SEO is Not Enough 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important subject to most companies and is part of Marketing's overall job. This month's paper on SEO considers an often overlooked, yet critical aspect of being found on the Web, which is the purpose of an SEO investment.  

Written by the newest member of our team, Mark Sprague, who is also a founder of Northern Light an early search engine company, this paper sheds light on the subject in ways you may not have understood from others.

 Read this month's paper.

Dear Mitchell,

Many people have abandoned direct mail for what they perceive is more effective methods such as email marketing. While I will grant you that email marketing is much less expensive than is direct mail marketing, it may not be more effective. (And no this is not a promotion for the US Postal Service.)

For a direct marketing piece, whether email or snail mail, to be effective it first must be opened. Free emails that are unopened are ineffective no matter their low cost. Recent data reported by Hubspot from their sources suggests that the average open rate for direct mail (snail mail) is 56%. Data we have seen for email campaign open rates is materially less than half that open rate. So while email may be more cost-effective to send, you may be missing the boat if you have abandoned snail mail as a campaign activity as well.

Experts have opined for some time that for CMOs to be taken seriously they are going to have to understand data. An article in Advertising Age, "When CMOs Learn to Love Data, They'll Be VIPs in the C-Suite," discusses this as well. Among its key findings, "With economics and innovation, things that weren't possible years ago are now possible, and that's causing brands to stop and rethink the role of data and how it powers the enterprise."   

And, ""The challenge for CMOs," said Dave Frankland, an analyst with Forrester, "is to integrate that data and mine insights to "distinguish signal from noise." The payoff for marketers who accept that challenge will be data and insights that give them "credibility and validity to go alongside their hunch and expertise," he said. "The best CMOs inherently understand customers at a macro level. This allows them to get in the customer's head at a micro level.""

This last statement is most telling for us. The key skill for a great marketer is the ability to think like a customer, as opposed to hoping the customer thinks like you. While data has always played a key role in helping marketers understand the "details," it has often substituted for getting out in the marketplace.

While we agree that the amount of data now available to the CMO is beyond vast, and the ability to manipulate that data into information is well within the budget (if not the experience) of most companies, the data is only part of the issue. The other part is gaining true customer insights.  

Those insights are rarely gained solely by sitting behind your desk looking at data, no matter how well correlated and inter-related. The best marketers will remember they need to be out in the marketplace if they really want to gain those insights.

As John Le Carre put it so well, "A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world."

In the 1952 GE annual report, GE defined marketing as an omnibus concept and stated "The marketing department will establish for the engineer, the designer, and the manufacturing man what the consumer wants in a given product, what price he is willing to pay, and where and when it will be wanted. Marketing will have the authority in product planning, product scheduling, and inventory control, as well as sales, distribution and servicing the products."

In the October 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review the Senior Vice President of GE and its current Chief Marketing Officer, Beth Comstock, co-authored an article stating that "Just 10 years ago General Electric had no substantial marketing organization" and "At best it was considered a support function; at worst, overhead."  

She claims that for decades the company had been technology driven and felt its products would market themselves. What happened between 1952 and 2010? How could this have happened and how could the current CMO need to reinvent marketing from scratch?

As if to repeat the past, the current CEO of GE, Jeffrey Immelt, issued a mandate that marketing should become a vital operating function across GE. Perhaps he should have more correctly stated, "re-become."

Unfortunately the article gives us no insights into how GE got into this mess and became a technology driven company and not a market driven company. Perhaps because their CMO does not recognize what happened over 60 years or does not think it relevant.

We see this as a much more relevant question than how they went about getting their "marketing back" because if you can lose it once, you can lose it again ... assuming you succeed in getting it back.

Updates. If there are others you feel would benefit from this issue, use the Forward email link just below on the left.