A Call To Action
New year predictions are out there. What to think about and where to focus. Another piece of tech to frazzle your brain.
Aside from AI, Blockchain, 5G, one theme caught my eye — the demise of organic search.
Here’s one of the articles I read…
Is this the end? I’m not 100% sure. What sounds more plausible is that it’s getting harder and taking longer to succeed.
Or as Winston Churchill once said:
“…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
It’s been going since the mid-1990s. Many might argue with the date, but let’s say that search is now a teenager. It’s got growing pains.
And in terms of limbs, maybe search had one arm tied behind its back?
What I mean by that is…
Before the teenage search ‘bot’s limbs crawl and rank content, something else to needs to happen…
– Engagement.
I.e., dealing with human emotion. And leaving logic aside.
We can’t just rely on the machine.
How can we understand the audience, develop relationships, or dare I say it, excite folk with an idea?
The bots can’t do it themselves — can they?
I don’t deny search is an essential tool. But it needs help earlier on because it involves a human at the start of the process.
And, search is more than just Google. More on that later.
The first name on the teamsheet
Search has been the bedrock of many strategies for a while.
Marketers have come to depend on it to drive traffic and revenue. Think of it as a dependable workhorse. But it’s become more than a horse.
Search has been like ‘self-drive’ for marketers. The ability for them to control content, create accountability, and report with confidence.
A robust set of numbers reported up the chain will always find favour in the boardroom.
And CFOs love the fact they can measure in sharp focus what was previously fluffy.
You can’t deny that search has been a fantastic tool that’s moved marketing out from the ‘closed-shop’ into the open market.
A race to the top of the table
As channels and tools expanded, patience was in short supply. Many companies just wanted to be ranked no. 1 overnight.
More keyword research. More content created. More servers spun-up. The search world goes round and round again.
Did anyone stop to question if page rank equates to conversion? Does X + Y always = Z?
But in the rush to build funnels, did we fall in love with logic and ditch the heart and soul?
Short-term vision.
My colleague Lee often says that ‘digital can get you to a certain point but not always all the way.’
Has search become too short-term focused?
Like a new pro football manager who‘s desperate to prove their worth to the chairman. Their approach is more ‘survive than thrive’…
‘Keep three clean sheets, pick-up home game points before I get sacked after 6 months in charge.’
Swap that out for…
‘I wanna’ be on page 1 of Google so I can show my boss my worth before they outsource my role.’
Have there ever been any short-cuts to success?
Sticking with the football manager analogy, investing in the long-term seems to be the smarter strategy.
But only a few clubs value the approach of managers like Arsene Wenger or dare I say it, AFC Bournemouth’s Eddie Howe.
Take the last decade of Premier League football managers.
Chelsea Football Club tops the list having had nine different managers in 10 years:
- Carlo Ancelotti (January 2010-May 2011)
- Andre Villas-Boas (June 2011-March 2012)
- Roberto Di Matteo (March 2012-November 2012)
- Rafael Benitez (November 2012-May 2013)
- Jose Mourinho (June 2013-December 2015)
- Guus Hiddink (December 2015-May 2016)
- Antonio Conte (July 2016-July 2018)
- Maurizio Sarri (July 2018-June 2019)
- Frank Lampard (July 2019-)
In the decade, Arsenal had three managers. Manchester Utd., five. Bournemouth, just the one (but they’ve only been in the Premier League since 2015).
The battle to ‘Rank and Bank’
Back to digital for a moment.
As more and more content got created, things got noisier. Social media channels got bigger.
As the science of SEO become more complicated, it spawned its harder-working cousin, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).
With everything now trackable. All eyes trained on driving the clicks, so they made a ‘Ker-ching’ noise. In some marketing quarters, this became a bit of an obsession.
I witnessed a few myself. Others told me of their search meeting experience….
“Anyone listening in from the outside would’ve thought it was someone with a form of Tourette’s.”
Before people even finished a sentence, they’d be interrupted:
‘Where’s the call to action?!’
Have we become obsessed with the transaction?
Now, asking where the call-to-action is may well be a logical question. But others struggle for air time;
“Shouldn’t we invest more in our service?”
“What does our audience want?”
“What is our value proposition?”
Fluff-free zone
These other questions nod to activities that don’t stack up well on a spreadsheet. They’re less tangible. More difficult to explain. And don’t always lead directly to a ‘sale.’
Engagement numbers always look slightly smaller and less epic. And often are treated with suspicion. Or as my client-side pal describes:
“Show ‘engagement’ stats to your FD and their eyes narrow, their arms fold and their chair leans slowly backwards”
(By the way, I do have some CFOs and FD friends. I’m not painting them as panto villains; we need to do a better job of explaining things to them).
Google and engagement
After my apocalyptic start to this post, the search industry would probably correct me by saying it’s in rude health.
And, to be fair, Google is already talking about engagement. This quote from their Engagement Project made me optimistic:
‘Rather than starting by thinking about how to reach or broadcast to as many people as possible to get to those who matter, what if we began with engaging those who are the most likely to care?’
‘Most likely to care?’ That really hit me!
Size isn’t everything
It also made me think of the great Seth Godin’s Minimum Viable Audience. All of that plus loads more in his book; This Is Marketing.
2020 — the end of the transaction rush?
Have we relied on search too much? Or did we hope it could do the engagement and handle the transactions? All at scale?
If we did, then that’s unfair.
Did we forget what makes humans tick? We are emotional creatures.
We like to laugh, cry, get scared, and get grossed-out. Creating something emotional that engages an audience isn’t a new idea. We just forgot about it.
Before we slap a call-to-action on a screen. We have to ‘earn’ the engagement process.
– It can’t be bought.
Let’s give those numbers on the spreadsheet a name? Turn them into people; people with hopes and dreams and everyday pains.
Maybe that’s where we need to refocus efforts in 2020?
It’s hard work.
It’s not easy making search work.
Hang on just a minute. It has always has been hard. I can’t ever remember a time when we took an audience for granted. Can you?
Before customers lend us their attention for a millisecond, we have to do something to them before they even consider transacting. That is not easy.
Think through the cut-through
That’s the fun bit, the human bit. The bit that needs a brain to think through. How and where we engage them.
We know that unusual, original creative approaches cuts-through. The homogenous hum of the crowd doesn’t.
Here’s one example that caught my eye from last year:
Widen the search.
Perhaps there’s another way of looking at search. In a way that’s broader and more empathetic. Understanding which corners of the web, our potential customers may be searching.
This blog article from Ryan Stewart on the Moz community blog blew me away. Hers’s a snippet that shows how wide our thinking needs to be:
“l just moved into a loft in downtown Miami. I loathe shopping of any sort, so I allowed my girlfriend to manage the process for me.
She ended up purchasing all of the furniture from Etsy (an e-commerce platform I knew very little about).
I asked her how she arrived there. This is what she told me:
Pinterest — She used Pinterest search to find inspiration on how to decorate. Using keywords like “loft decorations,” she narrowed it down to the specific pieces of furniture she liked.
Amazon — She then went to Amazon and searched with keywords that were based on the furniture she liked on Pinterest. She was looking for rustic furniture. Amazon didn’t have a great selection of that type.
Ebay — So she moved to Ebay, knowing that she could find cheap, secondhand (i.e., rustic) furniture there. She found that most things were a little “too used,” so she moved on.
Etsy — Finally, she landed on Etsy, knowing they specialize in unique handmade items. She purchased all the furniture from there (and simultaneously broke my bank account).
What I learned from Ryan’s article.
- Big-spending brands dominate organic search so you’ll have to cough-up and pay for it.
- Create useful content as no one really engages or links to products and services pages.
- It is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), not GO (Google Optimization) Yelp, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. are all search engines.
Break-free and empathize
There’s never been a better time to understand and empathize with your customers.
As search passes through its teenage phase, we need to think broader and more in-depth about how we use it to engage people.
Before we push the buttons and pull the levers of the machine, let’s understand them first.
Ryan’s article above shows how broad customers’ behavior is. The only way to find out is to ask first.
I got Felicia C. Sullivan’s email a few days ago, and she called it out perfectly:
“…Because our world has become increasingly transactional and performative. We’ve forgotten how to meet and befriend people simply for the sake of having decent people in our lives.”
