At Dinkum Interactive, we perform a large number of tasks requiring expertise in SEO, PPC, Web Design, Email Marketing, and others. This is a valuable set of skills for our clients but it’s not the reason they hire us. Our goal with each client is to support the development of a sophisticated internet marketing culture at their company/organization. That is our true purpose and value.
Over the last six months, Dinkum’s three partners – me, Rick Simmons, and Paul Fleming – have been working with business “change-agent” Steve Smolinsky to figure out who we are as a company and what it is that we offer – an especially difficult task in an industry that looks completely different every year or two.
Here’s our 30,000 foot view of our purpose:
- Our Passion is to empower our clients with measurable strategies that simply work.
- Our Niche is that we guide, nurture, and lead the development of a healthy and effective internet marketing culture.
Did you notice those two statements don’t mention any one channel or activity? Excellent. So the question is: why do we have to go and create internet marketing cultures? Can’t we just be like any other client-vendor relationship and get hired to do SEO, analytics, reporting, and the like? Our answer is no and this is why:
- Internet marketing is heavily dependent on strategy – if you don’t have a good recipe in place, it’s much less effective to start garnishing the dishes, let alone firing up the burner to get the water boiling. In fact, it often results in failure – the common analogy is when we’re asked to drive quality, qualified traffic at a website that doesn’t properly communicate the service/product our client offers. In summary: you can’t do internet marketing in a vacuum – at least not very well.
- It’s the forest, not the trees – while our corporate structures and marketing plans would prefer the ability to isolate activities from each other (SEO, PPC, outreach, client communications, website design, etc), the trajectory of the internet has emphatically pointed us in the other direction. Just ask any SEO “what it takes” to consistently rank highly with Google for terms that convert and they’ll paint you a picture that’s interconnected and holistic. Google, in fact, is telling us to nurture all aspects of our internet ecosystem (social, content, code structure, website speed, incoming links, and more) in order to earn the right to be highly relevant.
- Internet Marketing is Autocatalytic – if you read Jared Diamond or cool blogs like this, you might know the term “autocatalytic”. It’s a term that describes technological evolution as self-accelerating, in which innovations beget further innovations at a faster and faster rate, with the results of each innovation allowing more and more discoveries (ever hear of something called Moore’s law?!?). Our experience has shown that the more a company embraces a sophisticated and informed (strategic) view of internet marketing, the more it can be successful at tapping into its potential online because it suddenly has a much more expansive list of adjacent possibilities. Whether due to better search engine rankings, a nurtured social presence, a more qualified and intuitive staff, or established high-quality vendor relationships, a strong foundation in all aspects of internet marketing enables outsized results to happen more quickly and cost-effectively.
Fostering a A Pragmatic Approach
When we first began working with the Steve Smolinsky six months ago, our company was in the middle of its 4th year of double-digit growth. We were “super busy”. He convinced us that it was worth taking the time (full day sessions, weekly 90 minute meetings, preparation and tracking efforts) to get our company’s core drivers in place so that we could grow faster, better, and stronger with less effort, less investment, and less issues.
We listened mainly because it’s what we had been telling our clients about their approach to the internet: get your foundation in order, raise the level of the conversation internally, make sure you have the correct vendors and capital in place – in essence, we wanted them to craft a winning strategy so that they could start running instead of crawling.
Taking the time to build a robust and healthy internet marketing culture isn’t just profitable – it’s highly pragmatic. Our belief is that once you have the core elements in place, you begin to see outstanding results at lower costs and are more able to evolve quickly and successfully to meet new challenges or opportunities online.
Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1131288
