media seo analytics | push2digital

ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #3: SACRIFICE ACCURACY FOR DIRECTIONALITY IN YOUR TALK-TRACK

That’s right, I said it. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle famously suggests, “you can’t know both precisely where you are and how fast you are going at the same time.” And for the purposes of communicating with your executives, they tend to care a lot more about how fast you are going (direction) as opposed to absolute precision and accuracy of where you are right now. Craig Macdonald, Covario’s CMO says, “they don’t want to know the gruesome details of how you make the sausage.” It’s amazing how many times the search marketers get dragged into the trap of providing down to the dollar estimates of accuracy on a $100K or $1M budget, but then forget to highlight that their search returns are growing at roughly 30% while the best the other media channels can offer are 5% growth rates. The illusion and supposed comfort of accuracy ends up obscuring the core message, and the budget requests or strategic decisions are deferred or denied.

Keep in mind -- sacrificing accuracy doesn't mean incorrect data, the post here is suggesting that if you let your key decision maker get lost in the weeds of the exact details that may be familiar to you, you risk that he/she misses the overall impact of the stuff they really care about.

That stuff is what Russ Mann calls the "directional" info your stakeholders care about -- is audience up or down, is growth increasing or declining. Speak in the data terms they care about, which might mean you skip the underlying data that drives it.