Don’t Let Traffic Drive You

This is part one of five posts addressing the shortfalls of the SEM/SEO marketing approach.  Part one addresses the core concepts of site traffic, while parts 2 through 5 will dive deeper into specific flaws and how to solve or skirt the problems they cause.

Current Traffic Drivers

Although the current models for driving traffic to websites generate a lot of money for Google and others, they are inherently flawed. They consistently show a lack of regard for the consumers they are targeting. This, in turn, devalues the brand being marketed and negatively impacts the relationships that should lead to sales.

The traffic-driving models generally fit into three categories: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and affiliate marketing.
–SEO focuses on maximizing the searchability of your dotcom content through keyword-sensitive writing.
–SEM boils down to buying ad keywords and paying for each referral (Pay-per-click, or PPC).
–And, affiliate marketing involves creating sites and content that link back to your site.

We should also mention that traditional online and offline advertising and PR fit in to this mix as well. Banner ads, print and TV ads, and journalistic coverage all are used to drive online traffic with varying degrees of success.

Purchasing Engagement

Before we can address the flaws in these methods, we should point out the three basic levels of purchasing engagement that occur between a consumer and a product or brand.

1. Low Engagement is where not much time or effort is needed to make a purchase. A great example of this is impulse buying. For instance, a National Enquirer in the checkout line.
2. Medium Engagement is when you do a little research. You might ask a friend or buy what Consumer Reports tells you is the best air mattress to provide your visiting in-laws.
3. High Engagement is when you really deliberate about a purchase. You research diligently and spend hours weighing the pros and cons of what kind of laptop will help you get ahead.

The higher the level of engagement, the more important it is to have richer, more valuable content with which consumers can interact.

Traffic Quantity vs. Quality

SEO, SEM, and affiliate methods can push large numbers to your site, but, for the most part, you fail to engage them once they arrive. This is why click-through rates are a terrible indicator of success. Unless you are selling free ringtones (very low engagement) there is a high likelihood you are paying for Clicks To Nothing (CTN).

What improves your rate of conversion to actual sales and decreases your CTN is having valuable content on the other end of a click. Valuable traffic is characterized by being able to sustain high engagement.

Consider the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of you business is going to come from twenty percent of your customers. So concentrate on quality traffic. Don’t invest in attracting everybody to your site with SEM or affiliate marketing, invest in cultivating lower volumes with higher engagement.

SEO efforts are not enough, either. If people are highly engaged in a purchase and researching your product, you need to populate the other places their research might take them.

Even if you are tied to your SEO, SEM, and affiliate spending, even if it is working for you, unless you make content a priority, you are probably driving random traffic to bad content.

High-Quality Content is Key to Engagement

All the emphasis on these modes of pushing traffic to your site has made referrers and search engines easy targets at which to hurl your marketing woes. But don’t blame them. The key is to create a soft landing place for engines and referrers. That means creating quality, diverse, and broadly distributed content.

By creating good content, you will pull your highly engaged customers to you. When they search, they will not only find your brand, they will have the opportunity to interact with it in meaningful ways. The higher the engagement, the more opportunities there will be to provide value. Your resulting CTN will approach zero.

Understanding Your Audience

This means you must understand your audience better than just the traditional advertising or PR model. In the traditional model, you try to make content that will engage the largest possible audience. Put it out there and hope it works. This is like the bachelor who throws the spaghetti at the ceiling to see if it sticks. You’re really taking your chances.

The web offers so many chances to interact with your consumer base that you can actually test and find out what works with them. This is like Mario Batali making perfect pasta: he has listened to all the Italian grandmothers and master chefs who insist that you take the pasta out of the boiling water before it’s done and finish it in the sauce. It not only tastes the best, but it proves to be the best way to do it.

Get to know your highly engaged customers intimately. Listen to them. Try things out on them and let them decide what content works for them. They are going to work hard to make the right purchase; the least you can do is make it easy for them to pick yours.

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."