How to protect your marketing strategy when search traffic drops

Tom Inniss

00:09

Hello, and welcome to Marketers of the Universe. My name is Tom Innes, and I am the Content Marketing Manager here at Brew Digital. And today I get to put one of our own in the hot seat. So joining me is Hayden Woods-Williams, our usual host for the podcast, or co-host now, I suppose. But more day to day, he is our Digital Marketing Team Lead here at Brew Digital and he spends a lot of time helping brands figure out why their digital strategy isn't working as hard as it should be. So today we're going to look at something that I think keeps a lot of marketing teams up at night, which is knowing when to hold your nerve with a strategy and when to actually admit it's broken and start again. So because of our current environment where AI is reshaping search and algorithms keep shifting, often in favour of the platforms that are controlling them rather than marketers. And then at the same time, you've got the pressure from C-suite who wants answers yesterday. That line between the patience and the stubbornness has never really been harder to find if you ever knew where it was in the first place. So we're going to try and unpick that with Hayden, who's come prepared to answer some of my questions for once. Hayden, it's lovely to have you here. Thank you for joining me.

Haydn Woods-Williams

01:24

I'm pleased to be here, terrified to be on the other side of the microphone and the table.

Tom Inniss

01:30

The internet. The internet, there you go. So shall we just dive straight into it? I'll give you a hypothetical. So let's say that a brand is six months into a 12-month strategy. It's the halfway point and suddenly there's a massive platform change. For example, Google have an I/O event where AI overviews drastically reduces your search traffic and suddenly it looks like you're at Google zero in terms of the referrals that you're getting. How would you advise a brand to handle that without panicking?

Haydn Woods-Williams

02:31

Yeah, well I think there's two main things from this. Firstly, I think, you know, AI overviews, search, all of those things are tactical. They really sit in the realm of execution and delivery, which is very important. You can't have tactics about strategy, you can't have strategy about tactics. So the first thing I would say is it is good to be agile around your tactics. And you know, I think Ahrefs did some research that showed like 58% lower average click-through rates for position one organic listings to AI citations, which is a, it's a big drop off and it's something to potentially be worried about right now. But, and that's a big but, if you have done your due diligence and you've done all of the work that you needed to do to put together a really solid strategy, and whether you're six months into that, you should know now whether you've got a strong strategy or a weak strategy. I think you just have to keep going back to it. know start thinking about you know who are my target audience, what is my position and what is my objective. If before you kind of change anything you go back to your strategy you look for the answers to those questions then I think you can handle these massive shifts in the marketing environment more than if you just you know have that knee-jerk reaction. If you are one of these companies that maybe kind of jump straight into tactics and doesn't have a really solid strategy, this is where you go, "We did this wrong. We need to go back. We actually need to put a strategy that's backed by proper research, that's clear, that's simple, and that answers that, who's my target, what's our position,

Tom Inniss

04:31

what's our objective?" Will Barron So just to look at definitions here, how do you differentiate between tactics and a strategy?

Haydn Woods-Williams

04:38

That's a very good question and it's one that should be really easy to answer. I think ultimately, if we think about this in terms of a football team, right? So you have a strategy throughout the season, it's overall kind of vision of how you play. That allows you to decide what formation to play, how high you press, how you tell your right winger to defend or attack, and all of those things are a strategy level. So you decide what your position is that's going to make those smaller decisions and that's going to direct those smaller decisions. Tactics is really those game by game decisions that you're making. Ultimately, they're all fed by that overall vision of play or strategy, whatever you want to call it. But you may make small tweaks into actually this target audience or football team has a certain player that makes it very challenging to do how we usually play. So we're going to play a lower defensive line as an example. So that's probably the way that I would try to explain it.

Tom Inniss

05:55

Okay, yeah, so that makes sense now. So you would use your strategy to then guide how you adjust your tactics to a changing environment.

Haydn Woods-Williams

06:04

Yeah, exactly. And if you've kind of done the solid work at the strategic level, it should be clear to whoever is executing what the position is. I think sometimes when it comes to delivering strategy, it can get way too complex. You have like 10, 11 page documents. you need to really kind of shrink down everything into something that is really digestible for your sales team, for your marketing team, for your C-level, for customer success. And that way you've got everyone pulling in the same direction. Yeah. And ultimately it does come back to those, you know, who are we targeting, how are we positioning ourselves to target them and what are we trying to achieve?

Tom Inniss

06:50

Sam Blitvich Sure. So looking at that third point about what we're trying to achieve, that's often measured through KPIs. And at the beginning of any strategy period or at the beginning of any business year, you start to set KPIs and those might typically be conversion rates or website visits and that sort of thing. Now we are seeing website traffic tanking. But on the whole, we are seeing that lead quality or revenue is continuing to be stable. How do we educate the C-suite on what KPIs actually need to care about now? Do we need a complete rethink on how we measure our own success?

Haydn Woods-Williams

07:28

I think this again, really goes back to how we're positioning our KPIs, our objectives, whatever you want to call them, our goals. You're ultimately going to have from the C-suite a business level objective, right? You'd have a corporate objective, you're going to have corporate strategy. Those things are great. That's going to feed into your kind of marketing strategy objectives. And then those marketing strategy objectives should then feed into your kind of tactical metrics. And what we're talking about here really sits at that tactical metrics level. And really you need to kind of look at what your objectives are at the the marketing level to know what the correct metrics are going to be for your tactical level. So I could sit here and say, "We shouldn't care about clicks to website, we should now care about AI citations," or whatever I can say around that. But actually, depending on what your objectives are at the strategic level, if you have noticed in your customer journey that people are aware of you but they're not considering you, then your objective might be to increase the number of people who are considering purchasing from Brew Digital from 40% to 50%. That is where you look at what your metrics are at a classical level if we're talking about website traffic here. That's where rather than looking at overall web traffic, you can start looking at traffic to your conversion pages. You can start looking at brand search volume and who is searching directly for the brand. You can start looking at lead quality and those kinds of things. And I think that is where you really need to start thinking about KPIs. If I think about Brew as an example, we highlighted recently or last year that we were great at getting people into the sales pipeline, but actually the conversion rate from an opportunity to a new customer, that's where we were seeing the biggest drop off. So we were able to kind of look at our customer funnel, whatever you will, our journey, and identify this is where there's the biggest opportunity for us to increase revenue, increase new customers. And we set objectives around that to hire a new salesperson or business development manager is one example, but also to test different ways of positioning our conversion magnet, lead magnet, whatever you want to call it. And by doing that, we are starting to see that number shift and we're starting to see the kind of conversion rate there. And again, there, if we go back to that kind of KPI metric level, sorry, KPI at a tactical level, that's where the things that matter are things like loss reasons, things like response rates to proposals, all of those kind of things. So yeah, that was a long-winded way of saying that the KPIs are at a tactical level, but need to be fed by the corporate strategy, fed by the marketing strategy. And ultimately, if you're that senior person, or you're talking to that senior person, work out what they care about. Because actually, if it's only the marketing objective or the corporate objective, don't bother them with the marketing KPIs, tactical KPIs.

Tom Inniss

11:13

I feel like in most instances, though, aren't they ultimately just going to be most concerned about revenue?

Haydn Woods-Williams

11:17

Yeah, of course, of course. But, you know, depending on how the business is positioned, you know, if they're more product focused, they may have objectives around improving the product and improving retention rate, as an example, compared to, you know, if they're more sales focused, they may be more driven by revenue. If they're smart, they might be driven by profit.

Tom Inniss

11:46

Of course. That's smart. So going back, let's keep, let's use Brew as an example here. And you said that we were looking at our strategy and we identified that we were dropping people through the funnel. When you were scrutinizing that, how did you decide that it was, the strategy just needed more time and more testing and some iterations rather than it being a strategy that was fundamentally broken?

Haydn Woods-Williams

12:13

This is a hard question that has a really simple answer that is not particularly satisfying. So ultimately you kind of need to give it time and space and trust. If you have gone through the right processes then you need to do that. If you have skipped steps, if you haven't done your market research, if you haven't set who you're targeting, if you haven't decided on a position, if you've got too many objectives, all of those things are things that could be wrong with the strategy. And if you look at that, then if any of those things are a red flag, then maybe go back and look at it. But if you have kind of set everything, everything is backed by thorough customer research, you're being customer orientated. So you're kind of admitting that you don't know anything about the customer's opinion. You are actually getting verbatim their thoughts and you're acting on those thoughts and you're not acting upon assumptions. You've mapped out your total market, you've decided who you're targeting and who you're not targeting. You've decided your position. You've decided your key objectives. Stick with it, stick with it and try and make sure that all of the tactics that you're delivering align with your strategy.

Tom Inniss

13:53

Stick with it for how long?

Haydn Woods-Williams

13:55

Uh, I think that the 12 months.

Tom Inniss

13:58

So a whole year.

Haydn Woods-Williams

13:59

Yeah. I think make the changes at a tactical level. There are reasons that you made those decisions and sometimes things take longer to bed in. We think about branding and activation, tofu, bofu, whatever you want to call it. For some businesses, the sales cycle is super long. I think from Forrester, the average B2B buying cycle is like 121 to 218 days. It takes time for these things to move and for you to influence who you want and bring them through the pipeline. I think just look at those kind of metrics you've got at a tactical level and make sure those are moving in the right direction. If they're not, revisit your tactics, but still try and maintain your strategy.

Tom Inniss

14:58

And that leads very nicely onto my next question, which I wrote with a fan favourite, or at least a favourite of me, Michele, in mind here. So we've seen research that shows that brands with consistent strategies and creative produce up to twice as many profit gains, yet far too frequently we have people panic and scrap everything when a specific channel underperforms, which I know is like a massive bugbear of Michele. So building off of what you just said there, where it's a tactical change rather than a strategy change, how do we bake measured iteration into that from day one so we're not prematurely overcorrecting?

Haydn Woods-Williams

15:39

Yeah, this is the golden question in marketing, isn't it? We've all had this, like you launch a campaign and you get someone knocking on your door two days later, you know, where are the leads? Um, it goes back to what I just said around the, the average sales cycle. It takes a long time in B2B to move people from potential customer. Prospect through to converting customer, even to a sales conversation. It takes a long time, you know, and you add on top of that, that only 5% of your market are in a position to buy or are considering buying right now, that means that 95% of buyers are not in position to buy. You add on top of that, that of those 5%, it can take 121 to 218 days to move through the pipeline. You add on top of that, the idea that, um, and this is from, I think, six cents that 95% of buyers have already chosen their favorite vendor on the day one of the shortlist, and it shows you two things, firstly, it shows you that the 95% have to be influenced so that when they're ready to go to market to purchase, you are front of mind. And that is something that's really hard to measure in the CRM. That's really hard to measure in revenue. That's really hard to measure in the short term. That is where you really need to focus on building your brand over a long time, being consistent and constantly giving value and, and kind of. Building that relationship and trust with people, the 5%, that's where you can be a bit smarter with your activation and you can actually try to drive conversion a little bit more. If you have a solid strategy, you can start hopefully moving them through the pipeline and kind of targeting that. And that's where you can potentially have those short term wins. If you can set things up for the long term, but also try to run a campaign or touch points that move these people and start sales conversations with people who are ready to buy, that can kind of appease the stress that comes with people asking where the leads are. If you're kind of in a position where you're targeting everyone and you're expecting leads, you're fighting a losing battle and you're always going to be in that kind of position

Tom Inniss

18:27

of panic. Panic is the enemy of productivity. I thought, well actually I don't know. Going back to my uni days, panic was pretty much the instigator of productivity far too frequently.

Haydn Woods-Williams

18:42

It gets things done, doesn't it? It gets things done. It gets things done. And that's scary. And I think that's one of the reasons why so many businesses don't have marketing strategies because they get pressure from above so they jump straight into tactics rather than taking the time to put a strategy together. And the big thing that is really crazy about strategy is it should be insanely simple but it takes a long time to get to the insanely simple. So you can't just rush it. It needs to have time. Like if we're talking about brewing a beer, you can't just drink it straight from the bucket on day two. You've got to wait for the fermentation to happen, and then you've got to condition it. And then once it's done all of that magic, you get a delicious, tasty golden ale.

Tom Inniss

19:40

I'm going to move this conversation on, because when you start making too many metaphors, is where the whole conversation derails. We've already had Bibble and now we're brewing, it's worrying. So actually what I'm looking for now is a bit of validation or I suppose job security reassurance because one of the things you mentioned there around the 95 to 5% buying ratio is keeping people front of mind and a lot of that is frequently done with content either like a blog or a white paper but going back to our question around, well not our question of like a hypothesis around shifting algorithms, affecting strategy and so forth. We've typically created those to rank on page one of Google or to engage an audience on social media. If we are presuming that that's no longer going to drive traffic in the same way or we might not actually ever hit position one because it doesn't exist because Google's just subsumed everything, what is the role of those content pieces now and how do we approach them in a tactical way to ensure that they are delivering on the strategy?

Haydn Woods-Williams

20:52

Yeah that's a really really good question. I think one of the things we have to kind of shift our perspectives with is think about content, ads, social posts, all of those things. Think of them as touch points and a customer is going to have anywhere between 100 to 300 touch points on their journey towards becoming a customer. Like it's a massive amount. And there's a really good example if you look at banks and the kind of closing down of high street banks. Though walking past a bank and seeing that brand on the high street is a touch point, effectively that is marketing. And the impact that closing down those branches had was a drop in awareness around the brand. So I think you need to really take that little anecdote into your marketing and think, you know, whether you have that tangible click to website or whether you have an AI citation using the example we've been using throughout, both of those are still touch points for your They're going to have hundreds more, so you have lots of chances to make a positive impression on them. The important thing that you need to do is just make sure you're there. So the content needs to add value to the customer. It really needs to communicate and answer questions and problems that they really have. And you know, if you're creating content for the website, I think it's also important to actually think about killing bits of content as well. Like if it doesn't do those first two things, and also now that AI is kind of dropping the number of clicks you're getting, actually if someone's reading this, are they in a position to inquire or buy or suggest to a colleague in the buyer group? And if you take those kind of three things into consideration when you're putting content together for any channel, I think you can continue to make really impactful touchpoints for your customers. And I think it's moving to a quality of touchpoint rather than, you know, in the past, particularly with SEO, where it was, you know, you had to be doing three blogs a week. And interestingly, in a podcast we recorded recently with our social media manager, Debbie, said the exact same thing with social posts. It's not about the quantity anymore. It's really about the quality.

Tom Inniss

23:34

So I have a job for the time being.

Haydn Woods-Williams

23:36

Oh yeah, yeah, no, Tom, you're, you're spooking boy. And this podcast is a touch point, right? And you are king of the podcast. I can't do it without you.

Tom Inniss

23:44

Can I get that in a contract, please?

Haydn Woods-Williams

23:48

I think it's exciting more than anything. And you know, we've spoken about AI slop in the past. And ultimately, if you are a brand that gives value to the people that you're trying to talk to, who are in your audience, then you're going to build trust. And to do that, you need words. And consistency. Consistency. Oh, consistency.

Tom Inniss

24:10

Yes. Oh, you're in a Michele there. So I've got two questions left for you, Hayden. The write your strategy for next year, what do you think is the biggest fundamental difference from how they would have planned it a couple of years ago?

Haydn Woods-Williams

24:34

I say this from a personal experience. When I first started working in marketing strategy, I did this. You jump straight into tactics and it's so, so common. And you jump straight to tactics and you think about, you know, what am I going to do on paid media? What say, all of those things. Don't jump into those things first. Those are your tactics. Come to those later. Start in a diagnosis phase. So start by talking to your customers, researching qualitative, quantitative focus groups, like secondary research. Look, spend way more time than you think just collecting all of that data. Give yourself like an extra month or two on the delivery of your strategy. Because those are the things that are going to feed the entirety of your strategy for the next 12 months. And that's massive. And we've all been guilty of it. I would be super surprised if there is a single marketer listening to this or marketer that I've ever worked with or who works in marketing who's ever like, this is the easiest step to skip because you can make assumptions. But assumptions are insanely dangerous. And that's often what leads to failure. And I've been there. I've made assumptions, made strategies on assumptions and failed. So that would be my number one. John:

Tom Inniss

26:02

So I'm going to push you on timelines there. You say that we should have a 12-month strategy and at the same time you're also saying you need to give yourself a month or two for doing all of the customer research going forward. So how much overlap is there from one year strategy to another? because you also need to have a period of diagnosis to see what works within your strategy from one year to the next. Obviously you'll have like five-year objectives and five-year strategies but how do you simultaneously continue to run your strategy to completion from one year while building the next strategy?

Haydn Woods-Williams

26:36

So I think it's about having a living document. So if you are the the kind of company that builds a strategy and then you look at it. So you build it in September, you look at it again in August and you think it's directed what you've done, but you're not sure because you haven't looked at it all year. Then you're in a real tough spot. I think it's really about having a strategy and this is why simplifying and making it as simple as possible is really, really important. It's a strategy that is living like your sales team know it, your marketing team know it, your customer success team know it, your designers know it, your intern knows it. That's really impactful. When it comes to looking and analyzing whether it's worked or not, make sure you're doing that on a monthly, quarterly basis. You're learning as you go on that strategy, on the tactics you're delivering from the strategy. And then with regards to the crossover, I'd say it's anything between three to six months. If you need to survey quite a big number of people to get a proportional representation of your audience, then you're probably going to need a little bit more time. If you target a really niche audience or you can't afford to have those kind of big market research projects run by external agencies, you're probably going to have to spend even more time because you are going to actively have to go out and talk to those customers. And that is time consuming, it's uncomfortable a lot of the time, but it takes time. So yeah, I would say kind of three to six months. The first few months of that is always on that research phase.

Tom Inniss

28:17

Thank you. Our last question. For those who don't know, we do actually audit people's existing digital strategies to help support them, enhance what they're delivering and to suggest tactics to make the strategy more successful. When you are auditing a new client's existing digital strategy, Hayden, what is one immediate warning sign that tells you that it's destined to fail?

Haydn Woods-Williams

28:40

I've already spoken about customer research, so I feel like it's going to be obvious if I choose that. Yeah, I'm going to ban that. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say. But if it's based on assumptions, it's going to fail. That's number one. Put that in a box. File it away. Keep it on a post-it note on your screen. I'm going to say objectives. I think if there are too many objectives, we're spreading resources too thin and you're probably not going to achieve them. If the objectives are not related to specifics to your organization, so you think about the smart framework as an example, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. And really take those into consideration when you're setting those objectives. Make sure that you have a benchmark to grow from, make sure that the growth is realistic to your industry and to your situation, and make sure it's related to that corporate strategy as well. because ultimately it's there to drive growth in the business in the way that the corporate and senior management team want. So yeah, objectives. If they're done well, they can absolutely transform a business. If they're done badly, they can mean a business goes and pulls in 20 directions all at once and nothing gets achieved.

Tom Inniss

30:13

Will Barron Yeah, and I imagine it's a pretty big alarm bell if you

Haydn Woods-Williams

30:18

how common that situation actually is.

Tom Inniss

30:22

So Hayden with that, thank you so much. Before I do the final wrap-up, how can people reach us to have their digital strategy audited?

Haydn Woods-Williams

30:31

You can't. No, I'm joking. Head to www.brewdigital.com. On there you can just browse through our case studies or head to the contact us page, reach out to the team and if it's something that we think is suitable for your brand on a discovery call then it's something we can organise and look into.

Tom Inniss

30:55

Absolutely, and although I was going to wrap up I do want to just emphasise that point that Hayden made around suitability because this is one thing I absolutely love about Brew Digital is that we are not afraid to say perhaps we are not the right digital marketing agency for you. We're very transparent in that regard and we actually do genuinely want is best for every single one of our clients or would-be clients. So if we're not going to be the right fit, we're not going to just take your money. But we will always have a discovery call with you to help you find out whether or not we are the fit. So with that self-promotion out of the way, all that's left to do is say thank you so much, Hayden, for joining me today. And thank you, listener for indulging us in 30 odd minutes of strategy and tactics and football and brewing related analogies. That is all we have had time for today. If you take anything away from this podcast that changes how you think about your strategy, that is amazing. Objective Met, that was one of our tactics. Please do go and do something with it. If you have enjoyed this show, the single best thing you can do is recommend it to one person who you think will get something out of it. It really does make a difference. And if you haven't enjoyed it, then please share it with someone who you don't particularly like because there is no point us both being disappointed. So subscribe wherever you listen. Please check out our back catalogue if this is your first time here. And thank you as always to the Brew Digital team for everything that goes into making these episodes and for generally informing me, a somewhat marketing outsider about the importance of strategy. I've been Tom and these are the Marketers of the Universe. I mean we overran by 15 minutes but we have done it.

Haydn Woods-Williams

33:11

I mean we overran by 15 minutes but we have done it. Yeah... my bad.