We all work on Commission
Seth Godin recently put it about as eloquently as anybody could: we all work on commission. As never before, all of us who are vendors in this space–consultants, optimiziation specialists, marketing pros–are being challenged to substantiate our value, to empirically demonstrate the real returns that we can furnish.
Brands are less and less likely to put out anything upfront without proof: proof of concept, credibility, case studies, and so forth. They have to. There are an excess of pretenders out there, in many guises, cajoling, begging for dollars: social media gurus, consultants, and their ilk. They offer magic upfront, smoke and mirrors. Want more, something verifiable, something real? Open up the wallet.
There’s a clear delineation between those who say they can deliver and those who do deliver. Ultimately, that’s why the skepticism on the brands’ side is thoroughly justified. If I were a Director of Marketing or E-Comm at a major brand, I’d see through these charlatans. I’d point to myriad free tools, to terabytes of low cost data, that can deliver a powerful payload from an insights and intelligence standpoint, commensurate with the best that the big vendors have got to offer. Ease, low cost measurability is an endemic quality of the digital domain; metrics are literally baked into the digital DNA.
This is why we do thing differently. We lead with something totally free, and we ask our clients to judge us according to the value that we deliver. We can take such a radical position, because we lead with data. In the infinitely measurable, infinitely accountable medium that is the web, data is the lifeblood of every good organization. Data in the right analytical hands leads naturally to insight. We help site owners instrument and deploy low cost voice of customer and web analytics tools, thereby opening up powerful and always-on data capture streams. We measure, we analyze, we offer up insight. In this way, we earn trust, credibility, influence, and the right to be taken seriously. If the fit is right, we then move on with the execution and production of critical changes, thereby optimizing the website and aligning its key goals with the needs and desires of its visitors.
We look at everything through the lens of visitor intent and task completion. We know that conventional conversion measures are mainly distortions. Few brands achieve higher than a 3-4% transactional conversion rate. We get brands thinking about the other 96%. We help brands to define their micro conversion events: downloads, requests for information, video views, content consumption, etc. Each of these functions is a core task that certain high-priority visitor segments are looking to complete. Although they precede the hard conversion event, soft conversions or completed tasks keep consumer in the buying funnel. Research has shown that 67% of visitors who complete their tasks move successfully down the funnel towards a buy.
Yeah, we do things a little differently than your traditional agency. We put our reputation on the line with every new engagement. We don’t believe in history or in laurels. Judge us according to our ability to deliver value in the here and now. It’s that sense of immediacy, that sense of always being on commission, that makes us better.
