Bill Hunt
Global Strategy Consultant, Back Azimuth Consulting
“I think that you’re going to provide a valuable service to people because you don’t sell these things. You, yourself, are not necessarily doing the training as if you were an agency. An agency doing a training is always going to be skewed to their approach and their biases.”
Welcome to ‘Take Ten’, OMCP’s podcast where we spend 10 minutes, more or less, talking to online marketing thought leaders, educators, and career professionals about training and certification with hosts Jane Flint and David Temple.
OMCP: I’m here at Pubcon with the CEO of Back Azimuth, Bill Hunt on the convention floor here. Bill, why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about yourself?
Bill Hunt: Sure. As you said, I’m Bill Hunt. I run a company called Back Azimuth Consulting. Our primary focus is really three tracks. One, we built some tools to mine keyword data, to really help you understand the voice of the consumer. Second, I work with large companies to build centers of excellence and how to scale their global search programs. Third, is an offshoot of that, is really helping companies understand how to effectively leverage search, and more and more broader digital marketing across multiple markets.
OMCP: Wow, that sounds interesting, Bill. You were probably the first person to really understand online market in a global scale. What was the impetus for that?
Bill Hunt: Well, it was two things. I think the first time I realized that people needed to market differently was when I was actually living in Japan. And an engineer from Ford was helping out Mazda and said, “I can’t believe these Japanese people have to have a car with a steering wheel on the left hand side and this and this and this. My response to them at the time, as a somewhat drunk Marine was simply, “Why wouldn’t they, it’s their country?”
From that day on, I had this interest of, how do we market to different markets? It culminated when I had my own company in Los Angeles selling earthquake kits and disaster preparedness, and Japan was the first market. We actually used the web. I moved from an online retailer, if you will, to a digital marketing consultant because after the Kobe earthquake, we had sold quite a bit of product. And all these big companies, Western Digital, HP, etc. were coming to us and saying, “How do we use this thing called the Internet?” to target primarily Japan.
Then after Japan, they wanted Spanish speaking markets. So more and more, I’ve started trying to figure out how we could actually use the Internet. My business school thesis was actually using the Internet to reach overseas markets. This was in 1994, 1995 before we had any mainstream search engines, before we even had browsers in many cases. So, that’s where it came from, and it just kept growing and growing and growing. Finding that it’s a big world out there, and you’re basically one query away from targeting someone internationally. So the better you prepare yourself for that, the more successful you can be.
OMCP: One way I learned about search engine marketing was when I was studying ideas. When I was learning about search engine marketing I didn’t just read your book (Search Engine Marketing Inc), I studied it. In fact, I remember the Goldilocks reference that you don’t want your keywords to be too hot and too cold, even all these years later. How did you start educating yourself about search engine marketing and online marketing in those early days?
