Driving digital transformation; lessons from the Google monopoly

For the last ten years or so, Google has been eating up other businesses at an increasingly aggressive rate.

If you're not a search geek like me you might not be aware of that fact, but you should be, because their continued unchallenged absorption has significant implications for your marketing strategy.

You might just think Google as the friendly 'don't be evil' answer to all your questions, but they (and now Alphabet) have become a real danger to your business. As their monopoly grows, your ability to monetise your owned digital assets decreases, sometimes rapidly and dramatically.

I read this absolutely awesome deck from Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro, which inspired me to pen this article in the hopes of raising awareness of the insidious takeover happening under our very noses.

How is this happening?

Google have been scraping and presenting content from other sites and presenting it as their own "search results" for years, which essentially removes the need for a person to visit your website. This is known as 'zero click' search, where Google presents the answer to the question directly in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

This has the potential to kill entire websites and businesses almost as soon as Google decide to test a new vertical.

And guess what?

They own all the search data so if you're in a vertical they think they can make money from, you'll be on the hit list.

Including Google and YouTube between them control 69.9% of all web referral traffic.

Snippets and structured data have allowed Google to pull answers to questions that entire businesses have grown around.

• Remember Genius.com?
• Remember Weather.com?
• Remember Expedia?

Remember when you didn't have to pay money to own your own brand terms?

Google have been a powerful driving force for digital transformation in marketing and web development in particular for a long time. They changed the way an entire generation behaved and coined a new verb.

But all that change has come at a price - and that price continues to increase in direct proportion to Google/Alphabet's ownership of the online space.

Anyway, old man griping about change aside - Rand has outlined some practical, effective ways to start thinking about how to combat the inevitable takeover using SEO and thinking about your customer journey with a focus on zero click searches in his presentation (which you can read here in full).

As an aside; I wholeheartedly encourage you to embed SEO not just into your marketing strategy but into your business if you haven't already - it's an essential part of any digital transformation project if you still want to be found in the future.

But I'm not here to talk about SEO this time (tempting though it is...).

This article is focused on the social elements of your customer journey, and about doing more with what you already have.

Do more with the resources you already have

Your channel choices are much more limited than they seem. While the online world can appear like a never ending font of new opportunities for marketers, the reality is that there is serious concentration risk around a small number of very large channels and businesses.

The way to address this challenge is to push your marketing teams in particular to think beyond the simple 'spend more money' to leverage investment in existing channels, as well as the assets in your fixed cost base to generate a better return.

Search and social have always gone hand in hand. Just as Rand notes that marketers must think about search very differently in the current climate if they want to survive in the Google ecosystem of tomorrow, so must marketers think differently about how social networks are leveraged to generate better results.

Advertising is killing the public elements of a lot of social networks, and the barrier to entry to others is high if you don't approach them with the right thinking.

Making the most of social requires new thinking and new behaviours across your business.

It is not quick and easy, but like most things worth doing it will yield great rewards and build sustainability into your business.

Your people are one of your biggest untapped resources

The power and reach of an individual profile on social media is typically 7-10x greater than the company pages you spend so much time and money promoting.

The influence of person to person communication is orders of magnitude higher than a forgettable advertising touch which has to be repeated (for $$$) over and over again to get your message across.

So how do you work in new ways with your team to:

1. Diversify your marketing mix and reduce risk / cost
2. Leverage an the assets you already have in your business
3. Generate greater ROI from your fixed cost base

Deploy a social selling pilot as part of your digital transformation strategy

If you are not empowering and supporting your people to use social networks as a part of their role, you are missing a massive opportunity to enhance your current comms, marketing and sales and increase ROI across your business.

At BinaryM we split our approach to social selling into three key areas:

• People
• Content
• Social presence

Every business has these three assets.

What most business typically do not have is a unifying strategy to align them all behind a commercial outcome.

Creating and executing against such a strategy is not a quick job; it requires new ways of thinking and an evolution in your business that needs buy in from the top right down to the bottom.

Having said that, every epic journey starts with one step. Just like taking that first step, trying out this new way of working is actually quite straight forward.

One of the simplest and most powerful things you could do is run your own social selling pilot to see if you can create results from new ways of working across your teams.

Getting started

Sketching out how to approach a pilot doesn't have to be a huge undertaking, it's fairly straightforward to spend an hour at your desk getting an idea of the current state of play.

Here are some questions to help you get started by interrogating these areas in your own business:

What outcome(s) are you trying to deliver against? The answer to this question will provide the context for the answers to the following questions...

People - see if you have any true believers already doing the right things that can spearhead a pilot.

• Do you have any brand ambassadors? They can be anywhere in the business but ideally in a commercial or market facing role.
• Who is invested in social in your business? Who is using their presence to engage, promote and talk about your brand already?
• Are the senior team leading from the front? Or is everyone hiding away from social. Senior buy in is crucial to success.

Content - is your content fit for purpose and working hard?

• Is your content tailored to and suited for the modern buyer journey?
• Is your content really relevant to your target audience? Does it speak to their challenges and needs?
• Do you track and measure it against your commercial OKRs or business goals?

Social - are you missing the true power of social media?

• Do you rely heavily or solely on company pages and advertising on social networks?
• Do you empower your team to represent your business in social media?
• Do you know how to manage and measure social media activity across different roles or functions in your business?

These questions may well have raised more questions - if so, good!

That means you're on the way to identifying ways to identify gaps in your business. Once you know where the gaps are, you can start to work out how to address them.

To fall back on a well worn cliche; the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. To create the sustainable business of tomorrow, you need to start doing things differently today.

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If you would like more info or to chat further about this subject - drop a comment on this article or add me and send me a message, I'd love to say hello and find out how you are tackling these issues in your work life.