[Build Backlinks Online] Building a Brand Online: The Golden Age of Digital

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Building a Brand Online: The
Golden Age of Digital'

Posted by willcritchlow
This post is based on a talk I gave at ourSearchLove conferencein Boston last
week. It ties quite closely with the post my colleague Ron Garrett wrote last
week:Search Marketers Need to Evolve. You can probably tell we've been doing a
lot of thinking about this.
When I gave this talk at SearchLove, I hoped that it would put in context why
we bring such a range of speakers and topics together at our conferences and to
inspire the attendees to go back to their companies and make real changes. I
hope this post will do the same for you.

As digital marketers, our focus on analytics has served us well in driving
direct, measurable sales. The dominant form of
brand marketing, however, has remained offline with TV taking the lion's share
of the budget and attention. We believe that as TV faces disruptive technology
and business models, digital marketers have an opportunity to grow their
influence and impact. In total, this is an opportunity worth tens of billions of
dollars a year.
I'd very much like for usour industryyou and meto be the ones who benefit.
Despite all the growth we have seen in digital marketing spend, I think thatwe
are only just entering what I'm calling the
golden age of digital.
Building brands online first

We're entering the age when the biggest brands in the world will be built
online first. I hope to convince you of two things: first, that this change is
happening right now. And second, that we are the people to win in this world.
Starting at the beginning

There are some confident statements above, but the last few years have had
their share of introspection and crises of confidence. We've put a lot of time
and energy over the years into understanding the direction marketing is moving
and capitalising on the shifts.Duncan and I originally started by thinking that
networked computing was going to be a big deal and then started our company
initially on the back of a simple CMS that we built to help small business
owners take advantage of the self-publishing revolution.

As we shifted gears to focus more on the dominance of the search channel, we
started trying to understand where Google in particular might be taking things.
We've written plenty about that over the years, but we were talking about
effects similar toPanda, Penguin, and Hummingbird years before they actually
came to pass. Panda and Penguin started makingour vision cometrue. We were more
effective search marketers than we'd ever been because we'd largely bypassed
building the infrastructure for search as it
was and tried to build it for how search would be.
And yet something was wrong.
Powerful content was becoming ever more effective. And yet the greatest
examples of content that we were seeing at search conferences weren't built by
SEO agencies.
Brands were getting a bigger and bigger advantage in search.And yet the best
brand builders weren't SEO agencies.
For a long time, we've talked about how "SEO" isn't a verb. You don't "SEO a
website." Ranking well is an outcome, not an activity. It's like fame. "Famous"
isn't a verb. You don't "famous someone." You get famous for doing other things
(playing sport, performing music, appearing on TV). SEO is the same.
But what if we weren't the right people to do those things for people? What if
we weren't the world's best PR firm, branding agency, or creative producers?
Don't worry. I got over my insecurity. I believe the capabilities that we have
been building are going to
grow in power and influence. Here's how:TheInnovator's Dilemma

It wasMark Suster who kick-started my confidence with histalk in San Diego
[usethis link and sign up for an account to get access to the video for free].
He's an entrepreneur-turned-investor. He's smart and opinionated.

He talked aboutmaker studios at our conference. You might have heard a few
weeks ago that Maker Studios sold to Disney for half a billion dollars.
Maker is a producer and distributor of online video. The turning point for me
was in realising that the forces they were betting on were also rampaging
towards our quirky, exciting, geeky little corner of the marketing world.
There's a book calledThe Innovator's Dilemma by a Harvard Business School
professornamedClayton Christensen. It's a little dry, but if you're interested
in business theory and technology, it's an absolute no-brainer: You should read
it.
It describes two kinds of innovations that hit established markets. So-called
"sustaining innovations" make existing processes faster, cheaper, orbetter. They
can be very dramatic, but Professor Christensen's research shows that they
almost always end up benefiting the incumbent players in the market.
In contrast to "sustaining innovations" stand "disruptive innovations," which
are those that attack problems an entirely different way. They typically don't
work as well asthe existing solutions, perhaps solving only part of the problem,
but have a structurally different cost. So they're "cheaper but worse."
Cheaper but worse

Doesn't sound too compelling, does it?
That's what the incumbents think. They may spot a potential opportunity, and
may even pay lip service to the idea that they should be pursuing it, but
ultimately, their economic incentives are skewed towards maintenance of the
status quo.
Therein lies the dilemma.
There's often a subset of the market, for whom the new service is "good
enough." It may not be gold-plated, but it solves their immediate needs and they
can afford it. As they invest, it gets better and better, capturing more and
more of the market opportunity until it's meeting the core needs of even the top
end of the market while still being structurally cheaper. Money cascades to the
new entrant and leaves the incumbents high and dry.
Let's go back to the "cheaper but worse" innovation for a second. To me, that
sounds an awful lot like the idea of building a brand online. Let's look at the
details:The established way of building a brand for a generation has been via
mass market TV advertising and other classic above-the-line spend. Spends of
$100m+ are not uncommon.
Building a brand online is cheaper, yes, but right now, not as effective.
The incumbent brand-builders pay lip service to digital, but when you look at
their corporate structure, their fee structures, and their economic incentives,
and you realise that they'd far rather see TV get bigger than have to do all
this messy web marketing.
So I think there is a disruption coming to brand marketing, and I don't think
it's going to benefit the big guys.
Online first

I'm calling this whole phenomenon "online first": the biggest brands of
tomorrow will be built online. This will be partlybecause the tools we have
available to build brands online are going to get better and better, and partly
because money is going to flow to digital from TV. I recently wrote about this
in more detail in ourFuture of TV report:

I am definitely not saying that TV itself is in trouble. We live in an amazing
time for TV content. You just have to look at shows like Breaking Bad, Walking
Dead, andTrue Detective to see that we have exceptional content and more ways of
accessing that content than ever beforeand that's before we even get to Netflix
and House of Cards. In part as a result of this resurgence, the total time spent
watching video has increased every year recently.
Our devices are also getting better and better. The cost of big screens is
coming down; we nowhave full HD on our mobile devices.
But the way we get our content is changing. 80% of US households have some form
of internet-connected device paired with their TVaccording to gigaom research.
Whether it's an Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, Chromecast or something else, we can
increasingly watch anything we like on the big screen. And conversely, we can
watch more and more of our "classic TV" content on smartphones, tablets, laptops
and any other screen we can lay our hands on.
This particular part of the trend has been analysed to death. I'm not
interested in that for the purposes of thisanalysis.I'm interested in the
fragmenting viewership: In general,we're no longer all watching the same thing
at the same time. That has profound impacts on the way TV advertising is bought
and sold.
The innovator's dilemma predicts that the cost per unit of the high end of the
old market will continue to rise even as the bottom starts to fall away. It's
becoming ever more valuable to reach consumers on those rare occasions when we
do all sit down at the same time to watch the same content.
The complexity of time-shifted internet-delivered content rapidly surpasses
human optimisation ability. The upfront media market in which Oprah stands on
stage and extols her show and the network and seeks tens or hundreds of millions
of dollars of spend is a process which can't survive the move to digital-scale
complexity (if you're interested in this, I wrote anintroduction to TV
advertising a few weeks ago).
Advertising against TV-like content will
have to be bought more like AdWords. It has to become real-time (depending on
who's actually watching at a given moment), it'll have to be market-priced in
one form or another (because you can't negotiate all these things individually
on the fly).
I'm in danger of getting dragged into deep economic arguments, but the effect
of all this disruption is going to be a whole load of unbundling and a
reallocation of budgets.
Of course, in part, this will open up opportunities in video marketingboth in
brand-funded TV-like content and in video advertising against internet-delivered
video (check out the talk by
Chris from Wistia's [PDF]). I don't think it's a given that the incumbent TV
advertisers will dominate that space. It's structurally pretty different. We are
certainly betting in this areabetween
Phil andMargarita, we're already doing video strategy and execution for
ourselves and our clients.
It's
not all about video, though.
How our industry competes

There are three broad areas that we all need to get great at to take advantage
of this opportunity. Video fits into the first of these, which is technical
creativitythat place where technology and storytelling meet:1.Technical
creativity

I've been endlessly frustrated over the years by the creative storytellers who
misunderstand (or don't even care about) technology. The stupid apps that noone
uses. The branded social networks that nobody joins. The above-the-line
campaigns telling you to search for phrases they don't rank for.
Old-school SEOs can spot crawl issues or indexing problems in their sleep.
We've had to get good at things like analytics, UX, andconversion. Indeed, one
of the most popular talks last week (and Slideshare of the day) was from
Aaron Weyenberg at TED, and was all about UX. The things that stood out to me
the most were all about the different ways they listened to their audience and
gathered feedback at different stages of the process. This incorporated
everything from the standard hall-way tests through qualitative and quantitative
surveying to a really nicely-executed beta. You can see the full deck here:




The Story of a Redesign
And we mustn't lose sight of the value of that technical knowledge. Screw up a
migration and you're just as hosed as you've ever been.
For me personally, the creative is the more challenging partbut luckily it's
not all about me. We've been
investing in creative for a while, and I loved the presentation our head of
creative, Mark Johnstone gave last week entitled how to produce better content
ideas. It really clarified my thinking in a few areasparticularly about the
effort and research that should go in early in the process in order to give the
"lightbulb moment" a chance. By coupling that with examples of deconstructing
other people's creative (and showing us / giving us further reading on how to
practice ourselves) he made a compelling argument that we can all do this so
much betterand that not only designers can be "creative." I'm also looking
forward to trying out the immersion techniques he talks about for getting from
unstructured to structured. You can check out the full deck here:




How to Produce Better Content Ideas

[If you'd like to see more of the decks from Boston, you can currently get
themhere and in the next few weeks the videos will be available
withinDistilledU]2.Broad promotional ability

The second capability we need after technical creativity is a broad promotional
ability. This is your classic owned, earned and paid media.
As search marketers, we've typically focused primarily on the earned side of
thisvia outreach and digital PRand my colleague Rob Toledo gave a great
presentation about some of the cleverer forms of earned media in his
presentationThe Hunter/Gatherer. He talked in detail about ways of reaching that
tricky kind of influencerthe one who wants to discover their own interesting
share-worthy material. It was a funny presentation that contained some
exceptional tactics. You can see the full deck here:



The Hunter/Gatherer
I think paid media is going to have an ever-increasing part to play in online
brand building though.Pay Per Click is typically measured on direct response
metricssending traffic to landing pages and converting thembut social and video
advertising is on the rise. We increasingly spend money on promoting content
instead of promoting landing pages. I expect that trend to continue.
The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that this isn't inbound. I make no
apology for that.3.Influence and measurement throughout the Customer Lifecycle

Finally, alongside our technical creativity and promotional ability, we need to
double down on our ability to influence and measure customer behaviour
throughout the customer lifecycle.
We've all heard (or even been) the search experts who stand on stage and talk
about the measurability of digital. Sometimes they go further and make off-hand
comments about how you "can't measure TV."
Does anyone really believe that? Anyone think Proctor & Gamble or Unilever
really waste half the money they spend?
One of the most mind-blowing talks I ever attended was at ad:tech a few years
agoit was a speaker from Ogilvy talking about the econometric models they use to
measure their work for P&G. It was all about how they weretying together the
influence of point-of-sale, coupon codes, TV, and other above-the-line
advertising to understand what's making them the money. They are good at it but
it's expensive. Our industry'sstuff is cheap in comparison. It's not yet good
enough but if we work hard and invest, it can be.
What I didn't say

Remember: I didn't say TV is dead. I didn't say search is dead. I said that our
crazy blend of technical creativity, promotional chops and measurement skills is
going to be the skillset that builds tomorrow's biggest brands. ANDcrucially to
the topic near and dear to much of the Moz audience's hearts,it's also going to
be how you rank in Google.
Advertising is a half-trillion dollar a year industry struggling to understand
its place in a digitalworld. I don't want the same old guysto win on our turf.
The internet is our domain. Let's go get great at this.Sign up for The Moz Top
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