Where there is tactical smoke…there is strategic fire.
Even late into 2008 we routinely see two symptoms of misaligned marketing strategies during our day-to-day work with clients:
- 7 of 10 web analytics packages that we come across are improperly installed or simply not set-up to provide any meaningful reporting.
- Website content development efforts are pursued with complete disregard for search engine optimization best practices.
These two seemingly minor tactical operational details have become a proxy for poor strategic marketing planning in our current era of rapidly evolving media consumption. Where there is tactical smoke there is strategic fire, unfortunately.
Analytics: The first issue seems obvious. Measurement and analytics suites (Omniture, Web Trends, Google Analytics, etc.) simply cannot be properly deployed without some sense of what to measure. Since an obvious balanced scorecard or other framework of marketing contribution is frequently not present, most website analytics packages are installed “off-the shelf” or “straight out of the can”. In very few cases will this approach provide the data needed to determine whether a marketing strategy, at least as it relates to the role of a company’s digital assets, is driving strategic intent. It is difficult for anyone to take strategic planning seriously when measurement is not in place.
Given how much time and resources companies spend on the front end of “strategery”, we suggest starting small on the back-end to recover some value from these exercises. The last agenda item at each digital strategic planning session should seek to answer these questions:
- What three things will we measure to determine that the strategy is working?
- What is the standard or target that must be achieved for each measure?
(This should be stated as a ratio or specific numerical value.) - How specifically, must your analytics tools be deployed to capture this data?
At the next quarterly planning session, add three more measures. Pretty basic, yes?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no longer just a technical exercise…it is more a reflection of what the target audience wants which make it much more of a communications concern. Website development, therefore, should be treated by marketers like media planning. Media planning efforts spend a great deal of time examining:
- a Target Audience,
- their Information and/or Media Consumption Habits, and
- the most efficient means to Intersect with the target as they consume information/media each day.
The usual marching order from the marketing team to the web development team is:
- “Make sure the site is optimized for SEO”
When adopting a media planning mindset, the marching orders for SEO would be:
- The target audience(s) for this website are X, Y, and Z.
- The specific problems/challenges that this audience has that our products/services address are A, B, and C.
- The target audience articulates these needs in their own language utilizing the following 50 phrases…which must appear within the content of the website.
As my colleague, Stuart Meyler, frequently answers when clients ask him how they can rank #1 in Google: “Simple. Just develop what is widely agreed to be the freshest, most compelling content about the subject on the web…then you’ll rank #1.”
