There has never been a better time to be in marketing, and to be a CMO.
That’s because a CMO has never had more data to drive decisions. And marketing today is all about orchestrating digital experiences – if you aren’t leading with a digital strategy, well, then you simply aren’t leading. And the best part – digital experiences are fundamentally measurable. Or can be. And should be.
I remember the day this was made blindingly obvious. I remember the day like it was yesterday, but it was really close to three years ago.
The woman that ran search marketing on the demand gen team came into my office – which she only did when she had something really important to share – not because she wasn’t welcome, but she had no time for fluff. She loved what she did and what she did was figure out how to optimize what we did in marketing. She started telling me a story.
Before sharing her story, let me tell you a bit more about her. I’ll call her Mollie to protect her identify (I use Mollie because I think that’s simply an awesome name).
Mollie is the kind of person you dream about being on your team. Profoundly curious. A voracious learner. No ego. Lets data and learning drive her decisions and behavior. I have lost count of the number of times she’d pulled me aside to disclose (a) she’d identified a significant source of opportunity or risk, (b) she’d spent a fair amount of time researching how to unlock this opportunity or address the risk, and (c) she’d run enough experiments to confirm the plan she’s proposing will work. All I had to do was ask a few questions (which she had answers to) and say “yes, let’s go.”
So on this day, Mollie mentioned that she had observed that some of our best trafficked awareness and engagement pages had been benefiting from heavy SEO-based revisions. That seems kind of obvious. But here’s where she demonstrated true insight. She’d asked herself “what if every page we developed began first with the SEO strategy – not with a talented writer using Word offline to create what we publish – and then we let performance testing tune (edit) the copy?”
She’d taken the initiative to find out. She’d picked one of our pages written solely by a talented copy-writer (and was destined for future SEO optimization) and created a substitute page, which she herself had written from scratch on the same topic, but started with the terms we wanted to optimize the page for. Then she let the data tell us what to do next.
What she learned was that the SEO-originated copy outperformed the traditional “write first, optimize later” page by a factor of 10x.
What she proposed we then do was to convert all of our copy writing to “SEO-first.” Which meant cycling through our contractor pool to determine who could do this, and replace the ones who couldn’t. It meant changing the process for all the in-house copywriters.
It meant, as Mollie put it, that “data is our copy editor now.”
It was one of the easiest decisions I had to make as a CMO. The curiosity, the experimentation, the data made it obvious.
It fundamentally changed everything we did. Not only did this improve the search performance of the new pages we created, it changed how we curated all of existing content. We no longer had “static” copy on our website, of any kind. White papers are now routinely revised for SEO performance.
Every page is a living document, revised for search performance as algorithms and search term popularity evolves. Every page has data as its copy editor.
Tags: inbound marketing, marketing, SEO
Open Ambition 
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