If you open up your browser and surf for “effective marketing” or “making marketing effective” or you read about large companies tying their payments to the success of their ad campaigns.
All of these are interesting things because as has been noted over and over again, the days of just adding more to your ad budget and getting results is over.
Right now we seem to be in the dying stages of the “disease of more” in advertising.
With the big ESPN/Vivid Seats deal from a few weeks back, I had lots of people email me about how that is really just a play for greater exposure and more links and other things that, in theory, drive SEO.
Which on the surface makes sense because I know from experience that the payback on making a partnership deal about click throughs on sports sites isn’t as high as other types of affiliate deals.
But when you plan your advertising around an SEO play, you are actually failing to think wisely about what you are really trying to do with your marketing and advertising anyway.
Why?
Because you are striving for “more” when the world is striving for “relevant.”
You see, putting a ton of links on a website might make a lot of sense in the short term when Google’s algorithm rewards that. But what about when Google changes things up because companies have gamed the system?
What does putting a ton of links on a site or a set of sites really do for your brand if the readers of that blog or website/s doesn’t really go to that site as a place that they trust to recommend purchases of that kind?
In that way, all of these things are meaningless.
Why?
Because they don’t really have relevance to their audience.
See, the Internet seduced us into thinking that it would make it easier and easier for us to reach bigger and bigger markets.
But the fact is that the Internet made it easier for us to reach bigger markets if we gave people something to care about.
For the things that are redundant, not noteworthy, or irrelevant, it made ignoring them easier and it made the need to be relevant even more important.
Which begs the question: Are you relevant to your kind of people?