Keywords
Firstly, I love sharing my mistakes. In fact, I love the whole team sharing their mistakes. We've a team of 8 here at SquareFish, and you cannot beat learning from each other's mistakes to save us all having to individually fall into the same pitfall.
Here's one of our best marketing mistakes from 2021 - chasing the wrong keywords.
About the project - HeydayChalet.com
We are part of a great business called HeydayChalet.com - it's a chalet for digital nomads & coliving in the French alps. It's a place for truly living the dream work-life balance, mixing your time between work and the mountain activities on your door like skiing, mountain biking, hiking and a whole world more.
It's an amazing business run by an amazing founder, and one of the things we help out with is digital marketing.
The Marketing Mistake
We chased "coliving" keywords, when we should have been chasing "digital nomad".
How did we end up doing that? Surely we've been working in digital marketing long enough to not make such a schoolboy error as not getting the keyword research right? We were caught be the assumption pitfall.
The Assumption Pitfall
When we started this project, we did a lot of industry research. Rivals mostly referred to themselves as "coliving", indeed some even have "coliving" as part of their name. There's plenty of google search traffic for "coliving", and even the industry body is called "Coliving Hub", so for us that was a decision made, "coliving" keywords must be the right direction to go.
We were assuming that because the rivals mostly described themselves as "coliving", then their clients must use that same terminology with the same meaning. That turned out not to be true at all.
We'd be caught by the old pitfall of not testing our assumptions properly, by assuming what the rivals were doing is correct.
Only when the project launched, and the data started screaming at us that "Digital Nomad" was a far better keyword set did we quickly realised and change all our targeting.
Our Lessons
Just because the rivals are doing it, it doesn't mean it's right. Look at the rivals, yes, but look skeptically.
Be cautious of "insider" terminology being used for marketing - do your clients really use those same terms with the same meaning?
All assumptions should be tested, properly. Especially the assumptions that are so obvious that surely they don't need testing, they are the riskiest ones.
Sharing = one less mistake for everyone else to make
I hope that helps you and your team. Cannot beat sharing our mistakes to stop everyone individually having to make the same mistake themselves to learn.
Happy Marketing :)
