What The Google Century Means For Your Brand In 2013

Building a branding strategy in the digital age can be a bit like trying to construct a house of cards while sitting on the rear seat of a motorcycle.  An ordinary person can’t do it without quickly gaining a sense of futility (and of course, personal peril).

Many experts have been writing advance obituaries for Internet search for several years now; in most cases these have also been advance obituaries for search-giant Google .  Such experts often argue that the art of search-engine optimization (SEO) is dead or on life support, leaving online marketers to flail wildly in search of a new strategy that would allow them to reach the right consumers.

Yet just as Google is in far better shape than many skeptics would have imagined (with the Financial Times’ John Gapper terming it the General Electric of the 21st century), SEO is far from dead.  In fact, a new wave of SEO-focused services is gaining attention for the ability to bring a more understandable and more intelligent approach to maximizing an organization’s “findability.”

Last week, content marketing firm GinzaMetrics announced that it has responded to a global swell in spending on digital marketing by upgrading its platform.  The firm, which conducts ongoing, daily analysis of activity on Google, Bing and other major search engines, is tailoring findability in new ways—across 120 nations, 55 different languages and the variously shifting algorithms that address all those languages.

Ray Grieselhuber, GinzaMetrics CEO, says that the platform revamp is a response to the expectation that more than 25 percent of marketing dollars will be allocated to content marketing this year, and that content marketing is now an unsurpassed priority for digital marketers.

Good content gets your brand into the conversation…

Grieselhuber says that the new wave of digital marketing is linked to the ability to smartly produce and smartly distribute content that is, well, smart.

“We’re seeing a really big shift underway toward marketing high-quality, unique content,” he says, a shift that is driven by the evolution of search-engine algorithms that seek to filter out cyber-noise and cyber-trash.

Experts may disagree on exactly what the overlap may be between buzzwords like “content marketing” and “native advertising.”  But the key, Grieselhuber suggests, is that great brands won’t be known just for selling widgets—they’ll be known for creating solutions, and that requires them being able to join in and shape the conversation happening across cyberspace.

…but then you need to analyze the data

Erin O'Brien, GinzaMetrics’ COO, says that earned media (as opposed to traditional advertising and other paid media) remains crucial for branding in the digital age, and that the explosion of new delivery modes will make strong content even more important in the future.

“It’s exciting—and by exciting, I mean confusing, O’Brien says.” She says that the information that a company and its competitors distribute will demand a far higher level of data analysis than what is currently the norm.

Adds Grieselhuber, “When you build your platform for today’s technology, meaning a unified search, social and content view, you can rapidly respond to what customers are really looking for.”  He says clients find competitor comparison data to be particularly valuable.  “Because it’s so granular, marketers are able to dig into the real reasons target audiences are being reached or missed.”

All this will allow for new and better marketing models, Grieselhuber says.  He says this is allowing many companies to make a shift “away from volume, to a bigger focus on higher quality leads.”

Such trends aren’t necessarily about the much-ballyhooed rise of Big Data, O’Brien says.  “The ownership of data has been siloed,” she says, referring to how separate departments within many companies tend not to integrate their data pools, making meaningful analysis difficult or impossible.  New platforms will integrate the knowledge and the meaning that can be drawn from it.

It’s hard enough to compare an apple to an orange (well, it’s not really that hard:  apples are better).  And it’s especially hard to compare the value of an online article to a retweet or other emerging forms of exposure. But the tools are increasingly in place to make sense of it all.

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