Findability is better than SEO?

How do you find things when you don't know what you're looking for?

Source: Chitka.com, June 7, 2013

The obvious answer would be search, and that makes sense, as you can search via dictionary, book index, or via any of several online search engines. The same could apply to buyers of your product or service. Remember, however, to look at the bigger picture - purchasing is about trust. When someone decides to buy from you, they are expressing some level of trust, and whether you like it our not, a product vendor shouting that they have the best product might create awareness that you THINK that you have the best product, but that may not convince someone to buy.

I would propose that the your excellent SEO is necessary, but not sufficient. Generic external links to your site will help the SEO, but external links that are relevant can provide the external validation for your product that provides even more value visitors if they find you via an educational link, an independent third party, or a comparison site. Links of this nature can be earned via hard social media efforts, a PR push, or even participating in online forums or places where your customer might be, such as stackexchange for programmers or LinkedIn for human resources professionals.

So when you look at the image in this post from Chitka.com, where the source article stated "Sites listed on the first Google search results page generate 92% of all traffic from an average search", think about more than just traffic. You want traffic that trusts you and with whom you can build a financial relationship. If you just build traffic without trust, what was the point?

Is there a limit to Marketing Effort?

In my early days of marketing, I was an operational machine and proud of it. Too proud of it.

At the time I worked for an Asian networking equipment manufacturer, managed product and corporate marketing, product management, and customer service. I was given responsibility because I could simply do everything that was asked. All told, I had check list of 120 marketing task items that I managed, doing all of them on time and on budget while leading the company's marketing efforts from zero to millions in revenue.

I was doing a great job and executing on everything. I earned media placements, replaced competitors, and amazed my friends and co-workers with my efforts. With that success in my rear view mirror and wins that few people have replicated, I eventually realized that I was misguided -- and misdirected.

The constant lack of budget meant that my team constantly tried to do everything ourselves. We rarely hired contractors as there was little time to train them, and instead depended on overusing internal staff to design posters and print ads that were beyond our skill-sets. Worse yet, we did everything because the highest ranking executives said so.

Doing what I was told kept me employed, but it also cost the company untold revenues. Luckily, in the course of doing everything and interacting with customer and prospects, I gathered information about the real cost of marketing to our premium prospects. These prospects pointed out that we were absent from a few pricey marketing events that our competitors attended, but more importantly, the competitors at those events all had premium customer contracts. The events? Telecomm and Carrier association meetings. Our President had fit at the price of joining, but literally, within 3 months of paying the hefty fees and participating in the first events, we were in negotiations with a telco for a trial.

From then on, I stopped the team from doing everything, and focused on those things that had clear impact and actionable customer value. I was fortunate to learn that it wasn't all about effort. It was about impact and moving the needle.

Is your leadership hurting your organization?

In my work, I enjoy looking for opportunities where not only can I make impact, but where I can also learn from others. In pondering such an opportunity, I found a great article in Inc magazine that had me thinking about the views that people have around leadership.

In the article, 4 key signs of leadership failure are discussed. Read the article and feel free to share your opinion and let me know if you agree or disagree.

My quick take, however is to look at it a different way, the way attributed to Raph Nader "The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers."

It's a simple, but powerful statement if you think about it. If you produce more leaders, you need to do several things:

• Provides examples of good leadership
• Give people the chance to develop leadership skills
• Operate in an environment of respect (if you believe leaders deserve respect)
• Have a definition of success or at least of what successful leader is

This seems self-evident to me, however I realized that others may not see it that way, and it does matter from your frame of reference. If you subscribe to the method of leadership that states that fear drives people and that great leaders should be feared, than we would be at odds.

That said, I would challenge the leadership by fear believers to compare the market growth and market capitaliation of leadership by fear regimes to those based-on developing a culture of leaders. My non-scientific counting on fingers had the fear-based technique as non-scaleable and leading to low to negative growth.