Written by Clear leadership. The land grab in digital advertising right now is a frightening sight. Creative groups want to do media, media wants to build creative, social media “experts” want to drive online strategies, and the proliferation of display choices from traditional display buys to ad networks and exchanges is enough to give the hardiest of souls pause. As such, it is essential for clients to be transparent and clear on who is driving what and to set an expectation for everyone to play nice and work together. This is rarely easy, as everyone traditionally positions for his or her own cause, but the marketers who are willing to appoint a leader and command inclusive behavior will reap benefits faster.
Bring an end to politics as usual. One of the long-standing and greatest challenges to success in the organic search space has been the internal tussle that goes on between IT and marketing. From who “owns” the responsibility around this function, to priorities and implications of content and architecture changes, the topic is often hotly contested. And usually that fight is rarely beneficial to an end goal. With the continued rise of importance of non-paid media, organic search is rising up the visibility chart for CMOs, and one area of leadership should step in to eliminate these fights. On the upside, even when these fights still remain, universal search and off-page criteria dictate the IT bottleneck will become less of a deterrent for some companies.
Sustaining presence amidst fragmented media and working with a vast pool of experts doesn’t mean a brand can’t capture efficiency of channel performance. If your organization can cut through the clutter, agree to the leaders, show leadership by working together internally, and align the metrics to a single end goal, opportunities in search are still great. And then, when it is all said and done and everyone is aligned, we can share a snack of celery, in true “Wonder Pets” fashion. I know a two-year-old who would be game.
