Measure your failures
“We know we’re doing well because our web statistics tell us that we’re getting a lot of traffic from searches on beige widgets.” What’s wrong with this statement?
The speaker is focusing on their successes. This is a good strategy for ego reinforcement, but it’s a terrible way to find business opportunities. The biggest potential for growth lies in those prospects that either don’t visit your site or that visit without converting into customers. Your successful customer conversions represent only a tiny fraction of the available market unless you have the brand awareness in your market that Google, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola have in theirs.
There are various ways that organizations get caught up in this “myopia of success.” We have frequently encountered the example above where a company looks at their website analytics for evidence of their market size and direction for growth. From an SEO standpoint, this means looking at how well you’ve succeeded only on words for which you already have decent ranking. (Some companies will trumpet their success in their company name instead of products and services that they sell.) Your website statistics will not tell you anything about keywords for which you don’t rank, and these are typically the biggest opportunities. In the example above, they might rank well on “beige widgets”, but 10 times as many people might want blue ones. Their site stats won’t show any traffic for “blue widgets” if they don’t rank at all for that keyword.
Another common example of myopia of success is to rely on surveys of current customers and extrapolate to the broader market. Successful customers will give you answers consistent with what you do already. It is unlikely to tell you what obstacles everyone else encounters, thus the opportunities for market expansion.
It’s easy to see where the myopia of success comes from. We have data, or we can get it easily from customers we already know. Surely that data must be useful for something. Searching for real opportunities means understanding the limits of this information and pursuing that which will tell us how to really grow.
Pick a feed
