TMAI # 140: How Important Are You? A Graph.

[In our busy lives, it can be hard to take a pause for strategic reflection. So today, an exercise for you to pull a bunch of data, more than you usually do, and size up your influence - the opportunity you have to be heard. Your response to this newsletter was so encouraging, I wanted to send it again. Stay safe our there y'all!]

I feel that I am the most important person in our organization.

Ok. Maybe not THE most important, but surely I am in the top five most important employees.

Look, we all tend to have an outsized sense of our importance.

My project will save the company. My work is single-handedly making the organization smarter. My impact in the past was huge - approaching OMG huge!

The flip side of this is… I am not being heard. My ideas are not being prioritized high enough by our CMO. Good Lord how can they be so blind to how much more important my area is compared to others!!!!

: )

It is human.

The reality is that I am simply not all that important.

I humbly offer that neither are you.

The larger the corporation, the more true this is.

Even the most important piece in any company is way less important than its leader believes it is. The problem, of course, is that you and I don’t have a simple visual to right-size our view of ourselves. All we have is a view narrowed to the silo we are a part of.

The challenge is that this self-importance infused incomplete view causes us to be unhappy with the way the organization perceives our impact is out of sync with our own view of it. Often also because our ideas, our projects, are not given the importance/budget that we believe they deserve.

I want you to be happy, by getting a real sense of your importance/impact.

Let me share a simple exercise that allows you to, literally, see the big picture.

A little background first.

I was inspired to create this visual for a conversation I had before speaking at an SEO conference.

The organizers had collated initial challenges by the participants. At top of that list was the complaint that they (attendees) were not being taken seriously. Their companies/clients did not give them as much attention, money, love as they felt they deserved.

It is easy to imagine that this can be stressful, and if a company does not do optimal SEO, it can also be harmful to the business.

I've come to learn from my experience that it is a mistake to put the onus on others (company/client) in these cases. It is incredibly valuable to look within thyself first my child! :)

Here's how I recommend you undertake that self-reflection... You can do this for any role in the company, any collection of projects you are undertaking... I'm going to do it in the context of Marketing...

The magical golden visual of rightsizing importance.

Step 1. Draw a simple stacked bar chart that shows the budget being spent on each marketing tactic contributing to the totality of your company's marketing strategy.

Roll up small things into big chunks. Index the data so you end up getting something that looks like this…

Insightful, right?

At a glance, you have a view that is hard to find in most companies. There are many valuable uses of this bar chart – including where your company is over- or under-indexed in a particular area, the alignment of what’s on this bar chart vs. the company’s strategic goals, etc. But, I digress.

Step 2. Pick your area of focus and explode out the one-level-down details of budgets allocated to that area. For the purpose of this discussion, we will be exploding out the constituents for Digital.

It'll something that looks like this…

Ain’t that interesting?

You have valuable context for the distribution across all the strategies, and you have a stronger sense of all the things trying to steal attention from your most-important-in-the-company-very-critical work. Again, there is a lot more value in this bar chart but let’s stay focused.

(Sidebar: You can do this exercise with revenue as your KPI, it is immensely more valuable. If you do it with profit as your KPI, it will blow your mind and I'll also give you a big hug.)

Step 3. Plot the size of your budget against the overall budget.

The result will look something like this...

Yes, that small red line is what I’m asking you to draw.

Not that big, right?

In the war for corporate attention, you can imagine why less attention is being paid to the SEO efforts than you would like. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, if your graph looks like the one above, SEO does not matter all that much.

I am not saying that a company should not pay more attention to SEO. Neither am I saying that there isn’t more value to extract from SEO for any company. Perhaps in the company whose graph is above, there are still SEO mountains to scale.

What I am saying is that you feel you are not getting as much attention, or budget, as you deserve, but perhaps that is a misaligned perception. You are getting all the attention, and budget, you should based on that red line.

Let's play out a different scenario.

Imagine that somehow the company eliminated their Paid Search, Display and Digital Video campaigns, and put all the money into SEO.

I know, I know that sounds scary, stay with me.

In that instance, the value of SEO would increase and the graph would now look like this...

SEO is still a small part of the overall strategic cross-channel marketing investment.

It would be entirely rational for your seniormost leadership to spend all their time on all those other big chunks of budgets.

If you are feeling unhappy about the love, time, your team is getting from senior leaders, I encourage you to invest time in drawing your stacked bar chart, acclimate yourself with reality.

Once you have that reality-check, don't be satisfied with it. No siree Bob.

Step 4. Adapt and Expand.

(By now it should be clear I'm not just talking about SEO. I'm talking about the team that does Email, the team responsible for logistics, the engineers working on the new systems boards, the... YOU. Your team.)

The graphs show our relative importance as the SEO team. Even if both of these bars charts plot revenue. Please make peace with that. It is hard. But achieving an emotional acceptance will dial the stress way down, a very good thing.

If you are ambitious (like me :)), from this new more emotionally zen place, it is time to identify what you can do to increase your importance to the company!

One simple idea could be to expand your focus to include SEO and another big chunk on your stacked bar chart. Perhaps SEO + Television. OMG. That would be very cool. It is a really hard problem to solve, there will be no lack of CxO attention on you.

Another idea you could consider could be to expand your scope inside the digital red box. Maybe start with SEO + PPC, then add in Email after a while, then... Maybe all of digital. With every step, you increase the size of your proverbial line and with it your importance and impact.

If you want a faster track, you could focus on the NBT (next big thing :)). Every company has an obsession with these. And, CxOs absolutely love them!

You don't have to expand outside your core.

You could stay in SEO (/your current role) but shift your focus from day-to-day or week-to-week activity to doing something that has never been done with SEO by anyone else in your industry. Use SEO to solve a problem that has not been imagined yet (hopefully a material problem). This will get you the attention, love and cash you deserve (/crave).

The sky's the limit.

You can pick the very essence of what SEO is good at (finding new potential customers) and focus on just that problem across the entire spectrum. You are going to restlessly solve for the acquisition of new customers across the entire marketing stack. Imagine what a massively important and cool problem that is. It'll come with all the executive attention you can handle. I promise.

I could keep going on. I have so many more ideas. But. You catch my drift.

This is not the view you want for yourself, if you believe you are not getting the attention you deserve…