Getting post-click marketing

Terrific post by Gord Hotchkiss on Search Insider today, Get It Or Die: Online Is Your Core Business.

Gord starts by referring to a recent survey that showed 63% of B2B buyers prefer ordering things they order all the time online. Traditional channels pale in comparison, such as ordering from a real live sales rep, which clocked in at only 12%.

His question: how closely does your company’s strategic direction and resource allocation match that pie chart?

Lately, I’ve talked a lot about “getting it”. To me, there are two levels of getting it. There’s the safe level: the proficient e-business unit that understands search and executes effectively, realizes that online strategies have to be planned across channels, is struggling to put attribution models in place that work, and is continually testing and optimizing landing pages. If we look at digital marketing alone, they understand it and are skilled practitioners. This level, “getting it” with a small “g”, is rare, although there are several examples to look at.

But then there’s “Getting It”, with a capital “G”. This is the company that realizes that online forms the core of the customer experience and that everything else has to support that — if not today, then in the very near future. This is the company that is rapidly and aggressively moving to digital as its primary way of doing business, that is already making the painful but required transitions and is willing to cannibalize its traditional core in order to support the move to online. Outside of pure online plays, this level of “Getting It” is so rare as to be basically nonexistent.

The rest of his post talks about digital butt-covering — paying lip-service to these ideas, but hedging their bets — and how that safe, incremental approach is probably the riskiest thing they can do. And he has a great anecdote from Jim Lecinski of Google’s Chicago office too.

I couldn’t agree with this more, and I would contend that post-click marketing is on the front-line of “getting it”. People search for you, and then what happens after that first click is the quintessential marketing moment. If you’re still thinking of your online traffic as an unsegmented mass that can be sufficiently handled by your web site proper — one size fits all — then you’re missing a tremendous opportunity.

If the reason you’re not addressing it is because you don’t have allocated resources for it, then it might be time to rethink your pie chart.