Ryan Anderson dot ca

Q. What copy will perform best on my website?
A. I don’t know.

Q. What page should I direct search traffic to in order to get the highest conversion rate?
A. No clue.

Q. What time of day will get the best open rate on my email marketing campaign?
A. Dunno.

A big part of any consulting-style job, be it advertising, PR, business process or any other role in which the central function is to incite action across a broad group of people, is answering questions. To be successful, you need to be part futurist, part expert and part hand holder and teller that everything’s going to be okay-er.  But the reality of this type of work – especially that which deals with newer or unproven media or channels – is that sometimes the answer to the question the client is asking is “I have no idea.”

But that’s not much comfort to clients.

So, we answer the question based on our experiences, our intuition, our understanding of media and consumers, and we guess… just a little bit.  But more and more, the guesswork is coming out of the profession.  We have access to analytics, measurement systems and tracking that communicators have never before had access to, and for the most part, they’re inexpensive and easy to integrate. We can tell where our best-converting sales leads are coming from, what types of posts have the best engagement, and when the best time to send out our email communications is – all from easily collected real-time data.

So why are we still guessing?

Part of the reason is that advertising people have always been regarded in part as soothsayers. It was this confidence in our knowledge of the medium, the message and the huddled masses yearning to be sold to that garnered multi-million dollar ad budgets. Conversely, it’s the expertise and ego that got CMOs through the ranks to where they are today.  So where is the incentive for anyone in this equation to ever utter the phrase “I don’t know?”

As a society, we’ve always had an odd fascination with mediums and psychics who pretend to be able to see the future, telling us, to our amazement, what would happen to us, would we find love, how we would die. Of course, these were all parlour tricks based on intuition and a controlled situation. And that’s exactly what we’re doing when we predict what colour “buy” button will perform best, or where to put the call to action on the landing page. Our experience, knowledge and understanding of the media combines with our intuition to make an educated guess, but that’s usually all it is.

If, on the other hand, both the client and the agency embraces the fact that they don’t know the answer – that’s when real answers can be found.  We can A/B test copy to see which performs best.  We can analyze data to deduce why people are coming to our site.  We can built multiple landing pages for multiple keywords and choose the one to go with based only on which one makes the client more money.

Of course, it’s impossible to test everything, which is why we rely on experts in the first place.  If you’re Google, you’ll test 42 shades of blue to determine what colour your background should be, but that’s impractical at best, and an impediment to creative thinking at worst.  Instead, look to solve problems by focusing on the most probable solutions (based on intuition), and determining which one works the best (based on numbers).  It’s not as sexy as a crystal ball, but it’s certainly better for business.

photo credit: Frogman!

I’ve got a lot of geeky friends. In fact, most of my friends are a geek in some way, shape or form. They’re programmers and designers, but they’re also music geeks, theatre geeks, language geeks, running geeks, media geeks and so on, and for the most part, it’s a big part of why I enjoy being around them. They go out of their way to make themselves into experts in something, whether it’s completely esoteric or utterly practical. It will come as no shock to anyone who has ever met me that I’m a geek too – and it makes me a much better PR guy.

Being good at PR or marketing requires a thirst for knowledge that I would consider above the average. It means more than just knowing how to do your job – it means knowing about technology, about history, about the media, about sociology and a million other tiny little pieces before you can really create anything that comes close to resembling a “strategy.”

Consider the game of chess. A very simple game, but one that requires an intimate knowledge of not only the rules, but the intricacies of the pieces. To be any good at chess means a lot more that just knowing that bishops move diagonally and pawns only move forward – it takes knowing how each of the pieces relates to one another, and how all of the individual pieces comes together to make something much stronger than they are individually.

It’s said quite often that public relations, marketing or advertising is “not about the tools.” That’s a fair statement, but at a much higher level, the profession requires such an intense mastery of the tools – especially when it comes to social media – that it’s not sufficient just to have a textbook understanding of the tools. In order to be a grandmaster, you have to experience them on a level that cannot be read or explained. That’s where being a geek comes in, and that thirst for knowledge and personal depth – no matter how obscure interacting on Twitter or maintaining a podcast may seem to friends outside the industry – becomes a point of differentiation between “practitioner” and “expert.”

For those who are new to the industry, or trying to break in – your best investment in yourself, and ultimately your future tax bracket, is to be a geek. Dedicate yourself to learning about the whole, but spend the extra time understanding each of those moving parts. Your friends might think you’re a bit odd, but the benefit you provide to a future employer will be well worth it.