Sometimes it’s funny when things happen. I’ve been pretty honest on this blog about spending a ton of time on SEO over the past few weeks, honestly I was starting to feel like I wasn’t making any progress on our first keyword target….then this morning happened. We moved from #92 in Google’s results for our target keyword all the way up to #38….needless to say I’m thrilled on a couple of levels. First of all, it is nice to see some real tangible benefit to the time I’ve been putting in, secondly I think we’re starting to get to the point where it is realistic to expect to be in a position to gain some organic search engine traffic by the time all of our permits are set and ready to go.
We did watch an interesting movie last night that made me think that patience is a virtue that I need to continue to work on. Czech Dream is the story of two student filmmakers that use a government grant to advertise the opening for a new Supermarket (basically a Costco it seems) in the suburbs of Prague. So there isn’t a Supermarket, the whole thing is a hoax. About 4,000 people show up for the opening, my wife and I were nervous watching the movie because with that many people being upset, we thought the filmmakers were going to have to run out of there. In effect, nothing happened, the people just wanted the filmmakers to explain themselves….it was a drastically different reaction then you’d expect in the states. That’s not to say better, but I can’t imagine an American saying that it is a nice day and it was nice to take the bus 45 minutes to walk around a field and see the scaffolding of a fake store. To me, although they don’t state it implicitly, the filmmakers were trying to make the point not to let the governments heavy advertising affect them in terms of the upcoming vote in the Czech Republic should become a member of the European Union or not.
The advertising campaign itself was interesting to see, their logo was quite different (as you can see in the above picture, it’s the bubble) but their ads were posted everywhere and said things like “Don’t Come” and “Don’t Spend”…..their tv commercial had a man telling the camera that in his Supermarket he didn’t want any ugly women working there.
I’m not sure if there is anything that we can learn at Uncorked Ventures from the advertising campaign, but it has made me aware that there are plenty of ways to advertise your product. I think as of now we have a pretty standard campaign as far as the wine industry goes, except that we’re giving much greater access than any other wine club I’m aware of. We’re also focused on smaller wineries which is unique because it not only takes more effort on our part, but also because it cuts down on our profit margin.
I’ll continue trying to think of any possible ways to use, the counter-culture type messages that were so effective in the movie, in advertising for our wine clubs and export services.
