E-commerce Spotlight:  Tapping into the Knowledge of the Unknowledgeable:  When building your client/customer base online, an unknowledgeable “outsider” is as essential as a knowledgeable “insider”.

 

The fact that the 2003 Christmas holiday shopping season has the experts unanimously agreeing it was the season where online business “has come of age” is not limited to the Christmas Holidays nor is it limited to retailing.

 

In fact, building your client customer base online has already come of age and every business has but two choices; “come of age” or “become aged”.  When it comes to online marketing, “coming of age” comes 5 or 6 times a year, every year.  That is how quickly the science of search engine placement changes.  The changes are manifested in a variety of ways.  They can be modifications to the mechanics of the search engines or totally new features of search engines or new search engines entirely or twist variations to existing search engines.  Keeping up with all these changes takes someone who does nothing other than keeping up with the changes.  Many times that person is by cost necessity, an “outsider”. 

 

To deal with all this, one approach is to hire a fulltime “outsider” thereby converting them into an “inside outsider”. The individual will have tremendous knowledge about your business with which they can perform all the online marketing and keeping up with all the changes.  Many businesses with an unlimited budget have done just that and in the process exceeded that unlimited budget with wide ranging results some of which are embarrassingly unspectacular.

 

But whether you hire someone “inside” or not, real life situations have proven that bringing in an “outsider” who is knowledgeable about search engine tools yet relatively unknowledgeable about your business has far better and more immediate results.

 

The unknowledgeable “outsider” is the key to attracting new customers/clients online.  The reason is that the key to attracting new customers/clients online is knowing “how people search” and not “where people search”.  Almost any business with a decent website will tell you “yeh, we’re on Google” or “sure, we’re on MSN” or “of course, we registered with Yahoo”.  And sure enough, if you type in their specific URL, you will find them on all the search engines.  That is the function of  “where people search” and unfortunately, that is not “how” the world searches.  The world searches based on “how outside people (“outsiders”) search”.

 

The reality is, take those same websites where people say “yeh, we’re on Google” or “sure, we’re on MSN” or “of course, we registered with Yahoo” and instead of searching by URL (domain) search instead based on keywords about their business.  More often than not, their placement drops to no better than 500, well below the “top ten” that most people search through.  Think about it, when was the last time you scrolled through Google to find the number 500-listed accountant or architect or whatever?

 

It is this “how people search” that cries out for the need for a relatively “unknowledgeable outsider”.  All of us know too much about our business for our own good.  We need the knowledge of the unknowledgeable because that is how people search.  Brian Horowitz of Rainmaker Internet Campaign Management in Chicago has been able to identify this “knowledge of the unknowledgeable” in every client he has serviced. 

 

The lawyers of a law firm were surprised to find out that stepping back about ten paces from detailed descriptions like “IRS tax collection garnishments” or “Illinois Department of Revenue Sales Tax Audits”.  Instead, it took an unknowledgeable person to figure out much higher click through and contact results can be achieved using much more general terms such as “Illinois Tax”.  The reason for this is “that’s how people search”. 

 

Mr. Horowitz goes on to recall an engineering company in which you could pose the question “What business are we in?”  And the unanimous answer would always be:  “We’re in the business of metals testing”.  That’s the way they understood their business for years.  But that is not how the world perceives their business and therefore that is not how the world searches for their services.  Rather than “metals testing”, the world searches, “products testing” and “materials testing”.  A business is only able to identify and then use this information in conjunction with “The Knowledge of the Unknowledgeable”.

 

Mr. Horowitz goes on to point out these vignettes are only a small part of what makes a good Internet Marketing Campaign.   The good news is that unlike most other marketing projects, with the correct budget, the correct Internet marketing campaign can start producing identifiable results within 30 days and significant results well within the normal 6-month campaign cycle.