Revisiting Why Digital Gatekeepers Kill Organic Traffic (Thinks Out Loud)

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Digital gatekeepers always work to get between you and your customers. That was true five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago. And it’s still true today. They kill organic traffic to raise their revenues and gain greater profits. That hasn’t changed in decades, and I don’t believe it’s going to change anytime soon.

What can you do about it? How can you bypass the gatekeepers and grow your business? That’s what this repost of a prior Thinks Out Loud episode is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Revisiting Why Digital Gatekeepers Kill Organic Traffic (Thinks Out Loud) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

• Why Google is the Beast That Scares Your Industry’s 800-lb. Gorilla (Thinks Out Loud Episode 238)
• The Hotel Marketing and Distribution Trend You Care About Most This Year
• In a Digital World, Is Every Company a Technology Company? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 236) –
• Will Digital Turn Every Business Into a Service? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 235) –
• What Netflix’s Struggles Can Teach You About Your Digital Strategy (Thinks Out Loud Episode 347)
• The Empty Promise of Data Moats | Andreessen Horowitz
• Is Content Still King or Have the Gatekeepers Won? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 328) – Tim Peter & Associates
• Content is King, Customer Experience is Queen (Thinks Out Loud Episode 188) – Tim Peter & Associates
• Marketing at the Speed of Digital (Thinks Out Loud Episode 215)
• How to engage your hotel’s secret sales force
• An AI Day in the Life of a Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434)
• Revisiting How to Diversify Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud)
• Will Marketers Bet that Google Wins the AI Economy? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 433)
• Building Plans for an Uncertain Future — Big Tech Earnings Q2 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 431)

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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• Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including:
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Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 20m 41s

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Transcript: Revisiting Why Digital Gatekeepers Kill Organic Traffic

If you’ve listened to this show for any amount of time, you know that I believe gatekeepers are the single biggest risk your business faces. Always. I usually lump those gatekeepers together under the mantle of big tech. I also refer to them as AgFam. You know, the AgFam. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft.

Because those guys are the biggest gatekeepers at the moment. And they are hurting your business every day. They’re far from the only ones. In travel, you’ve got Booking.com and Expedia. In entertainment, you’ve got Netflix and Spotify and Live Nation and YouTube, and so on. Every industry has gatekeepers.

The job of those gatekeepers is to build a wall between you and your customers and control the only gates that let those customers through. They then charge you a fee. A toll, a tax, every single time they let someone through, always. That’s their whole business model. And yes, some of them are facing antitrust investigations and regulatory oversight and the like.

I would argue, though, that they’re mostly holding their own in those cases. Even Google’s recent antitrust lawsuit is going to need until next year, next August, before the penalty phase, after which they’re going to appeal, they’re going to fight this case. All the way that they can, all the way to the Supreme Court, because they can’t afford not to.

Their entire business depends upon being able to charge a toll, to charge a tax to you for every customer they let through. And while they’re fighting this, before we even get to that point, you’re still paying a toll for every customer they let through the gate. For all of them, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Booking.com, Expedia, Netflix, Spotify. The AI companies are going to want to do it too at some point, though they’re not there yet. But that’s the whole gig. That’s what you try to do. Ben Thompson refers to it as aggregation theory. You aggregate demand, and then you control who you let it pass through to, and the people you let it pass through to are people like you.

So what can you do about it? How can you compete in this environment, especially as a smaller company? Well, that’s the subject of a prior episode, which I’m going to repost for you right now, all about digital gatekeepers, the death of organic traffic, and what you can do about it. I hope you give it a listen, and I hope you enjoy it.

Well, hello there everyone, welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital marketing expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. And as ever, I really appreciate you tuning in.

It means so much to me to have you here. Now, today we’ve got a lot to cover. We need to see the show notes for this one. There’s like, I don’t know, 30 links in it or something along those lines. because there’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot. You know, I talked about this weeks ago, in the episode, why Google is the beast that scares your industry’s 800 pound gorilla, And a piece I wrote both for Hotel News Now, as well as the blog, all about how,Google really represents the hotel marketing and distribution trend you care about most this year.

But I want to make this less about Google. And more about the rise of gatekeepers generally, how digital is beginning to enable gatekeepers in ways we’ve not seen in the past. Now, obviously Google is one of the biggest gatekeepers there is. But so is Facebook. So is Instagram. Obviously, Instagram being part of Facebook.

So is YouTube. Oh wait, that’s part of Google. And so is Amazon, which isn’t part of any of those, but certainly competes head to head with them. And I think we can say the same about Apple, as well as Android, which, oh yeah, that’s Google again. You’ve heard me talk about Apple, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, others in the past and how much control that they have and how much they.

I don’t want to say get in the way between you and the customer and your customer, but certainly they represent a gatekeeper between you and your customer. And I’m going to focus mostly on Google in this discussion, but everything I’m going to say here applies equally to Facebook. It applies equally to Amazon.

It applies equally to Apple. And it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about search or social or mobile or apps. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about search or mobile or apps. When there is a single gatekeeper or just a few gatekeepers, suddenly the world changes. I mean, you could talk about Netflix and it is the same way if you’re in make video,Steam or Epic, when we talk about video games, Archive and Elsevier, when we’re talking about, you know, academic papers, these are all the new gatekeepers.

And a lot of the changes we’re seeing are related to the fact that these gatekeepers have a lot of power, have a lot of control, you know, everybody’s famous, everybody’s familiar with Stuart Brand’s famous saying that all information wants to be free, but it seems increasingly like we have to turn that saying on its head and say, does all information want a paywall?

You know, if you think about it, even Google’s ads are a paywall of a kind. So I’m going to kind of break this down for you. And I think why this is so important. And I want to start with a fantastic article written by Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media Studios. It’s a tremendous, tremendous article for those of you who care about Google and search and things along those lines.

But he has done a brilliant job of archiving and cataloging how Google’s changes to the search results are changing how customers find you. So he gives three examples of how the number one ranking has changed, not in terms of ranking on Google search results, but instead in terms of placement. Where the average placement of the three examples he provides, the number one ranking has dropped roughly about 570 pixels lower on the consumer’s screen than where it was three or four years ago.

So three separate examples, it doesn’t matter where it was placed. These were all number one, but number one moved from being somewhere around 350 pixels on the screen 350 pixels from the top to being roughly about 920 pixels from the top on the screen. As he says brilliantly, rankings are durable.

Placement is not. Now what’s causing the drop? Well, the fact that Google has added maps and ads, other Google features like related questions, featured snippets, videos, and so on, where what you’re seeing is we just keep getting pushed lower in organic terms in favor of either other Organic Types of Media, Maps, Featured,, Featured Snippets, et cetera, or Paid Media like Ads, or as we’re starting to see, there’s a tremendous, um, article about this on Search Engine Land, things like Ads, For my business listings or ads on maps.

And I’m going to link to these in the show notes, various examples of these. Now, this shouldn’t come as any surprise to you. Again, this is something I’ve been talking about going back a long, long ways. I’ve got, I’ll put some links in the show notes,dating back to, I think, 2011.a Biznology article that talks about whose brand does Google want to build, which of course the brand they really want to build is Google.

And,I, this one just struck me as funny, given the topic of today’s show, titled should marketers really trust Google in 2014? And if I could read one quick excerpt from that post, You know, I’d written at the time that these changes effectively reduce your opportunities to get in front of customers via organic search, RSS feeds, and email.

These were changes to Google reader, Google, changes to,Gmail. Etc. But I also said at the time, now none of this is evil. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google all have a right to do whatever they believe is best for their business. And as public companies, one could argue, have a responsibility to their shareholders to increase revenues and profits however they’re able.

So this isn’t new. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. This is something that’s been ongoing for years. You know, again, the oldest post I’m linking to today goes back to April of 2011, so this really shouldn’t come as a shock to you, but what’s increasingly important is the fact that Google has. Made more and more changes that make it more and more difficult for you to show up in front of your customers when you want, quote unquote, for free.

And you’re going to see your costs rise. Unless of course, you’re smart about how you react to this and do some really simple. But really intelligent things to continue to do well, even as these changes occur. You know, so a few things I want to talk about that you can do to adapt to this reality, you know, the first is thinking.

Pay attention to how your customers react to the changing marketplace. Pay really close attention to where your traffic comes from on your site. Are you seeing a drop from organic? Are you seeing a drop from organic channels? And I mean, organic search, organic social, things along those lines to understand, is it affecting you yet?

In all likelihood, it is. If in fact it is, you need to be really clear on where are the biggest drops and what do you need to do to address that. You also need to think in terms of growing your email list. That’s incredibly, incredibly important. If you’ve noted the growth of email newsletters over the last couple of years, most of that, in fact, is driven by reporters, journalists,writers, thinkers, publishers, et cetera, saying, we don’t want to be dependent upon email.

These giants like Google or Facebook or any of those other players, for the bulk of our traffic, we need to connect with them directly. The other thing you need to do is pay close attention to improving your conversion rates. The reality is it’s always going to cost you something to get customers to come to your sites.

No matter where they come from, if you’re doing it through organic search, if you’re doing it through organic social, if you’re doing it through any of the other things that I’m going to talk about in a moment, there’s at a minimum, a labor cost associated with it. And so you damn well better make sure that when customers come to your site, they convert.

It doesn’t matter whether they come to your website. It doesn’t matter whether they call you. It doesn’t matter whether they walk into a store or, you know, work through one of your third party channels. The reality is that every lost opportunity increases your cost. So you want to take a close look at where those customers come from and how effective you are at turning those direct contacts into action, into revenues and into profits.

You really want to work on improving those results. So you continue to get the best return on your spend. You also want to look at ways to unleash what I’ve always referred to as your secret sales force. And what I mean by your secret sales force are your best customers. How do you turn your customers into advocates for your business?

It’s one of the reasons why customer experience is queen is a constant mantra of mine. It’s all about helping customers have a great story to tell, how, how you can get them to participate in the creation of a positive brand story for you and share with their friends and family and fans and followers, whether it’s via email or social or texting, or just talking to them on the street about how much they like working with you to build your business.

It’s You can also look at building a dedicated referral program or an advocacy program for your business to engage that secret sales force even more effectively. And when we’re talking about our secret sales force, another portion you want to consider are your employees. Look at how you can engage your employees in addition to your customers in telling that positive brand story.

You know, there are tools like LinkedIn Elevate for building those employee engagement programs and are well worth taking a look at. And of course, the other thing you need to do is look at applying agile or lean practices to your business. When you’re in a rapidly changing environment, that’s not, that’s not something that’s going to change anytime soon.

I’ve talked about how speed is the biggest change we’ve seen in marketing and it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down anytime soon. So, the best response isn’t necessarily to just anticipate every possible change, but instead to learn how to quickly respond, even if you’re anticipating, because maybe you don’t always get it right.

And so when we talk about things like Agile or Lean or Scrum or other IT development methodologies that have become fairly popular over the last bunch of years, those also work for digital marketers and digital strategists and can help you adapt more easily, more efficiently, and more effectively.

That’s incredibly important. And of course, the last thing you need to do is keep learning. Obviously this isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple are going to do whatever they need to do to do what’s right for their customers. And more importantly for their business, you need to do the same.

And so that’s why you want to focus on continue learning, improve your conversion rates, engage your secret sales force, enlist your employees, test and learn, and just keep learning.