So here’s a question to ponder: how many times does a clock strike 12 each day?
Sometimes things so obvious to us as business owners. You’re in the business of selling children’s clothing, so your audience needs to have or know children, and needs to want to buy clothing for those children. Your company handles investment management? Obviously you want to talk to anyone who has some discretionary funds. Beauty Salon? Well, you need to speak to people who need their makeup or hair taken care of, right?
That at least is the business model that works in the brick and mortar world. Who’s walking into a children’s clothing store that has no connection to children? What kind of person goes to speak with an investment manager when they have no money to invest? Do women really go into a beauty salon when they are not ready for some personal attention?
Hey, but I don’t operate in the brick and mortar world. Search Engine Marketing by its very nature either exists entirely in the ether of the web, or integrates hard advertising into the Internet. While the purpose of Digital Marketing in many cases is to drive an audience towards a brick and mortar location, it is not confined to the physical rules of that location. And when you separate language from physical confines, you open the door to very significant changes in perception.
Which brings me back to my original question: How many times a day does a clock strike 12? The answers are 2, 24, and 26.
For an audience that thinks in analog, there is only one “12″ on the face of a clock. Within 24 hours, the big hand of a clock sweeps to that number 24 times; once each for the striking of every hour, AM and PM. A purist (or an engineer) might argue that both the big hand and the little hand sweep past that “12″ twice within the 24 hours of the day, hence the also-correct answer 26.
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- Digitally defined perception
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- For the Analogically inclined
For those living in the digital world, the answers are also 24 and 26, but for a slightly different reason than for analog thinking. On a digital clock, the number 12 appears 26 times during a 24-hour period; twice at midnight and noon, and once for every hour of the day at 12 minutes past the hour.
So why 2? Simply put, the language of the question begs a unique thought process. We are trained to think of “the clock striking” as the time of a particular time of day. If we say “Meet me when the clock strikes 12″, no reasonable speaker of the English language would ever think to ask beyond the most basic “AM or PM?” As far as we all are concerned, based upon that phrasing of the question the clock only strikes 12 twice a day.
By that same thinking, our business owner examples might want to seriously consider the implications of search questions like “skiing outfit on sale”, or “inexpensive sports car”, or “halloween party supplies”. Try and put yourselves in the mindset of the audience that is searching, and imagine if perhaps as a children’s clothing store you might want to catch the eye of someone going on a skiing trip, especially if they have children who need warm clothes while on that trip. What if the person looking for an inexpensive sports car could be shown how to finance that car and save some money by a sharp investment manager? Does the Halloween partier want the makeup expertise of your beauty salon for an extra-special Halloween face?
It’s not really thinking out of the box. It’s more about making sure that you do not say “no” to a potential customer simply by not being visible in their search space. If you know your audience, then you will know their range of needs for your products or services. And then you will not no them.
