Building a competitive marketing capability is like building a house. The walls are your website. Email marketing is your heating system. Advertising is your windows. If you have a crappy old boiler you are wasting a ton of money and energy. A new boiler will take advantage of best-practice techniques like segmentation, pacing, and relevance. Your old windows from 1935 are traditional advertising. They don’t work very well (with old windows you will lose about 4x the heat vs. new double-pane windows). Search engine marketing is your window replacement. Technology allows better targeting of messages to people who are actually looking for those messages. A bad window replacement job is not very efficient and neither is bad Search Engine Marketing. Bad Search Engine Marketing is placing a terrible advertisement in the wrong newspaper with nobody responding – and doing this month after month without knowing what the response is.
Once in a while you need a specialist. The plumber is the email marketing specialist. The electrician is the Search Engine Marketing specialist. The mason is the Search Engine Optimization specialist. The VP of Marketing is the general contractor. You would be surprised how many general contractors there are out there that don’t know what the mason, electrician or plumber even does. The traditional newsletter is watering the lawn. You water the lawn over and over until it is waterlogged. The CEO wants better results. So you try every possible variation on watering the lawn – more frequent, less frequent, different angle – but the grass just will not grow any faster. The CEO is disappointed and you are watering like crazy and meanwhile your boiler is 50 years old, your windows need replacement and your roof is leaking.
