After The Click

"…Journalists and PR professionals, the influence brokers of traditional media, have lost a huge degree of influence on the web in large part because they don’t link to anything. While traditional media brands are still powerful channels on the web, they are losing influence everyday to the link-driven web network — journalists and PR professionals can no longer depend on controlling these former monopoly channels to exert influence online."
~The New Influentials (PSFK)

Good point.  It's true.

Now think about what happens after the click.  After someone has used Google to search for something and clicked on a high ranking link thinking, it had the relevant content they were looking for.  Instead, they find themselves on a site loaded with links and "keywords" offering no value whatsoever.  Turns out that the only reason the site exists is not to provide value, or content, or information—but in fact to show up in the search engines.  It was carefully engineered for that sole purpose.

It's how some marketers will choose to combat the power of the link.  They'll fight fire with artificially produced flames.  Of course what they don't realize is that they are doing exactly what their marketing forefathers have taught them.

They are fooling the "customer".

Or are they?  What happened to tried and true marketing techniques?  We began to resent them.  Avoid them.  Tolaerate them—but just barely.  Marketing became noise and so we bought DVR's and iPods to tune it out.  So the marketers shouted, became more clever, put marketing in places we never expected.

And some, though not all really only care about what happens before the click.  If you click—they've done their job.  Or have they?  What happens after the click is just as important as what happens before.  Maybe even more.  It's an opportunity to inform, inspire, engage, and enable.  In the best case scenarios—it can bring a brand to life and take relationships to the next level.

Or, it can cause suspicion, mistrust and frustration.  All because the metric of the click meant more than anything else. So yes, there are ways to compete with the "new influentials".  There are tricks, gimmicks, shortcuts and clever work-arounds.  You can measure the success of it all.  What's harder to measure is the long term impact it has on your reputation—especially if you underestimated how resourceful your customers can really be.

What happens after the click can be a moment of truth for any business.  It's an opportunity to do something something most others don't—to do something meaningful.  Or you can take the easy way out—and just be happy they clicked.  A short term strategy if I ever heard one.

Comments

[joe szabo]

Great point.

I've been in situations where the account planner only cared about how many people clicked the ad. That was a big part of his sale to the client. I had concerns with what the landing page was doing and how the user went about ordering the product we were advertising.

In my soon to be announced role as Director of Design, I will be responsible for what happens "after the click". It will be an uphill battle; client is running a legacy platform and they're not sure about SEM in general.

The good news is we've built some software that creates dynamic landing pages based on what the user's search term is, telling us what the best content is to meet those needs.

Thanks for this. Good ammo to help us deliver better, more relevant experiences after the click.

[Scott]

Great point. I have witnessed this myself in developing a web strategy for a line of products we were promoting. I was too concerned with hwo many clicks and not with what happened after the clicks. Once we realized we were focused on the wrong thing, we quickly changed tac.

[David Sherwin]

So, so true. I've had clients that have focused so closely on their overall campaign click-through metrics and then discovered that those clicks never translated to customers moving further down the path towards a change in behavior or a sale.

A big question I've been chewing on related to this is:

How does the quality of your web experience change after the click if it takes a year to sell your service or product? When initiating a big campaign that's the first touch in a 20-step sales cycle, how does your web experience evolve and deepen after that first click to provide the necessary structure to help move customers down the path towards a big-ticket purchase without scaring them away in the process? (Too much information, too much effort, too little direction, etc...)