Don’t chase the wrong numbers.
I saw this tweet this morning and started writing (it must be one of the quickest blog posts I’ve written).
25. The secret to marketing isn’t to know how to rank well in search engines, it’s to know why people search for those terms.
— Josh Spector (@jspector) December 10, 2020
The tweet summed up my scepticism about so many quick SEO fixes. It also made me think about other areas of digital marketing where we obsess about the wrong numbers.
Kevin Kelly famously asserted that all a band, artist, author, app maker needed was 1000 true fans to be a success. If those true fans bought almost everything they released and shared the love, it would be enough to build a successful career.
Seth Godin writes of the minimal viable audience. You don’t need huge numbers of followers; just “the smallest group that could possibly sustain your work...”
He goes on to write that if you delight them, you’ll discover two things: the audience is larger than you first thought and they will tell others. He finishes with:
“... if you aim for mass... you’ll probably create something average.”
He also wrote in 2009 that the secret to new marketing is the first ten… “Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.”
So don’t chase the wrong numbers. Chase the right numbers. A passionate minority will inform the majority.
What does this mean in practice?
Let’s break it down.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Don’t let an obsession with being on page 1 of Google divert you from your real objectives. You may find it doesn’t help your business at all; that it encourages the wrong sort of enquiries which you will waste time following up.
Email marketing
The number of subscribers on your list is a poor target. Growing your email list with short-term incentives and no planned follow up to keep them engaged, proves nothing.
Instead focus on the open rate.
“The open rate tells you everything. It is the pulse. It is the vital signs. It tells you people are interested. Or not... the size of the list doesn’t tell you the truth. Engagement does.”
David Hieatt from Do Open.
If your open rate is low your email deliverability will get worse. This means more of your emails will end up not being seen.
Do regular house keeping on your list. Remove people who haven’t opened your emails (e.g. in the last six months). This will help your email deliverability and you may even save some money.
Website visits
Similar to SEO, what’s the point if lots of people visit your website but they don’t stay around for long, or never enquire, or buy? All it proves is that you have attracted an uninterested visitor or your website isn’t communicating what you do.
The time people spend on your site, the number of pages they look at and the number of conversions - this is what matters.
Social media followers
Who cares how many thousands of followers you have? It’s a vanity metric.
How much is spam? How many people are seeing your posts (… fewer than you think given their algorithms. Organic Facebook posts are only being seen by 5.5% of your followers and that’s 2.2% down on 2019)?
What’s important is how many are engaging with what you share. It’s all that matters. 100 engaged followers is better than having thousands who ignore you.
