015 - Google's newest competitor isn’t a search engine

1* Google’s newest competitor isn’t a search engine

This simple three sentenced post provoked over 220 comments.

For good reason, because I think Michael is absolutely right.

I’m finding Google is becoming less and less relevant for good quality content, yet, for all my personal needs, like buying a wardrobe, looking for the nearest hardware store, and when the local dumb is open (I have recently moved and these are my most recent searches), Google is the King, Queen and Emperor. But, for smart, original, intelligent content, for research on a pain point I have for my job, it’s becoming less and less helpful.

Google is an intent and research channel, your buyers will mostly start or end up here at some point when they’re researching for products like yours.

Despite it, in my view, becoming less informative and less of a reliable source to find good quality content, it’s still the ingrained behaviour for most B2B buyers.

But how satisfied will your customers be when they “google” their problem or solution they seek and find the most optimised content. How does your SEO ranked piece of content help them? How satisfied will they be with your ranked piece of content? How does your search strategy reflect the problem your buyer is trying to solve?

This need to be the mindset, and consideration. Vs all out focus on “how do we get more clicks”, “improve our CTR” and “to get people on our website”.

I think this will be an emerging shift, Google isn’t going away, but it won’t be the sole owner of choice for users seeking answers.

Your customers are already turning to their community of choice and influencers they follow to seek answers vs Google.

Then how does your marketing reflect this behaviour?

2* Mo Data, Mo Problems

Covid has impacted the world and businesses forever - “Captain Obvious”.

But, this interesting report (attached) from Treasure Data has highlighted some revealing behaviour changes from both business and marketing leaders.

At its core, with such an evolving environment, businesses have struggled to maintain the pace of change, and the influx of data is increasing the complexity, decisions making, and confidence professionals have in making key business decisions.

Behaviours that we need to take into account as professional marketers, marketing to such audiences.

Here are four really interesting takeaways from this report.

57% of C-Suite leaders take longer to deliberate over key business decisions, post height of COVID

FOMU (Fear of messing up) is on the rise

Four in 10 leaders say they don’t feel confident using data to make decisions.

56% of marketers don’t feel they harness the power of data

3* The real marketing funnel

On my quest to encourage change, and to shift away from brands focusing solely on generating leads. I came across this really simple visualisation of your target audience.

Your audience, category and product aren’t different, the below will be a pretty good description of your customer base.

1-5% of your customers are not ready to buy.

Is your marketing geared towards the 1-5% or the 95%?.