Chapter One

1. You Are Here

Getting the Lay of the Land

Let’s begin by looking at the marketing landscape that exists today. We’ll examine two apparently contradictory trends that affect every move we make in digital marketing: fragmentation and consolidation.

Fragmentation

In the last ten years, we’ve gone from having around 200 different digital marketing tools at our disposal to being able to choose from more than 8,000. This is a reflection of the growth of digital marketing as well as the expansion of tactics and choices at our fingertips.

If you have a big enough computer screen or are prepared to paper your office walls, take a look at this: 2018 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic.1 Shared by Scott Brinker at the annual MarTech conference, this jam-packed image offers a visual representation of the number of unique marketing technology vendors offering those tools. Brinker has been assembling the supergraphic since 2011, and the 2018 number is higher than 2011 to 2016 combined!

Think about all the tools, tactics, and channels at your disposal today: different device types, the Internet of Things (IoT), search engines, social media, email, chatbots, push messaging, text, conversion rate optimization, analytics, search engine optimization, pay per click, video, and your website, just to name a few. All of these tools are available on a variety of platforms as well.

This fragmented world is full of opportunity. It allows you to efficiently target specific demographics and psychographics. If you’re trying to reach customers from age twelve to twenty-four, for instance, you’ll get a lot of value from being on Snapchat but probably don’t need to make Facebook your number one priority. You may even want to establish yourself on an up-and-coming social entertainment network like TikTok (60 percent of its users are between sixteen and twenty-four). On the other hand, if you want to be seen by eighteen-to- forty-four-year-olds, Facebook it is.

You can also target your audience with surgical precision. New, hyperlocal platforms pop up every day. If you can get in there when the competition is light, you can grab a piece of that market. I was on Nextdoor for a while, where neighbors often communicate with each other about a number of things, including services they need and service providers. If you’re a local home service provider like a plumber or handyman, this is a great way to really capture your local neighborhood. Of course, they also launched the ability to create sponsored ads, so you could test that as well, assuming you know how to track its effectiveness.

Even Google, a company that built its reputation on comprehensive search results, is getting into these niche markets with local service ads. These are call-only ads for specific service providers in specific places—plumbers, garage door contractors, locksmiths, and fence installers who live and work nearby—all vetted and guaranteed by Google. This makes it easy for the customer since they don’t have to get references or do background checks. The truly brilliant thing Google is doing is hooking this local services option up to their digital assistant. If you say, “Okay, Google, help me find a plumber,” it will pull up a list of people you can call directly through the assistant. If a plumber is on that list, good for them. If they aren’t, they’ve missed a big opportunity.

Navigating Fragmentation

Harnessing that opportunity requires today’s marketers to acknowledge that their role has changed quickly and dramatically. Fifteen to twenty years ago, an SEO marketer was responsible for areas such as keyword targeting, on-page optimization, site crawlability, and maybe some social media outreach. One person could handle that for a small company.

By 2011, however, the list had grown significantly more challenging. As Rand Fishkin says, the job of “SEO” got upgraded to “organic web strategist,” with additional responsibilities including local maps optimization, reputation tracking, analytics, social media promotion, content creation, new search protocols, and new search verticals—a full plate, for sure.

As complex as the SEO role was in 2011, it was still possible for one person to manage the responsibilities for a small company by themselves. Not so today, when Google makes hundreds of changes to their algorithm every year; even specialists have to know what’s going on in all of the other channels and anticipate what’s coming next. No longer can you say you’re just going to focus on organic search. What about remarketing campaigns, Facebook paid campaigns, Google Display, and Instagram? Did you know that Google is experimenting with a comments feature directly in their search results for sports games? Is that still search, or is it social? How can you harness that?

You need deep expertise to navigate the fragmented digital marketing world, yet you’re probably behaving more like a generalist. That makes sense; you need to be aware of all the different possibilities for creating and distributing valuable content. Only then can you put together an effective plan for creation, publication, management, and promotion of all of that content.

So you need to be a specialist and a generalist. Tired yet?

I feel for marketers and business owners in the current landscape, because although the opportunities are plentiful, there is simply too much going on for any one person to handle alone. At the very least, you need to know enough to be able to prioritize. To truly succeed, you will probably need help from someone with deep expertise. We discovered this truth at Webfor: we started out hiring generalists but found that bringing on people who specialized in certain areas actually allowed us to be more effective. As a team, we have broad knowledge, but each team member brings a deep, up-to-the-minute knowledge in a specific area.

Consolidation

Paradoxically, as the marketing landscape gets more fragmented, some of the bigger players have bought up big chunks of that land and built consolidated marketplaces—virtual campuses that users enter and never have to leave.

The most obvious example of consolidation is probably Amazon. Remember when Amazon was just an online bookstore? Maybe you don’t; it didn’t last long. Today, Amazon is the starting point for nearly 50 percent of product searches done online. They purchased Whole Foods, so you can buy everything from avocados to zucchinis on Amazon, and soon, they may be delivered to your front door by drone. Why would you go anywhere else?

Everybody wants to capture as much of the traffic from as many places as they can. Consider Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world; their audience is huge—over 2 billion users as I write—but Facebook is not content to own only the social space. They also have a search capability and a messaging feature, they host events and entertainment options, and they recently launched Portal, a direct channel for people to make video calls through Facebook. The more time a user spends on their platform, the greater market share Facebook captures.

Similarly, Google, the most popular search engine in the world, is branching out into territory usually occupied by social media. As their search engine becomes more tuned in to user intent and less focused on isolated keywords, Google will begin to roll out new features like the commenting within search results that I mentioned above. When that happens, marketers want to be there, because that’s where the customers will be.

Because owning vast amounts of virtual real estate is so valuable, companies are vying for control of the prime locations. They don’t always succeed. Facebook hasn’t actually managed to capture much search traffic, and Google’s early foray into social (GooglePlus, anyone?) didn’t succeed as a social media platform. That doesn’t mean they’re done trying, though.

Setting up your marketing “shop” in a consolidated landscape does come with risks. Even Google and Facebook can be disrupted. Working in a consolidated space is a little like building a house on someone else’s land—you don’t have control over what happens to the ground you built it on. The landowners might decide to make the property less valuable, as Facebook effectively did when it decreased the reach of organic posts, a space where many had staked their claim only to find it becoming less and less influential. Don’t get me wrong—you need to be on Facebook and Instagram if that makes sense for your business; just don’t let it be your only investment.

I reached out to a colleague, Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and SparkToro (a search engine for audience intelligence), to get his thoughts on the long-term future of digital marketing. He said, “As dollars and advertisers flood the major platforms (right now, that’s the Google, Amazon, Facebook tri-opoly), the ROI of throwing money at those platforms will diminish to...