Some reasons brands must change or risk going extinct, like the dinosaurs.
Many individuals find dinosaurs to be fascinating.
Being a dinosaur brand, however, makes you less attractive.
It’s the quickest way for you to lose favour with your client.
How Do Brands End Up Extinct?
No brand ever considers itself to be outdated or set in its ways.
However, many businesses act in ways that unwittingly risk making their brand obsolete:
- They could do it better.
- Their foundational and resource-constrained backlogs are holding up product advancements.
- Long-term projects (like SEO repairs) are neglected and left unattended year after year.
In other words, dinosaur brands lag, get ignored, stagnate, and finally become forgotten by customers.
Even well-known brands are susceptible to going extinct.
But how can you negotiate the evolving digital landscape while staying at the top of the figurative food chain in the long run?
Always be prepared to adjust to change, whether due to shifting markets, conditions, or search intent.
There is always change, and technology is evolving at an unequalled rate.
Unless you’ve been contrasting SEO recommendations from 2010 with those from 2022, you might assume things are going well. (However, Bill Slawski, who passed away in 2010, is the exception to this rule because even this blog post from 2010 contains wise counsel.)
Therefore, you may avoid errors that lead to dinosaur brand behaviour even if your company needs to catch up in marketing, operations, or SEO.
How Does a Dinosaur Behave As a Brand?
Dinosaur brand behaviour occurs when a firm (older one) works with outmoded thinking or is slow to embrace a more agile approach to implementing change, particularly in four areas that might otherwise promote sustainable growth for the brand:
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Collaboration
- Data
Strategy
Understanding one’s condition is necessary for strategic thinking to move to a more favourable one.
If a business wants to be viewed as strategic, it must be aware of how it sees itself and how its customers and rivals see it. It must also be mindful of whether it relies on inaccurate or out-of-date information or models.
Unfortunately, this difficulty frequently arises in the SEO sector, especially concerning dinosaur businesses. This is because commerce moved considerably more slowly before the Internet became widely used.
In the discipline of SEO, a plan cannot be established once and is effective for years to come, and it is based on technological developments.
Building your approach in 2010 based on SEO papers released that year, assuming you can move on to whatever is next, is dinosaur behaviour in a discipline like SEO. This antiquated method ignores how search is constantly changing (e.g., E-A-T and broad core updates).
Consumer awareness of the brand is the precise definition of brand awareness. However, if flexibility is a strategy, brands would benefit more from developing more self-knowledge and awareness of how they are viewed.
For instance, it is more than just an unproductive strategy when a brand people don’t see or hear from often attempts to utilise a marketing channel like SEO to grow organic traffic. However, it is also not a problem SEO is designed to address.
Consumers need to learn to look for that brand. Hence the brand has a problem with awareness.
Recall that SEO is not a route for creating demand. It satisfies a current need.
Because consumers are unaware that dinosaur brands still exist, they need help with awareness.
Tactics
The methods used to carry out plans, organise operations, or use marketing channels are known as tactics. Dinosaur behaviour appears as follows:
She was doing things that once worked but no more extended function (e.g., sending terrible outreach emails).
- It needs to be more readily providing customers with a method to terminate a payment plan.
- You believe that the content on your website is already competitive and doesn’t require any further investment.
- We are not launching a test influencer campaign to engage users on social media in the present era.
Being adaptable implies seizing contemporary chances, particularly in a dynamic medium like search.
How many firms altered their content to obtain a spot in those answer boxes when the People Also Ask feature first appeared as a SERP component?
How many websites are now making an effort to include additional E-A-T-related signals? At the risk of oversimplifying SEO, a company’s website would lose rankings and visitors if the material was never updated because search constantly changes.
Collaboration
SEO is a team sport as well as an investment.
SEO is not and shouldn’t be practised in isolation, particularly at the corporate level.
With the assistance of cross-functional teams, more SEO work is performed. The lack of execution, particularly on SEO measures essential to bolstering the technical site design and variety of content types required to attract organic demand, eventually causes dinosaur behaviour, which stifles collaboration.
Having products available for purchase online while a significant live broadcast event is going place has proven to be one of the aspects brands have found the most difficult to arrange and do correctly.
Because other marketing channels may be involved, such as social media posts and adverts, commercials, and live event sponsorships, customers may be enticed to look for and purchase an athlete’s or performer’s clothing at live events (such as sporting events or award shows).
A live event increases search demand, so cross-functional teams should plan for the sheer volume of opportunities months in advance. But many businesses (even those in the present era) continue to emphasise the well-known calendar holidays, holding deals on days like Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, or Christmas.
Just consider how many people watch events like a live musical performance, the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, or the Olympics together on their computers and mobile devices! Sadly, despite being a fantastic opportunity, it still presents a difficult obstacle.
I feel like more organisations are starting to recognise this kind of opportunity and are making more substantial inroads with teams to work in a more meaningful way that both delights (and is attentive to) customers in how they search and shop, bringing money to the bottom line in the process.
To capitalise on the search intent from direct-to-site and organic visitors, which can lead to purchases, corporate brands that are proactive in their adaptation will be able to capture revenue from live events that have been spent as media dollars in the future.
Data
Who among the leaders of SEO or omnichannel wouldn’t adore being able to highlight a campaign that included SEO, product, marketing, and media buying efforts?
Imagine relating the tale of how you connected everything:
“We spend X dollars on social media and streaming for the 4-5 months before this live event. On these category and product page URLs, we coordinated content optimizations in parallel, which resulted in X dollars in sales immediately after the event and a total of $$$ in the two weeks that followed.”
Holy sh*t! Celebrate, then do it again!
Marketers must operate from/with the best data and an omnichannel perspective for something like that.
A vast amount of information is at our disposal. The data can become excessively loud and valuable if it is regularly maintained, cleansed, untangled, and validated across channels.
As a result, dinosaur brand behaviour that disregards data hygiene appears as follows:
- Allowing outdated analytics platforms to continue to function without preparing for platform changes.
- Allowing analytics tags to accumulate in website code, slowing things down.
- Need to maintain or transition to a contemporary product data storage solution.
- Deterioration of product and customer data flows.
- Need to create documentation for the definition, configuration, and tagging of channel attribution.
The details are always where the devil is.
Asking questions that guide your company to the truth regularly can help it adapt and improve:
- How is the data organised?
- What does each attribute mean?
- Does the metric shown in this dashboard help us determine the best course of action?
The business has yet to perfect its analytic processes. But adaptation over time involves changing.
Your business might become more competitive as you move closer to having a complete grasp of all data inputs and outputs since you’ll be using information that is as accurate as it can be to run your operations.
Every brand must pay attention to those customer touchpoints, even though I’m oversimplifying the Omni space.
Websites need to be maintained in particular because it is the online store that customers will access on their phones or desktop and expect to be open around the clock.
A retail brand becomes extinct in the eyes of the consumer without reminders to them like a physical store or marketing like TV commercials; it becomes just another brand consumed by the “retail apocalypse.”
Keeping the brand grounded by receiving performance data provides an understanding if traffic has been fluctuating. By having a solid flow of well presented data, you can grasp the situation better, eventually optimising your website traffic and converting visitors to customers. Tools such as DMA Analytics allows you to receive these well presented data without the hassle of mobilising your internal teams.
If brand recognition is invested in, demand stays strong.
Because prospective buyers genuinely believe your brand no longer exists, it poses a significant risk to your brand.
Your brand has become extinct, much like the dinosaurs!
Ferguson remarked, “This is where the old marketing tale about Arm & Hammer baking soda comes into play. For many years, they were the preferred brand of baking soda, but eventually, people stopped baking as frequently. Instead of abandoning, the company looked at all the other ways customers used the product and leaned in that direction.
Ferguson continued, “Brands can do that now with content.” To stay relevant, “I’ve seen brands generate material that illustrates multiple ‘hacks’ for their product.”
DMA Branding & Identity Services helps to captivate customers with your alluring products and services. This will help you to stay on top of the game, giving you a competitive edge in the industry.
The Danger of Failing to Adjust to Shifts in Search Intent
Another harsh reality is that search intentions can alter over time.
To satisfy the changing demands of what and how people seek online, brands must continue to spend on altering their website content, in particular.
Simply put, demand speaks through search.
When entering a query into a search engine, a user’s primary intention is to perform a search. As an illustration, before the epidemic, most search intent for retail locations focused on geography (“near me”) and locating the opening hours.
Since 2020, search intent for retail businesses has altered nearly immediately to meet the demand from customers for new possibilities like “grocery delivery” or contactless “curbside pickup.”
The Google Trends data below compares the intent change surrounding a stable word like “in store pickup” to a new term that appeared at the beginning of the pandemic, “contactless delivery.”
Marketers have only been seeing in real-time as brands and companies adjust to the shift in consumer demand for their products and services over the past two years.
Adaptability is, without a doubt, the new competitive edge.
Don’t Skimp on Adaptability
In business, execution is critical.
Ideas drive brands.
You want your brand to be relevant at all times. The secret is always to be conscious of how people perceive your brand and to be prepared to change and do what is necessary to stay current.
SEO is the best person to ask about playing the long game because it mostly depends on execution in terms of technical advancements (crawling, indexing, speed, etc.), content, and links.
The most obvious example of dinosaur brand behaviour is when there is a lack of investment in the fundamentals of SEO that are connected to an adaptable strategy, tactics, data, and teamwork.
Create outstanding teams that support the maintenance of your brand’s dominance.
Small businesses like yours may improve every aspect of their search engine optimization with D’Marketing Agency assistance in order to rank better on search engines.
Wondering what we do? To find out more about our approach to search engine optimization, Contact D’Marketing Agency. When you’re ready, contact us so we can help with your SEO.
