Grant Hyde and Tim Ella are footy mates whose friendship goes back decades - but these days, they're also business partners.
Their company, Kadoo Tours, runs Indigenous history walking tours of La Perouse and Watsons Bay in Sydney.
While Grant and Tim have had plenty of success booking school groups, they're hoping to expand their client base to include more tourists and corporate clients.
But they're unsure how to go about doing that - so we introduced them to NGNY, an award winning Indigenous-owned digital marketing agency.
Founded in 2014 by John Saulo and Liam Ridgeway, the company's clients include social enterprise Blacademics, jewellery business Haus of Dizzy and the Yabun Festival.
Here's what NGNY had to say to Kadoo Tours: (Q&A edited and condensed for clarity)
NGNY - John: I guess the first port of call is to understand where or who the corporate clients are that you want to target. Are they a large government agency or smaller midsize corporate client?
Kadoo Tours - Grant: We're probably looking at larger and medium [sized] corporations, government and non-government, that deal with Indigenous people, or have Indigenous people working for them.
NGNY - Liam: How are you guys actually attracting the market and the audience you actually have at the moment?
Tim Ella (left) and Grant Hyde (left) from Kadoo Tours have been mates since the age of twelve. Source: Supplied
Kadoo Tours - Grant and Tim: We're cold canvassing and our webpage, word of mouth.... TripAdvisor’s been very positive for us.
NGNY - John: Well just having a look at your TripAdvisor, it’s great, you’ve got 12 reviews everybody is very positive about that and this is really good content. The next port of call would also be around understanding the metrics on your Facebook page. We can see they’re very heavily within the 35 - 50 age group, which if we're thinking about a corporate client, sits right in the space.
NGNY - Liam : So what you need to be able to do is understand who your key audience is that you need to be engaging with and then develop your messaging and communications targeted specifically to them.
Kadoo Tours - Grant: So boys what do we need to do to improve our search engine optimisation?
Liam Ridgeway (left) and John Saulo (right) co-founded NGNY in 2014. Source: Supplied
NGNY - John: First we need to make sure you have access to your metrics so you know your baseline and then we can build on that. First port of call would be making sure you have something like a Google Analytics plugged into your website, which will give you an understanding of the types of people coming, how long they’re spending on your website, where they’re located. Something else we use in our business is Google Search Console which plugs into your website and tells you how people are finding your website, so it will give you the keywords that are coming up for your site and off the back of that we're able to adjust the content of the website to bring in more keywords which will help traffic.
Kadoo Tours - Grant: Right, so what I’ve found is if I type in ‘Aboriginal tours in Sydney’ we’re on page one. If I type in ‘Indigenous tours Sydney’ we’re on page…nowhere, we might as well not be on there. Why?
NGNY - John: That has to do with types of words you’re using on your website, you’re obviously focusing on ‘Aboriginal’ and haven’t used ‘Indigenous’ enough throughout.
Kadoo Tours - Tim: Is there anything else that could make out website more user-friendly?
NGNY - Liam: There’s a few things that stand out. Firstly, in regards to when people first come to your page, you need to have clear messaging in regards to what you’re doing. So if you look at your website, you’ve got ‘welcome to Kadoo’ in large font, but the rest of the font is quite small and it’s very word heavy, text heavy. The key thing with that is clearly stating what you do and what the value is to your customers - and secondly what the call to action is, basically a sales pitch. You’re trying to get them from your home page, to basically buy your service.
Kadoo Tours - Grant: So [the] ‘book now’ [icon on our webpage]?
NGNY - John: The ‘book now’ works, it’s just that it sits there on its own, there’s nothing that compliments it, it’s the only thing on the page that is talking to how we access your service.
Kadoo Tours' home page. Source: Supplied
Kadoo Tours - Grant: That tells me straight in this conversation, what changes I can make straight away when I get back into the dashboard. Excellent.
NGNY’s key points for a more effective online presence:
1. Have a clear idea about who and where your target market is and develop messaging specific to them.
2. Make sure you’re collecting data on who’s visiting your website - a tool like Google Analytics can help. This will ultimately help with your search engine optimisation (SEO).
3. Make sure your home page has a clear sales pitch and call to action.
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