Marketing is a collection of many moving parts working together; the only way for marketing efforts to be successful is if the parts are optimized. Marketing is similar to a car traveling down a street.  You have a dashboard, engine, fuel and other numerous supportive, critical parts, such as seats. (I once drove a car that had an upside down bucket for a seat.  It was fine until the first turn, followed by an almost complete disaster.)

In this example, the car starts from zero, much in the way marketing efforts begin online. Assuming you wish to drive the speed limit, you have several options for how to achieve your cruising speed. You can rev the engine and get to 60mph quickly, which is the fast course of action but certainly not the most fuel-efficient. Or you can gradually accelerate, holding your miles/gallon indicator steady at 30 mpg.

A marketing dashboard is similar to the one in your car; your marketing barometers include CPO (miles per gallon), an indicator of efficiency; conversions (speed), an indication of volume and sustainability. Budget (or fuel capacity) is also crucial, especially when we want to ramp up our efforts for long-term success (or go really fast and have a big highway in front of us.)

In order to keep all these factors working together towards the health of your company, and overall business goals, you need a marketing framework. A framework can provide goal sales volume, at CPO limits, for a specified period of time. A framework can also take into account the various demands placed on a business, those of a financial and goal-growth nature, and the expectations of your customers.

If we return to the car metaphor, we can clearly see those that are slower to perform and those that have the power and fuel to achieve success. These are the Starbucks and the Wal-Mart’s of the world, with seemingly endless capacity and drive.

There are always issues of course.  We have seen the management insistent on reducing costs while the vehicle has yet to reach the goal. Unfortunately, cutting costs (or limiting our drive toward goal) has serious effects.  Picture this: We started out 10 mph getting 5 mpg.  We are accelerating and bleeding off efficiency to grow sales. (Just like a company, a car is naturally inefficient when accelerating.) We can slow down and save valuable mpg but at a cost of time.  All too often we see companies leave the gate in a rush to keep up with competitors and investors, only to slow down for some reason, often poor management decisions or a false need to meet a ‘middle metric’ goal.

A classic example based on a true story is a company who had consistent acceleration of marketing efforts met by sales growth. When they acquired private equity investment their efforts were refocused from a growth strategy to a maximization of profit volume. That maximization point removed the necessary reach and frequency needed to sustain growth, to the serious detriment of sales and the overall health of the company.

To keep the analogy, it was as if we have a car moving at 30 mph accelerating toward 75 mph and then added a mpg restriction of 20mpg. The car couldn’t accelerate quickly enough to keep up with competitors.

Other times, we see a fast moving company with momentum as their primary KPI, thus becoming blind to market downturn. In this case, there’s always an option to recoup by cutting staff and stores but one must wonder what attention was paid to the other dashboard KPIs clearly in front of them.  Accelerating from zero to 200 mph and sustaining this speed does not last long. In the last 90s, we saw the dot come implosion create fast moving companies that did not balance profit volume with market share. Today, under what should be better conditions, we see it again.  This time, banks and investment firms lead the way.

A business must be reactive to the marketplace and must seize market share when it is available, with innovation often leading the way. For most of us, innovation comes only so often. Most of the businesses of the world should focus on a balance between profit volume and market share. We must run our business much like we drive, with some days requiring a bit of acceleration, and others, necessitating conservation.  If we do not operate our businesses within a framework that focuses on economic realities of cost or volume or profit, we are likely to crash, be ticketed or run out of gas far ahead of our time.

Link strategy is an important part of any comprehensive SEO effort and, like most other SEO tactics, such should be addressed with regard to the size of the business. In general, large companies can benefit from a handful of high quality links, while smaller lack the relationships and partnerships that larger business have, therefore will often need to pursue a higher volume of lower quality links.

I have observed lately, however, that some large companies are engaging in paid for, or pay-per-listing, “link farm” efforts, whereby links originate from content created specifically for the purpose of linking. One company that I know of in particular is employing these methods, although they have multiple valuable partnerships with other strong brands that could easily be utilized for linking purposes.

High value links come from websites that protect their own value and generally have a paucity of links. This gives more importance to those websites to which they do link. Links to an outside site are like holes in the side of a ship: the more holes you have, the more likely you are to sink, or, to carry the metaphor a bit further, to become less visible to the coast guard. (The Coast Guard in this case is Search Engines, of course.)

But is there a place for these lower value links? Yes, when the high value links are not available. This could be due to insufficient resources or lack of brand value to acquire the links. As a large company, this would be worrisome, but smaller companies are bound to have trouble selling partnerships with larger brands.

The lower value link farm concept does have merit: the costs are known and the agencies that perform this service usually offer some type of performance clause.  Efforts can be switched on and off and it does not disrupt existing operations. In general however, I would leave link farms to the small companies that have neither as much to lose, nor the existing value and relationships of which to take advantage.