Engagement Over Impressions by Paul Grimsley
A lot of datasets are problematic because they are fluffy — there is no meat to them. They seem like they are something, when in fact they only represent a step towards something. But people bet on them like they are sure things.
It is the difference between someone that is interested and someone who handed you a signed check: one is a product and one is a sub-product (something that has to be attained in order to gain the final product).
Making a lot of calls out in a day is a necessary thing in order to generate leads, but it is not the same thing as closing a prospect and actually selling them a service or a product. Some people fail to see the difference, and they are the ones who do not close or complete a cycle of action. Doing work and being effective aren’t the same thing.
“Did you sell anything?”
“I called a lot of people.”
‘Well done, but did you sell anything?’
“That’s not my statistic.”
“It isn’t? Well, it should be.”
It’s like looking at the activity on your Facebook Page — does it matter what anyone does if no one clicks the link to goes and purchases what you’re trying to sell? Only to a degree, right?
You don’t sell you don’t make any money.
When you sit down and you talk to someone about traffic, you are talking about potential. When you talk about optimization you are basically saying all the channels that people move through are greased and ready for the person to be fed in at one end and slide through to the finish line, but that often isn’t what people hear when you speak to them. What people are hearing is — I am guaranteeing you purchases from your website. Any salesman promising that is a fool or a liar. What you can say is, we are able to create the environment that is most conducive to someone converting into a buyer.
And then how do you measure the success of the marketing? By the handling of the fluffy data? well, you can make it less fluffy — you can make educated guesses by what pages are ranking as to what is being searched for. You can look at the heat map of a page and see where people have been looking on the page. But how you measure the success depends on how you sell the marketing — are you pitching the creation of the conducive environment, or are you pitching the number of people coming out the end who exchange money?
You want your salespeople monitoring the calls they make, and the sales they close, because they are directly related. If you get enough people or impressions, some of them are going to engage. So again — one is the product and one is the sub-product. Now what pushes someone towards engaging? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Is there a sure thing? Well, there are successful actions, and there are recommendations … things that have been tried and tested and have proven valuable in the quest for people who spend money.
Content drives people toward the finish line; content is the bait on the hook. And what do we mean by content? We mean quality writing that addresses three audiences — the owner of the site, the potential customers, and the search engines. You can’t cheat this, or short-cut, or short change people or search engines. Why? Because Google is invested in providing people with the best experience.
People don’t read everything, but when a page has just been crammed full of keywords, and reads like word salad, and that gets discovered people are going to feel like they have been steered and controlled into something of a dead end. They will feel cheated. There is an idea that there is an art in concealing the art of something — meaning that the process by which something is done is not transparent. You know how SEO and marketing works, but if you present something that clunks along, rather than good writing that satisfies the criteria it is supposed to, people spot the crank handle in the jalopy and they don’t want to be taken along for the ride.
I suppose the point is, not to mistake the fluffy data for the more solid data — the process data for the results data. Not that one is unimportant, but they tell you different things … and observation of the two will provide illumination on different things that you need to fix. So, best not to muddy them any more than they are already.
