The following excerpt is transcribed from The Future Of Now event that took place on 11 February 2021.
Key points
- Over the last five years, increased competition for Big Tech platforms like Google meant that in order to experience continual growth and increase in revenue, organic marketing fell out of favour in place of paid advertising.
- The risk that comes with solely focusing marketing efforts on one platform is that there will be a continual need to increase the advertising budget just to be seen over competitors because organic reach has dramatically dropped.
- We don’t need to outplay the platform’s system, but instead work on optimising the intended outcomes.
Speaker
Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin is the co-founder of SparkToro, fondly referred to as the front page of the web marketing world. SparkToro is a global market research and audience intelligence platform. Many people also know Rand from his previous life as co-founder of Moz and Inbound.org. Rand is also a published author, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.
The changing era of digital marketing
The 1990’s was the decade of many ‘digital firsts’. From the first use of the term ‘digital marketing,’ to the first clickable web banner ad, to the launch of the first social media site, Six Degrees. It was also the decade we saw the birth of Google. Since then, the digital landscape has gone through a series of evolutions. From 2000 to 2010, we witnessed a rise in smartphone usage and an explosion of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
With this influx of online activity, marketers turned their focus towards online marketing. The efforts of organic marketing were rewarded with growth, increased engagement and trackable data (i.e. keyword data, referral data, cookie tracking, SEO content etc). As marketers had more access to specific data about their target demographics, they could prioritise and direct more targeted ads towards groups that would likely convert into sales. Now, the digital landscape is no longer a unique marketing tool just for the savvy investor but instead has become a business necessity, making it virtually impossible to go online without coming across some form of paid advertising.
Over the last five years, increased competition for Big Tech platforms like Google meant that in order to experience continual growth and increase in revenue, organic marketing fell out of favour in place of paid advertising. Google has prioritised its own products in its search results over others and the data that once helped marketers now has gaps, leading to a rise in Dark Traffic. This causes confusion for marketers while Big Tech companies have grown more advantageous.
Why reliance on one platform for marketing is risky
In 2020, advertisers saw Google reduce visibility into the search keywords that would trigger their ads. On top of this, more than half of Google searches are answered without users having to click on another link and irrelevant ads are placed above relevant results – forcing advertisers to bid on navigational searches. As algorithms are constantly updated, the rules of marketing and advertising on digital platforms have mostly changed to benefit big tech companies over its users.
The risk that comes with solely focusing marketing efforts on one platform is that there will be a continual need to increase the advertising budget just to be seen over competitors because organic reach has dramatically dropped. Therefore, if a business has built up an audience only using a platform like Facebook, they will have to keep paying more than its competitors just to reach their own audience.
Analysis vs. synthesis: Keeping up with Big Tech changes vs. proactive prediction
“Today all we really need to know is the outcome we are optimising toward.“
— Rand Fishkin
Big Tech platforms have dominated through algorithms that optimise for engagement. This includes the following incentives:
- To show content that is most likely to earn the user’s continued engagement.
- To prioritise posts that keep the user on the platform and not leave to another site.
- To gather as much user data as possible to improve the algorithm.
These incentives mean that there is a good chance a lot of the content being produced isn’t organically reaching the targeted audience unless the algorithm believes it will keep its users engaged. But the good news is that we don’t need to painstakingly try to outplay the platform’s system. It is instead about optimising the intended outcomes.
For Google search, this means caring less about specific ranking factors like Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) page quality characteristics. This is because it is difficult to determine the exact formula of this ranking system and equally impossible to break down into something that can be manipulated. It is more beneficial to provide information that best meets the needs of searchers with keywords, links and associations etc. that they will likely use when looking for the information you are providing. For social platforms, hashtags aren’t as important as engaging posts, like short videos, since this is what will keep users on the platform. This is especially important today because social media platforms are designed as walled gardens, with algorithms that are prioritising content that keep users engaged and from leaving their platform over relevant content.
Marketing as a competitive advantage in 2021
Build a brand that people know, like, and trust
To gain a competitive advantage with your marketing strategy you should start by asking, ‘What drives searchers to prefer one result over another?’ This can be answered by looking at five strategic points:
- Figure out who your customers are.
- Find the messages that resonate with them.
- Uncover the sources that influence them.
- Discover where those audiences engage.
- Amplify messages that work in places they pay attention.
This will help to shape the audiences’ preferences towards the brand and build trust. While providing maximum advantage in growing your social presence on the content network to draw them in.
Invest in a diversity of marketing channels, so you’re not over-reliant on one
“Don’t build your digital home on rented land”
— Rand Fishkin
In order to avoid risk and over-reliance on one marketing channel, it is important to diversify your marketing. Continue to drive traffic from “rented land” (i.e. social media platforms) to your website and email list. These remain the ‘holy grail’ marketing channels as engagement and conversion have remained the most steady.
Also start with organic marketing to grow you audience before progressing onto paid advertising. A common recommendation by Marketeers is to build your strategy with paid advertising. This is great for rapidly gaining visibility, however, is only a temporary fix. A better approach is to focus your attention on creating content that will deliver value in your specialist domain to build trust and authority with your brand. Then employ paid digital advertising to support and amplify your efforts. This will improve the performance of your efforts in the long term.
Build a marketing flywheel that scales with decreasing friction
Using a marketing flywheel is a scalable way to avoid the friction you would face when solely relying on paid advertising as a marketing strategy. An example of a flywheel could start with creating content (i.e. running a webinar, publishing a blog post etc.) and then boosting its reach through sharing on a larger platform. This will result in more engagement thereby providing the opportunity to grow your audience. As you create more content, continue amplifying your reach to engage more people. In turn your algorithmic signals will improve providing you with a higher ROI when you produce more new content in the future.
Q&A
What has been the big shift in Digital Marketing platforms and marketing principles over the last 5 years?
RF: I think that the two biggest shifts have been seen in both the algorithms and incentives.
The shift in algorithms has gone from being identifiable inputs (i.e. content) that can be tactically optimised individually, to a world where it’s not possible. Even if you conceivably could, algorithms are changing every day, so often, and are personalised to every person and user that it just doesn’t matter.
The second shift is incentives. For a long time, we saw so much growth with incentives that we didn’t feel the need to extract it from other places. But now, there’s been a shift where big companies can’t get growth unless they start competing with their customers and taking away data from them to own new and different markets. So, yes, I think some principles remain the same like, “Don’t build your digital home on rented land.” That principle has been around for a long time, but I think other strategies are new because of these two changes.
How can Marketers and Strategists adapt their methods of marketing to gain visibility and relevance in the current digital landscape?
RF: That can be a challenging thing to do, but I’ve seen two things be very effective.
One is to start small with experiments. So basically, to go convince your boss, team client, or whoever you’re working with to try a new and different way of thinking, reporting or anything, and see whether there is improved customer acquisition, improved branding or whatever metrics the company cares about.
The second one that is sometimes a better driver of behaviour, is by referencing a competitor and demonstrating how they are beating you. For many people, especially those in leadership, that is usually enough of a motivator to embrace new ideas.
What considerations should people have when trying to drive traffic to their websites from social media channels?
RF: The average engagement rate on social networks is dismal, but you don’t have to settle for the average. You can do much better than this. And the way that I have found to do that is optimising for what I call ‘engagement streaks’. Essentially what you’re doing with a streak is trying to give the network some of what they want, then fool the algorithm into thinking that they should show your content highly regularly to earn that engagement rate back.
So that tends to be content that keeps people on the platform, and posts that are either earning lots of repeat visits or clicks, more so than likes and shares. Content formats like visual video, shocking headlines, and surprise content, tend to be optimal and at the same time, you’re also playing the game of giving your followers what they want.
So, you may want to show off your whole life, but people tend to subscribe to brand channels, and even individuals, because they want one thing from you. For example, I really like talking about pasta and rice and my hobby and my politics and whatever’s going on in my neighbourhood, and the kid who wrote to NPR about dinosaurs. But most people follow me for digital marketing stuff. So, if I want to build high engagement, I have to stick to that topic. High controversy content and belief reinforcing content to a niche group both work well. The easier it is to consume and process, the better. That’s why shorter, more visual, and emotional content works.
The way you play this game is to engage, drop traffic and repeat. You want to consecutively be posting high engagement, non-promotional posts to build your engagement streak, and then add in a promotion with a call to action to send traffic to your website. After that, you repeat the process of building up engagement again. Your non-promotional posts are earning new brand exposure, new followers, and reputational algorithmic engagement, which then allow promotional posts to capitalise on that algorithmic reputation to send clicks back to your site.
Further reading
- Lost and Founder, by Rand Fishkin
- The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate,Unlimited Story Ideas, by Melanie Deziel
To see all our speaker Future Of Now book recommendations click here.
More about Rand Fishkin and SparkToro:
About The Future Of Now series
Our goal at More Space For Light with The Future of Now (FON) series is to build a community of like-minded passionate professionals. We intend to bring together like-minded professionals to share, inspire, and explore new opportunities for growth. So you can discover new ways of working to bring back into your organisation.
More about the organisations connected to this event
- morespaceforlight.com.au – A strategy and innovation consultancy specialising in both in-person and/or remote workshops, design programs and Design Sprints.
- MURAL.CO – a remote collaboration whiteboard. With this platform you will supercharge your remote and in-person meetings and workshops.
- hacker.exchange – a global education company that is supercharging the next generation of startups & leaders.
