Sociology, the Backbone of Marketing

Just the other day, I was in an interview that made me realize how little people know about the basics of marketing in regard to SEO and how it was developed. I always go into an interview as if they are going to hire me. Professional, motivated, and straight-forward. Everything was going great until I got rhetoric that likes to creep up on you every so often at an interview. While the interviewer liked my writing style, he mentioned that he wasn’t sure where I would fit into the company in regard to marketing.

Everyone at some part of their careers has experienced this type of interview. They are interested in meeting you, the talent, but curious and unsure about actually bringing a technical writer on board. Almost as if they were star struck and suddenly the star dust faded. Wondering if a circle could fit into a square hole if they brought you in for a meeting. Let’s say, you are a great fit, but it’s the hiring company that should change from being a square to a circle. It’s all about having the right perspective. Content may not be the most important part of optimization, but it is the most valuable. With the coming millennial generation altruism, transparency, and relativity is everything to them in regard to a company’s voice and image.

From the Island of Misfit Toys

Most companies don’t realize they need you because you are misunderstood. People who don’t understand marketing and are interviewing you may view you as Hermey the Elf from the Island of Misfit Toys. Where does a copywriter fit exactly? For instance, I’ve been let go from temp writing gigs because I over delivered. I have a strong SEO background so when someone tells me to write with SEO detailing, I am going to turn out the best SEO copy. But sometimes companies are not doing any analytics for their services or products so there is no SEO database to work with. I’ve had to spend time pulling sources together to produce the best SEO content. Over time, I’ve learned that when some people literally say they want “SEO copy” they really mean:

Throw something together that sounds SEO-ish so we can hurry up and get this on the website.

In the end, they wonder why traffic is low on their site and if hiring a writer was a waste of time.

It’s almost as if SEO is some illicit drug they’re all sprinkling in cyberspace hoping the fiends will come out and feed.

I don’t care what it says. Just throw an SEO word in there so we can make it live on the site. In fact, comb through all the descriptions that were written before you got here and throw something SEO in there.

My friend (I really mean this out of sympathy for you), SEO doesn’t work like that. On its own, it isn’t some magic pill that will instantly make your website go from drab to fab. If your website doesn’t have the magic in the first place, then you have a lot of work to do.

Quality Over Quantity

For the search engine it’s about value, not squishing ranking keywords together like clowns in a VW Bus. A great website will have a heavy weight on unique content. This is why writers should be more valued in marketing. We should get paid in line with the rest of the marketing team and not base minimum or minimum wage in some rare cases of my own. (You know who you are.) We are the magic makers along with a great marketing team. A great writer will give a blank screen personality as the words fill up. They will craft a unique voice for your company that no one else has. Just let me sit in my captain’s chair, sip some morning tea, and get a feel for who you are.

In the beginning of my SEO experience, I wrote for people who did not know what clicks-per-page was. Being fairly new to marketing I really didn’t know how to answer their curiosity. I just figured if they had a great database and web developer, then the site would work for itself. I wrote content into their public databases, put what I thought was SEO (women’s shoes, stiletto heels, men’s sneakers, etc), filled out the meta tags, and called it a day. As I grew in my experience and was hired alongside some amazing marketing teams, I learned firsthand what all of SEO entails. I am grateful for those companies and people who took me in from the dark, cold interwebs with very little experience, but believed in my capacity to get it based on my hands-on experience with SEO when it was just a brick-and-mortar concept to most small online businesses and blogs.

There is an emphasis on detail and technicality where information technology and marketing merge. Without a well-built site, marketing is pointless. I would like to say this merging is the bones while sociology is the muscle. Some eyebrows may have perked up at that last statement. I promise to prove my well-overlooked point. Just keep all phalanges and toes inside the ride until we come to a complete stop.

A Skeptical Future

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned I stepped out of an interview where they weren’t sure where I would fit if they hired me. They did compliment me by saying that it looks like I have a talent for helping companies find a unique voice based off of the samples I gave them. They even said perhaps that should be a role in and of itself for their team. Then they asked me what is my SEO experience within my writing career. I explained to them what I explained to you all above. I made a point to say SEO is great for generating traffic.

That’s when the curve ball came that made me realize they only understand a small part of marketing. They posed the question of while it looks like I know a lot about pulling users into an experience by following best practices, but what about things like direct mail that would be more of a reaching out experience and not pulling in? To me, this is a conundrum, because it’s all circular. The snake of marketing always circles back to bite its tail.

It All Boils Down to Sociology

Search engines base SEO off of what the users are typing into them for certain industries. These words and phrases become available for the copywriter to use in websites. This SEO content becomes like a magnet drawing people in who are searching under the same terms that the copywriter is using on the website. Like attracts like. SEO content is based off of real users and the copywriter’s creativity fills the spaces in between those keywords and phrases. It’s all about permutations, baby. Using key words several different ways to produce the same outcome — getting your website to the top of a search engine’s ranking. Google maps marketing works much the same way.

Is Google Stalking Me?

During this part of my interview, I let the interviewer know that whether the message is meant to drive traffic or send out for direct emails the science is still the same. Say you have a Venn Diagram. One circle is for outgoing messages and the other is for incoming traffic. In the middle where the circles overlap is sociology. Search engines have invested a ton of money into how people think en masse. Based on these studies they can predict how people will search for, say, a plumber. These search engines will also know what ads to display on random websites for the user based on their searches.

Really, all these studies ever were was letting the user type what they were searching for into Google and Google recording it. Let’s face it, a bit of stalking had to be done in order to get to know the public. Point is, whether you’re sending information out or wanting to generate incoming traffic you’ll want to use those keywords and phrases that Google has collected and people are already using and familiar with. Google created the wheel, if you will, and you’re not going to reinvent it. Unless, you can create the partnerships and amass the resources they have to drive people to use your search engine. If that’s the case, don’t let me get in your way.

Google Marketing Platform

You have users that Google is studying and making a killing off of just by collecting the most commonly used words and phrases for whatever industry they are searching for. That’s why most times you can type something into Google, and it will autofill the rest of what you are searching for. If I didn’t know any better, I would tell you Google has a crystal ball and is reading my mind. In reality, they’ve studied a massive amount of people, behaviors and how those intersect with culture. You have to understand culture to understand context and how people search. Is this not sociology in a nutshell?

It’s obvious to me, but I did study sociology in college, so I’ll give you a break. Psychology is the study of the individual where sociology is the study of the group. Would you rather appeal to the individual and micromanage them or would you like to become a commercial success and appeal to the audience? I’m surprised more marketing majors don’t find the correlation. Commercial writers know how to appeal to a massive amount of people, but are overlooked because of the lack of understanding of this basic marketing principle. Big time.

At the end of my interview the interviewer thanked me for explaining these details to them. They said,

“We didn’t know this other side of marketing.”

They felt confident enough at this point to email me information about a client of theirs so I could write up some campaign samples for them. I thanked them back. My voice started to sound monotonous from driving my point home, but I was thankful I had that epiphany. You learned well, young getting older grasshopper.

Google Digital Marketing

If you are looking to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM) skills in order to improve your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), then I highly suggest Google Digital Garage. It’s free and just as good as the paid programs I’ve trained in for multi-million-dollar advertising firms. It’s a great place for Google marketing kits and tools, as well as Google marketing certification.