The three stages of digital marketing: when to start SEO
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See their case study linked in the end of the newsletter.
One of my favorite aspects of being a consultant and not a full-time employee is the number of people and diverse companies I get to meet.
I enjoy meeting investors and hearing about how they think through business models and startup founders with an electric passion that can be felt even in a virtual meeting. Still, most of all, I love meeting marketers with their unique marketing challenges.
(Plug: please reply/reach out if I can help you, even if it’s not SEO. My consulting efforts are focused on helping to develop products that grow search traffic; most companies I meet aren’t a fit, so I get to direct them toward better channels. I really do like thinking through marketing challenges, and I would be happy to put you in touch with experts across other disciplines who can help!).
Three stages of marketing
Throughout my years as a consultant, I have discovered that there are three distinct stages of digital marketing that must be followed. Still, too often, companies want to skip the steps and go right to the third stage, where they try to check the box on every channel simultaneously.
Progressing through the stages allows a company to manage its financial and human resources in the most efficient way possible, but more than that, each stage allows the teams to learn and grow from the previous stage.
In a previous newsletter, I said that most startups should not do SEO; as promised, this will not rebut that opinion; it will explain when they should do SEO. Obviously, I am a huge fan of SEO and derive most of my income from this channel; however, no one benefits from me recommending that they do SEO when it isn’t the right channel for them. In fact, I would prefer to convince them not to do SEO so they preserve political and financial capital for when it is an ideal time.
From my experience, the three stages of marketing are:
Acquisition
Growth
Experiment and expand
Acquisition
In the acquisition phase, new companies must acquire new customers to grow their revenue, meet a milestone, or learn about their product’s fit in the marketplace. The channels they choose should be the ones that acquire a high quantity of customers in the fastest and most efficient way possible. This isn’t the time to be cheap or slow.
Constraining marketing spend unnecessarily will make it take longer to learn how to acquire customers systematically.
At this time, the channels that the company uses are dependent on the product and category, but most of the time, I think paid marketing on Google/Meta or similar is the best bet. The advantage of paid marketing is that you can quickly learn what works and doesn’t.
The key metric to focus on at this stage is user growth, not profit.
Growth
The next stage is growth. During this stage, the company has a stable user base and hopefully a good sense of their ideal customer profile. They have also nailed down what each user should cost them. This knowledge can be used to expand even if those new users might cost more. Now, they can use more diverse digital marketing to find more users like the ones they already have.
At this point, I still think paid marketing is the best, but this is also where a company might even bring offline ideas into the mix. Paid marketing with lookalike audiences will be highly effective now that there is a better sense of who the best user might be.
This might be when they could also start using SEO to build on some of their success in paid channels. Building out supporting SEO efforts might be advantageous if they have identified a set of queries that convert well in paid marketing. For many companies this still could not be the right time for SEO if there isn't a logical path toward breakeven on this channel.
Breakeven is important because at this growth stage, money and time spent on a non-profitable channel will inevitably take resources from profitable channels.
Experimentation
The last channel is experimentation. This is when a company has a well-worked machine driving users and growth and has the budget flexibility to try something new.
This is the stage where too many companies who figured out a great playbook for performance marketing early on must start finding other channels.
While paid channels can be very effective, relying on only one channel forever is risky. I meet many late-stage or even public companies that have perfected paid marketing but are too risk-averse to try anything else. I do my best to point out that trying to find other channels is less risky than it is to continue relying on only one channel or even a single platform. Just ask the companies that relied on Twitter advertising as their main channel only to have that rug pulled away from them.
When it is unclear how effective an SEO strategy might be for user growth or if the SEO investment is substantial, this is the best time to begin exploring it.
When a company experiments with a new channel, it should view it as an investment rather than marketing, hopefully giving this channel more time to mature. For example, from my experience, a great SEO investment could take the better part of a year before it drives meaningful results. If this investment were measured like a paid marketing campaign, it would end before it had enough time to show results.
Recap
Marketing efforts should be sequenced rather than a done-all-at-once effort. There is a time and place for every channel to be most effective, and expectations around what each channel can do for the overall goals should be stated and managed from the outset.
I have broken these stages into three, but some might see this as two or even ten. Regardless of how marketing is sequenced, it should be done in a way that iterates and improves rather than throwing everything at the wall.
As I said in that prior post, SEO might be the best fit for a business model, but it might not be the best time to invest in it until a company is more mature.
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