I was sitting in a meeting the other day with a client and I could tell some of the people in the room had an approach to distributing content on the web which was very different than mine. Frankly, I like situations like these. It may be frustrating when they think you're speaking Greek, but you can learn a lot about other, completely valid, ways of thinking.

The general scenario is that our client has a well-established business producing relatively short video segments for their clients and now they're trying to make a proper jump into distributing that video content on the web. They've tried a number of things in the past, but now they're really trying to do it properly.

After quizzing them for a while, trying to tease out where they're coming from, it seems that they have a strong bias for paid placement (aka "media buys") - building a public web site that's well SEO'd isn't even on their radar. They currently have public web pages, but when I asked them why the pages exist the best answer was "we put them up because our competitor had public pages", which everyone in the room knew wasn't a good reason for having them (not that another argument couldn't be made for keeping them).

Our client still wants to reach the public via the web, they just don't don't see a public web site with organic or viral traffic as the way to go. Why? Because the results are too unpredictable. Some of the video segments may do well with organic and viral marketing, but others will fall flat on their face. What they need to present to their clients is predictable results - even if in certain cases those results aren't as good as organic results.

Plus with media buys they can even use comScore data to do demographic targeting. Given their situation, it's hard to argue with the logic... They need to be predictable and things that are organic or viral are anything but predictable - at least on a project by project basis.

Bottom line, our client does need to focus on media buys, but at the same time I'm going to encourage them to also put up a well optimized and properly promoted public web site. Media buys may be predicable, but you'll never hit a home run with them. Plus, in the grand scheme of things the public web site will be relatively inexpensive to deploy since they're already developing the content for other purposes. What they'll get with organic traffic is a highly-targeted audience with an existing interest in whatever it is our client's clients are trying to promote.

Tags: SEO/SEM
Categories: Advertising, SEO/SEM