Online marketers, brand managers, and channel marketing managers: Why are we in business?

• To build our mailing list?
• To “get more traffic” to our site?
• To increase average time spent on our site?
• To increase average pageviews per visit on our site?
• To get more new users to visit our site (no matter how qualified)?
• To get more followers on twitter?
• To get more fans on Facebook?

None of the above.

These are by-products of a marketing campaign. In fact, these are not even indicators to suggest positive or negative performance of a campaign. Why? Because they are not relevant to a consumer/customer. If these are listed as goals of a campaign then this is “marketing for the sake of marketing.”

What is relevant to a consumer/customer?

Growing your mailing list by 10% does nothing if that 10% never buys your products. Increasing time spent on your website does not suggest you’ve tapped a resource for new brand advocates, either (it may however suggest you’ve created additional roadblocks preventing site visitors from completing desired tasks in a short amount of time).

Meaningful messaging that triggers action leading to a conversion — this is marketing and it’s why we’re in business. Anything else is just noise that makes your brand irrelevant to your target audience.

Sigh. This post claims that branding is irrelevant/dead thanks to search engines and how search is transforming the way in which people research and buy products.

Huh?

I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t honestly tell me that Lamborghini, BMW, Lincoln, and Hyundai (just to name a few random automotive brands) are all on equal playing fields when a consumer searches for “car” on Google. 

The post goes on to talk about the power of SEO and why SEO is not dead. SEO is most certainly not dead and should make for a critical component in your online strategy. His point in trying to prove why SEO is not dead is muddied by the claims of “branding being dead.” Brands don’t matter in certain categories (probably because there’s no clear category leader), but certainly not across the board.

Proper SEO can elevate your brand to the top of the listing for non-branded searches.

They key is creating brand awareness (through advertising, promotion, PR, etc. outside of search engines) and dominating on branded AND non-branded searches for your category. This is done by juggling your SEO work with your SEM campaigns to find the “sweet spot” so SEM can pick up the slack where you lag behind in SEO. Branding then goes onto heavily influence clicks on search engine results.

This type of tunnel-vision thinking is why “online” is still broadly viewed as an IT function.

Flat-out comments like this show the still “techy” and misguided view of some Internet strategists and how marketing and “tech” still quite aren’t aligned — even on established sites such as searchenginewatch.com. Any marketer worth their salt should understand that brands can drive search results. When industry publications and commentary throw out claims like this, it’s difficult to create alignment with a marketing department — especially when marketing should “own” (or at least have visibility to) SEO and SEM strategy.