SEO News

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

All the puzzle pieces have come together, and MozCon 2016 is ready to rock! Over the past week, I’ve had the pleasure of peeking at our speakers’ outlines, and I cannot wait. Whether you’re looking to for the latest SEO information, ready to tackle mobile’s biggest issues, wanting to push your content to 10x, or generally wanting to absorb everything online marketing, it’s going to be so good.

If you’re reading this post and remembering you haven’t bought your ticket yet, I’ll pause:

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Now let’s get to the good stuff:

The MozCon 2016 Agenda

Monday

08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

09:00–09:20am
Welcome to MozCon 2016! with Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz
@randfish

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

09:25–10:10am
Uplevel Your A/B Testing Skills with Cara Harshman

Content Marketer and Storyteller at caraharshman.me
@caraharshman

A/B testing is bread and butter for anyone who aspires to be a data-driven marketer. Cara will share stories about how testers, from one-person agencies to dedicated testing teams, are doing it, and how you can develop your own A/B testing expertise.

Cara Harshman just celebrated her four-year anniversary at Optimizely. Besides managing content strategy, customer case studies, and the blog, she has been known to spend a lot of time writing parody songs for company all-hands meetings.

10:10–10:40am
AM Break

10:45–11:15am
The Big One: Relaunching Your Website with Lauren Vaccarello

VP of Marketing at Box
@laurenv

Change makes us all nervous, and relaunching an entire site can be both thrilling and daunting. Lauren will walk you through how to do it right, from infrastructure and content to design, information architecture, and marketing automation, and share real life triumphs and cautionary tales.

Lauren Vaccarello is a best-selling author and currently runs corporate and field marketing at Box.

11:15–11:45am
The Hidden Talents of Email: Creating Customer-Centric Messages with Justine Jordan

VP Marketing at Litmus
@meladorri

Far from dead, email is a powerful workhorse that belongs in every marketer’s optimization toolkit. Justine will show you how to use email to deliver personal, 1-to-1, and contextually relevant messages that delight your subscribers and encourage engagement.

After mastering table-based layouts in college, Justine Jordan fell in love with the unruly art of email design back in 2007. Currently VP of Marketing at Litmus, Justine and her team are passionate about inspiring fellow marketers to create better email.

11:45am–12:15pm
How to Do Reputation Marketing with Rhea Drysdale

CEO at Outspoken Media
@rhea

Dig into the discipline of reputation marketing and strategy. Rhea will show you what the role of a reputation marketer looks like, what analytics to track, and why everyone should be investing in their organization’s reputation to diversify and reduce marketing spend and other high business costs.

Rhea Drysdale is the Co-Founder and CEO of Outspoken Media, a reputation marketing agency that offers custom solutions for difficult SEO, content, and reputation problems.

12:15–01:45pm
Lunch

01:50–02:20pm
Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing with Joe Hall

SEO Consultant at Hall Analysis LLC
@joehall

Information Architecture (IA) shapes the way we organize data, think about complex ideas, and build web sites. Joe will provide a new approach to IA for SEO and Content Marketing, based on actionable insights, that SEOs can extract from their own data sets.

Joe Hall is an executive SEO consultant focused on analyzing and informing the digital marketing strategies of select clients through high-level data analysis and SEO audits.

02:20–02:50pm
Breaking Patterns: How to Rewrite the CRO Playbook with Mobile Optimization with Talia Wolf

CMO at Banana Splash
@Taliagw

Best practices lie. Talia shares how to build a mobile conversion optimization strategy and how to turn more mobile visitors into customers based on A/B testing their emotions, decision making process, and behavior.

As CMO at Banana-Splash and Founder of Conversioner, Talia Wolf helps businesses optimize their sites using emotional targeting, consumer psychology, and real-time data to generate more revenues, leads, and sales. Talia is a keynote speaker, author, and Harry Potter fan.

02:50–03:20pm
Taking the Top Spot: How to Earn More Featured Snippets with Rob Bucci

CEO at STAT Search Analytics
@STATrob

Featured snippets (also known as “answer boxes”) are steadily appearing in the first organic SERP spot, providing big opportunities for SEOs able to snag them. Armed with the latest data and analysis, Rob Bucci will take you on a deep dive into the constantly evolving featured snippet and show you how to earn more for your site.

Coming from Vancouver, Canada, Rob Bucci is the CEO of STAT Search Analytics. He especially loves tackling big data challenges in data mining and analysis. When he isn’t doing that, you can find him splashing in the ocean, or taking cookies out of the oven.

03:20–03:50pm
PM Break

03:55–04:25pm
Content Chaos: Building Your Brand through Constant Experiments with Ross Simmonds

Co-Founder at Crate
@TheCoolestCool

A look at how taking risks on content and making investments can work out in a big way for brands and marketers. Whether it’s Reddit, Slideshare, Quora, or Instagram, Ross shares some of the lessons he’s learned from a variety of different content experiments.

Ross Simmonds is a digital marketing consultant and entrepreneur. He’s worked with both startups and Fortune 500 companies and is the co-founder of two startups: Crate and Hustle & Grind.

04:25–5:10pm
Social Media: People First, “Rules” Second with Dana DiTomaso

Partner at Kick Point
@danaditomaso

You can follow all the “rules” about perfect post length, perfect time to post, perfect image size, and everything else and still not see any financial impact from social media. Dana doesn’t think social media should always revolve around community building and group hugs. When you show the right people what they want to see, when they want to see it, you’ll start attributing revenue increases to social media efforts.

Dana DiTomaso is a partner at Kick Point, where she applies marketing into strategies to grow clients’ businesses, in particular to ensure that digital and traditional play well together — separating real solutions from wastes of time (and budget).

07:00–10:00pm

Monday Night #MozCrawl

Catch the pub crawl on Monday night, details coming soon! You’ll be able to explore some of our favorite haunts and make some new friends. Spread across multiple bars, go at your own pace and visit the stops in any order. Each stop is sponsored by a trusted partner and one by us. You must bring your MozCon badge — for free drinks and light appetizers — and your US ID or passport. See you there!

Official MozCrawl stops and partners coming soon.

Tuesday

08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

09:05–09:50am
You Can’t Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter with Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist at Moz
@dr_pete

Google is getting better every day at understanding intent and natural language, and the path between typing a search and getting a result is getting more winding. How often are queries interpreted, and how do we do keyword research for search engines that are beginning to understand concepts?

Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with marketing and data science on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past four years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project.

09:50–10:20am
How to Be Specific: From-The-Trenches Lessons in High-Converting Copy with Joanna Wiebe

Creator and Copywriter at Copy Hackers
@copyhackers

Abstracted benefits, summarized value, and promise-free landing pages keep marketers safe — and conversion rates low. Joanna shares how and why your copy needs to get specific to move people to act.

The original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copy Hackers and Airstory. She’s optimized copy for Wistia, Buffer, Crazy Egg, Bounce Exchange, and Rainmaker, among others, and spoken at CTA Conf, Business of Software… and now MozCon.

10:20–10:50am
AM Break

10:55–11:15am
Server Log Files & Technical SEO Audits: What You Need to Know with Samuel Scott

Director of Marketing and Communications at Logz.io
@samueljscott

Server log files contain the only data that is 100% accurate in terms of how Google and other search engines crawl your website. Sam will show you what and where to check and what problems you may to need to fix to maximize your rankings and organic traffic.

Samuel Scott is a global marketing speaker and Director of Marketing and Communications for log analysis platform Logz.io, as well as a contributor to TechCrunch and Moz.

11:15–11:35am
Digital Marketing Skill Pivot: Recruiting New Talent with Emma Still

Marketing Lead at Seer Interactive
@mmstll

Torn between your marketing work and hiring? Emma shares how to take the skills you already have, flip them on their head, and find people to hire on your growing marketing teams. Spoiler: they’ve been under your nose the whole time.

Emma Still leads all Marketing efforts for Seer Interactive. Prior to that, she led a team of SEO professionals at Seer, where she leveraged her digital marketing skills to recruit team members to build stronger, more successful digital teams.

11:35–11:55am
Boost SEO Rankings by Removing Internal Links with Alex Stein

SEO Manager at Wayfair
@sonofadiplomat

Learn how to optimize internal link structure for an easy and surprisingly large SEO ranking wins. Alex will cover the math behind how authority flows through your site, how to evaluate links in your global navigation, common mistakes on CMSs, and other tactics to improve your site’s most important pages.

Alex Stein is currently SEO Manager at Wayfair.com, an online home goods store. Follow him on Twitter @sonofadiplomat for all things SEO, and he is, in fact, the son of a diplomat.

11:55am–12:15pm
Improve Your UX & SEO through Navigation Optimization with Robyn Winner

SEO Manager at Hornblower Cruises and Events
@robyn_winner

Learn the tactics for creating a navigation that increases your organic visibility, streamlines user experience, and boosts conversion rates as Robyn walks you through the most important steps to getting your navigation in order.

Robyn Winner is a passionate SEOer with a deep love for data analytics, user experience optimization, content strategy development, and her two adorable cats who fill her life with joy and fur… on everything.

12:15–01:45pm
Lunch

01:50–02:35pm
Local Projects to Boost Your Company and Career with Mike Ramsey

President at Nifty Marketing
@mikeramsey

Mike will walk through the projects that his individual team members took on to improve how they handled local links, reviews, reports, and lots of areas in between.

Mike Ramsey is the President of Nifty Marketing, which works with big brands and small businesses on digital marketing. He talks about running agencies, local search, and Idaho a lot.

02:35–03:05pm
Reimagining Customer Retention and Evangelism with Kristen Craft

Director of Business Development at Wistia
@thecrafty

True customer loyalty and retention lies in the experience people have with your brand. Kristen will show you how to leverage video to optimize for experience, foster loyalty, lower churn, and create evangelists.

As Director of Business Development at Wistia, Kristen Craft loves working with Wistia’s partner community, building connections with other companies that care about video marketing. Kristen holds degrees in business and education from MIT and Harvard.

03:05–03:35pm
PM Break

03:45–04:15pm
Optimizing the Journey to Deliver Radically Relevant Experiences with Rebekah Cancino

Co-Founder and Content Strategy Consultant at Onward
@rebekahcancino

How do you connect your search rankings to your long-term conversion rates? Customer journey mapping. Rebekah will show you how to bridge the gap between SEO, content, design, and UX with an effective framework your team can use to deliver radically relevant digital experiences when and where it matters most.

Rebekah Cancino spent the last decade helping clients, like Aetna and United Way, overcome some of their toughest content problems. Her consultancy offers workshops and training for in-house teams that bridge the gap between content, design, and technical SEO.

04:15–05:00pm
Putting Trust into Domain Authority with Wil Reynolds

CEO/Founder at Seer Interactive
@wilreynolds

Domain Authority is a trust sentiment, not a pure numeric value. Wil will show real examples of sites that build authority and trust by understanding and then solving users’ problems. He’ll also give you practical ways to use Google SERPS to uncover the many ways to best solve these problem.

Wil Reynolds — Director of Strategy, Seer Interactive — founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site’s traffic has on the company’s bottom line has shaped the SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House.

07:00–10:00pm
Tuesday Night Networking: MozCon Ignite!

We’re thrilled to bring back MozCon Ignite: A networking and passion-talks event for attendees on Tuesday night from 7–10 pm at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall at Seattle Center. Here you’ll meet-and-greet your fellow Community members and hear them give five-minute talks about their hobbies and passion projects. Last year, we heard about everything from how to cook the perfect hot dog to what it’s like to lose your short-term memory. Leave that notebook in your hotel and settle in for some fun. Enjoy light appetizers, non-alcoholic drinks, and two alcoholic drink tickets on us. It’s going to be a blast! Speakers announced here.

Wednesday

09:00–10:00am
Breakfast

10:05–10:35am
The Irresistible Power of Strategic Storytelling with Kindra Hall

Strategic Storytelling Advisor at Kindra Hall
@kindramhall

Whoever tells the best story wins. In marketing, in business, in life. Going beyond buzzwords, Kindra will reveal specific storytelling strategies to create great content and win customers without a fight.

Kindra Hall is a speaker, author, and storytelling advisor. She works with individuals and brands to help them capture attention by telling better stories.

10:35–11:20am
29 Advanced Google Tag Manager Tips Every Marketer Should Know with Mike Arnesen

Founder and CEO at UpBuild
@mike_arnesen

Google Tag Manager is an incredibly powerful tool and one you’re likely not using to its full potential. Mike will deliver 29 rapid-fire tips that’ll empower you to overcome the tracking challenges of dynamic web apps, build user segments based on website interactions, scale the implementation of structured data, analyze the consumption of rich media, and much more.

Mike Arnesen has been driven by his passion for technical SEO, semantic search, website optimization, and company culture for over a decade. He is the Founder and CEO of UpBuild, a technical marketing agency focusing on SEO, analytics, and CRO.

11:20–11:50am
AM Break

11:55am–12:25pm
Engineering-As-Marketing for Non-Engineers with Tara Reed

CEO at AppsWithoutCode.com
@TaraReed_

Tara shares how to build useful tools like calculators, widgets, and micro-apps to acquire millions of new users, without writing a single line of code.

Tara Reed is a Detroit-based entrepreneur and founder of AppsWithoutCode.com. As a non-technical founder, she builds her own apps, widgets, and algorithms without writing a single line of code.

12:25–12:55pm
Persuasion, Data, & Collaboration: Building Links in 2016 with Kirsty Hulse

Managing Director at Manyminds
@kirsty_hulse

Securing links can be tough, and it’s not about how creative or productive or smart we are, but how persuasive we are. Kirsty will walk you through how to get clients and managers to say yes to your best ideas, how to get interesting, affordable data, how to get experts to collaborate with you, and how to create outreach emails that compel people to cover your campaign.

Kirsty Hulse is the founder of Manyminds Digital, a digital marketing agency made entirely of expert, independent resource. With a decade’s experience, she has defined search strategies for some of the world’s leading brands.

12:55–02:25pm
Lunch

02:30–03:15pm
Indexing on Fire: Google Firebase Native and Web App Indexing with Cindy Krum

CEO and Founder at MobileMoxie, LLC
@suzzicks

In the future, app and web content will be indistinguishable, and Google’s new Firebase platform allows developers to use the same resources to build, market, and maintain apps on all devices, in one place. Cindy will outline how digital marketers can use Firebase to help drive indexing of native and web app content, including Deep Links, Dynamic Links, and Angular JS web apps.

Cindy Krum is the CEO and founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.

03:15–03:45pm
Mind Games: Craft Killer Experiences with 7 Lessons from Cognitive Psychology with Sarah Weise

UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive
@weisesarah

How often are you asked to influence people to click a button? Buy a product? Stay on a page? We like to think of ourselves as logical, yet 95% of our decisions are unconscious. Sarah shares how to weave cognitive psychology concepts into your digital experiences. Steal these persuasive triggers to boost engagement, conversions, leads, and even delight.

Sarah Weise is UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive. She has crafted experiences for hundreds of websites, apps, and products. Over the past decade, she has specialized in creative, lean ways to connect with customers and build experiences that matter.

03:45–04:15pm
PM Break

04:20–05:05pm
Link Building’s Tipping Point with Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz
@randfish

Links still move the needle — on rankings, traffic, reputation, and referrals. Yet, some SEOs have come to believe that if we “create great content,” links will just appear (and rankings will follow). Rand will dispel this myth and focus on how to build the architecture for a link strategy, alongside some hot new tools and tactics for link acquisition in 2016.

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

07:00pm–12:00am
Wednesday Night Bash

There ain’t no party like a Moz party! It’s true. We invite all MozCon attendees to join us on Wednesday night until midnight at the Garage for pool, photos, bowling, karaoke, and more. Let’s relax and celebrate with all the new friends we’ve made.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Congratulations to our MozCon Ignite speakers!

MozCon Ignite is quickly becoming one of our favorite evening events. Trust me, you don’t want to miss this Tuesday night MozCon event where our community comes together to share ideas, heartwarming tales, hilarious fun, and more about their lives outside of business and marketing. All in 5-minute stories. If you don’t know what Ignite is, check out this 5-minute Ignite talk about what Ignite presentations are. This year, MozCon Ignite will be at McCaw Hall, home of the Seattle opera.

Our lineup (in alphanumerical order):

Help! I Can’t Stop Sweating – Hyperhidrosis with Adam Melson

Seer Interactive
@adammelson

With a love for all things digital, Adam Melson works for Seer Interactive as a team lead and has been there for over eight years. Outside of work, Adam loves running, hanging around his wife and baby, and sweats. A lot. Many people have a sweating problem. He’ll go into that problem and solutions for it.

Life Lessons Learned as a Special Needs Parent with Adrian Vender

Internet Marketing Inc
@adrianvender

Adrian Vender is a seasoned digital marketing and analytics consultant, currently acting as the Director of Analytics at IMI. Adrian has a passion for integrating technical solutions to marketing strategies to provide the best opportunity for campaign optimization. When Adrian decides to give up on working for the day, he can get lost in the world of Reddit or in quality family time.

How Pieces of Paper Can Change Lives with Anneke Kurt Godlewski

Charles E. Boyk Law Offices, LLC
@amkurt

After traveling and studying abroad in the Netherlands, Anneke Kurt Godlewski settled in Toledo not only to be close to family, but also because northwest Ohio has the most interesting and compassionate people, which has helped her career in community-based marketing and PR.

Anneke has been called an excellent cook (she’s just a great recipe-reader!), and she loves to take photographs, read, write, and give. She’s also a freelance writer and currently working on a memoir called The Curvy Catholic, which chronicles keeping faith after bad dates, self-acceptance issues, and crazy motherhood.

Prison and a Girl that Loves Puppies with Caitlin Boroden

DragonSearch
@caitlinboroden

Caitlin Boroden is a Senior Digital Marketing Strategist at DragonSearch in the beautiful Hudson Valley, NY. She is fascinated by SEO, photography, puppies, and has a slight addiction to Reddit.

My Year of Fuck It! with Daisy Quaker

AMSOIL INC.
@daisyquaker

Daisy Quaker is an Online Marketing Manager at AMSOIL INC. She leads in-house SEO, online advertising, marketing automation, and lead nurturing efforts. She moonlights as co-founder at NezLab. NezLab specializes in Online Advertising (AdWords) audits that help clients maximize the return on their online ad campaigns. She also makes a mean curry and tries to get seven hours of sleep every night.

A Plane Hacker’s Guide to Cheap *Luxury* Travel with Ed Fry

Hull.io
@edfryed

Ed Fry is a London-based marketer, employee #1 at inbound.org, and has just joined Hull.io as their first marketer. Outside of marketing, one of his favorite past times involves indulging in tea and scones at 35,000 feet.

Embracing Awkward: The Tale of a 5′ 10″ 6th Grader with Hannah Cooley

Seer Interactive
@hccooley

Hannah Cooley is an SEO manager at Seer Interactive in San Diego. (Yes, she knows Wil Reynolds. No, she doesn’t have his personal phone number.) She may have been the most awkward 6th grader on earth, a phase that never quite went away.

Hornets, Soba, & Friends: A Race in Japan with Kevin Smythe

Moz
@KevSmythe

Kevin Smythe is a trail runner based in Seattle. When not running in the mountains, he’s the controller at Moz, crunching numbers to provide balance to his life.

Wooly Bits: Exploring the Binary of Yarn with Lindsay Dayton LaShell

Diamond + Branch Marketing Group
@lindsaydayton

Lindsay Dayton LaShell is an experienced digital marketer, content strategist, and the founder of Diamond + Branch Marketing Group. She wishes she had six arms so that she could drink beer, scritch her dog, answer email, and knit a sock at the same time.

Finding Myself in Fiction: LGBTQUIA Stories with Lisa Hunt

Moz
@gentlethorns

Lisa Hunt is a Moz Helpster: the first to be hired outside of the U.S. and part of our small UK team. Before moving into support, she worked in retail as the manager of a bookshop. She was very disappointed to learn that they don’t teach you to read in your first year at primary school and insisted that her mum teach her instead.

Is Your Family Time for Sale? with Michael Cottam

Visual Itineraries
@Michael512

Michael Cottam is an independent SEO consultant from Bend, Oregon. Michael’s a full-time single dad of 9-year old Benjamin, and when not saving clients from the wrath and whim of Google, he takes Ben traveling around the world and exploring the great outdoors.

How to Start an Underground Restaurant in Your Home with Nadya Khoja

Venngage Inc.
@nadyakhoja

Nadya Khoja is the Director of Marketing for Venngage and online infographic maker. When she is not working on promoting the tool, she hosts trade-based dinner parties in her apartment in Toronto.

Flood Survival: Lessons from the Streets of ATL with Sarah Lively

Nebo Agency
@sarahinatlanta

Sarah Lively is a Senior SEO Specialist at Nebo Agency where she specializes in building online reputations and helping clients perfect their digital strategies. She is also considered to be an amateur meteorologist and spends most of her spare time studying rain patterns and hiding from storms.

How a Cartoon Saved My Life with Steve Hammer

RankHammer
@Armondhammer

Steve Hammer is the co-founder and president of RankHammer, the 2015 US Search Awards small agency of the year. He’s best known for his love of Adwords scripts and eating better than most anyone in Internet marketing.

It’s going to be a blast! Thank you to everyone who tossed their hats in the ring. Seriously, it takes courage to try.

Hope to see you all at MozCon! Make sure to buy your ticket, as we sell out in advance every year.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by CraigBradford

Strategy is hard enough if you understand it. It’s even harder if you don’t.

If you understand it, you realize it’s made up of many moving parts. If you don’t, the best you’ll come up with is some version of operational efficiency: building more links, writing more blog posts, making more video. Those activities aren’t strategies — and if you fail to differentiate your plan, you’ll find yourself forever chasing those who started before you, or falling behind better-funded competitors.

I enjoy strategy, both on the academic and theoretical side of things and in more practical opportunities helping our clients at Distilled. Below are some of the things I’ve learned along the way that you might find useful, especially if you’re a business owner, setting up marketing strategies, or a consultant. If you’re in more of an individual contributor role, you’ll receive the background and basis you need to understand how it all fits together and create a personal development plan towards building strategy.

Read on and you’ll have a better understanding of what strategy means, what type of strategy you need and how to make good decisions. For each section, I’ve included a reading list too.

What is strategy?

Good strategies are compounds, not elements.

Start here:

• What is Strategy?
• Making Marketing Strategy Easier

A good starting point for understanding strategy is an infamous article by Michael E. Porter – “What is Strategy?” It’s quite academic, but covers a lot of the key points. I recommend reading it a few times; it’s worth it.

To understand what strategy is, I like to use a chemical analogy of elements and compounds. A compound is a combination of two or more elements. In the case of a strategy, the activities would be the elements and the strategy would be the compound. I like this analogy for a few reasons:

Reverse-engineering a compound can be challenging

Many people fall into the trap of trying to copy a competitor’s strategy. This is bad for a number of reasons, but one in particular that I’d like to highlight: even if you think you know what a competitor’s strategy is from the outside, it can be very hard to copy successfully unless you know all of the individual details.

Much like a chemical reaction, different quantities of the same elements combined in different ways can produce very different results. Often, when people try to copy a strategy, they’re really just copying an element or activity.

Compounds are only as strong as their weakest link

Different strategies take different levels of energy to crack. In What is Strategy?, this idea is referred to as “activity systems” and “fit.” The example used is Southwest Airlines. Some people would try and describe a strategy as a slogan: “Southwest Airlines services price- and convenience-sensitive customers.” That might be true, but there’s not anything particularly advantageous about that idea. The competitive advantage comes from how they integrate:

“Through fast turnarounds at the gate of only 15 minutes, Southwest is able to keep planes flying longer hours than rivals and provide frequent departures with fewer aircraft. Southwest does not offer meals, assigned seats, interline baggage checking, or premium classes of service. Automated ticketing at the gate encourages customers to bypass travel agents, allowing Southwest to avoid their commissions. A standardized fleet of 737 aircraft boosts the efficiency of maintenance.”

This is what those individual pieces look like as part of a system:

Click to open a larger version in a new tab

The more stable the compound, the slower it reacts

A stable compound with lots of bonds, while strong and hard to copy, is slow to adapt if the market changes unexpectedly. Change forces managers to dismantle their existing resource systems and reassemble them in new strategic positions.

“For example, Liz Claiborne, an apparel company, relied on a positioning strategy in which production, distribution, marketing, design, presentation and sales resources were all tightly linked. But when the industry changed, the company’s relationships with department stores were disrupted. In an effort to adapt, Claiborne executives changed resources such as their “no reordering” process that had antagonized department stores. But since this process was synergistically entwined with other resources like overseas logistics and distant manufacturing locations, the “no reordering” process could not be undone without damaging system coherence. Financial performance sank precipitously. Only after Claiborne executives dismantled their existing resources and started reconnecting new ones did positive performance begin to return.”
– Source

All of the above is to say that the key to an effective and sustainable strategy is to focus on the integration of activities. Operational efficiency alone isn’t a strategy. A good way to sanity-check this is by asking why you’re doing an activity.

I like this slide from fellow Distiller Rob Ousbey, which puts some of theory into context in marketing strategy:

Making marketing strategy easier

What type of strategy do you need?

Start here:

• Which Strategy When?

The type of marketing strategy you use can (and should) change as the business requirements change. Two questions that are a good place to start:

1. How predictable is your market?
2. How malleable is the market (can you influence demand, needs, etc.)?

Based on your answers to those questions, there are choices. I like the wording from “Which Strategy When?”:

1. Position (fortress) – Positional-based strategies are best when you’re trying to defend a long-term position in the market. Strategies in this space involve deepening the activities and resources that you have within a particular area. This is best in markets where there isn’t a lot of change.
2. Leveraging strategy – Leveraging strategies are useful in markets where you have some influence on how the market moves and there’s less predictability. A chess analogy is a good one, since it’s not just about having the right pieces; it also requires making smart moves. A recent example that I love is the example of Google using Deepmind AI to reduce data center costs by 15%. That’s a pretty big deal.
3. Opportunity (surfing) – Opportunity strategies can be compared to surfing and waves; it’s hard to predict when they’ll come or how long they’ll last. Timing is important, and occasionally you get a good one. Being set up in a way that allows you to capitalize on opportunities as they arise is crucial.

It’s possible, probably recommended, to have some mix of all three. I like the graph that our R&D team use to explain this, shown below. The idea is that there are always trade-offs between the chance of success and reward.

Click to open a bigger version in a new tab

Picking a strategy and making decisions

Start here:

• The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
• Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy:
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
• The Big Lie of Strategic Planning
• Creating Your Digital Strategy

Closely related to the difficulty of strategy is the necessity to make choices. Strategy forces you to make decisions and explicitly cut off options. This can be difficult for a number of reasons. I talked about this in depth in my SearchLove Boston presentation, Creating a Digital Strategy:

One of the hardest things about strategy? Resisting the urge to do it all. The most obvious way this happens is by getting distracted by competitors. In the book The Secrets of Consulting, the first chapter introduces the idea of the law of strawberry jam: “the wider you spread it, the thinner it gets,” which is a nice way of saying that you can’t do it all. Every service or feature you add to your business has a cost of some kind. Trade-offs are a critical part of making sure your strategy is sustainable, because they protect from competitors trying to straddle multiple markets.

To go back to the previous example of Southwest Airlines, someone that tried to spread it far and thick was Continental Lite. By trying to copy Southwest and offer a low-cost airline solution while still trying to compete as a full-service airline:

“The airline dubbed the new service Continental Lite. It eliminated meals and first-class service, increased departure frequency, lowered fares, and shortened turnaround time at the gate. Because Continental remained a full-service airline on other routes, it continued to use travel agents and its mixed fleet of planes and to provide baggage checking and seat assignments.”
Source: What is Strategy?

If you haven’t made some trade-offs, your position probably isn’t sustainable and is open to imitation.

“Trade-offs ultimately grounded Continental Lite. The airline lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the CEO lost his job. Its planes were delayed leaving congested hub cities or slowed at the gate by baggage transfers. Late flights and cancellations generated a thousand complaints a day. Continental Lite could not afford to compete on price and still pay standard travel-agent commissions, but neither could it do without agents for its full-service business. The airline compromised by cutting commissions for all Continental flights across the board. Similarly, it could not afford to offer the same frequent-flier benefits to travelers paying the much lower ticket prices for Lite service. It compromised again by lowering the rewards of Continental’s entire frequent-flier program. The results: angry travel agents and full-service customers.”
Source: What is Strategy?

Other academic theories as to why copying competitors is a bad idea are covered in the Innovator’s Dilemma, which I also recommend reading.

The short version is that when competitors copy each other, the only person that wins is the customer. Over the long term, the more competitors converge, the more they look like each other and customers default to price to help choose between options. This drives prices down and squeezes margins.

To draw comparisons to the search space, I see this taking place in processes like keyword research. So many companies make a big list of keywords, then churn out average content that looks the same as every other article online about that topic. Don’t waste your time.

Advice for choosing a digital marketing strategy

Start here:

• Stop Worrying About Making the Right Decision
• You Can’t Be a Wimp—Make the Tough Calls

Don’t turn it into an optimization problem. There’s more than one right answer in the majority of cases. I like the advice Scott McNealy gives (he was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its CEO for 22 years). When asked how he makes decisions, he said:

“It’s important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about ‘making the right decision’ and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right.”
Source

What an amazing attitude! You can see how this applies at the later stage in strategy. Once you’ve gone through all of the possible scenarios, validated the ideas, and narrowed it down to the last couple, this is the stage where analysis paralysis takes effect and people naturally want to turn strategy into planning. Just pick one and focus on making sure it turns out a success. Another way to think about this: strategy is about placing bets and shortening odds of success. Remember that you can course-correct; strategy isn’t sniping. You can take more than one shot and iterate, so don’t be afraid to change.

With that in mind, I’ll wrap it up. Hopefully this was useful to some people. For a deeper dive into this, take a look at my SearchLove presentation, Creating Your Digital Strategy, which covers all of the above and in a more practical, process-driven way.

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