What the CEO needs to know about search marketing

If you’re at a small company, your CEO (you?) probably wears many hats. “Chief cook and bottle washer.” One of those hats may be hands-on search marketing.

However, for this discussion, let’s consider the CEO role as distinct from day-to-day operational management.

The CEO has one overarching mission: build an incredibly effective organization. It’s where the buck stops on deciding the organizational structure of the firm, its culture, its incentives, its internal checks and balances, and — as Cisco would say — its human network.

If the CEO doesn’t get that right, almost nothing else matters.

As companies grow, this quickly becomes a full-time job. But even if that responsibility is juggled with a stack of bottles to be washed, it still must be the CEO’s top priority.

Given that perspective, what does the CEO need to know about search marketing, post-click marketing, and online marketing overall?

The CEO doesn’t need to know which keywords or ads you bought, how much traffic is coming from each, how many different landing pages you’re sending them to, which rich media tactics you’re using to engage them, or what the conversion rate is for each segment on each path.

All that stuff is critically important, but not to that role.

What the CEO does need to know: how is your organization structured to excel at marketing in this brave new world?

• How does your company define the different pieces of online marketing?
• How do they interrelate in the specific context of your business?
• Who is responsible for each of those pieces?
• What will be in-house core competencies, what will be outsourced?
• What are the mechanisms to optimize across multiple pieces?
• How will incentives, budgets, and rewards be governed across those pieces?
• How will tools and infrastructure to support this structure be adopted?
• How is your online strategy decided, coordinated, and refined?
• How quickly do you adapt to changes in the online marketing environment?

In the big picture, this is the single most important dimension in how competitive and successful a company will be online. Get it right, and it’s a rocketship. Get it wrong, and it’s like dragging a sack of bricks on a marathon. Ignore it, and you do so at great peril.

You know your organizational structure is not right when you run into situations like these:

• It takes 4-8 weeks for IT to add a piece of tracking code to your web site.
• The search marketing team has never met the web site team — except maybe at the holiday party.
• Legal has to approve every landing page you publish (yet they’ve never heard of a “tweet”).
• Your top-placing ads for “coffee” are schizophrenically selling “chocolate” instead:

We’ve all seen variations of these quagmires.

As an industry, it’s time to tackle these organizational barriers head-on, instead of wrestling inefficiently with a patchwork of workarounds and compromises under the radar.

Search marketing pundits have done a wonderful job of covering the tactics of search marketing in the trenches. But now there needs to be more advocacy and analysis from all of us on how organizational management and leadership must evolve in this new era.

It’s time to go from trench warfare to an Official Golden Age of Online Marketing Leadership.

Online isn’t just about new methods of marketing. It demands a new kind of governance of marketing.

And that’s what the CEO needs to focus his or her attention on.

As a timely post-script:

Gord Hotckiss of Enquiro has a column in today’s Search Insider about Selling Search to the C-Suite. He references the Search Marketing Maturity Model that I published as a way to help companies align their holistic evolution of search management, and he zooms right in on this point:

There’s another thing you’ll notice if you look at Scott’s model: moving beyond the first level is almost impossible if you don’t have some level of buy-in from management. The people managing search may have the best of intentions to move to higher levels of maturity through channel integration, more sophisticated testing and a robust post-click optimization strategy (which is Scott’s particular passion), but you can’t go there until you get the executives on your side.

If the C-Suite is knowingly or unknowingly keeping search in a tightly restricted sandbox (typical at the Ad Hoc and Engaged levels), you’ll never realize the benefits of an integrated campaign.

I’m delighted to hear that this will be one of the key topics at next month’s Search Insider Summit.

Comments

[Michael Locke]

Wow, what a great post! Definitely passing this on.

[Scott Brinker]

Thanks, Michael!

I think it's worth asking the question: knowing everything we know today about search, social, and online marketing, how would we design the ideal organization to leverage the heck out of that?

[fx15]

thanks for post