Marketing Without Context
By Craig Danuloff
Why is online marketing so misunderstood? From the broo-ha-ha over whether or not SEO is rocket science to yesterday’s BusinessWeek article declaring the end of paid search marketing (unless you’re a mega-corp) to the discussion of re-branding affiliate marketing to the idea that we’re all off in our analytics expense allocation by 900% - it’s clear there is not a universal definition or agreement or understanding of what-in-the-world we’re all doing.
In many ways it isn’t surprising. Traditional marketing has a long history, full of experience and academic study and debate. Traditional marketers studied this history, received undergraduate and graduate degrees in marketing, and then served apprenticeships (in many cases) at branding and marketing ‘factories’ like P&G. By the time someone gained responsibility or a big fancy VP of Marketing title, they could easily have had 10-20-30 years of experience in a field that had seen consistent but not monumental change since they began.
Online marketing, on the other hand, has been invented in real-time over the past 10 years, and the technical and social environment in which it operates change radically every six to twelve months. The elders have six to ten (or twelve in a very few cases) of experience and vast majority of practitioners have only three to five. We’re an industry in kindergarten (and often act accordingly) with nothing but a few slightly older siblings to show us the way.
The interesting issue is at the intersection - how can traditional marketers really understand the online opportunity and what to do about it? From those we meet in the course of our business, and those I talk to at trade shows etc., I think it’s fair to say they’re frustrated by the lack of clarity in terms of definitions, process, targets, and measurement – all the issues that lead to the ‘debates’ listed above.
They’re trying to embrace it but they don’t know who to trust, what to believe, and how to put anything into context. The results aren’t pretty:
- A lack of context drives paid search budgets to be 10x to 50x the size of organic search optimization budgets. Would any traditional marketer take out an expensive YellowPages ad and then go unlisted in the regular free directory?
- A lack of context spends those huge paid search budgets driving clicks to home pages, generic landing pages, or even 404 pages. Would anyone run newspaper ads day-after-day for out of stock items, or put the phone number for their Cleveland store in the ads run in Buffalo, hoping consumers would be smart enough to ask to be transferred?
- A lack of context deploys large expensive websites without even a single full-time writer assigned to add ‘more and better’ content every day to improve the site’s relevance and quality. Unfortunately this is an error that is probably committed equally frequently offline – very few marketers have figured out that there is close to no such thing as too much relevant information.
- A lack of context builds websites without first developing a clear understanding of who is likely to come and what they want, and an on-site plan for solving these problems in a way that produces the desired business results. Would anyone allow their sales staff to repeat the same script to every prospect regardless of what the prospect said about themselves or explained they were trying to accomplish?
- A complete lack of context allows dollars to be spent on traffic acquisition or visitors to come through a website without sufficiently collecting, reporting, and analyzing data to understand what’s happening. Can you imagine running a retail store as an absentee owner, never knowing how many people came in, what drove them in, how they behaved in the store, but just by seeing the bills and sales receipts?
It’s a business opportunity of course. Our strategy group is very busy helping companies and traditional marketers better understand this world and craft cohesive 12-18 month plans to attack it.
The online debates that inspired this post may also be part of the solution. At their core each of these is forcing a more complete examination and explanation of the components of online marketing. I look forward to many more of these in the months ahead. If we’re lucky perhaps by next year, as we start 2008, the framework for online marketing can be much clearer and better understood than it is today.
